Washington at the Plow

Washington at the Plow PDF Author: Bruce A. Ragsdale
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674246381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Washington at the Plow

Washington at the Plow PDF Author: Bruce A. Ragsdale
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674246381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Washington at the Plow

Washington at the Plow PDF Author: Bruce A. Ragsdale
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067426990X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book

Book Description
Winner of the George Washington Prize 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 “respectability & importance which we ought to hold in the world.” Washington at the Plow depicts the “first farmer of America” 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 Washington’s 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 Washington’s famous decision to free his slaves after his death.

George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver PDF Author: John Perry
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
ISBN: 1595554041
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book

Book Description
Christian Encounters, a series of biographies from Thomas Nelson Publishers, highlights important lives from all ages and areas of the Church. Some are familiar faces. Others are unexpected guests. But all, through their relationships, struggles, prayers, and desires, uniquely illuminate our shared experience. A generation of 20th-century Americans knew him as a gentle, stoop-shouldered old black man who loved plants and discovered more than a hundred uses for the humble peanut. George Washington Carver goes beyond the public image to chronicle the adventures of one of history's most inspiring and remarkable men. George Washington Carver was born a slave. After his mother was kidnapped during the Civil War, his former owners raised him as their own child. He was the first black graduate of Iowa State, and turned down a salary from Thomas Edison higher than the U.S. President to stay at the struggling Tuskegee Institute, where he taught and encouraged poor black students for nearly half a century. Carver was an award-winning painter and acclaimed botanist who saw God the Creator in all of nature. The more he learned about the world, the more convinced he was that everything in it was a gift from the Almighty, that all people were equal in His sight, and that the way to gain respect from his fellow man was not to demand it, but to earn it.

You May Plow Here

You May Plow Here PDF Author: Sara Brooks
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393308662
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book

Book Description
"A profoundly poignant yet triumphant book, a recreation by an Alabama-born black of her struggle against racism and poverty while striving for the common dream of Americans. . . . {A} marvelously earthy 'narrative.'. . . Her memoir is the stuff of human pride made memorable in raw, homely vernacular".--Publishers Weekly.

Farmer George Plants a Nation

Farmer George Plants a Nation PDF Author: Peggy Thomas
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
ISBN: 1620910292
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 41

Get Book

Book Description
School Library Journal Best Book of the Year NSTA/CBC Outstanding Science Trade Book American Farm Bureau Foundation for Education Recommended Book Besides being a general and the first president of the United States, did you know that George Washington was also a farmer? Here's a look at America's first President as he's rarely seen. George Washington was the first leader of our country—but he was also an inventor, scientist, and the most forward-thinking farmer of his time. As he worked to make the new country independent, he also struggled to create a self-sufficient farm at Mount Vernon, Virginia. Excerpts from Washington's writings are featured throughout this nonfiction picture book, which also includes a timeline, resource section, as well as essays on Washington at Mount Vernon and his thoughts on slavery. Both the author and illustrator worked closely with the staff of Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens to render an accurate portrait of Farmer George at work. Nebraska Farm Bureau Children’s Agriculture Book of the Year Ohio Farm Bureau’s Children’s Book Award A Wisconsin Ag in the Classroom Book of the Year Kansas State Reading Circle Recommended Reading List

Hands on the Freedom Plow

Hands on the Freedom Plow PDF Author: Faith S. Holsaert
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252098870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 656

Get Book

Book Description
In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. The testimonies gathered here present a sweeping personal history of SNCC: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the movements in Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power and antiwar activism. Since the women spent time in the Deep South, many also describe risking their lives through beatings and arrests and witnessing unspeakable violence. These intense stories depict women, many very young, dealing with extreme fear and finding the remarkable strength to survive. 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. Each story reveals how the struggle for social change was formed, supported, and maintained by the women who kept their "hands on the freedom plow." As the editors write in the introduction, "Though the voices are different, they all tell the same story--of women bursting out of constraints, leaving school, leaving their hometowns, meeting new people, talking into the night, laughing, going to jail, being afraid, teaching in Freedom Schools, working in the field, dancing at the Elks Hall, working the WATS line to relay horror story after horror story, telling the press, telling the story, telling the word. And making a difference in this world."

