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9781282553033

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Lynn Nelson gets beneath the literature of nineteenth-century 'agricultural improvement' to the hard realities encountered by a Virginia planter who tried it. William Massie plowed deep, sowed clover, improved his seeds and breeds, and achieved some success by dogged good management. But in the end, Pharsalia foundered on the contradictions between high farming and ecological pushback from pests and weeds, crop markets glutted by cheap frontier production, resistance from black slaves and white neighbors, and the luxurious lifestyle expectations of Massie's children. Variations of this same dilemma haunt the dreams of soil conservation and sustainable farming in America to this day. Agricultural history needs more ecologically grounded studies like this one. --Brian Donahue, author of The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord

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Lynn A. Nelson is an associate professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University.

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