An Archaeology of Improvement in Rural Massachusetts: Landscapes of Profit and Betterment at the Dawn of the 19th century

This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19^th century rural Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18^th and 19^th centuries as part of a transition to industrial capitalism. The meaning of Improvement vacillated between ideas of economic profit and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enactio...