MacFadyen, Joshua (Author)
Farmers feed cities, but starting in the nineteenth century they painted them too. Flax from Canada and the northern United States produced fibre for textiles and linseed oil for paint – critical commodities in a century when wars were fought over fibre and when increased urbanization demanded expanded paint markets. Flax Americana re-examines the changing relationships between farmers, urban consumers, and the land through a narrative of Canada's first and most important industrial crop. Initially a specialty crop grown by Mennonites and other communities on contracts for small-town mill complexes, flax became big business in the late nineteenth century as multinational linseed oil companies quickly displaced rural mills. Flax cultivation spread across the northern plains and prairies, particularly along the edges of dryland settlement, and then into similar ecosystems in South America's Pampas. Joshua MacFadyen's detailed examination of archival records reveals the complexity of a global commodity and its impact on the eastern Great Lakes and northern Great Plains. He demonstrates how international networks of scientists, businesses, and regulators attempted to predict and control the crop's frontier geography, how evolving consumer concerns about product quality and safety shaped the market and its regulations, and how the nature of each region encouraged some forms of business and limited others. The northern flax industry emerged because of border-crossing communities. By following the plant across countries and over time Flax Americana sheds new light on the ways that commodities, frontiers, and industrial capitalism shaped the modern world.
...MoreReview R Douglas Hurt (July 2021) Review of "Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent". Environmental History (pp. 611-613).
Review Béatrice Craig (2020) Review of "Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent". American Historical Review (pp. 220-221).
Book
Helen Louise Cowie;
(2021)
Victims of Fashion
(/isis/citation/CBB465419433/)
Article
Gary Patterson;
(2023)
John Mercer (1791-1866): The Most Colorful Chemist in the 19th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB630467702/)
Article
David E. Lewis;
(2023)
“The Chemical History of Color,” but Just Two Kinds of Them
(/isis/citation/CBB140544596/)
Thesis
Snow, Whitney Adrienne;
(2013)
Tung Tried: Agricultural Policy and the Fate of a Gulf South Oilseed Industry, 1902--1969
(/isis/citation/CBB001567506/)
Article
Tunstall, Alexandra;
(2012)
Beyond Categorization: Zhu Kerou's Tapestry Painting Butterfly and Camellia
(/isis/citation/CBB001214317/)
Article
Sara Spike;
(2020)
Mayflowers and Sleeping Johnnies: Nature-Study, Local Knowledge, and A. H. MacKay’s Phenological Research in Rural Nova Scotia, 1892-1925
(/isis/citation/CBB173073577/)
Article
Braden Hutchinson;
(2013)
Making (Anti)Modern Childhood: Producing and Consuming Toys in Late Victorian Canada
(/isis/citation/CBB526123679/)
Article
Dorotea Gucciardo;
(2013)
Introduction: Canada’s Usable Past: Consumer Technologies in Historical Perspective
(/isis/citation/CBB801266985/)
Book
Robert Hellyer;
(2021)
Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups
(/isis/citation/CBB751902936/)
Article
Lindsay Wells;
(2020)
Proserpina Unbound: John Ruskin, Maria La Touche, and Victorian Floriculture
(/isis/citation/CBB984508626/)
Book
MacLennan, Carol A.;
(2014)
Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawai'i
(/isis/citation/CBB001553164/)
Thesis
Varno, Theodore James;
(2011)
The Nature of Tomorrow: Inbreeding in Industrial Agriculture and Evolutionary Thought in Britain and the United States, 1859--1925
(/isis/citation/CBB001567261/)
Article
Dan Bouk;
(2017)
The History and Political Economy of Personal Data over the Last Two Centuries in Three Acts
(/isis/citation/CBB789951727/)
Book
April Merleaux;
(2015)
Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness
(/isis/citation/CBB547901266/)
Article
Melanie A Kiechle;
(2021)
“Health is Wealth”: Valuing Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States
(/isis/citation/CBB251116095/)
Article
Katja Bruisch;
(2020)
Nature Mistaken: Resource-Making, Emotions and the Transformation of Peatlands in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union
(/isis/citation/CBB975736525/)
Thesis
Joshua Albert Specht;
(2014)
Red Meat Republic: The Rise of the Cattle-Beef Complex, 1865-1906
(/isis/citation/CBB394694042/)
Article
Van Lanen, Amanda;
(2014)
“Where Dollars Grow on Trees”: The Promise and Reality of Irrigated Farming in Central Washington, 1890--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001421793/)
Article
Rebecca Jones;
Andrea Gaynor;
(2019)
Wild Harvesting, Self-Sown Crops, and the Ambiguous Modernity of Australian Agriculture
(/isis/citation/CBB464398977/)
Article
Loskutova, Marina;
(2014)
Early Research on Insect Pests in the Russian Empire: Bureaucracy, Academic Community and Local Knowledge in the 1830s–1840s
(/isis/citation/CBB001202375/)
Be the first to comment!