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Labor History

Pennsylvania

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Full-Text Articles in Other History

Georgic Rhetoric, Virtue And The Commercialization Of Agriculture In Pennsylvania From 1785 To 1870, Naomi Ulmer Dec 2019

Georgic Rhetoric, Virtue And The Commercialization Of Agriculture In Pennsylvania From 1785 To 1870, Naomi Ulmer

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This research examines how farmers in Pennsylvania between 1785 and 1870 were persuaded by georgic agrarianism to take social, economic and even moral risks to abandon a semi-subsistence mode of production in favor of commercial production. The georgic rhetoric is derived from Virgil’s poem “The Georgics.” It discusses agriculture and man’s labor in nature. Virgil discusses the relationship between man, nature and his ability, or inability, to control nature to ensure his own survival. Beginning in the late 18th century, supporters of improved agriculture, mostly wealthy and upper-class gentlemen, tried to persuade common yeomen farmers to produce for the …


Making An Impression: Butter Prints, The Butter Market, And Rural Women In Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Pennsylvania, Jennifer L. Putnam Jun 2017

Making An Impression: Butter Prints, The Butter Market, And Rural Women In Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Pennsylvania, Jennifer L. Putnam

Madison Historical Review

Pre-industrial butter-making was an arduous process, involving milking, churning, proper storage, printing, and, sometimes, transport to market. The 19th-century economy in Philadelphia was forever changed by the practice of rural women selling their surplus butter as a response to the rise of consumerism. Butter-making provided rural women with the means to earn their own income, providing economic agency and increasing their independence by allowing them to work outside of the home. Butter prints emerged as a way to brand one’s butter with a signature trademark. A print’s size and shape, the materials and methods used in its construction, and the …