Rural History: the prospect before us, revisited

Le résumé fourni par la source

Setting out their vision in the first issue of Rural History published in April 1990, editors Liz Bellamy, Keith Snell and Tom Williamson emphasised that rural history had often been seen as synonymous with a narrowly economistic agricultural history, and that exciting and innovative work deploying other methodological perspectives had been left 'scattered across a range of disciplines and subdisciplines'.Sixty-three issues later, and with only one of the original editors still in place, not only are we confident that Rural History has established itself as the home for such work, but also that it has played a central role in transforming the study of our subject along a more nuanced and eclectic line.Of course, a journal is only as good, and as influential, as the papers it publishes, and key roles in eliciting and attracting the most innovative research have been played by Liz Bellamy, who retired to pursue other projects in 2014, and, in particular, by Professor Keith Snell, who steps down as one of the editors in this issue.Thirty-one years is an extraordinarily long time to act as a journal editor, not least given the current pressures on academics to publish and attract grant income, rather than promote their discipline or serve the wider scholarly community.Keith has been a model editor: efficient and prompt; patient with his fellow editors when others might have been quick to berate; generous in his feedback to those who submitted work to the journal; and a wonderful supporter of doctoral students and early career researchers whose work we are especially proud to publish.It is therefore particularly appropriate that this issue contains a paper by Keith himself on the rural writings of Ronald Blythe.It exemplifies his work, and his approach to rural history: erudite and witty; widely read and deeply humane; acutely attuned to local dynamics and yet always subtly speaking to broader phenomena and generalisable patterns.He is a historian of the countryside, yet wary of false geographical (and intellectual) divisions.In tribute to his years of service, Cambridge University Press have made freely available sample chapters of his several Cambridge-published books, his several papers published in Cambridge, and a selection of papers from this journal that Keith has expertly curated, papers that speak to Keith's time on the journal and his intellectual passions.But the end of one era in the history of the journal is unquestionably the opening of another, and we also take this opportunity to welcome Professor Annie Tindley to the editorial team.Annie is a scholar with a formidable reputation in the study of the history and heritage of land, widely known for her work on landownership, the politics of land reform, and land management in Scotland and Ireland, as well as in a wider British and imperial context.We are also in the process of refreshing our wider editorial board, saying farewell to some old friends and supporters, while welcoming members of a new generation of researchers.So, in the spirit of the initial editorial, what is before us?We remain true to the founding principles of the journal and, in particular, to our commitment to publishing the very best in interdisciplinary research on our rural pasts.Over the past thirty-one years we have broken new ground, with innovative articles on rural environmental history, rural custom and heritage, representations of the rural, rural poverty and policy, landscape history, material cultures, gender

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