A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture

A Time to each Purpose: The Four Seasons in American agriculture By Michael Kammen (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Pres 2004 336 pp $3995)

Spring, summer autumn, and winter are nature-made periodizations with which race have long understood changes in their environments and lives. In A Time to each Purpose, Michael Kammen examines in what manner the seasons have inspired American cultural disclosure He moves through overlapping periods to research representations of the seasons, primarily in painting, popular illustration, poesy and prose, but also in statuary glass, and media such as lay film, and advertising. Kammen argues that American investment in and modification of this nearly universal perspective have time and time again invigorated the nation's agriculture and memory.

Kammen maintains that producing art and ideas about the seasons were among the ways that Americans reworked and mov beyond European traditions. Packed into the baggage that colonial Americans transported to the of recent origin World was Europe's centuries-old four seasons motif. There was nothing exceptional about the seasons supporting a national agriculture Like landscape painting, four seasons art promot cultural nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth hundred During the mid-nineteenth century, cultural pioneers, greatest in quantity notably Henry David Thoreau, worked to establish the nation's seasons as exceptional. Kammen acknowledges that celebrating the seasonal beauty of the nation's wilder lands rather than fields and ornamental gardens was distinctive. Americans further distinguished their seasons from European seasons by dint of emphasizing splendid fall colors and characterizing winter as the couple calm and a period of intellectual and spiritual growth

Industrialization and urbanization provok Americans to think about their seasons in anew. Better housing, heating and fare distanced more Americans from daily toil in nature. According to Kammen, rural and urban America shared a seasonal regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement circa 1850, which once not to be found became a memory often transmited in seasonal sentiments. These nostalgic interpretations became more typical as the twentieth hundred approached. Nor did they let slip vigor. Kammen devotes almost one-half of the volume to the enduring significance of the seasons in the twentieth hundred as expressed through nature writing, late painting, Norman Rockwell calendars, 1960 folk-rock music, and contemporary poesy With the increasing popularity of the seasons, the divergence between nuanced interpretations and simplistic mass-market nostalgia expanded. Sensitive bystanders prized the unrelenting uniqueness of the seasons within the seasons, while more pedestrian, frequently urban, Americans saw the seasons as predictable. Kammen is felicitous in showing the cultural ubiquity of the seasons. He proffers historians another theme to advance the investigation of continuity and change in American life. American's attachment to the seasons, for example, might help explain on what account Rachel Carson's 1962 Silent Spring transformed the environmental move (1)

Kammen implies a cyclical dynamic characterizes the seasons in American tillage As the seasons became les rigorous aspects of everyday life, cultural appreciation of them intensified and flourished. Although the seasonal motif deteriorated into cliche in commercial exploits, during the mid-twentieth hundred sophisticated thinking about seasons in nature writing and painting became more widespread. Kammen closes by surveying recent scientific research into by what means the seasons influence human bodies and feelings. He give an inkling ofs that these inquiries may demonstrate that a biological, seasonal awareness move swiftlys counter to the "'flattening'" (27 238) efficiencies of air conditioning, frozen commonss and snow plows that allow Americans to race forward no matter the time of year.

The breadth of knowledge in this volume flows from Kammen's effort to apply and to synthesize arguments advanced in his novel works to a topic that has interested him above the past quarter century. The sperms of this project can be fix in his late-1970s scholarship upon the life cycle as well as his writings upon American art and landscapes during the 1990 His tremendous insights into American agriculture and memory also inform this interpretation of the seasons. Kammen's archival research draws upon the correspondence of nature writers Henry Beston, Hal Borland, John Burrough Rachel Carson, John Muir, and Edwin Teale as well as replys to their writings from critics and readers. The pages spring to life with 65 black-and-white figures and 48 color plates.

Despite Kammen's efforts to integrate seasonal expressions from across the cultural appearance his unwavering emphasis on seasons in symbolic metes might disappoint some readers. That there is not universal appreciation for the greatest in quantity sophisticated seasonal art reflects not sole cultural tastes but also social differences. Kammen notes in what way African Americans and Native Americans experienced the seasons in the antebellum era in passing; he does not examine whether or in what manner their interpretations of the seasons changed above time. Kammen assumes that increasingly widespread urbanization and industrialization from one extremity to the other of the twentieth century meant that physical experience of the seasons had ceased. Kammen appears to accept the shared regard of moralistic naturalists and alienated urbanites about the los of seasonal awareness as the solitary American perspective on seasonal changes and their significance. There is no mention of: railroad laborers working in soaking spring rains, during dusty dried summers and along icy rights-of-way; postal carriers walking their roads year-round; or, "seasonal" laborers harvesting everything from apples to zucchini for Americans' tables. These tribe likely did not lack reflections or feelings about the seasons in their daily variety or annual revolution of times The book does not address in what manner the seasons influenced the social and cultural worlds of an array of ordinary Americans. A Time to each Purpose is dedicated to the seasons as squeeze outed on paper and canvas and as experienced end books and in galleries and museums.