Notes from the Ground
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Science, Soil, & Society in the American Countryside
Benjamin R. Cohen
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Format: PaperPrice: $35.00
Integrating the history of science, environmental history, and science studies, Notes from the Ground examines the cultural conditions that brought agriculture and science together in early America.
Notes from the Ground examines the cultural conditions that brought agriculture and science together in nineteenth-century America. Integrating the history of science, environmental history, and science studies, the book shows how and why agrarian Americans—yeoman farmers, gentleman planters, politicians, and policy makers alike—accepted, resisted, and shaped scientific ways of knowing the land. By detailing the changing perceptions of soil treatment, Benjamin Cohen shows that the credibility of new soil practices grew not from the arrival of professional chemists, but out of an existing ideology of work, knowledge, and citizenship.
“Notes from the Ground, by explaining how new technologies were evaluated and accepted in practice, transforms our understanding of antebellum Southern agriculture.”—David E. Nye, author of America as Second Creation
“Cohen takes readers back to the Early Republic to explore how people thought about land and production, ingeniously demonstrating how day-to-day labor in fields and barns led farmers to adopt and create their own scientific approaches. This crisp and clever book is closest in tenor and content to Steven Stoll’s Larding the Lean Earth, and expands upon it in important ways.”—Deborah Fitzgerald, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Well organized, persuasively argued, and tightly documented…Impressive.”—Virginia Magazine
“A tightly argued, engaging, and important analysis.”—Technology and Culture
“A stimulating new interpretation of a well-chronicled moment in American agricultural history.”—Paul Sutter, Agricultural History
Publication Date: September 6, 2011
29 b/w illus.
