Drew A Swanson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780300191165
- eISBN:
- 9780300206814
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300191165.001.0001
- Subject:
- Environmental Science, Nature
This book presents an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant ...
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This book presents an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurtured it, but as the book provocatively argues, the choice of crop initially made perfect agrarian as well as financial sense for southern planters. This book explores how one attempt at agricultural permanence went seriously awry. It weaves together social, agricultural, and cultural history of the Piedmont region and illustrates how ideas about race and landscape management became entangled under slavery and afterward. Challenging long-held perceptions, this study examines not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the justifications that encouraged tobacco farming in the region.Less
This book presents an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurtured it, but as the book provocatively argues, the choice of crop initially made perfect agrarian as well as financial sense for southern planters. This book explores how one attempt at agricultural permanence went seriously awry. It weaves together social, agricultural, and cultural history of the Piedmont region and illustrates how ideas about race and landscape management became entangled under slavery and afterward. Challenging long-held perceptions, this study examines not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the justifications that encouraged tobacco farming in the region.
