Rural and agricultural history provide their readers different perspectives on the ways in which the countryside has changed over the course of American history. Rural history approaches the question of change from the perspective of communities and families, while agricultural history generally eschews the social perspective for issues of crop production. Such is the case of two recent and important books in rural and agricultural history, Hal Barron's Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformationin the Rural North, 1870-1930 and Steven Stoll's The Fruits of Natural Advantage: The Making of the Industrial Countryside in California. While both authors are intimately concerned with the transformation of the countryside, Barron and Stoll approach their subjects from radically different perspectives. The books also offer widely divergent geographic foci, with Barron surveying his subject from the vantage point of the northeast and midwest, while Stoll writes of California. Both offer readers new ways of understanding the transformation of rural America caused by the vast social, economic, and technological changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.