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The two indispensable books on the history of corn are:

Fussell, Betty. The Story of Corn (New York: Knopf, 1994). Columbus’s quote on corn is on page 17. The statistics on wheat versus corn consumption are on page 215.

Warman, Arturo. Corn & Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance. Trans. Nancy L. Westrate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Other helpful works touching on the history of corn include:

Anderson, Edgar. Plants, Man and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952).

Crosby, Alfred W. Germs, Seeds & Animals: Studies in Ecological History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

———. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

Eisenberg, Evan. The Ecology of Eden (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Very good on the coevolutionary relationship of grasses and humankind.

Iltis, Hugh H. “From Teosinte to Maize: The Catastrophic Sexual Mutation,” Science 222, no. 4626 (November 25, 1983).

Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). Excellent on the evolutionary origins of the plant and pre-Columbian maize agriculture.

Nabhan, G. P. Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989).

Rifkin, Jeremy. Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Plume, 1993). The quote from General Sheridan is on page 78.

Sargent, Frederick. Corn Plants: Their Uses and Ways of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901).

Wallace, H.A., and E. N. Bressman. Corn and Corn Growing (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1949).

Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (New York: Crown, 1988).

Will, George F., and George E. Hyde. Corn Among the Indians of the Upper Missouri (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1917).

CHAPTER 2: THE FARM

The best accounts of the history and workings of the commodity corn complex in the United States are a series of studies by Richard Manning and C. Ford Runge commissioned by the Midwest Commodities and Conservation Initiative, a joint project of the World Wildlife Fund, the American Farmland Trust, and the Henry A. Wallace Center for Agricultural & Environmental Policy: All three studies are available online at: www.worldwildlife.org/commerce. Manning, Richard. Commodities, Consensus, and Conservation: A Search for Opportunities

and The Framework of a Commodities System (April 2001).

Runge, C. Ford. King Corn: The History, Trade, and Environmental Consequences of Corn (Maize) Production in the United States (September 2002).

In writing about the rise of industrial agriculture I also drew on the following works:

Kimbrell, Andrew. The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2002).

Manning, Richard. Against the Grain (New York: North Point Press, 2004).

Morgan, Dan. Merchants of Grain (New York: Viking, 1979).

Russell, Edmund. War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Schwab, Jim. Raising Less Corn and More Hell: Midwestern Farmers Speak Out (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). See the interview with George Naylor beginning on page 111.

Scott, James. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Scott, an anthropologist and political scientist, puts industrial agriculture in the illuminating context of other modernist schemes, including architecture and Soviet collectivization.

Smil, Vaclav. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2001). This indispensable book tells the story of Fritz Haber’s life and