Core Historical Literature of Agriculture

In this broad and fair but fickle and undulating clime, where Dame Nature's promises of flowery-springtime are so frequently frowned upon by a polar wave, which drives the lifeblood back to the very heart of every unprotected living thing, some kind of protection from the lingering wintry blasts is an absolute necessity to every grower of early garden vegetables...

So begins "A Manual for Vegetable Plants" by Isaac F. Tillinghast, a volume digitized in Cornell University's Core Historical Literature of Agriculture. From Cornell's introduction: "The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) is a core electronic collection of agricultural texts published between the early nineteenth century and the middle to late twentieth century. Full-text materials cover agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crops and their protection, food science,forestry, human nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science. Scholars have selected the titles in this collection for their historical importance. Their evaluations and 4,500 core titles are detailed in the seven volume series The Literature of the Agricultural Sciences, Wallace C. Olsen, series editor."

The collection contains searchable and browsable scanned pages of books and journals that together form a core of full-text literature that is interesting not only to researchers but to organic gardeners, small farmers and anyone interested in the history of farming. I find it fascinating to read about the concerns of market gardeners before modern agricultural technology made pesticides and herbicides widely available; the earlier literature from the 18th century is similarly intriguing.

Some holdings I enjoyed:

Why Farmers are Poor from 1940

Letter From Maine: Cure for Robbing! from the American Bee Journal of of August 1868

Sweet Peas Up-to-Date 1897

This collection is just one of Cornell's Windows on the Past digitized series.