The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.

Presents a comprehensive history spanning the 233 years of the four major services' sales commissaries.

Presents a comprehensive history spanning the 233 years of the four major services' sales commissaries.

This work focuses on how whites used Nez Perce history, images, activities and personalities in the production of history, developing a regional identity into a national framework.

In the nineteenth century, most American farms had a small orchard or at least a few fruit-bearing trees. People grew their own apple trees or purchased apples grown within a few hundred miles of their homes. Nowadays, in contrast, Americans buy mass-produced fruit in supermarkets, and roughly 70 percent of apples come from Washington State. So how did Washington become the leading producer of America’s most popular fruit? In this enlightening book, Amanda L. Van Lanen offers a comprehensive response to this question by tracing the origins, evolution, and environmental consequences of the state’s apple industry. Washington’s success in producing apples was not a happy accident of nature, according to Van Lanen. Apples are not native to Washington, any more than potatoes are to Idaho or peaches to Georgia. In fact, Washington apple farmers were late to the game, lagging their eastern competitors. The author outlines the numerous challenges early Washington entrepreneurs faced in such areas as irrigation, transportation, and labor. Eventually, with crucial help from railroads, Washington farmers transformed themselves into “growers” by embracing new technologies and marketing strategies. By the 1920s, the state’s growers managed not only to innovate the industry but to dominate it. Industrial agriculture has its fair share of problems involving the environment, consumers, and growers themselves. In the quest to create the perfect apple, early growers did not question the long-term environmental effects of chemical sprays. Since the late twentieth century, consumers have increasingly questioned the environmental safety of industrial apple production. Today, as this book reveals, the apple industry continues to evolve in response to shifting consumer demands and accelerating climate change. Yet, through it all, the Washington apple maintains its iconic status as Washington’s most valuable agricultural crop.

THIS is the story of the men who sought for gold, from California to the eastern rim of the Rocky Mountains. Mrs. Wolle writes colorfully of the unbelievable privations the men endured in penetrating the fastnesses of the high Sierra and the Rockies and in crossing the desert wastes of Arizona, Utah and Nevada; of the mines first discovered in New Mexico by Coronado and his men four centuries ago; and the first great rush that hit California in 1849. She follows the miners who poured in successive waves into the golden gulches of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, climbed to the deeper mines high in the mountains of Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, and dared at last to penetrate the Indian-infested Black Hills of South Dakota. It is doubtful if the vividness of this phase of history will ever fade for American readers. In personally following the trails of the pioneering prospectors, Mrs. Wolle finds her excitement continually renewed, as she stumbles upon mute evidence of past bloodshed, lust and struggle. It is this excitement which she conveys to her readers both in the text and in the more than one hundred on-the-spot drawings which show the towns and town sites with the eye of the nostalgic lover of this picturesque and courageous part of our national heritage. A guide book for the adventurous, THE BONANZA TRAIL will be attractive alike to travelers, American history enthusiasts and collectors of Americana. Nor will its pages soon be forgotten by the general reader. “THE BONANZA TRAIL is the fascinating and definitive book on the ghost and near-ghost towns of the Old West for which so many students and amateurs of Western Americana have been waiting. Like the once booming camps and diggings which are its subject, it is a repository of the wonderments, glories and pathos of pioneer times and romantic bonanzas....A book that, to the informed intelligence, is almost impossible to put down.”—LUCIUS BEEBE, The Territorial Enterprise