ABSTRACT
It is important to see the connection between our cultural fascination with the future and our diminished perceptions regarding the worth of the past. Young adults majoring in history at colleges and universities across the country are routinely asked "What are you going to do with that?" This chapter suggests that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries represent enviable periods in terms of sustainable yet productive agriculture. This development was in part tied to new technologies that were gradually embraced by northern European peasants after the year 1000. These changes included new strategies for rotating crops, new plows, and a new draft animal and new harnesses designed for it. The social identity one comes to possess in an unhealthy community may well be hierarchical and based on class, religion, gender, ethnicity, wealth, occupation, and so forth. What communities do for individuals in return is to prescribe a social identity.
