The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North [Hardcover]

The Nature of the Futureplumbs 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 Futuredispels 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 Futurereveals how improvers transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation from the ground up.Emily Pawleyis Walter E. Beach ’56 Chair in Sustainability Studies and associate professor of history at Dickinson College.