Catalogue of the John Adams Library in the Public Library of the City of Boston
Catalogue of the John Adams Library in the Public Library of the City of Boston

Author: Boston Public Library. Adams Collection

Publisher:

Published: 1917

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13:

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The Adams Library of 2,756 volumes was presented to the town of Quincy, Mass., in 1822; a catalogue was issued in 1823 under title: Deeds and other documents relating to the several pieces of land, and to the library presented to the town of Quincy, by President Adams, together with a catalogue of the books. The library was lodged, after various transfers, in the Thomas Crane public library of Quincy in 1882, and deposited in the Boston public library in 1894. Additions to the original collection have brought the numbers to 3,019.

An Archaeology of Improvement in Rural Massachusetts
An Archaeology of Improvement in Rural Massachusetts

Author: Quentin Lewis

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-11-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 3319221051

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This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19th century rural Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18th and 19th centuries as part of a transition to industrial capitalism. The meaning of Improvement vacillated between ideas of economic profit and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enaction. Utilizing archaeological data from the home of a wealthy farmer in rural Western Massachusetts, as well as an analysis of early Republican agricultural publications, this book shows how Improvement’s twin meanings of profit and betterment unfolded unevenly across early 19th century New England. The Improvement movement in Massachusetts emerged at a time of great social instability, and served to ameliorate growing tensions between urban and rural socioeconomic life through a rationalization of space. Alongside this rationalization, Improvement also served to reshape rural landscapes in keeping with the social and economic processes of a modernizing global capitalism. But the contradictions inherent in such processes spurred and buttressed wealth inequality, ecological distress, and social dislocation.

Larding the Lean Earth
Larding the Lean Earth

Author: Steven Stoll

Publisher: Hill and Wang

Published: 2003-07-03

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1466805625

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A major history of early Americans' ideas about conservation Fifty years after the American Revolution, the yeoman farmers who made up a large part of the new country's voters faced a crisis. The very soil of American farms seemed to be failing, and agricultural prosperity, upon which the Republic was founded, was threatened. Steven Stoll's passionate and brilliantly argued book explores the tempestuous debates that erupted between "improvers," who believed in practices that sustained and bettered the soil of existing farms, and "emigrants," who thought it was wiser and more "American" to move westward as the soil gave out. Stoll examines the dozens of journals, from New York to Virginia, that gave voice to the improvers' cause. He also focuses especially on two groups of farmers, in Pennsylvania and South Carolina. He analyzes the similarities and differences in their farming habits in order to illustrate larger regional concerns about the "new husbandry" in free and slave states. Farming has always been the human activity that most disrupts nature, for good or ill. The decisions these early Americans made about how to farm not only expressed their political and social faith, but also influenced American attitudes about the environment for decades to come. Larding the Lean Earth is a signal work of environmental history and an original contribution to the study of antebellum America.

Sowing Modernity
Sowing Modernity

Author: Peter D. McClelland

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9780801433269

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Contrary to those who regard the economic transformation of the West as a gradual process spanning centuries, Peter D. McClelland claims the initial transformation of American agriculture was an unmistakable revolution. He asks when a single crucial question was first directed persistently, pervasively, and systematically to farming practices: Is there a better way? McClelland surveys practices from crop rotation to livestock breeding, with a particular focus on the change in implements used to produce small grains. With wit and verve and an abundance of detail, he demonstrates that the first great surge in inventive activity in agronomy in the United States took place following the War of 1812, much of it in a fifteen-year period ending in 1830. Once questioning the status quo became the norm for producers on and off the farm, according to McClelland, the march to modernization was virtually assured. With the aid of more than 270 illustrations, many of them taken from contemporary sources, McClelland describes this stunning transformation in a manner rarely found in the agricultural literature. How primitive farming implements worked, what their defects were, and how they were initially redesigned are explained in a manner intelligible to the novice and yet offering analysis and information of special interest to the expert.