Overview
- Discusses the improvement of rural agricultural landscapes in New England in the early 19th century
- Focuses on the role of Improvement as a cultural logic operating to manage and structure rural life
- Addresses the role that agriculture and symbolic constructions of urban and rural life played in structuring landscape change
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology (CGHA)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Improvement as Archaeological Subject
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Front Matter
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Improving New England at the Dawn of the Nineteenth Century
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Front Matter
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The Materiality of an Improver in the Connecticut River Valley
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Quentin Lewis received his BA in Archaeology from Boston University, and his MA and PhD from the University of Massachusetts. He has conducted archaeological work in the Midwestern and Northeastern United States, as well as in the North of England, where he is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in Archaeology at Durham University. He has continued his lifelong personal and scholarly fascination with New England with research on historical memory and the development of capitalism. His newest research project involves studying the impacts of the Great Depression on the landscapes of the Northeast of England.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: An Archaeology of Improvement in Rural Massachusetts
Book Subtitle: Landscapes of Profit and Betterment at the Dawn of the 19th century
Authors: Quentin Lewis
Series Title: Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22105-2
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-22104-5Published: 02 December 2015
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-36328-8Published: 23 August 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-22105-2Published: 25 November 2015
Series ISSN: 1574-0439
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 236
Topics: Archaeology