Jane Adams - brief biography
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I grew up in rural southern Illinois and saw first hand the transformation of farm life. The one-room school I attended consolidated when I was in second grade. Like many of my classmates, I left the area when I graduated from high school. Unlike most of my classmates, I became a social activist. I participated in the civil rights movement, helping desegregate Carbondale, the nearby college town, and then in 1964 going south to Mississippi as a volunteer in Freedom Summer. I participated in the anti-Vietnam War movement, largely in Students for a Democratic Society.

I returned to college in the 1970s. Indigenous peoples were beginning to organize throughout the world. I became deeply concerned about the opening of the Amazon region to timbering and agriculture, and pursued this interest in graduate work at the University of Illinois Department of Anthropology. I intended to do my doctoral research in Amazonian Ecuador, but family concerns required me to stay in the U.S. In the early 1980s, few anthropologists work with rural white people in the U.S., and few undertook historical studies. That has changed; anthropology is beginning to come home.
Jane Adams and her brother Jim, ca. 1947, Oak Ridge School in background. Ava, Illinois
I see many parallels between the emptying out of the rural regions in which I grew up and the recent wave of "development" in what were once remote regions of the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, "globalism" is on everybody's lips. But no one seems to understand what, exactly, is occurring.

I have worked with a broadly interdisciplinary team trying to understand watershed planning in the Cache River Watershed in deep southern Illinois, under a US Department of Agriculture grant. The Cache is one of 15 wetlands worldwide desiganted by the United Nations as particularly important, along with the Everglades and the Okefeenokee in the U.S. It has, in the past 20 years, shifted from being a region dependent on agriculture and timbering to one more valued for its unique ecology. The shift has, predictably, been difficult.

I now collaborate with my husband, photographer D. Gorton, in projects aimed at harnessing the new digital technologies to understanding and communicating both the past we shared and the future we and our children face. We have only just begun learning the new, and complex, computer, digital video, and sound tools necessary to realize our vision.
We are trying to understand the ways that people in the midsection of the United States have negotiated the transformations of the last century, and how that has affected the way they now see the world. One project focuses on the rural landscape of Central and Southern Illinois; the other the Mississippi-Arkansas Delta.

Please visit from time to time and see what new materials we have posted.
My books
The Transformation of Rural Life: Southern Illinois 1890-1990. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Introduction		 All Anybody Ever Wanted of Me Was to Work: The Memoirs of Edith Bradley Rendleman. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed. edited. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Introduction
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