Nature of the Future - Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North

The Nature of the Future plumbs the innovative, far-ranging, and sometimes downright strange agricultural schemes of nineteenth-century farms in the northern US. 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 dispels this mist, focusing on a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality-antebellum New York State-to examine the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Emily Pawley shows how "improving" farmers practiced a science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from US history, environmental history, and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future reveals how improvers transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation from the ground up.

About the author

Emily Pawley is Walter E. Beach '56 Chair in Sustainability Studies and associate professor of history at Dickinson College.

Product details

• Authors: Emily Pawley
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.06.2022
• EAN: 9780226820026
• ISBN: 978-0-226-82002-6
• No. of pages: 312
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Biology > Botany; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; USA, Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Botany, HISTORY / United States / 19th Century, c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, United States of America, USA, History of the Americas, Botany & plant sciences, Agribusiness and primary industries, Botany and plant sciences, Primary industries