- Table View
- List View
American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly: The Political Economy of Grain Belt Farming, 1953-1980
by Jon K. LauckThe breathtaking number of mergers and joint ventures among agribusiness firms has left independent American farmers facing the power of an increasingly concentrated buying sector. The origin of farmers’ concern with such economic concentration dates back to protests against meatpackers and railroads in the late nineteenth century. Jon Lauck examines the dimensions of this problem in the American Midwest in the decades following World War II. He analyzes the nature of competition within meat-packing and grain markets. In addition, he addresses concerns about corporate entry into production agriculture and the potential displacement of a production system defined by independent family farms. Lauck also considers the ability of farmers to organize in order to counter the market power of large-scale agribusiness buyers. He explores the use of farmer cooperatives and other mechanisms which may increase the bargaining power of farmers. The book offers the first serious historical examination of the National Farmers Organization, which fully embraced the bargaining power cause in the postwar period. Lauck finds that independent farmers’ attempts at organization have been more successful than previously recognized, but he also shows that their successes have been undermined by the growing concentration and power of agri-business firms, justifying a new approach to antitrust law in agricultural markets.
American and Australasian Marsupials: An Evolutionary, Biogeographical, and Ecological Approach
by Nilton C. Cáceres Christopher R. DickmanThis book focuses on the ecology, evolution, biogeography, systematics and taxonomy of New World and Australasian marsupials, greatly expanding the current knowledge base. There are roughly 140 species of New World marsupials, of which the opossum is the best known. Thanks to recent research, there is now an increasing amount of understanding about their evolution, biogeography, systematics, ecology, and conservation in the Americas, especially in South America. There are also some 270 marsupial species in the Australasian region, many of which have been subject to research only in recent years. Based on this information and the authors’ extensive research, this book provides comprehensive insights into the world's marsupials. It will appeal to academics and specialized researchers, students of zoology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, ecology, physiology and conservation, as well as interested non-experts.
American Beetles, Volume I: Archostemata, Myxophaga, Adephaga, Polyphaga: Staphyliniformia
by Ross H. Arnett Jr. Michael C. ThomasA thorough update of Arnett's The Beetles of the United States, American Beetles, Volumes I and II cover the genera of beetles that occur in Alaska, Canada, and the contiguous United States. Built on the foundation of the original work and almost completely rewritten with contributions from more than 60 coleopterists, these volumes describe each fa
American Beetles, Volume II: Polyphaga: Scarabaeoidea through Curculionoidea
by Ross H. Arnett Michael C. Thomas Paul E. Skelley J. Howard FrankExperts offer the most sweeping reference available on the subject of North American beetles. Their rigorous standards for the presentation of data create a concise, useful format that is consistent throughout the book. This is the resource of choice for quick, accurate, and easily accessible information.
An American Bestiary
by Jack SchaeferIn a series of leisurely and loving portraits, Jack Schaefer describes a whole ark-full of creatures great and small, who mostly live beyond the din of traffic and the glare of city lights, from the industrious pika, whose sophisticated stockpiling permits him to live in comfort on the desolate rockslides of the high Rockies, to the magnificent pronghorn, whose very appearance represents a perfection of successful adaptation. The book is packed with a thousand bits of information, much of it surely unfamiliar even to the well-read naturalist: the special conditions of a bat's pregnancy, the subterranean architecture of the gopher, the seasonal frustrations of the stolid porcupine. But more important is the overall warmth and geniality of the author's vision--one would like to call it his humanity, but, alas, at the present stage of our development "animality" seems a more appropriate word. In any case, the reader will end up a better mammal, and perhaps even a wiser and more understanding human being.
American Biodefense: How Dangerous Ideas about Biological Weapons Shape National Security
by Frank L. Smith IIIBiological weapons have threatened U.S. national security since at least World War II. Historically, however, the U.S. military has neglected research, development, acquisition, and doctrine for biodefense. Following September 11 and the anthrax letters of 2001, the United States started spending billions of dollars per year on medical countermeasures and biological detection systems. But most of this funding now comes from the Department of Health and Human Services rather than the Department of Defense. Why has the U.S. military neglected biodefense and allowed civilian organizations to take the lead in defending the country against biological attacks? In American Biodefense, Frank L. Smith III addresses this puzzling and largely untold story about science, technology, and national security. Smith argues that organizational frames and stereotypes have caused both military neglect and the rise of civilian biodefense. In the armed services, influential ideas about kinetic warfare have undermined defense against biological warfare. The influence of these ideas on science and technology challenges the conventional wisdom that national security policy is driven by threats or bureaucratic interests. Given the ideas at work inside the U.S. military, Smith explains how the lessons learned from biodefense can help solve other important problems that range from radiation weapons to cyber attacks.
