Corn Crusade

Corn Crusade
Author: Aaron Todd Hale-Dorrell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2019
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0190644672

Scarcely making ends meet -- Industrial agriculture, the logic of corn -- Corn politics -- Better living through corn -- Growing corn, raising citizens -- From Kolkhoznik to wage earner -- American technology, Soviet practice -- Battles over corn

Food Policy and Food Security

Food Policy and Food Security
Author: Stephen K. Wegren
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2018-03-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498532381

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Russian food policy. Food policy is defined as the way government policy influences food production and distribution. Russia’s food policy is important for several reasons. The first and most obvious reason is that a dysfunctional food policy is symptomatic of larger political and societal problems. A failing food policy is often the precursor to political instability. Russian food policy is also important is due to the agricultural recovery since 2004 that has allowed Russia to become self-sufficient in grain production. Being food-sufficient in grain means that Russia is not drawing upon global grain supply. Even more important, Russia now produces surpluses and has become a global grain supplier. Moreover, the agricultural recovery has made the country food secure, traditionally defined as having enough food for a healthy life. An analysis of food policy reveals that the structure of food production has changed with the emergence of mega-farms called agroholdings that are horizontally and vertically integrated. Agroholdings represent a concentration of capital and land, with a small number of farms producing large percentages of total food output. The book explores alternatives to the industrial agricultural model by discussing different variants of sustainable agriculture. A final importance of Russian food policy concerns food trade. Russia has become more protectionist since 2012. The food embargo against Western nations (2014-2017) is one example, so too is import substitution that is a core component of food policy. The book demonstrates the politicalization of external food trade. Food trade and denial of access to the Russian market is used as an instrument of foreign policy to punish countries with whom Russia has disagreements. Current Russian policymakers have food resources to augment, support, and extend national interests abroad. Russia historically has cycled through periods of integration and isolation from the West. This book raises the question whether a new normal has arisen that is characterized by the permanent withdrawal from integration, as evidenced by its nationalist and protectionist food policy. The book is entirely original, rich in detail and broad in scope. It is based on field work, survey data, a wide reading of primary sources and the secondary literature, all of which are linked to important policy questions in development studies and food studies. It is destined to become a classic book on Russian food policy.

The Poison Squad

The Poison Squad
Author: Deborah Blum
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0525560289

A New York Times Notable Book The inspiration for PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film The Poison Squad. From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United States and the heroes, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for change By the end of nineteenth century, food was dangerous. Lethal, even. "Milk" might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This was not by accident; food manufacturers had rushed to embrace the rise of industrial chemistry, and were knowingly selling harmful products. Unchecked by government regulation, basic safety, or even labelling requirements, they put profit before the health of their customers. By some estimates, in New York City alone, thousands of children were killed by "embalmed milk" every year. Citizens--activists, journalists, scientists, and women's groups--began agitating for change. But even as protective measures were enacted in Europe, American corporations blocked even modest regulations. Then, in 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor from Purdue University, was named chief chemist of the agriculture department, and the agency began methodically investigating food and drink fraud, even conducting shocking human tests on groups of young men who came to be known as, "The Poison Squad." Over the next thirty years, a titanic struggle took place, with the courageous and fascinating Dr. Wiley campaigning indefatigably for food safety and consumer protection. Together with a gallant cast, including the muckraking reporter Upton Sinclair, whose fiction revealed the horrific truth about the Chicago stockyards; Fannie Farmer, then the most famous cookbook author in the country; and Henry J. Heinz, one of the few food producers who actively advocated for pure food, Dr. Wiley changed history. When the landmark 1906 Food and Drug Act was finally passed, it was known across the land, as "Dr. Wiley's Law." Blum brings to life this timeless and hugely satisfying "David and Goliath" tale with righteous verve and style, driving home the moral imperative of confronting corporate greed and government corruption with a bracing clarity, which speaks resoundingly to the enormous social and political challenges we face today.

Pagan's Crusade

Pagan's Crusade
Author: Catherine Jinks
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2003
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9780763620196

In twelth-century Jerusalem, orphaned sixteen-year-old Pagan is assigned to work for Lord Roland, a Templar knight, as Saladin's armies close in on the Holy City.

