Hal S. Barron's Mixed Harvest is an important addition to recent work on the social repercussions of corporate consolidation, the growth of state power and professional expertise, and the spread of an urban-based consumer culture in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—what Barron calls the “second great transformation.” His book is inspired by the belief that rural people have been neglected in the historiography of this epochal shift, which tends to focus on urban developments and the crucial role played by modernizers and reformers committed to professional and bureaucratic agendas. Too often, Barron argues, rural people are depicted as passive objects acted upon by middle-class professionals and reformers—or as militant “traditionalists” opposed to everything modern, clinging stubbornly to an outmoded way of life. The aim of Mixed Harvest is to restore their agency and examine their ambivalent responses to the changes occurring in their midst.