Promoting Agriculture in a Changing World: 225 Years of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, 1785 to 2010, is a superbly researched and written new volume that documents the role the Society has played in American agriculture. Author Elizabeth A. Mosimann, a Society member and curator of the Society’s library at the University of Pennsylvania for eight years, is especially suited to her task of documenting how the Society has influenced agriculture throughout the many advances and transformations it has undergone.

Mosimann’s new work is not the first history of the Society to be written but it is the first to explore 20th-century agriculture and the Society’s influence on it in detail. She compellingly presents the role the Veterinary School at the University of Pennsylvania played in energizing the Society, the changing nature of the family farm, the era of big business in agriculture, conservation and stewardship of the soil and the development of agriculture’s institutions and places of higher learning. Woven throughout this rich history are the roles that Society members played in the march toward progress. Copies are available for $25.