Abstract: Summer One Research

My research focuses on the history of the oyster industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth century United States, specifically exploring the cultural and environmental significance of the oyster in coastal American social ecology. The nineteenth century brought immense change to coastal environments and the beginning of intensive oyster industry. Oysters went from a wild-harvested to industrially-cultivated crop, from working-class fare to a luxury food associated with the elite. Oysters’ transition from natural abundance to scarcity was affected by increasingly extractive and mechanized interactions between people and environment. Efforts to increase production profoundly impacted the coastal cities and towns which had upheld the oyster as a symbol of American food culture, often barring small-scale fishermen from harvesting a once-reliable form of sustenance. I seek to connect environmental and social history by studying labor and culture around oyster consumption.
The limited existing historical scholarship on American oyster cultivation focuses primarily on the industry’s economic and environmental history, less on the interspecies connections between oysters, environment, and consumers. The lack of attention to narratives of the people who were employed in oyster industries and for whom oysters were a part of everyday life and labor led me to investigate these stories. African Americans, women, and working-class coastal communities made livelihoods in this industry when they were barred from many others, work through which they could gain economic security and social stability. Oysters provided food security through their affordability and abundance, and were consumed across economic classes in the nineteenth century. To support my exploration of the history and people of the oyster industry, I integrate recent historical and anthropological scholarship on the Eastern oyster industry with analysis of archival materials from the collections of the New York Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History, and New-York Historical Society such as trade periodical The Oysterman and Fisherman, prints and photographs, menus, and administrative records of oyster commerce. The paper builds on the approaches and research of scholars in disciplines of environmental, food, and maritime history, expanding previous understandings to encompass environmental and social change connected to the oyster industry. Tracing the ecological conditions of oysters, practices of oyster cultivation and harvest, class and race dynamics within the oyster industry’s labor force, and the material culture of oyster consumption, this paper explores the oyster industry’s critical yet under-appreciated role in American social and environmental history.
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