American Carrier Air Power at the Dawn of a New Century
by Benjamin S. LambethIn the Afghanistan war, U.S. carrier-based fighters substituted almost entirely for land-based theater air forces. The Navy's carriers again played a key role in conducting around-the-clock operations against Saddam Hussein's forces in Iraq. American carrier air power is now able to conduct coordinated deep-strike missions well beyond coastal reaches. The Navy's performance over Afghanistan and Iraq showed how the nation's carrier force can provide around-the-clock target coverage, consistently accurate target attack, and multiple successful target attacks per sortie.
American Catch
by Paul GreenbergINVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS & EDITORS Book Award, Finalist 2014 <P><P>In American Catch, award-winning author Paul Greenberg takes the same skills that won him acclaim in Four Fish to uncover the tragic unraveling of the nation's seafood supply--telling the surprising story of why Americans stopped eating from their own waters. In 2005, the United States imported five billion pounds of seafood, nearly double what we imported twenty years earlier. Bizarrely, during that same period, our seafood exports quadrupled. <P><P>American Catch examines New York oysters, Gulf shrimp, and Alaskan salmon to reveal how it came to be that 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat is foreign. In the 1920s, the average New Yorker ate six hundred local oysters a year. Today, the only edible oysters lie outside city limits. Following the trail of environmental desecration, Greenberg comes to view the New York City oyster as a reminder of what is lost when local waters are not valued as a food source. Farther south, a different catastrophe threatens another seafood-rich environment. <P><P>When Greenberg visits the Gulf of Mexico, he arrives expecting to learn of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill's lingering effects on shrimpers, but instead finds that the more immediate threat to business comes from overseas. Asian-farmed shrimp--cheap, abundant, and a perfect vehicle for the frying and sauces Americans love--have flooded the American market. Finally, Greenberg visits Bristol Bay, Alaska, home to the biggest wild sockeye salmon run left in the world. A pristine, productive fishery, Bristol Bay is now at great risk: The proposed Pebble Mine project could under¬mine the very spawning grounds that make this great run possible. In his search to discover why this precious renewable resource isn't better protected, Green¬berg encounters a shocking truth: the great majority of Alaskan salmon is sent out of the country, much of it to Asia. Sockeye salmon is one of the most nutritionally dense animal proteins on the planet, yet Americans are shipping it abroad. <P><P>Despite the challenges, hope abounds. In New York, Greenberg connects an oyster restoration project with a vision for how the bivalves might save the city from rising tides. In the Gulf, shrimpers band together to offer local catch direct to consumers. And in Bristol Bay, fishermen, environmentalists, and local Alaskans gather to roadblock Pebble Mine. With American Catch, Paul Greenberg proposes a way to break the current destructive patterns of consumption and return American catch back to American eaters.
American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race To Catch The Shadow Of The Moon And Win The Glory Of The World
by David BaronLonglisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Winner of the AIP Science Communication Award An Amazon Best Book of the Year (Science) A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year Finalist for the Colorado Book Award (Nonfiction) Booklist Editors’ Choice (Science & Technology) Featuring a new afterword priming readers for the total solar eclipse of 2024, this “essential” (BBC) account brilliantly captures the celestial and human drama of eclipses. With this “suspenseful narrative history” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air), award-winning science writer David Baron tells the story of the enterprising scientists—among them, planet hunter James Craig Watson, pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell, and ambitious young inventor Thomas Edison—who raced to Wyoming and Colorado in the summer of 1878, at the dawn of the Gilded Age, to observe the first great American eclipse. Thrillingly recreating the fierce jockeying of these nineteenth-century astronomers, Baron draws on years of “exhaustive research to reconstruct a remarkable chapter of U.S. history” (Lee Billings, Scientific American), when the fate of American science still hung precariously in the balance. Now updated with an afterword that unites eclipses and eclipse-chasers past and present—revisiting the total solar eclipse of 2017 and looking forward to that of 2024—American Eclipse reveals the enduring power of these ethereal events to bring people together across space and time.
