Victory Gardens Produced Nearly Half of America’s Fresh Produce in WW2. With Today's Supply-Chain Meltdowns, Are They Ready for a Comeback?

Victory Gardens Produced Nearly Half of Ameri...

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Passenger Pigeons Once Numbered in the Billions and Blotted Out the Skies for Days. They Went Extinct in 30 Years.

In America’s first hundred years, the animal you were most likely to see was a passenger pigeon. And you saw a lot of them. Flocks were so numerous they literally blotted out the sun for days and their combined weight snapped the branches of entire forests where they roosted. Yet ...  Show more

Tooth Enamel Tells All: Genetic Testing and Why It’s Rewriting Our Understanding of Early Medieval Migration

Europe's borders in the Middle Ages were created by one man, and he wasn't even born in the Middle Ages, nor was he Christian. It was Emperor Diocletian, who ruled Rome from 284 to 305. His reforms that chained tenant farmers to land created the blueprint for feudalism. He split ...  Show more

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The Kitchen Front: How wartime food strategies influenced our eating ethos
The Food Programme

Making do, digging for victory, the hedgerow harvest, the garden front: food and farming was front and centre during the Second World War, with hearty phrases like these encouraging the population to pull together and do their bit for the national diet.Now, 75 years after Victory ...  Show more

Tracing A Fraught And Amazing History Of American Horticulture
Short Wave

When Abra Lee became the landscape manager at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, she sought some advice about how to best do the job. The answer: study the history of gardening. That led to her uncovering how Black involvement in horticulture in the U.S. bursts wit ...  Show more

Victory Gardens and Better Days Ahead
Citizen Chef with Tom Colicchio

In early March, slim pickings on grocery store shelves, news of meat plant shutdowns, skyrocketing demand for food bank services, predictions of supply chain breakdown and food shortages drove many Americans to do what we haven't collectively done since WWII: plant home gardens. ...  Show more

Erin Stewart Mauldin, “Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South” (Oxford UP, 2018)
New Books in Military History

The antebellum South was on the road to agricultural ruin, and the Civil War put a brick on the gas pedal. In Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford University Press, 2018), a sweeping reassessment of some of the oldest ...  Show more