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RUS (Rural Uplook Service) - 1918 Compiled by Liberty Hyde Bailey (on CD)

$15.00 $7.50

Cat No.:   CA0390: (See also product CA0390-DL for this "book" as a downloadable file and save the mailing cost.)

A preliminary attempt to register the rural leadership in the United States and Canada, compiled by Liberty Hyde Bailey in Ithaca, N.Y., during the years 1914 through November, 1918, and printed by W. E. Humphrey of Geneva N.Y.

Despite the somewhat strange sounding, (and perhaps these days Yoda-ish) title of this book, in its own time it was a serious effort to create a “Who’s Who” of people who were a part of the population of the enormous section of North America NOT within a significant population centre. It does not appear that the Service was appreciated at the time because we could only find record of a further issue in 1920 but cannot find any available copies of that issue, implying it failed to get into significant circulation, and consequently was never published again.

In words taken from the book’s Scope & Plan:
“The field covered by such a register has no definite boundaries. In general, it has been the desire to compile compact information about those persons who are now contributing through their achievements to the betterment and advancement of country life.… It has been the aim to include those persons who are regularly and prominently engaged in rural work as farmers, teachers, investigators, business men, ministers, lecturers, farm agents, authors, editors, rural organizers, administrators, if their efforts are of such a nature as to make them public characters.… Each entry is a curriculum vitae, without enlargement or appraisal.”

“The pieces of information requested of respondents are as follows: name; occupation or profession; title, if in an institution or in public work; place and date of birth; parentage; how reared, whether on farm, in town or city; marriage; family; higher education, of academy grade or above; advanced degrees; college fraternity or sorority; subsequent academic history; kind of farming or other specialty; connection with honorary, learned or fine-art bodies or academies …; appointment on state or national commissions or other public boards or agencies; political, legal or military positions or offices; delegate offices to foreign or important conventions or bodies; decorations, medals, awards and prizes; elective officership in prominent agricultural societies, cooperative associations, and others; notable travel; authorship of books (not bulletins and reports); naturalization, if born abroad; editorial positions.”

“The number of persons solicited for inclusion in the volume is 7061; the number responding and entered in the book is 2746. It will be seen, therefore, that the volume contains many less than three-sevenths the number of names the Editorial Office desired should go in, and the Office list itself is undoubtedly too short. … It has been a difficult time in which to collect the information because of the distractions and the changes in addresses due to the call to war.” While this may appear to be a relatively small number of individuals it should be remembered that each “entry” will also give the parents names, the wife’s name, and any progeny, an average of, conservatively, 6 more names per entry for a total of 16,500 individuals approximately.

Following the “Scope and Plan,” from which much of the above has been extracted the remainder of the book is simply a list of entries alphabetically ordered by Family name and then given name of the main subject. Like most “directory like,” and limited life reference books the printing values take second place to the speed and economy of publication. Fortunately our production processes are able to recover an adequate level of clarity (without sacrificing fidelity to the original text) and then our hand editing of the underlying OCR results makes this digital edition supremely accessible for quickly finding the search phrase or name you are looking for, while our FastFind technology means no waiting for your computer to find all the search results.

No. of CDs is:  1 ;   Format is:  PDF ;   Searchable?:  YES;

FastFind:  Yes;  ISBN No.:   978-1-927503-46-1 ;