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Explores the history of value as a concept, one that we regularly use but tend to take for granted as the monetary expression of market mechanisms. 

Calculating Worth, a collection of essays edited by historians Joanna Cohen and Laura F. Edwards, reshapes our concept of what “value” meant in the past. Collectively, the essays reorient conventional narratives and reveal multiple methods of determining value, some traditional, some new, but all based in human agency. Calculating Worth brings together scholars of legal history, Native American history, women’s history, material culture, the history of slavery, and African American history, with topics that range widely over the nineteenth century, across North America and beyond. 

Through studying subjects as varied as personal property, land, enslaved people, and intangibles such as prayer, reputation, and suffering, this portrait of value is diverse, humanistic, and far more capacious than what typically fits within the bounds of the concept of capitalism. Rather, value turns out to be a question of power—and how it is used.

An exploration of the elaborate relationship between farmers, aerial sprayers, agriculturalists, crop pests, chemicals, and the environment.

The controversies in the 1960s and 1970s that swirled around indiscriminate use of agricultural chemicals—their long-term ecological harm versus food production benefits—were sparked and clarified by biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). This seminal publication challenged long-held assumptions concerning the industrial might of American agriculture while sounding an alarm for the damaging persistence of pesticides, especially chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT, in the larger environment.

In Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 David D. Vail shows, however, that a distinctly regional view of agricultural health evolved. His analysis reveals a particularly strong ethic in the North American grasslands where practitioners sought to understand and deploy insecticides and herbicides by designing local scientific experiments, engineering more precise aircraft sprayers, developing more narrowly specific chemicals, and planting targeted test crops. Their efforts to link the science of toxicology with environmental health reveal how the practitioners of pesticides evaluated potential hazards in the agricultural landscape while recognizing the production benefits of controlled spraying. 

Chemical Lands adds to a growing list of books on toxins in the American landscape. This study provides a unique Grasslands perspective of the Ag pilots, weed scientists, and farmers who struggled to navigate novel technologies for spray planes and in the development of new herbicides/insecticides while striving to manage and mitigate threats to human health and the environment.

An essential high culture institution, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has both supported and molded American musical culture. Denise Von Glahn examines the Foundation and its immense influence from the organization’s prehistory and origins through the onset of World War II.

Funded by the Guggenheim mining fortune, the Foundation took early shape from the efforts of Carroll Wilson, Frank Aydelotte, and Henry Allen Moe--three Rhodes Scholars who initially struggled to envision and implement the organization’s ambitious goals. Von Glahn also examines the career of the longtime musical advisor Thomas Whitney Surette while profiling early awardees Aaron Copland, Ruth Crawford Seeger, William Grant Still, Roger Sessions, George Antheil, and Carlos Chàvez. She examines the processes behind their selection, their values and aesthetics, and their relationships with the insiders and others who championed their work.

Climate change is today’s news, but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling are well documented for Europe and the North Atlantic. These variations in climate, including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), AD 900 to 1300, and the early centuries of the Little Ice Age (LIA), AD 1300 to 1600, had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Europe. In this pathfinding volume, William C. Foster marshals extensive evidence that the heating and cooling of the MWP and LIA also occurred in North America and significantly affected the cultural history of Native peoples of the American Southwest, Southern Plains, and Southeast.

Correlating climate change data with studies of archaeological sites across the Southwest, Southern Plains, and Southeast, Foster presents the first comprehensive overview of how Native American societies responded to climate variations over seven centuries. He describes how, as in Europe, the MWP ushered in a cultural renaissance, during which population levels surged and Native peoples substantially intensified agriculture, constructed monumental architecture, and produced sophisticated works of art. Foster follows the rise of three dominant cultural centers—Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, Cahokia on the middle Mississippi River, and Casas Grandes in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico—that reached population levels comparable to those of London and Paris. Then he shows how the LIA reversed the gains of the MWP as population levels and agricultural production sharply declined; Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, and Casas Grandes collapsed; and dozens of smaller villages also collapsed or became fortresses.

European imperialists began to dream of other kinds of wealth besides gold in the New World

The Colonial Search for a Southern Eden compiles three insightful lectures delivered by renowned historian Louis B. Wright at the Dancy Foundation in 1951. Wright explores the 17th‑century English colonial vision for the American South—not as a gold rush, but as a fertile terrain primed for economic prosperity through well‑planned plantations and commercial crops. 

