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Farmscapes : Picturing Land Transformation In Nineteenth-Century America., Eileen L Yanoviak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines American farmstead imagery of the nineteenth-century and how those images reflect the environmental history of the North. In this study, images of farms illustrate, through the landscape, the transition from subsistence farming to agribusiness that fundamentally changed American life and the land over the century. By comparing the actual ecological and economic conditions of the farm and farmer to the images depicted by artists, it is possible to see both representations of change and the persistence of the agrarian myth in spite of dramatically different realities. This study focuses on the process of change in the American …