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Historiography of Plant Breeding and Agriculture

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Handbook of the Historiography of Biology

Part of the book series: Historiographies of Science ((HISTSC,volume 1))

  • 212 Accesses

Abstract

There are unique opportunities that plant breeding and agriculture offer the historian of biology and unique ways in which the historian of biology can inform the history of plant breeding and agriculture. This chapter will first address what agriculture has in common with themes that cut across this handbook, before turning in Part 2 to issues, problems, and questions that stem from agriculture’s particular features and ending in Part 3 with paths for future work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Gregory Radick was the first person to suggest that I read Darwin on these terms, and I remain grateful for his sharing this insight.

  2. 2.

    My considerable thanks to Berris Charnley, who helped make sure I missed as little as possible, and Jonathan Harwood, who many years ago shared with me his lists of historians working across agriculture and genetics. Also thanks to the History of Science Society’s IsisCB database which helps keep us all up to date.

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Acknowledgments

This chapter was written while the author was a Research Fellow on the Narrative Science project, www.narrative-science.org, and received funding from the ERC under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 694732).

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  1. London School of Economics, London, UK

    Dominic J. Berry

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  1. HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Michael Dietrich

  2. University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, MN, USA

    Mark Borrello

  3. Tel Aviv, Israel

    Oren Harman

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Berry, D.J. (2019). Historiography of Plant Breeding and Agriculture. In: Dietrich, M., Borrello, M., Harman, O. (eds) Handbook of the Historiography of Biology. Historiographies of Science, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74456-8_27-1

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