American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, And Medicine In The Garden Of The Early Republic
by Victoria JohnsonThe untold story of Hamilton’s—and Burr’s—personal physician, whose dream to build America’s first botanical garden inspired the young Republic. <P><P>On a clear morning in July 1804, Alexander Hamilton stepped onto a boat at the edge of the Hudson River. He was bound for a New Jersey dueling ground to settle his bitter dispute with Aaron Burr. Hamilton took just two men with him: his “second” for the duel, and Dr. David Hosack. <P><P>As historian Victoria Johnson reveals in her groundbreaking biography, Hosack was one of the few points the duelists did agree on. Summoned that morning because of his role as the beloved Hamilton family doctor, he was also a close friend of Burr. A brilliant surgeon and a world-class botanist, Hosack—who until now has been lost in the fog of history—was a pioneering thinker who shaped a young nation. <P><P>Born in New York City, he was educated in Europe and returned to America inspired by his newfound knowledge. He assembled a plant collection so spectacular and diverse that it amazes botanists today, conducted some of the first pharmaceutical research in the United States, and introduced new surgeries to American. His tireless work championing public health and science earned him national fame and praise from the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander von Humboldt, and the Marquis de Lafayette. <P><P>One goal drove Hosack above all others: to build the Republic’s first botanical garden. Despite innumerable obstacles and near-constant resistance, Hosack triumphed when, by 1810, his Elgin Botanic Garden at last crowned twenty acres of Manhattan farmland. “Where others saw real estate and power, Hosack saw the landscape as a pharmacopoeia able to bring medicine into the modern age” (Eric W. Sanderson, author of Mannahatta). Today what remains of America’s first botanical garden lies in the heart of midtown, buried beneath Rockefeller Center. <P><P>Whether collecting specimens along the banks of the Hudson River, lecturing before a class of rapt medical students, or breaking the fever of a young Philip Hamilton, David Hosack was an American visionary who has been too long forgotten. Alongside other towering figures of the post-Revolutionary generation, he took the reins of a nation. In unearthing the dramatic story of his life, Johnson offers a lush depiction of the man who gave a new voice to the powers and perils of nature.
American Energy, Imperiled Coast: Oil and Gas Development in Louisiana's Wetlands (The Natural World of the Gulf South #5)
by Jason P. TheriotIn the post--World War II era, Louisiana's coastal wetlands underwent an industrial transformation that placed the region at the center of America's energy-producing corridor. By the twenty-first century the Louisiana Gulf Coast supplied nearly one-third of America's oil and gas, accounted for half of the country's refining capacity, and contributed billions of dollars to the U.S. economy. Today, thousands of miles of pipelines and related infrastructure link the state's coast to oil and gas consumers nationwide. During the course of this historic development, however, the dredging of pipeline canals accelerated coastal erosion. Currently, 80 percent of the United States' wetland loss occurs on Louisiana's coast despite the fact that the state is home to only 40 percent of the nation's wetland acreage, making evident the enormous unin-tended environmental cost associated with producing energy from the Gulf Coast.In American Energy, Imperiled Coast Jason P. Theriot explores the tension between oil and gas development and the land-loss crisis in Louisiana. His book offers an engaging analysis of both the impressive, albeit ecologically destructive, engineering feats that characterized industrial growth in the region and the mounting environmental problems that threaten south Louisiana's communities, culture, and "working" coast. As a historian and coastal Louisiana native, Theriot explains how pipeline technology enabled the expansion of oil and gas delivery -- examining previously unseen photographs and company records -- and traces the industry's far-reaching environmental footprint in the wetlands. Through detailed research presented in a lively and accessible narrative, Theriot pieces together decades of political, economic, social, and cultural undertakings that clashed in the 1980s and 1990s, when local citizens, scientists, politicians, environmental groups, and oil and gas interests began fighting over the causes and consequences of coastal land loss. The mission to restore coastal Louisiana ultimately collided with the perceived economic necessity of expanding offshore oil and gas development at the turn of the twenty-first century. Theriot's book bridges the gap between these competing objectives.From the discovery of oil and gas below the marshes around coastal salt domes in the 1920s and 1930s to the emergence of environmental sciences and policy reforms in the 1970s to the vast repercussions of the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, American Energy, Imperiled Coast ultimately reveals that the natural and man-made forces responsible for rapid environmental change in Louisiana's wetlands over the past century can only be harnessed through collaboration between public and private entities.
