Chapter 13 - Early American Plant Writing

Summary

Although rarely at the center of the most influential human historical narratives, the stories of human-plant interaction are nonetheless sporadically recorded in a variety of literary genres and other cultural media across nearly five centuries. This chapter aims to provide a contextual outline of our present human–plant culture as it developed in North America through the early nineteenth century, and to orient readers to the most frequently discussed texts, questions, and resources in the field. It introduces the early modern history of settler cash crops – cotton, sugar, and tobacco – and the longer history of changing agricultural practice during the early contact period. Early American literature in English – poetry, herbals, prose tracts, and instructional writing – was deeply engaged with the movement of indigenous and imported plant species as they flowed in and out of North America as rapidly as humans moved into the region from the rest of the globe.