Goldberger's War

Goldberger's War
Author: Alan M. Kraut
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2021-05-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0374606323

For fans of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Alan M. Kraut's Goldberg's War tells the story of one doctor's courageous journey to cure deadly diseases and epidemics. Goldberger's War chronicles one of the U.S. Public Health Service's most renowned heroes--an immigrant Jew who trained as a doctor at Bellevue, became a young recruit to the federal government's health service, and ended an American plague. He did so by defying conventional wisdom, experimenting on humans, and telling the South precisely what it didn't want to hear. Kraut shows how Dr. Goldberger's life became, quite literally, the stuff of legends. On the front lines of the major public-health battles of the early 20th-century, he fought the epidemics that were then routinely sweeping the nation--typhoid, yellow fever, and the measles. After successfully confronting (and often contracting) the infectious diseases of his day, in 1914 he was assigned the mystery of pellagra, a disease whose cause and cure had eluded the world for centuries and was then afflicting tens of thousands of Americans every year, particularly in the emerging "New South." “Engrossing story of an American medical hero.” —The New England Journal of Medicine

Down from the Mountain

Down from the Mountain
Author: Bryce Andrews
Publisher: Mariner Books
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2019
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1328972453

"Andrews' wonderful Down from the Mountain is deeply informed by personal experience and made all the stronger by his compassion and measured thoughts... Welcome and impressive work." --Barry Lopez Winner of the Banff Mountain Book Competition's Mountain Environment & Natural History Award The story of a grizzly bear named Millie: her life, death, and cubs, and what they reveal about the changing character of the American West The grizzly is one of North America's few remaining large predators. Their range is diminished, but they're spreading across the West again. Descending into valleys where once they were king, bears find the landscape they'd known for eons utterly changed by the new most dominant animal: humans. As the grizzlies approach, the people of the region are wary, at best, of their return. In searing detail, award-winning writer, Montana rancher, and conservationist Bryce Andrews tells us about one such grizzly. Millie is a typical mother: strong, cunning, fiercely protective of her cubs. But raising those cubs--a challenging task in the best of times--becomes ever harder as the mountains change, the climate warms and people crowd the valleys. There are obvious dangers, like poachers, and subtle ones as well, like the corn field that draws her out of the foothills and sets her on a path toward trouble and ruin. That trouble is where Bryce's story intersects with Millie's. It is the heart of Down from the Mountain, a singular drama evoking a much larger one: an entangled, bloody collision between two species in the modern-day West, where the shrinking wilds force man and bear into ever closer proximity.

Bourbon Justice

Bourbon Justice
Author: Brian F. Haara
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2021-07
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1640124276

Brian Haara recounts the development of commercial laws that guided the United States from an often reckless laissez-faire mentality, through the growing pains of industrialization, past the overcorrection of Prohibition, and into its final state as a nation of laws.

The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder

The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder
Author: Robert Corn-Revere
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2021-11-04
Genre: Law
ISBN: 110712994X

The book explores the importance of free speech in America by telling the stories of its chief antagonists - the censors.

Crusade for Justice

Crusade for Justice
Author: Ida B. Wells
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2020-04-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 022669156X

The NAACP co-founder, civil rights activist, educator, and journalist recounts her public and private life in this classic memoir. Born to enslaved parents, Ida B. Wells was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She co-founded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement, working alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, Madam C. J. Walker, Mary Church Terrell, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony. This engaging memoir, originally published 1970, relates Wells’s private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice. This updated edition includes a new foreword by Eve L. Ewing, new images, and a new afterword by Ida B. Wells’s great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster. “No student of black history should overlook Crusade for Justice.” —William M. Tuttle, Jr., Journal of American History

The First Crusade

The First Crusade
Author: Thomas Asbridge
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2012-01-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1849837694

'A nuanced and sophisticated analysis... Exhilarating' Sunday Telegraph Nine hundred years ago, one of the most controversial episodes in Christian history was initiated. The Pope stated that, in spite of the apparently pacifist message of the New Testament, God actually wanted European knights to wage a fierce and bloody war against Islam and recapture Jerusalem. Thus was the First Crusade born. Focusing on the characters that drove this extraordinary campaign, this fascinating period of history is recreated through awe-inspiring and often barbaric tales of bold adventure while at the same time providing significant insights into early medieval society, morality and mentality. The First Crusade marked a watershed in relations between Islam and the West, a conflict that set these two world religions on a course towards deep-seated animosity and enduring enmity. The chilling reverberations of this earth-shattering clash still echo in the world today. '[Asbridge] balances persuasive analysis with a flair for conveying with dramatic power the crusaders' plight' Financial Times