The business of breeding : hybrid corn in Illinois, 1890-1940 / Deborah Fitzgerald.

  • Fitzgerald, Deborah Kay.
Date:
1990
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The business of breeding : hybrid corn in Illinois, 1890-1940 / Deborah Fitzgerald. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/272 (page X)
    Acknowledgments ing documents. At Funk Brothers, Leon Steele and in particular Eugene Funk, Jr., were generous with both their time and their historical materials. Mr. Funk's hospitality, openness, and sense of humor made this part of the research especially enjoyable. At Pfister, Merle Fulton and the late Walter Pfister made helpful suggestions, as did Ron Scherer and Leo Oleson at DeKalb-Pfizer Genetics. Librarians at the National Archives were likewise help¬ ful. Kim Pelkey, Marie Sheehan, and Bobbi Kelley all processed my words with speed and good humor, for which I am grateful. Others who have helped include A. Richard Crabb, who kindly gave me a copy of his book The Hybrid Corn Makers, a major source for this project; Lew Heghn, an independent corn breeder and friend, who answered my technical questions with great patience; and my uncle. Dean Unkel, and brother-in-law, Lowell Aldrich, both Iowa farmers, who answered my practical ques¬ tions and helped me understand agriculture from a farmer's point of view. Thanks go as well to Margaret Rossiter and an anony¬ mous referee at Cornell, whose criticisms on an earlier draft of this book were both pointed and welcome. I am grateful to Peter Agree and Marilyn Sale at Cornell University Press for providing timely encouragement and reassurance, and to Judith Bailey for her remarkably graceful and intelligent editing. During my years at the University of Pennsylvania's Depart¬ ment of the History and Sociology of Science, fellow graduate students, faculty, and staff provided both a provocative intellec¬ tual climate and a familial sense of community. Charles Rosen¬ berg was a source of great inspiration and support. His own studies of agricultural science provided the intellectual model upon which this book was built, and his interpretive style, which is evident throughout, helped me understand how historical ma¬ terials resist taming and why ambiguity is so persistent. Barbara Kimmelman, whose friendship saved me more than once from despair that this project might never reach fruition, was as well my toughest critic and most knowledegable judge of ideas and approaches. Thomas Broman, James Capshew, Richard Gillespie, Alex Laszlo, Lynn Nyhart, and Jack Pressman provided much-