Can I read Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880 (Environmental History and the American South Ser.) on EtoBox?

Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880 (Environmental History and the American South Ser.) by Lynn A. Nelson is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880 (Environmental History and the American South Ser.) about?

Pharsalia, a plantation located in piedmont Virginia at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is one of the best-documented sites of its kind. Drawing on the exceptionally rich trove of papers left behind by the Massie family, Pharsalia's owners, this case study demonstrates how white southern planters paradoxically relied on capitalistic methods even as they pursued an ideal of agrarian independence. Lynn A. Nelson also shows how the contradictions between these ends and means would later manifest themselves in the southern conservation movement.Nelson follows the fortunes of Pharsalia's owners, telling how Virginia's traditional extensive agriculture contributed to the soil's erosion and exhaustion. Subsequent attempts to balance independence and sustainability through a complex system of crop rotation and resource recycling ultimately gave way to an intensive, slave-based form of agricultural capitalism.Pharsalia could not support the Massies'aristocratic ambitions, and it was eventually parceled up and sold off by family members. The farm's story embodies several fundamentals of modern U.S. environmental thought. Southerners'nineteenth-century quest for financial and ecological

Author

Lynn A. Nelson

Publisher

Athens: University of Georgia Press

Published

2007

Language

EN

ISBN

9781282553033

Subjects

History, Nature, Agriculture