Emily Pawley

Dickinson College, History, Faculty Member

University of Pennsylvania, History and Sociology of Science, Alumna

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Emily Pawley teaches environmental history, the history of capitalism, and the history of science at Dickinson College. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Smithsonian, and the American Antiquarian Society. She has published on analytic tables, cattle portraiture, counterfeit apples, and aphrodisiacs for sheep. Her book, The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North came out with University of Chicago Press in April 2020. She is also interested in climate change pedagogy and climate change activism. She is a member of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.

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Papers by Emily Pawley

The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North

equality that informed the founding generation and also stoked apocalyptic fears that this great ... more equality that informed the founding generation and also stoked apocalyptic fears that this great American inheritance was on the verge of imminent collapse unless those white men organized to defend it. Although it has always been contested, the reactionary white male identity politics that first emerged in the antebellum era has been a recurrent and powerful force in American political culture ever since.

2. No Ordinary Farmers

The Nature of the Future

3. Experiments All for Worldly Gain

The Nature of the Future

6. Divining Adaptation

The Nature of the Future

8. The Balance-Sheet of Nature

The Nature of the Future

1. Capitalist Aristocracy

The Nature of the Future

7. Truth in Fruit

The Nature of the Future

Introduction: Bending Reality with Large Strawberries

4. Trying Machines

The Nature of the Future

PART FOUR. Values

PART THREE. Futures

PART ONE. Performances

PART TWO. Experiments

The Nature of the Future

Feeding Desire: Generative Environments, Meat Markets, and the Management of Sheep Intercourse in Great Britain, 1700–1750

Osiris

As a system of profit based on reproduction, growth, and eating, animal husbandry offers an ideal... more As a system of profit based on reproduction, growth, and eating, animal husbandry offers an ideal place to examine how capitalism shapes knowledge of bodies. Recent work on the history of breeding demonstrates this, showing how new markets in “blood” helped define new theories of heredity and race. This essay expands on this literature by examining eighteenth-century British efforts to control a different aspect of animal reproduction: desire. Spurred by changing meat markets in out-of-season lamb and expanding property structures that created sex-segregated herds, shepherds, farmers, and agricultural writers worked to provoke the seasonally dependent desires of ewes by feeding them aphrodisiac foods, changing the ways that sex was staged, and creating landscapes of “artificial” grass timed to help ewes escape the constraints of the seasons. Their efforts draw our attention to a broader range of bodily experts, from physicians, to professional feeders, to Linnaean botanists, who were interested in the ways that landscapes could be made to shape bodies. The essay suggests that these forms of environmental control, which still undergird capitalist farming, have left significant modern traces on both knowledge and landscapes and offer a rich and relatively untapped source of bodily knowledge.

Roundtable: Agricultural History and the History of Science

Agricultural History

Cataloging Nature: Standardizing Fruit Varieties in the United States, 1800–1860

Business History Review, 2016

The forests and fields of the early American republic teemed with individually varying seedling f... more The forests and fields of the early American republic teemed with individually varying seedling fruit trees. American nurserymen stabilized both this chaotic landscape and their trade by promoting named fruit “varieties” gleaned from domestic orchards and from a global network of botanical gardens. Developing strategies to regulate the production of names and descriptions, they altered both texts and organisms, replacing a profusion of “wild” trees with a negotiated list of “named varieties.” Examining this process reveals intersections between commercial and scientific credibility and illuminates the alternative business forms built around living goods.

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The Point of Perfection: Cattle Portraiture, Bloodlines, and the Meaning of Breeding, 1760-1860

Journal of the Early Republic, 2016

To modern eyes at least, Grace the cow's two portraits (see Figures and) are not flattering. She ... more To modern eyes at least, Grace the cow's two portraits (see Figures and) are not flattering. She looks bulky, rectangular, a little comical. At first and even second glance, the portraits look like all the other printed portraits of cattle and pigs that crowded American agricultural print in the first half of the nineteenth century. A moment's reflection, however, makes all such portraits seem somewhat strange. First, though seemingly identical, they are in fact ''portraits,'' depicting named individual animals, whose lives are often described in detail in the caption. They have the idealized form of advertisements, but often, as in Grace's case, the body depicted is not for sale; as the caption reveals, Grace had been killed and eaten in 1851, well before her likenesses appeared in print. Finally, at a time when images were expensive, there are so many of them, hundreds upon hundreds in lithograph and woodcut, on broadsides, catalogues, agricultural journals, and manuals in increasing numbers from the 1830s onward. Clearly, to the growing community of breeders, portraits of domestic

format_quoteBreeding practices produced the ancestors of today's industrial food system, revealing unexpected dynamics in capitalism.format_quote

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Accounting with the Fields: Chemistry and Value in Nutriment in American Agricultural Improvement, 1835–1860

Science as Culture, 2010

Thyroid ultrasonography (US) plays a key role in the diagnosis and management of thyroid-related ... more Thyroid ultrasonography (US) plays a key role in the diagnosis and management of thyroid-related diseases. The aim of this article was to illustrate various pitfalls that can occur in utilizing thyroid US and techniques to prevent them. In this article, we present cases demonstrating the common pitfalls associated with US equipment, performance, normal thyroid structures, misinterpretations, and surrounding structures. Knowledge of these areas is essential to avoid misdiagnosis or improper disease management.

format_quoteProper use of high frequency ultrasound transducers is essential for accurate thyroid imaging; inadequate quality can lead to missed diagnoses.format_quote

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Science in Early America: Print Culture and the Sciences of Territoriality

Journal of the Early Republic, 2016

Where was science in the early American republic? Generations of scholarship suggested either tha... more Where was science in the early American republic? Generations of scholarship suggested either that there was not very much-early Americans were too busy making farms to think very abstractly-or that what there was took place in the general vicinity of lightning storms. Until relatively recently, most historians of American science drew from twentieth-century modalities of science: Scientists were men, professionals formally trained in a specialist discipline, working in a purpose-built structure with sensitive instruments and talking mostly with one another. Their primary income came from their research, the legitimate fruits of which were to be formally published in professional journals, typically employing a jargon that might be fully legible only to an elite subset of colleagues. In keeping with Cold War norms, which placed theoretical physics at the top of the hierarchy of knowledge, historians also prized particular kinds of science: ''pure'' or ''basic'' research that could be

format_quoteSilliman's consulting work set a precedent for profitable science-business relationships in early America, legitimizing scientific consulting.format_quote

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