The further we go the bigger it gets and the more interesting. I don't know what we would have done without you." So wrote Bob Barry, a White executive with the Tom Huston Peanut Company, to George Washington Carver, the shy, unassuming scientific genius of Tuskegee Institute. The two, along with Grady Porter and Tom Huston himself, embarked on a quest to grow the peanut industry in the South by understanding and solving the problems faced by farmers. From 1924 until the end of Carver's life, these four men, three White and one Black, sustained a professional partnership and a personal friendship built on mutual admiration, respect, trust, and purpose. Their work attracted the attention and support of university and government scientists around the country as well as agricultural industry professionals and their most important audience, farmers in the Southeast. Their effort laid the foundation for research to support the fledgling peanut industry, which became one of the region's most important cash crops, with a farm value totaling over $1 billion in 2020. More Than Peanuts follows the journey of these four men, through the letters they wrote to each other and to others who joined them on the way. The letters document a fascinating early example of cooperation between farmers, private business, university researchers, and government policymakers to grow a prosperous industry. Even more importantly, they are eloquent testimony to a lasting interracial friendship in the segregated South-so much more than peanuts.

An important historical account of Tuskegee University's significant advances in health care, which affected millions of lives worldwide. Tuskegee University is most commonly associated with its founding president, Booker T. Washington, the scientific innovator George Washington Carver, or the renowned Tuskegee Airmen. Although the university's accomplishments and devotion to social issues are well known, its work in medical research and health care has received little acknowledgment. Yet Tuskegee has been fulfilling Washington's vision of "healthy minds and bodies" since its inception in 1881. In To Raise Up the Man Farthest Down, Dana R. Chandler and Edith Powell document Tuskegee University's medical and public health history with rich archival data and never-before-published photographs. Tuskegee University was on the forefront in providing local farmers the benefits of their agrarian research and helped create the massive Agricultural Extension System managed today by land grant universities throughout the United States. Tuskegee established the first baccalaureate nursing program in the state and was also home to Alabama's first hospital for African Americans. Washington accepted the first licensed female physician in the state for the position of resident physician at Tuskegee. And, most notably, it Tuskegee was the site of a remarkable development in American biochemistry history: its microbiology laboratory was the only one relied upon by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) to produce the HeLa cell cultures employed in the national field trials for the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines. Chandler and Powell are also interested in correcting a long-held but false historical perception that Tuskegee University's medical research legacy begins and ends with its involvement with the shameful and infamous "study" of untreated syphilis. Meticulously researched, this book is filled with previously undocumented information taken directly from the vast Tuskegee University archives. Readers will gain a new appreciation for how Tuskegee's people and institutions have influenced community health, food science, and national medical life throughout the twentieth century.