A01=Emily Pawley
Age Group_Uncategorized
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agricultural improvement
agricultural science
Author_Emily Pawley
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJK
Category=HBLL
Category=KNA
Category=NHK
Category=PST
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
environmental history
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
history of capitalism
history of science
Language_English
Market Revolution
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
United States history
Product details
- ISBN 9780226693835
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 06 Apr 2020
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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.
