The Plow

Download or read book Washington at the Plow written by Bruce A. Ragsdale and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh, original look at George Washington as an innovative land manager whose singular passion for farming would unexpectedly lead him to reject slavery. George Washington spent more of his working life farming than he did at war or in political office. For over forty years, he devoted himself to the improvement of agriculture, which he saw as the means by which the American people would attain the Òrespectability & importance which we ought to hold in the world.Ó Washington at the Plow depicts the Òfirst farmer of AmericaÓ as a leading practitioner of the New Husbandry, a transatlantic movement that spearheaded advancements in crop rotation. A tireless experimentalist, Washington pulled up his tobacco and switched to wheat production, leading the way for the rest of the country. He filled his library with the latest agricultural treatises and pioneered land-management techniques that he hoped would guide small farmers, strengthen agrarian society, and ensure the prosperity of the nation. Slavery was a key part of WashingtonÕs pursuits. He saw enslaved field workers and artisans as means of agricultural development and tried repeatedly to adapt slave labor to new kinds of farming. To this end, he devised an original and exacting system of slave supervision. But Washington eventually found that forced labor could not achieve the productivity he desired. His inability to reconcile ideals of scientific farming and rural order with race-based slavery led him to reconsider the traditional foundations of the Virginia plantation. As Bruce Ragsdale shows, it was the inefficacy of chattel slavery, as much as moral revulsion at the practice, that informed WashingtonÕs famous decision to free his slaves after his death.

Download or read book The Plow written by Solon Robinson and published by . This book was released on 1852 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead written by Olga Tokarczuk and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "A brilliant literary murder mystery." —Chicago Tribune "Extraordinary. Tokarczuk's novel is funny, vivid, dangerous, and disturbing, and it raises some fierce questions about human behavior. My sincere admiration for her brilliant work." —Annie Proulx In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . . A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

Download or read book Speed-the-plow written by David Mamet and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 1989 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charlie Fox has a terrific vehicle for a hot male movie star, and he has brought it to his friend Bobby Gould, head of production for a major film company. Both see the script as a ticket to the really big table where the power is. The star wants to do it; all they have to do is pitch it to their boss in the morning. Meanwhile, Bobby bets Charlie that he can seduce the secretary temp. As a ruse, he has given her a novel "by some Eastern sissy writer" that he is supposed to read before saying "thanks but no thanks." She is determined that the novel, not the trite vehicle, should be the company's next project. When she does sleep with Bobby, he finds the experience is so transmogrifying that Charlie must plead with Bobby not to pitch the sissy film. - Publisher's note.

Download or read book Plough, Sword, and Book written by Ernest Gellner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elucidates and argues for the author's concept of human history from the past to the present.

Download or read book Hands on the Freedom Plow written by Faith S. Holsaert and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The women in SNCC acquired new skills, experienced personal growth, sustained one another, and even had fun in the midst of serious struggle. Readers are privy to their analyses of the Movement---its tactics, strategies, and underlying philosophies. The contributors revisit central debates of the struggle including the role of nonviolence and self-defense, the role of white people in a black-led movement, and the role of women within the Movement and the society at large. --

Download or read book People of the Plow written by James C. McCann and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1995-07-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than two thousand years, Ethiopia’s ox-plow agricultural system was the most efficient and innovative in Africa, but has been afflicted in the recent past by a series of crises: famine, declining productivity, and losses in biodiversity. James C. McCann analyzes the last two hundred years of agricultural history in Ethiopia to determine whether the ox-plow agricultural system has adapted to population growth, new crops, and the challenges of a modern political economy based in urban centers. This agricultural history is set in the context of the larger environmental and landscape history of Ethiopia, showing how farmers have integrated crops, tools, and labor with natural cycles of rainfall and soil fertility, as well as with the social vagaries of changing political systems. McCann traces characteristic features of Ethiopian farming, such as the single-tine scratch plow, which has retained a remarkably consistent design over two millennia, and a crop repertoire that is among the most genetically diverse in the world. People of the Plow provides detailed documentation of Ethiopian agricultural practices since the early nineteenth century by examining travel narratives, early agricultural surveys, photographs and engravings, modern farming systems research, and the testimony of farmers themselves, collected during McCann’s five years of fieldwork. He then traces the ways those practices have evolved in the twentieth century in response to population growth, urban markets, and the presence of new technologies.