India imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred. And yet India is among the world's leading producers of beef, leather, and milk, industries sustained by the mass slaughter of bovines. What is behind this seeming contradiction? What do ......
Food Security and the Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia
A detailed study of the failure of poverty reduction programs in Indonesia to reduce food insecurity. Economic growth in the middle-income countries of Southeast Asia over the past few decades has been widely praised for reducing poverty in both absolute and relative terms. Indonesia is a prime example. But while poverty has declined in ......
Originally delivered as the Stegner Lecture at the 2020 annual symposium of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment, Jessica Fanzo here explores how, in the context of the broad global trends of population growth, climate crisis, and inequitable food availability, food systems need to be re-oriented to ensure they can ......
McCormick's Reaper, Heritage Branding, and Historical Forgery
Harvesting History explores how the highly contentious claim of Cyrus McCormick's 1831 invention of the reaper came to be incorporated into the American historical canon as a fact. Spanning the late 1870s to the 1930s, Daniel P. Ott reveals how the McCormick family and various affiliated businesses created a usable past about their departed ......
How Brazil Embraced the World's Most Caffeine-Rich Plant
In this sweeping chronicle of guarana-a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant-Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guarana as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Satere-Mawe people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the ......
How Brazil Embraced the World's Most Caffeine-Rich Plant
In this sweeping chronicle of guarana-a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant-Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guarana as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Satere-Mawe people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the ......
Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands
Quinoa's new status as a superfood has altered the economic fortunes of Quechua farmers in the Andean highlands. Linda J. Seligmann journeys to the Huanoquite region of Peru to track the mixed blessings brought about by the surging worldwide popularity of this "exquisite grain." Focusing on how Indigenous communities have confronted globalization, ......
From its designation in 1926 to the rise of the interstates nearly sixty years later, Route 66 was, in John Steinbeck's words, America's Mother Road, carrying countless travelers the 2,400 miles between Chicago and Los Angeles. Whoever they were-adventurous motorists or Dustbowl migrants, troops on military transports or passengers on buses, ......
Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War
Liquor was essential to military culture as well as healthcare regimens in both the Union and Confederate armies. But its widespread use and misuse caused severe disruptions as unruly drunken soldiers and officers stumbled down roads and through towns, colliding with civilians. The problems surrounding liquor prompted debates among military ......
