Rip Van Winkle's Neighbors

Thomas S. Wermuth is Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Director of the Hudson River Valley Institute at Marist College. He is also Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of New York State.

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1. "A Very Beautiful and Fertile Wheatland"The Seventeenth-Century Settlement of the Hudson River Valley 2. "One Body Corporate and Politique"Politics, Society, and Community in the Eighteenth-Century Valley Towns 3. "A Comfortable Subsistence"Rural Economic Culture in the Eighteenth Century 4. "We Are Daily Alarmed, and Our Streets Filled with Mobs"The Revolution in the Valley, 1775-1785 5. "The Farmer Now Sells for Money"Hudson Valley Farmers and the Market Revolution, 1785-1820 6. "The Harbingers of Commerce"Mid-Hudson Valley and the Creation of a Market Society, 1820-1850 Conclusion"A Diversified Economy and Society"The Mid-Hudson Valley and the Mid-Nineteenth Century NotesBibliographyIndex

"What is perhaps most rewarding about Rip Van Winkle's Neighbors is the way that it evokes the everyday life of time and place for the reader, and recognizes at every turn the ways in which the economic, social, political, and cultural are intertwined." — New York History"Thomas Wermuth presents a fine instance of the importance of studying large questions in small places. Though I have worked many of the same sources I learned a great deal worth knowing from this book. " — Edward Countryman, author of The American Revolution"Wermuth's analysis of economic and social relations in the Hudson Valley is excellent." — George Rappaport, Wagner College