Bøger af Jimmy M. Skaggs

'Guano' (bird droppings) was the 19th century's most important fertilizer and in 1856 Congress, believing that American farmers were being gouged on guano sales by foreign monopolists, authorised U.S. citizens to claim and exploit unowned guano-rich islands around the world.

Red meat--it's as American as apple pie. In a world where most hunger is alleviated with an occasional handful of grain, red meat's daily appearance on most American tables is a vivid symbol of national prosperity. The red-meat industry is also a powerful symbol. Undulating with the waves made by entrepreneurs and monopolies, shortages and gluts, scandal and government regulations, the industry mirrors the nation's turbulent economic history. Author Jimmy M. Skaggs traces the development of the red-meat industry from forest-foraging razorbacks in colonial days to genetic engineering of tender, disease-resistant beef cattle. Scholars and persons interested in livestock raising, agriculture, and America's marketplace will find Prime Cut to be an unflinching account of one of our nation's most volatile, most quintessentially American industries. With the extensive bibliography accompanying this work, the only modern comprehensive study of American livestock raising and meatpacking, readers will have access to countless details of the meat industry.

Hundreds of miles from its supply center in Chihuahua and just freed from the grip of Spain's mercantilist colonial policies, New Mexico was ripe for foreign commerce when the first of the Missouri traders arrived in Santa Fe in 1821. For the next forty years trade flourished between Americans hawking anything that would sell, often at incredible profit, and New Mexican buyers hungry for all types of manufactured goods. But the frontier moved inevitably westward, goods became more readily available and consequently less expensive, and the railroad at last replaced the mulewhackers who had long plied the Santa Fe Trail. Broadcloth and Britches is the first account to synthesize an abundance of primary source material--the reminiscences of traders, the impressions of journalists and soldiers, the unpublished manuscripts of both literate and semiliterate observers--and serious scholarly journal articles and monographs of the Santa Fe Trail and trade. In this detailed and lively narrative, the authors trace the origins, development, and decline of the trade: the early expeditions; the route and its hazards; transport, financing, and profits; the effects of complex political shifts in Spain, Mexico, Texas, and the United States; and the economic consequences of increasingly efficient supply to a relatively fixed market.