For the first half of the 19th century, American farmers began to create knowledge about the land in new ways, driven by how that knowledge might become profitable. This meant creating a new framework of value for nature and its produce, one that drew upon recent developments in the sciences and political economy. As farmers began networking through print but also in person at county and state fairs, they began interacting with a speculative economy not only when they sold their harvest, but when they decided what to grow and how to do it.
The history of agricultural political economy in antebellum America is usually dominated by the South, or else by the expanding western frontier. New England is generally passed over as the site of the nation's emerging industrial economy, a world in which environmental concerns are no longer central. Yet at the start of the Civil War, 80% of northern Americans still lived in rural areas. The productivity or degeneracy of 'Nature' could not help but be a political and social issue, one that functioned as more than a conditioning background. Using the language of the new soil science, farmers began to reimagine their role as improvers of the soil, creating markets for nutrients and the organic waste of the developing American economy. What conception of natural stewardship did these farmers and improvers possess? When nature demonstrated the limitations of her abundance, how did improvers rationalize the degradation of soil, the changes in climate, and the failures of crop transplantation? How and when did politicians, farmers, and wealthy improvers assign Nature a moral authority? When did improvement schemes for the future justify the removal of things in the present? How was northern agriculture used as a foil and critique of southern plantations? Ultimately, all sorts of different Americans were fighting over what makes a \"good\" landscape, a conflict which blurred the relationship between nature, politics, and the economy in ways that were both practical and conceptual and demands an investigation into the origins of early American fertilizers and the stories of Americans told about them.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 33896