The Property of the Nation

The Property of the Nation PDF Author: Matthew R. Costello
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700633367
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
George Washington was an affluent slave owner who believed that republicanism and social hierarchy were vital to the young country’s survival. And yet, he remains largely free of the “elitist” label affixed to his contemporaries, as Washington evolved in public memory during the nineteenth century into a man of the common people, the father of democracy. This memory, we learn in The Property of the Nation, was a deliberately constructed image, shaped and reshaped over time, generally in service of one cause or another. Matthew R. Costello traces this process through the story of Washington’s tomb, whose history and popularity reflect the building of a memory of America’s first president—of, by, and for the American people. Washington’s resting place at his beloved Mount Vernon estate was at times as contested as his iconic image; and in Costello’s telling, the many attempts to move the first president’s bodily remains offer greater insight to the issue of memory and hero worship in early America. While describing the efforts of politicians, business owners, artists, and storytellers to define, influence, and profit from the memory of Washington at Mount Vernon, this book’s main focus is the memory-making process that took place among American citizens. As public access to the tomb increased over time, more and more ordinary Americans were drawn to Mount Vernon, and their participation in this nationalistic ritual helped further democratize Washington in the popular imagination. Shifting our attention from official days of commemoration and publicly orchestrated events to spontaneous visits by citizens, Costello’s book clearly demonstrates in compelling detail how the memory of George Washington slowly but surely became The Property of the Nation.

The Life Of George Washington

The Life Of George Washington PDF Author: M L (Mason Locke) 1759-1825 Weems
Publisher: Palala Press
ISBN: 9781378677063
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

George Washington's Expense Account

George Washington's Expense Account PDF Author: George Washington
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802196616
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 455

Get Book

Book Description
A journalist takes a close look at the Founding Father’s creative accounting skills in “a very funny book” (The New York Times Book Review). George Washington made a noble gesture of refusing payment for his services as commander in chief of the Continental Army—but as this book reveals, he also took it as an opportunity to indulge his insatiable lust for fine food and drink, extravagant clothing, and lavish accommodations. In a close analysis of the document that financed our Revolution, Marvin Kitman uncovers some surprising scandals and fascinating facts—and serves each up with verve and wit. “An intriguing network of historical detection.” —San Francisco Chronicle

The Widow Washington

The Widow Washington PDF Author: Martha Saxton
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721335
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book

Book Description
An insightful biography of Mary Ball Washington, the mother of our nation's father The Widow Washington is the first life of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington’s mother, based on archival sources. Her son’s biographers have, for the most part, painted her as self-centered and crude, a trial and an obstacle to her oldest child. But the records tell a very different story. Mary Ball, the daughter of a wealthy planter and a formerly indentured servant, was orphaned young and grew up working hard, practicing frugality and piety. Stepping into Virginia’s upper class, she married an older man, the planter Augustine Washington, with whom she had five children before his death eleven years later. As a widow deprived of most of her late husband’s properties, Mary struggled to raise her children, but managed to secure them places among Virginia’s elite. In her later years, she and her wealthy son George had a contentious relationship, often disagreeing over money, with George dismissing as imaginary her fears of poverty and helplessness. Yet Mary Ball Washington had a greater impact on George than mothers of that time and place usually had on their sons. George did not have the wealth or freedom to enjoy the indulged adolescence typical of young men among the planter class. Mary’s demanding mothering imbued him with many of the moral and religious principles by which he lived. The two were strikingly similar, though the commanding demeanor, persistence, athleticism, penny-pinching, and irascibility that they shared have served the memory of the country’s father immeasurably better than that of his mother. Martha Saxton’s The Widow Washington is a necessary and deeply insightful corrective, telling the story of Mary’s long, arduous life on its own terms, and not treating her as her son’s satellite.