Culture and Cultivation: Agriculture and Society in Thoreau's Concord
1982; Oxford University Press; Volume: 69; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1887751
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
ResumoThe town of Concord, Massachusetts, is usually thought of as home of minutemen and transcendentalists-the place where the embattled launched America's war for political independence on April 19, 1775, and where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, more than a half-century later, waged their own struggles for intellectual independence, both for themselves as writers and for American culture as a whole. But in late nineteenth century, Concord acquired a distinction it never possessed in years when it was seedbed of revolutionary scholars and soldiers. It became a leading center of agricultural improvement. Thanks to coming of railroad in 1844, Concord farmers played milkmen to metropolis and branched out into market gardening and fruit raising as well. Concord was nursery to a popular new variety of grape, developed by a retired mechanic-turned-horticulturist named Ephraim Bull. And to crown its reputation, town called cultural capital of antebellum America by Stanley Elkins became asparagus capital of Gilded Age. Concord was, in short, a full participant in yet another revolution: agricultural revolution that transformed countryside of New England in middle decades of nineteenth century. 1 The progress of that agricultural revolution forms my central theme. The minutemen of 1775 inhabited a radically different world from that of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren on eve of Civil War. We know general outlines of how things changed-that farmers gradually abandoned producing their own food, clothing, and tools and turned to supplying specialized, urban markets for a living. In process, they rationalized their methods and altered ways they thought about their work. Theirs was a
Referência(s)