Across its concise 75 pages, Wright charts the transformation of settlers’ aspirations—from hopes of quick wealth to cultivated visions of tobacco, silk, sugar, and cotton plantations meant to create a utopian "Southern Eden". These were carefully cultivated not just for their profitability but to establish structured, enduring societies complementary to English economic goals. 

Wright—a Guggenheim Fellow, Benjamin Franklin Medalist, and former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library—brings scholarly precision and elegant prose to this study, making it accessible to both historians and general readers. Publishers and reviewers have praised it as “extremely interesting and well written,” highlighting its focused yet comprehensive interpretation of colonial Southern motivations and their long-term implications. This work stands as a pivotal contribution to early American economic and colonial history—offering a nuanced understanding of how idealistic and ideological goals shaped plantation culture and southern development in the Atlantic colonies. 

With its concise structure and authoritative voice, The Colonial Search for a Southern Eden is ideal for historians, students, and enthusiasts seeking to understand the ideological underpinnings of colonial Southern society.
 

This work offers a groundbreaking account of how Chicana/o activists have engaged in sustained efforts to reclaim Indigenous identity through political struggle, cultural expression, and transnational solidarity.

Author José Luis Serrano Nájera takes an in-depth look at the history of Chicana/o indigeneity, starting with the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and through twenty-first century transnational activism and solidarity movements. Serrano Nájera reveals how claims to indigeneity were rooted in reciprocal relationships with Indigenous communities and driven by a shared commitment to decolonization. Through chapters on visual and performing arts, ceremony, education, and grassroots organizing, this book challenges reductive narratives of cultural appropriation and instead foregrounds the complex and historically grounded nature of Chicana/o indigeneity.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Serrano Nájera demonstrates how Chicana/o indigeneity has contributed to broader Indigenous rights movements, including efforts that culminated in the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This work highlights the intercontinental dimensions of Chicana/o activism and offers a vital source for scholars and students in Chicana/o studies, Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, history, and political science. Confronting Colonial Legacies is a compelling call to rethink the politics of identity, sovereignty, and solidarity across the Americas.

Why did white pine help spark the American Revolution? How did balsam aid the development of germ theory? What does hemlock have to do with making leather? In Conifers of the New England–­Acadian Forest, microbiologist Steve Keating explores how conifers influenced the course of human history, writing in a style that is both scientific and accessible.

Keating’s study focuses on one of the most forested and wild ecoregions in North America, which extends into New York, New England, and Canada and includes Acadia National Park. Here, spruces, firs, and cedars of the northern boreal forest mix with hemlocks and pines of more temperate climates. This combination helps create the appearance, aroma, and ecology of the region, and the trees’ unique botanical traits have been ingeniously utilized by numerous peoples including the Iroquois, French explorers, beer brewers, and shipbuilders. Keating concludes with identification guides for the conifers and where they can be found in Acadia National Park.

Most agricultural production is of commodity or undifferentiated products. Producers suffer from a roller-coaster ride of price swings, over- or under-production, weather and pest threats, and the inability of family famers to capture anything beyond a small percentage of the final price.

Cooperatives Across Clusters provides lessons from the cranberry industry, a commodity product organized mostly into family farms in seven different clusters around North America. The industry is remarkable in that it's substantially organized around one large cooperative, Ocean Spray. The authors examine how the cooperative came to be, the challenges of coordination and industry leadership across the diverging clusters, and the lessons for cooperation for other agricultural industries.

The book provides a multi-layered contribution to agricultural economics. First, it examines location decisions and what factors supersede growing conditions to allow industries to arise around production. Second, it explores pathways available for farmers to try to overcome, through cooperative organization, the natural boom-bust cycles of commodity price swings. Third, it looks at how cooperative decisions are made, and the challenges of providing industry leadership, including research and development and collective marketing, through a cooperative that faces continual defections and new problems. Finally, through in-depth historical, statistical, and field research, it provides a comprehensive study of the cranberry industry and suggests ways farmers can grow the industry. Agricultural policymakers, farmers, industry specialists, and researchers of agriculture and clusters more generally will find this to be an important and informative new resource.