At the same time, the agrarian past, with its more pragmatic attitudes toward livestock, is receding from memory.

A Regional Studies curriculum should ask students to answer fundamental questions: What does it matter that New Jersey has an agrarian past?

In an industry whose charm is its connection to an agrarian past and a simpler time, change is often glacial.

Mexico appeared to be caught between two identities: one looking to the complex modern world, the other yearning for a romantic agrarian past.

But it is also a throwback to the town's agrarian past, an icon that sits atop a hill in the western part of town like a beacon.

What Villa and Zapata longed for was not an idealistic new society but a return to the certitudes of the agrarian past.

Old stone walls and crumbling cellar holes are common evidence of the region's agrarian past.

Songs of love, labor, weddings and war looked back to Lithuania's agrarian past and its turbulent history.

"You are led to look for a sign of our agrarian past," continued Mr. Volk, a self-described creative writer, who then paused for dramatic effect.

Bryant's historiography was often based on an English romantic exceptionalism drawn from his nostalgia for an idealized agrarian past.