Harvesting History
Harvesting History

Author: Daniel P. Ott

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1496234405

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Harvesting History explores how the highly contentious claim of Cyrus McCormick’s 1831 invention of the reaper came to be incorporated into the American historical canon as a fact. Spanning the late 1870s to the 1930s, Daniel P. Ott reveals how the McCormick family and various affiliated businesses created a usable past about their departed patriarch, Cyrus McCormick, and his role in creating modern civilization through advertising and the emerging historical profession. The mythical invention narrative was widely peddled for decades by salesmen and in catalogs, as well as in corporate public education campaigns and eventually in history books, to justify the family’s elite position in American society and its monopolistic control of the harvester industry in the face of political and popular antagonism. As a parallel story to the McCormicks’ manipulation of the past, Harvesting History also provides a glimpse of the nascent discipline of history during the Progressive Era. Early historians were anxious to demonstrate their value in the new corporate economy as modern professionals and “objective” guardians of the past. While ethics might have prevented them from being historians for hire, their own desire for inclusion in the emerging middle class predisposed them to be receptive to the McCormicks’ financial influence as well as their historical messages.

Mind and Hand
Mind and Hand

Author: Julius Adams Stratton

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 830

ISBN-13: 9780262195249

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The intellectual heritage of MIT: an account of "the flow of ideas" about science and education that shaped the Institute as it emerged and that inspires it today. The motto on the seal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Mens et Manus" -- "mind and hand" -- signals the Institute's dedication to what MIT founder William Barton Rogers called "the most earnest cooperation of intelligent culture with industrial pursuits." Mind and Hand traces the ideas about science and education that have shaped MIT and defined its mission -- from the new science of the Enlightenment era and the ideals of representative democracy spurred by the Industrial Revolution to new theories on the nature and role of higher education in nineteenth-century America. MIT emerged in mid-century as an experiment in scientific and technical education, with its origins in the tension between these old and new ideas. Mind and Hand was undertaken by Julius Stratton after his retirement from the presidency of MIT and continued by Loretta Mannix after his death; Philip N. Alexander, of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, stepped in to complete the project. The combined efforts of these three authors have given us what Julius Stratton envisioned -- "a coherent account of the flow of ideas" from which MIT emerged.