Tanga Region, Tanzania, is an area of persistent rural poverty with a long history of drought, floods, food shortages, famine, and social and economic disruption. Though farmers have been cultivating the land there for hundreds of years, they have consistently been unable to supply adequate food for the region's inhabitants. In Challenging Nature, Philip Porter examines eighteen farming communities to understand what the farmers there know about their environment and which historical and economic factors play into the lack of food security. 

Porter first began work on this project in 1972, asking 250 farmers in the region about life history, environmental and agricultural changes, types of crops grown and methods of planting, environmental assessments, agricultural practices, food and water supplies, training and education, and attitudes toward nature. Twenty years later, he returned and reinterviewed as many farmers as could be found from the first survey. The result contextualizes the environmental history of the region while informing current and future agricultural development.

Fort Mackinac was home to more than 4,500 British and U.S. soldiers between 1780 and 1895. These soldiers constructed buildings and walls, drilled on the parade ground, marched sentry beats, and performed myriad maintenance and administrative duties in support of the fort’s strategic military function. That function varied greatly over the fort’s 115-year history. During the first half-century of its occupation the island fort protected and controlled the upper Great Lakes fur trade and served as an administrative center for maintaining alliances with the region’s Native Americans. By the late 1830s the decline of the fur trade and acquisition of Native American lands that resulted in the creation of the state of Michigan diminished the fort’s strategic value. It was not until after the Civil War that Fort Mackinac regained a role of importance, when it became the headquarters for the country’s second national park. In this volume, Mackinac State Historic Parks’ director Phil Porter tells the story of Fort Mackinac through the lives and activities of its soldiers. This book is profusely illustrated with more than 150 historic oil portraits, maps, and photographs collected from libraries and museums across the United States and Great Britain. Military historians and readers interested in Mackinac’s rich military history will appreciate the interesting and visually compelling story of soldier life at Fort Mackinac in The Soldiers of Fort Mackinac: An Illustrated History.