American Environmental Fiction, 1782-1847
by Matthew Wynn SivilsWhile Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are often credited with inventing American environmental writing, Matthew Wynn Sivils argues that the works of these Transcendentalists must be placed within a larger literary tradition that has its origins in early Republic natural histories, Indian captivity narratives, Gothic novels, and juvenile literature. Authors such as William Bartram, Ann Eliza Bleecker, and Samuel Griswold Goodrich, to name just a few, enabled the development of a credibly American brand of proto-environmental fiction. Sivils argues that these seeds of environmental literature would come to fruition in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, which he argues is the first uniquely environmental American novel. He then connects the biogeographical politics of Cooper’s The Prairie with European anti-Americanism; and concludes this study by examining how James Kirke Paulding, Thomas Cole, and James Fenimore Cooper imaginatively addressed the problem of human culpability and nationalistic cohesiveness in the face of natural disasters. With their focus on the character and implications of the imagined American landscape, these key works of early environmental thought contributed to the growing influence of the natural environment on the identity of the fledgling nation decades before the influences of Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden.
American Environmental History: An Introduction (Columbia Guides to American History and Cultures)
by Carolyn MerchantBy studying the many ways diverse peoples have changed, shaped, and conserved the natural world over time, environmental historians provide insight into humanity's unique relationship with nature and, more importantly, are better able to understand the origins of our current environmental crisis. <P><P>Beginning with the precolonial land-use practice of Native Americans and concluding with our twenty-first century concerns over our global ecological crisis, American Environmental History addresses contentious issues such as the preservation of the wilderness, the expulsion of native peoples from national parks, and population growth, and considers the formative forces of gender, race, and class. Entries address a range of topics, from the impact of rice cultivation, slavery, and the growth of the automobile suburb to the effects of the Russian sea otter trade, Columbia River salmon fisheries, the environmental justice movement, and globalization. This illustrated reference is an essential companion for students interested in the ongoing transformation of the American landscape and the conflicts over its resources and conservation. It makes rich use of the tools and resources (climatic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists) that environmental historians rely on to conduct their research. The volume also includes a compendium of significant people, concepts, events, agencies, and legislation, and an extensive bibliography of critical films, books, and Web sites.
American Environmentalism: The US Environmental Movement, 1970-1990
by Riley E. Dunlap Angela G. MertigFirst published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The American Experience in Environmental Protection
by Lisa NewtonThis book tracks the growth of environmental awareness and conservation in the United States through the major trends of the 20th century, and establishes a philosophical ground for protection of the environment. It records a major cultural shift in the thinking of this nation, and provides guidelines for its continuation.
The American Farmer and the New Deal
by Theodore SaloutosThird volume of a trilogy of agricultural history preceded by Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900-1939 & Farmer Movements in the South, 1865-1933. The American Farmer and the New Deal focuses on the challenges of the New Dealers in agriculture; the farm strikes, relations among the laborers and sharecroppers, the drought seasons, the dust storms, and tenants as well as it tries to come up with solutions to this difficulties
American Farming Culture and the History of Technology (Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment)
by Joshua T. BrinkmanPresenting a history of agriculture in the American Corn Belt, this book argues that modernization occurred not only for economic reasons but also because of how farmers use technology as a part of their identity and culture.Histories of agriculture often fail to give agency to farmers in bringing about change and ignore how people embed technology with social meaning. This book, however, shows how farmers use technology to express their identities in unspoken ways and provides a framework for bridging the current rural-urban divide by presenting a fresh perspective on rural cultural practices. Focusing on German and Jeffersonian farmers in the 18th century and Corn Belt producers in the 1920s, the Cold War, and the recent period of globalization, this book traces how farmers formed their own versions of rural modernity. Rural people use technology to contest urban modernity and debunk yokel stereotypes and women specifically employed technology to resist urban gender conceptions. This book shows how this performance of rural identity through technological use impacts a variety of current policy issues and business interests surrounding contemporary agriculture from the controversy over genetically modified organisms and hog confinement facilities to the growth of wind energy and precision technologies. Inspired by the author's own experience on his family’s farm, this book provides a novel and important approach to understanding how farmers’ culture has changed over time, and why machinery is such a potent part of their identity.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of agricultural history, technology and policy, rural studies, the history of science and technology, and the history of farming culture in the USA.
