The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographical index, 125 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographical index. 338 photographs and illustrations, many old and rare, many recent in color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographical index. 615 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.

A prize-winning memoirist and nature writer turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere? In fourteen essays, Dispersals explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds: from species considered invasive, like giant hogweed; to those vilified but intimate, like soy; and those like kelp, on which our futures depend. Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being ‘out of place’—weeds, samples collected through imperial science, crops introduced and transformed by our hand. Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong, why both cross borders, and how our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

Surface science has existed as a recognized discipline for more than 20 years. During this period, the subject has expanded in two important ways. On the one hand, the techniques available for studying surfaces, both experimental and theoretical, have grown in number and in sophistication. On the other hand, surface science has been applied to an increasing number of areas of technology, such as catalysis, semicon ductor processing, new materials development, corrosion prevention, adhesion and tribology. . There is, however, no sharp division between fundamental and applied surface science. New techniques can immediately be applied to technologically important problems. Improvements in understanding of fundamental phenomena such as epi taxial growth of one metal on another, or the bonding of hydrocarbons to metal sur faces, to name just two examples, have direct consequences for technology. Surface science has also become very much an interdisciplinary subject; physics, chemistry, materials science, chemical and electronical engineering all draw upon and contribute to surface science. The intimate relationship between principles and applications of surface science forms the theme of this proceedings volume. The contributions were all presented as invited lectures at an Australian-German Workshop on Surface Science held at Coogee Beach, Sydney, Australia, in December 1991. The contributors, all active surface scientists in their respective countries, were asked to highlight recent develop ments in their own areas of activity involving new techniques, advances in funda mental understanding or new applications in technology.

00 This is a study of the first major American effort to aid a developing country--China--in the early twentieth century. Anyone interested in U.S.-China relations and in the American presence abroad will find it provocative and frequently moving. This is a study of the first major American effort to aid a developing country--China--in the early twentieth century. Anyone interested in U.S.-China relations and in the American presence abroad will find it provocative and frequently moving.

At the turn of the twentieth century, soybeans grew on so little of America’s land that nobody bothered to track the total. By the year 2000, they covered upward of 70 million acres, second only to corn, and had become the nation’s largest cash crop. How this little-known Chinese transplant, initially grown chiefly for forage, turned into a ubiquitous component of American farming, culture, and cuisine is the story Matthew Roth tells in Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America. The soybean’s journey from one continent into the heart of another was by no means assured or predictable. In Asia, the soybean had been bred and cultivated into a nutritious staple food over the course of centuries. Its adoption by Americans was long in coming— the outcome of migration and innovation, changing tastes and habits, and the transformation of food, farming, breeding, marketing, and indeed the bean itself, during the twentieth century. All come in for scrutiny as Roth traces the ups and downs of the soybean’s journey. Along the way, he uncovers surprising developments, including a series of catastrophic explosions at soy-processing plants in the 1930s, the widespread production of tofu in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, the decades-long project to improve the blandness of soybean oil, the creation of new southern soybean varieties named after Confederate generals, the role of the San Francisco Bay Area counterculture in popularizing soy foods, and the discovery of soy phytoestrogens in the late 1980s. We also encounter fascinating figures in their own right, such as Yamei Kin, the Chinese American who promoted tofu during World War I, and African American chemist Percy Lavon Julian, who played a critical role in the story of synthetic human hormones derived from soy sterols. A thoroughly engaging work of narrative history, Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America is the first comprehensive account of the soybean in America over the entire course of the twentieth century.

A diary of a young American girl growing up in Japan during the years 1875-1884. Gives a intimate view of the social changes taking places in Meiji Japan.