An exploration of the rise of the crop strain that came to dominate the American tobacco industry and its toll on the Southern landscape that produced it

Drew A. Swanson has written an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco.  A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurtured it, but as the author provocatively argues, the choice of crop initially made perfect agrarian as well as financial sense for southern planters.
 
Swanson, who brings to his narrative the experience of having grown up on a working Virginia tobacco farm, explores how one attempt at agricultural permanence went seriously awry. He weaves together social, agricultural, and cultural history of the Piedmont region and illustrates how ideas about race and landscape management became entangled under slavery and afterward. Challenging long-held perceptions, this innovative study examines not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the justifications that encouraged tobacco farming in the region.

"Won the Ohio Academy of History, for the junior faculty, 2015 Publication Award which is given “to an active member of the Academy” for an “outstanding publication in the field of history issued in the year preceding the annual meeting.”
" - Ohio Academy of History

"Winner of the 2015 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award from the Agricultural History Society for the year's best book on agricultural hisotry" - Agricultural History Society

"“…Drew Swanson’s A Golden Weed is [a] well-researched study of tobacco in the Old Bright Belt…Swanson examines tobacco’s environmental history and deep-rooted connections to the region’s culture.”—Dale Coats, NCHR
" - NCHR

""A Golden Weed is thus both a cultural and an environmental history; Swanson is interested in ideas about land but also in the ways that the natural environment..."—Megan Kate Nelson, The Journal of American History" - Journal of American History

"“Swanson excels in delivering what his title promised: a rigorous exploration of why generations of farmer’s sacrificed the integrity of the landscape they loved to grow soil-depleting tobacco. His persuasive arguments about this key issue now make it essential for future historians of southern agriculture”—Adrienne Monteith Petty, American Historical Review" - American Historical Review

"Selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015, in the botany category." - Choice