An American Gospel
by Erik ReeceFrom the award-winning author of Lost Mountain, a stirring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical inquiry. At the age of thirty-three, Erik Reece's father, a Baptist minister, took his own life, leaving Erik in the care of his grandmother and his grandfather-also a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and a pillar of his rural Virginia community. While Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he unexpectedly found comfort in the Jefferson Bible. Inspired by the text, he undertook what would become a spiritual and literary quest to identify an "American gospel" coursing through the work of both great and forgotten American geniuses, from William Byrd to Walt Whitman to William James to Lynn Margulis. The result of Reece's journey is a deeply intimate, stirring book about personal, political, and historical demons-and the geniuses we must call upon to combat them. .
American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
by William LangewiescheSelected as one of the best books of 2002 by The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Sun-TimesWithin days after September 11, 2001, William Langewiesche had secured unique, unrestricted, round-the-clock access to the World Trade Center site. American Ground is a tour of this intense, ephemeral world and those who improvised the recovery effort day by day, and in the process reinvented themselves, discovering unknown strengths and weaknesses. In all of its aspects--emotionalism, impulsiveness, opportunism, territoriality, resourcefulness, and fundamental, cacophonous democracy--Langewiesche reveals the unbuilding to be uniquely American and oddly inspiring, a portrait of resilience and ingenuity in the face of disaster.
American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland
by Marie Mutsuki MockettAn epic story of the American wheat harvest, the politics of food, and the culture of the Great PlainsFor over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it.In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize.American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.
American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe
by John KrigeIn 1945, the United States was not only the strongest economic and military power in the world; it was also the world's leader in science and technology.
American Hemp Farmer: Adventures and Misadventures in the Cannabis Trade
by null Doug FineThe inside story of the world&’s most fascinating and lucrative crop from gonzo journalist–turned–hemp farmer Doug Fine.Hemp, the non-psychoactive variant of cannabis (or marijuana) and one of humanity&’s oldest plant allies, has quietly become the fastest industry ever to generate a billion dollars of annual revenue in North America. From hemp seed to hemp fiber to the currently ubiquitous cannabinoid CBD, this resilient crop is leading the way toward a new, regenerative economy that contributes to soil and climate restoration—but only if we do it right.In American Hemp Farmer, maverick journalist and solar-powered goat herder Doug Fine gets his hands dirty with healthy soil and sticky with terpenes growing his own crop and creating his own hemp products. Fine shares his adventures and misadventures as an independent, regenerative farmer and entrepreneur, all while laying out a vision for how hemp can help right the wrongs of twentieth-century agriculture, and how you can be a part of it.
American Herbal Pharmacopoeia: Botanical Pharmacognosy - Microscopic Characterization of Botanical Medicines
by Roy Upton Alison Graff Georgina Jolliffe Reinhard Länger Elizabeth WilliamsonWinner of the James A. Duke Award for Excellence in Botanical Literature Award from the American Botanical CouncilCompiled by the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia, this volume addresses the lack of authoritative microscopic descriptions of those medicinal plant species currently in trade. It includes an atlas providing detailed text and graphic descri
American Horticultural Society Plant Propagation
by Alan Toogood Paul AndersonAHS Plant Propagation is a comprehensive, essential guide to increasing the numbers of a huge range of plants. An extensive introduction explains the botany and plant physiology behind the science of propagation, and the encyclopedic A - Z section presents all the appropriate techniques for more than 1,000 different kinds of plants. Specialized groups such as orchids, ferns, palms, grasses, and roses are given extensive feature treatment.
American Insects: A Handbook of the Insects of America North of Mexico, Second Edition
by Ross H. Arnett Jr.Offering a complete accounting of the insects of North America, this handbook is an up-dated edition of the first handbook ever compiled in the history of American entomology.By using American Insects, A Handbook of the Insects of America North of Mexico, Second Edition, readers can quickly determine the taxonomic position of any species, genus, or