Cataloging Nature: Standardizing Fruit Varieties in the United States, 1800–1860

2016 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Pawley

The forests and fields of the early American republic teemed with individually varying seedling fruit trees. American nurserymen stabilized both this chaotic landscape and their trade by promoting named fruit “varieties” gleaned from domestic orchards and from a global network of botanical gardens. Developing strategies to regulate the production of names and descriptions, they altered both texts and organisms, replacing a profusion of “wild” trees with a negotiated list of “named varieties.” Examining this process reveals intersections between commercial and scientific credibility and illuminates the alternative business forms built around living goods.

2016 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen E. Tillotson ◽  
Jennifer A. Colanese

Recent state-level penal policy reforms have the potential to shift the burden of incarceration to local jails. We argue that such transcarceration is not a new phenomenon, but rather, is a persistent aspect of incarceration in the United States. In this article, we provide an historical analysis of jails in the Early American Republic (1790-1850), including their role expansion to include felon and misdemeanant incarceration, their role contraction alongside the development of institutions for various special populations, and their enduring function as a site of “rabble” management.


Author(s):  
Jean H. Baker

Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe is a biography of America’s first professionally trained architect and engineer. Born in 1764, Latrobe was raised in Moravian communities in England and Germany. His parents expected him to follow his father and brother into the ministry, but he rebelled against the church. Moved to London, he studied architecture and engineering. In 1795 he emigrated to the United States and became part of the period’s Transatlantic Exchange. Latrobe soon was famous for his neoclassical architecture, designing important buildings, including the US Capitol and Baltimore Basilica as well as private homes. Carpenters and millwrights who built structures more cheaply and less permanently than Latrobe challenged his efforts to establish architecture as a profession. Rarely during his twenty-five years in the United States was he financially secure, and when he was, he speculated on risky ventures that lost money. He declared bankruptcy in 1817 and moved to New Orleans, the sixth American city that he lived in, hoping to recoup his finances by installing a municipal water system. He died there of yellow fever in 1820. The themes that emerge in this biography are the critical role Latrobe played in the culture of the early republic through his buildings and his genius in neoclassical design. Like the nation’s political founders, Latrobe was committed to creating an exceptional nation, expressed in his case by buildings and internal improvements. Additionally, given the extensive primary sources available for this biography, an examination of his life reveals early American attitudes toward class, family, and religion.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135406612098342
Author(s):  
Syed Javed Maswood

Contemporary economic globalization is typically seen as a product of both trade and economic liberalization after the Second World War and of technological advances that have made it possible to overcome coordination and management of geographically dispersed production units. Trade liberalization and technological advances were certainly important variables, but I argue that it was neo-protectionist American policies of the early 1980s that provided the initial catalyst for globally networked production processes. American protectionism encouraged Japanese investment in the United States that allowed US car manufacturers to learn the essentials of network manufacturing as practiced by Japanese transplants in the United States. In the next stage of global network manufacturing, liberal trade played a much more pivotal role because the global supply chains could not obviously be maintained without liberal trade. In this paper, I also discuss the likelihood of a reversal and suggest that globalization is unlikely to reversed in a significant way. Liberal trade is essential to the integrity of global supply chain networks, but these new production processes have themselves created a firewall against future systemic protectionism.


Author(s):  
Pete Minard

Species acclimatization--the organized introduction of organisms to a new region--is much maligned in the present day. However, colonization depended on moving people, plants, and animals from place to place, and in centuries past, scientists, landowners, and philanthropists formed acclimatization societies to study local species and conditions, form networks of supporters, and exchange supposedly useful local and exotic organisms across the globe. Pete Minard tells the story of this movement, arguing that the colonies, not the imperial centers, led the movement for species acclimatization. Far from attempting to re-create London or Paris, settlers sought to combine plants and animals to correct earlier environmental damage and to populate forests, farms, and streams to make them healthier and more productive. By focusing particularly on the Australian colony of Victoria, Minard reveals a global network of would-be acclimatizers, from Britain and France to Russia and the United States. Although the movement was short-lived, the long reach of nineteenth-century acclimatization societies continues to be felt today, from choked waterways to the uncontrollable expansion of European pests in former colonies.


1994 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. DzIewonski

The origins of the Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN) can be traced to the summer of 1984. At that time, GEOSCOPE - the French global network of broadband instruments - was already well under way, and in the United States, the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) had just published its Science Plan for Global Seismographic Network (GSN). There was clearly an opportunity and the need to involve scientists from other countries in planning for the future of global seismology. An ad hoc meeting of some ten West European seismologists had been arranged in August during the annual meeting of the European Geophysical Society in Louvain. This may be considered to signify the beginning of widescale international cooperation, even though this particular group eventually became the nucleus of ORFEUS (Observatories and Research Facilities for EUropean Seismology). Rather than taking an active role in deployment of new stations, it chose to focus on the issue of providing the service for data collection and exchange, with an important mission of developing the requisite software.


1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Woods

American architectural journals first appeared in the second half of the 19th century. Encouraged by advances in printing and graphic technologies, they were part of a general trend toward specialized journalism during this period. The architectural periodical developed along with journals for women, clerics, railroad engineers, and grocers. Yet it also resulted from publishers' desires to capitalize on the success of house pattern books and the widespread interest in architecture that they created. Despite these favorable omens the early American architectural journals foundered; they had troubled and short lives, generally lasting only two years. The premise of this paper is that their success depended on the architectural profession's direct involvement and support and the backing of a major publishing house. Beginning with the first periodicals of the 1850s and 1860s, architectural journalism identified itself with the emerging profession; its editorials asserted the architects' primacy in design and construction and distinguished their role from the builders'. Professional and educational issues, in fact, took precedence over aesthetic and stylistic discussions in editorial columns and articles. Yet the journals displayed the same pragmatism that had characterized builders' guides and pattern books, the first architectural literature published in the United States.


2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Marcus ◽  
Dawn A. Marcus ◽  
Kalathil K. Sureshkumar ◽  
Sabiha M. Hussain ◽  
Rita L. McGill

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