| Chapter : | America’s Love of the Land: An Introduction |
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matic rural repopulation to improvements in transportation and communications infrastructure—representing a further evolution of similar technological and infrastructural concerns (electrification, mail delivery, road improvement) identified by Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission in 1909.
In the final analysis, Love of the Land is not intended merely as a collection of agricultural and environmental history, but as a cultural primer for the many now returning, without context, to a life on the land. As the twenty-first century citizen debates a move back to the country, perhaps even to occupy a long-abandoned family homestead, they will find herein timeless advice from, for example, Edward Payson Powell. As they consider how to raise their son or daughter in rural America, they will find still-relevant, gender-specific counsel from Martha Foote Crow, William A. McKeever, Isaac Phillips Roberts, and Henry Wallace. And as those same parents consider educational options for their children in a rural school district, they will no doubt find traces of both the obstacles and the pleasures of nature study as outlined by Mary Hunter Austin, Liberty Hyde Bailey, H. W. Foght, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Dallas Lore Sharp, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and others who believed nature the best teacher.
Love of the Land: Essential Farm and Conservation Readings from an American Golden Age, 1880–1920 aims to be the best kind of historical environmental reader, anthologizing farm and conservation readings that seem as near as today’s news. As Mark Twain said, “History does not repeat itself, but history rhymes.” And nowhere is that rhyme more apparent than in these classic agrarian and conservation writings from a golden age.