Over the past few decades, scholars often have told the story of modernization as if modernity -- viewed as a historical force propelled by self-aggrandizing capitalists and other elites -- inevitably wrenches people from a richly realized traditional life into a world of anomie, immiseration, oppression, and ecological degradation. Non-modern societies have generally stood, in the modern imagination, as social orders whose usefulness for intellectual inquiry lies in their systematic contrasts with, and implied critique of, contemporary society. Within the United States, rural society of the Early Republic and of putatively "backward" areas like Appalachia and its westward expansion across the Upland South have often held the place of this imagined agrarian society. The rural has often been viewed as the pastoral contrast to the urban. (1)