Event Title

SSA03 - Exploring the Hegemony of Ag Modernization through Historical Ag News

Presenter Information

Marcy Galbreath, University of Central Florida
Amy Giroux, University of Central Florida

Location

CB1-309

Streaming Media

Start Date

4-11-2017 1:45 PM

Description

Digital cultural history can mean different things to different audiences; a community history website, an online museum, or an institutional photo repository all have digital cultural contexts. Our project concerns interpreting data from one such heritage database, Chronicling America, to understand the role newspapers—the social media of the era—played in disseminating hegemonic ideologies within American agricultural communities. Our research uses archival newspapers to trace the role of federal and state governments in shaping perceptions and identities for U.S. farmers. How did late 19th and early 20th century legislative acts challenge and redefine farming and the people who participated in agriculture? The First Morrill Act, Hatch Act, and Smith-Lever Extension Act set the stage for agricultural knowledge to become a formalized sphere for technical and scientific inquiry in the United States during the advent of modern farming. Agriculture at the time was an area open to change through reorganization, systemization, and science-based principles of production. It was hoped that, just as these ideas had transformed the U.S. manufacturing economy, they would similarly reshape agricultural processes. Implicit in this drive for modernity is the notion that farmers, in their native practices, would be inadequate for the needs of an industrialized America; farmers, for their part, embraced the new technologies and the concept of a business-model agriculture. Finding the newspapers that contain traces of these acts through Chronicling America is possible but difficult due to the immense amount of information. Currently, the database contains 11,764,536 pages, and is continually growing as more collections are added. Our response to the challenges and opportunities of big data, a topic-specific search tool website we title Historical Agricultural News (HAN), makes the Chronicling America database more accessible and offers downloadable data sets and visualizations. To rhetoricians, written genres such as legislative acts (and the newspapers that report them) participate in social action, reflecting power relationships and directing community perceptions. In this paper, we argue that legislative acts, visible through the lens of archival newspapers, demonstrate a hegemonic reshaping of farming identities by establishing discourses of education, improvement, and industry. HAN enables article-level text analysis of newspapers from the time period, reveals the presence and activity of these genres, and produces visualizations to trace the expansion of progressive ideologies..