"Agrarian ideology flourished in the nineteenth-century Midwest, where countless settler families carved homesteads out of the prairie and nurtured ideals that we consider distinctively American - independence, democracy, community, piety. Our Common Country explains the making of the family farm culture in the heartland by telling the story of families in rural Fountain Green, Illinois, from settlement to century's end. A richly textured social history narrative of people the reader will come to know, the book examines three themes: changing cultural identities, the expansion of the market, and the adoption of class-based gender ideologies. It features a major political conflict at each stage of market expansion - the Mormon troubles, the Civil War, and the Grange protest - to highlight the transformations that took place."--BOOK JACKET.