How farmers shaped the development of agricultural machinery

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, farmers in the midwestern United States and in Ontario began adopting new agricultural machines: threshers, reapers, and drills for more efficient production of grains, as well as sewing and washing machines for more efficient production within the farm household. By using, maintaining, and altering these machines within the natural and social contexts of their farms, rural people produced new technological systems of industrial agriculture. They also struggled with machine manufacturers and their agents for control of those systems—both individually and through farmers’ organizations. Cultivating Machines contributes to historiographies of capitalism, technology, and agriculture as it demonstrates the importance of everyday know-how and informed tinkering to the mechanization of grain agriculture.

In this study, James Rick moves from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and the introduction of horse-powered machines, to the end of the century, when mechanized technologies became indispensable and central parts of farms themselves. Ultimately, large-scale wheat production, the increased complexity of machines, the need for replacement parts, and the efforts of manufacturers and their agents to assert themselves as authorities over industrial agriculture diminished the technological independence of farming people.

"This wonderfully engaging study explodes the myth of racial democracy in a pathbreaking analysis of Brazilian style." -- Karen Brodkin, author of How Jews Became White Folks

"Twine offers one of the most sophisticated analyses to date of the intransigence of Brazilian racism. Her nuanced account of the complex interplay of gender, race, and class is particularly exciting. This book will have a powerful impact not only on the field of Brazilian racial studies, but on the whole burgeoning literature on the African Diaspora." -- Howard Winant, author of Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons

"A revealing and sharply observed dissection of how racism works 'on the ground' in Brazil." -- George Reid Andrews, author of Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988

America’s public parks are in a golden age. Hundreds of millions of dollars—both public and private—fund urban jewels like Manhattan’s Central Park. Keeping the polish on landmark parks and in neighborhood playgrounds alike means that the trash must be picked up, benches painted, equipment tested, and leaves raked. Bringing this often-invisible work into view, however, raises profound questions for citizens of cities.

In Who Cleans the Park? John Krinsky and Maud Simonet explain that the work of maintaining parks has intersected with broader trends in welfare reform, civic engagement, criminal justice, and the rise of public-private partnerships. Welfare-to-work trainees, volunteers, unionized city workers (sometimes working outside their official job descriptions), staff of nonprofit park “conservancies,” and people sentenced to community service are just a few of the groups who routinely maintain parks. With public services no longer being provided primarily by public workers, Krinsky and Simonet argue, the nature of public work must be reevaluated. Based on four years of fieldwork in New York City, Who Cleans the Park? looks at the transformation of public parks from the ground up. Beginning with studying changes in the workplace, progressing through the public-private partnerships that help maintain the parks, and culminating in an investigation of a park’s contribution to urban real-estate values, the book unearths a new urban order based on nonprofit partnerships and a rhetoric of responsible citizenship, which at the same time promotes unpaid work, reinforces workers’ domination at the workplace, and increases the value of park-side property. Who Cleans the Park? asks difficult questions about who benefits from public work, ultimately forcing us to think anew about the way we govern ourselves, with implications well beyond the five boroughs.