This book outlines the history of rickets, a disease commonly associated with childhood, and studies its association with race and its long-reaching effects on childbirth. For centuries, the condition was recognized but poorly understood. For females, rickets could pose a double jeopardy: suffering in childhood and severe danger in adulthood when giving birth. The disease could result in a contracted pelvis that obstructs the birth canal. Medical researchers were faced with two distinct challenges: unravelling the aetiology of rickets and ensuring the safety of women giving birth. Solving the riddle of rickets proved especially difficult. Thought variously to be a disease of industrial cities and children of the poor, grounded in lack of exercise or sunlight, or the product racial difference, the condition defied analysis until the discovery of vitamin D early in the 20th century. The dangers of rickets radically diminished. Medical intervention in childbirth continued, and birth increasingly shifted from the home to the hospital. Medical practitioners justified intervention by emphasizing the dangers of pelvic disproportion, continually enlarging the definition to gain full control of birth. Often conditioned by racial assumptions, surgical experimentation promoted common use of anaesthesia and a radical increase in caesarean sections, and birth became a colder, more clinical experience.

In 1947, as the integration of Major League Baseball began, the once-daring American League had grown reactionary, unwilling to confront post-war challenges - population shifts, labor issues and, above all, racial integration. The league had matured in the Jim Crow era, when northern cities responded to the Great Migration by restricting black access to housing, transportation, accommodations and entertainment. The racial divide forced blacks to create their own, often poorly funded institutions, including baseball's Negro Leagues. As the political climate changed and some major league teams realized the necessity of integration, the American League proved painfully reluctant. With the exception of the Cleveland Indians, integration was slow and often ineffective. This book examines the integration of baseball - widely viewed as a triumph - through the experiences of the American League and finds only a limited shift in racial values. The teams accepted few black players and made no effort to alter management structures, and organized baseball remained an institution governed by tradition-bound owners.

The re-established forests of the Upper Delaware are a living reminder of centuries of both exploitation and good intentions. Emerging after the last glaciation, they were first modified by Native Americans to promote hunting and limited agriculture. The forests began to disappear as European settlers clear-cut farmland and fed sawmills and tanneries. The advent of the railroad accelerated demand and within 30 years industry consumed virtually every mature tree in the valley, leaving barren hillsides subject to erosion and flooding. As unchecked cutting continued, conservation efforts began to save what little remained. A century and a half later, a forest for the 21st century has emerged-an ecological patchwork protected by a web of governmental agencies, yet still subject to danger from humans.

A Wider View of the Universe traces the origins and development of Henry David Thoreau's painstaking and profound study of the natural world. Arguing that Thoreau in his early career did not perceive nature a worthy subject for his pen, the author chronicles his growing interest and the reasons behind the shift in viewpoint. Making do with a superficial knowledge of nature-even while living at Walden Pond-Thoreau began to study the subject more acutely in 1849 and 1850. Over the next dozen years, he applied himself especially to botany and ornithology, while seeking to integrate this more exact knowledge into the large patterns of life. Independently deriving what now would be considered an ecological world view, Thoreau devoted the last years of his writing career to nature studies, written in his own unique and exacting fashion. Henry Thoreau wrote after the fashion of a painter. How he arrived at this art provides an intriguing and arresting story.