The re-established forests of the Upper Delaware exist as a living reminder of centuries of both exploitation and good intentions. Emerging after the last glaciation, they were first modified by Native Americans to promote hunting and limited agriculture. The forests began to disappear as Europeans clear-cut farmland and fed sawmills and tanneries.The advent of the railroad accelerated demand and within 30 years industry had consumed virtually every mature tree in the valley, leavi...

In 1947, as the integration of Major League Baseball began, the once-daring American League had grown reactionary, unwilling to confront postwar challenges--population shifts, labor issues and, above all, racial integration. The league had matured in the Jim Crow era, when northern cities responded to the Great Migration by restricting black access to housing, transportation, accommodations and entertainment, while blacks created their own institutions, including baseball's Negro Leagues.

Thoreau in his early career did not consider nature a worthy subject for his pen. Beginning with only a superficial knowledge of nature--even while living at Walden Pond--he later began to study the subject more intensely in 1849. Over the next dozen years, he applied himself especially to botany and ornithology, seeking to integrate knowledge into the larger patterns of life.Independently deriving what today would be considered an ecological worldview, Thoreau devoted the last yea...

This book outlines the history of rickets, a disease commonly associated with childhood, and studies its association with race and its long-reaching effects on childbirth. For centuries, the condition was poorly understood. For females, rickets could pose a double jeopardy: suffering in childhood and severe danger in adulthood when giving birth. The disease could result in a contracted pelvis that obstructs the birth canal. Medical researchers were faced with two distinct challenges: unrav...

Lord Peter Wimsey-amateur detective, man of fashion, talented musician, and wealthy intellectual-is known to legions of readers. His enduring presence and popularity is a tribute to his creator, Dorothy L. Sayers, who brought Lord Peter to life during “the long week-end” between the First and Second World Wars, as British aristocracy began to change, making way for a modern world. In Conundrums for the Long Week-End, Robert McGregor and Ethan Lewis explore how Sayers used her fictional her...