The Nature of the Future : Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North / Emily Pawley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pawley, Emily, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Agriculture--New York (State)--History--19th century.

Agriculture.

Agriculture--Capital productivity--New York (State)--History--19th century.

Crop science--New York (State)--History--19th century.

Crop science.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (310 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future aims to remake this staid vision. Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, US history and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction: Bending Reality with Large Strawberries

PART ONE. Performances

PART TWO. Experiments

PART THREE. Futures

PART FOUR. Values

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226693972

022669397X

OCLC:

1145611159