Follow @yaleSCIbooks When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence he would never have imagined a country where agriculture was not always a respected activity in society. In American Georgics: Writing on Farming, Culture and the Land, editors Edwin C. Hagenstein, Sara M. Gregg, and Brian Donahue explore the history
Ivan Lett— I’m no political junkie, just a book publishing historian who comes away from the glory of Britannia every so now and then to find the ever-changing world around me to be…well, ever-changing. When news of the revolution in Egypt broke last winter, I was still in a holiday
While we typically associate slavery in America with the plantation economies of cotton, sugar, and tobacco, by the middle of the 19th century, Southern railroad companies were actually some of the region’s largest slaveholders. Indeed, men like Samuel Ballton, a slave born in Virginia in 1838, spent years of their
Sarah Underwood— For me, there are two outstanding features of Dillon, South Carolina. One is that savvy out-of-staters like me drive several miles below the speed limit. The other is the South-of-the-Border theme park. Nearly every summer of my life, my family drove from Northern Virginia to Myrtle Beach, South
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Several months ago, a new Apple store opened in New Haven, and now, hardly a day goes by that the store is not filled with at least two or three customers, examining iPads and laptops. Not infrequently, one of these customers will leave the store with a sleek
Follow @yaleSCIbooks With our interview with Austin Troy about The Very Hungry City: Urban Energy Efficiency and the Economic Fate of Cities, we’re also sponsoring a book giveaway on Goodreads. Reminding us of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, as global demand for energy grows and prices rise, a city’s energy consumption
Follow @yaleSCIbooks This month Yale University Press has published The Very Hungry City: Urban Energy Efficiency and the Economic Fate of Cities, by Austin Troy, associate professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont, and principal and co-founder of Spatial Informatics Group. The
Popular wisdom says that, on the web, the consumer is king. With endless search ability, we can find products, compare prices, and shop with far more freedom than we might in a brick-and-mortar shopping mall. However, in his book The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your
Follow @yaleSCIbooks With the federal lawsuit being brought against Tropicana on the basis of alleged consumer fraud for their packaging and distribution of “100% pure and natural” orange juice, Alissa Hamilton, author of Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice, has been commenting on the industry practices that are
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Sarah Underwood— Sometimes, the forgetting of history is accidental and gradual—a lost document, a mistranslation, or the unfortunate lack of a written record in the first place. On other occasions, events do not have to pass into history before they are forgotten. Those are the ones that are