Article
ID: CBB001213806

The Social Sciences, Philosophy, and the Cultural Turn in the 1930s USDA (2013)

unapi
Social sciences Science and culture Philosophy Science and government 20th century, early United States United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)

One of the more unusual attempts by the American state to mobilize academic expertise unfolded in the late 1930s, when the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) hired scholars in the culture and personality fields and philosophy to aid its efforts to promote economic, social, and cultural change in the countryside. USDA progressives also reached out to disciplinary scholars in other ways as they sought to institute a deliberative mode of planning in local communities and to remake the curricula of the land-grant colleges in support of that project. These USDA initiatives and scholars' responses reveal that scientific knowledge was mobilized in the 1930s not just for the instrumental purpose of regulating economic behavior but also to explain and legitimate federal programs and to inform ambitious projects for cultural change. At the USDA, as at many other sites between the wars, scientific thinkers turned to the social sciences and philosophy in order to understand and then change the public mind.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001213806/

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Authors & Contributors
Petty, Adrienne
Egli, Rebecca
Gabriel N Rosenberg
Varno, Theodore James
Zenderland, Leila C.
Warren, Louis S.
Journals
Agricultural History
Public Understanding of Science
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Journal of Industrial Ecology
Journal of American History
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Publishers
Washington State University
University of California, Davis
McGill University (Canada)
V & R Unipress; Vienna Univ. Pr.
University Press of Kansas
Routledge
Concepts
Science and government
Social sciences
Agriculture
Science and culture
Science and politics
Public policy
People
Wallace, Henry Agard
Spillman, William Jasper
Hoover, Herbert
Fromm, Erich
Darwin, Charles Robert
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century, late
20th century
21st century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Germany
Pacific Northwest (North America)
Southern states (U.S.)
England
Institutions
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (United States)
Vienna. Universität
United States. Geological Survey
United States Reclamation Service
Geological Survey (U.S.)
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