Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside

摘要

The question of when and how the residents of the United States and other Western nations became more scientific and quantitative in their outlook toward the natural world is one of the perennial questions in the history of technology and science. In Notes from the Ground, Benjamin Cohen argues that science became "culturally credible" (p. x) in the United States in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, largely through the writers, agricultural improvers, and "agrarian citizens" (p. 8) who helped persuade a broader public that mastery of the soil encompassed virtues that went beyond the simple matter of crop yields.