Taking the reader on an evocative journey through the worlds of traditional craftspeople from blacksmith to bee-keeper, wainwright to housewife the acknowledged "Father of Self-sufficiency" John Seymour celebrates their honest skills, many of which have disappeared beneath the tread of progress.

    Mather believed his main purpose in life was to do good and he devoted his life to praying, preaching, and writing, eventually publishing more than 400 works.

    It also portrays the four essential components of the farms where many of them lived. The stately and beautiful connected farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders stand today as a living expression of a rural culture, offering insights into the people who made them and their agricultural way of life. A visual delight as well as an engaging tribute to our nineteenth-century forebears, this book has become one of the standard works on regional farmsteads in America.

    Gary Clayton Anderson is the first historian to use an ethnohistorical approach to explain why, after more than two centuries of friendly interaction, the bonds of peace between the Dakota and whites suddenly broke apart.In Kinsmen of Another Kind, Anderson shows how the Dakota concept of kinship affected the tribe's complex relationships with the whites. The Dakota were obligated to help their relatives by any means possible. Traders who were adopted or who married into the tribe gained from this relationship--but had reciprocal responsibilities. After the 1820s, the trade in furs declined, more whites moved into the territory, and the Dakota became more economically dependent on the whites. When American traders and officials failed to fulfill their obligations, many Dakotas finally saw the whites as enemies to be driven from Minnesota. This reprint edition of Anderson's work, first published in 1984, provides a new understanding of a complicated period in Minnesota history.

    

    Added to this new edition is insight into how oral history is practiced on an international scale, making this book an indispensable resource for scholars of history and social sciences, as well as those interested in oral history on the avocational level. This volume is a reprint of the 1984 edition, with the added bonus of a new introduction by David Dunaway and a new section on how oral history is practiced on an international scale. Selections from the original volume trace the origins of oral history in the United States, provide insights on methodology and interpretation, and review the various approaches to oral history used by folklorists, historians, anthropologists, and librarians, among others. Family and ethnic historians will find chapters addressing the applications of oral history in those fields.