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The Propitious Esculent
''The Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World History'' is a book by John Reader outlining the role of the potato (the '' esculent'' of the title) in world history. It was also published under the titles ''The Untold History of the Potato'' and ''Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent''. The potato has been present and influential during the major events in the last 500 years. These include the historical moments of discovery and culture change that have led to the present globalized world. Potatoes had a single region of origin; how they moved from place to place has affected the variety of tubers and the people and places that received them. Reader's book aims to contextualize the potato in world history. Reader presents the information and ideas in ''The Propitious Esculent'' building on the work of two important scholars: Redcliffe N. Salaman and William H. McNeill. In 1949 Salaman wrote a book, ''The History and Social Influence of the Potato''. After publishing t ...
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Random House
Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. History Random House was founded in 1927 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, two years after they acquired the Modern Library imprint from publisher Horace Liveright, which reprints classic works of literature. Cerf is quoted as saying, "We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random," which suggested the name Random House. In 1934 they published the first authorized edition of James Joyce's novel '' Ulysses'' in the Anglophone world. ''Ulysses'' transformed Random House into a formidable publisher over the next two decades. In 1936, it absorbed the firm of Smith and Haas—Robert Haas became the third partner until retiring and selling his share back to Cerf and Klopfer in ...
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Potato
The potato is a starchy food, a tuber of the plant ''Solanum tuberosum'' and is a root vegetable native to the Americas. The plant is a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae. Wild potato species can be found from the southern United States to southern Chile. The potato was originally believed to have been domesticated by Native Americans independently in multiple locations,University of Wisconsin-Madison, ''Finding rewrites the evolutionary history of the origin of potatoes'' (2005/ref> but later genetic studies traced a single origin, in the area of present-day southern Peru and extreme northwestern Bolivia. Potatoes were domesticated there approximately 7,000–10,000 years ago, from a species in the '' Solanum brevicaule'' complex. Lay summary: In the Andes region of South America, where the species is indigenous, some close relatives of the potato are cultivated. Potatoes were introduced to Europe from the Americas by the Spanish in the second half of th ...
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Esculent
This list of Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names is intended to help those unfamiliar with classical languages to understand and remember the scientific names of organisms. The binomial nomenclature used for animals and plants is largely derived from Latin and Greek words, as are some of the names used for higher taxa, such as orders and above. At the time when biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) published the books that are now accepted as the starting point of binomial nomenclature, Latin was used in Western Europe as the common language of science, and scientific names were in Latin or Greek: Linnaeus continued this practice. Although Latin is now largely unused except by classical scholars, or for certain purposes in botany, medicine and the Roman Catholic Church, it can still be found in scientific names. It is helpful to be able to understand the source of scientific names. Although the Latin names do not always correspond to the current English common n ...
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Redcliffe N
Redcliffe may refer to: Places England *Redcliffe, Bristol, a district of the city *Redcliffe College, a Bible college in Gloucester, England Queensland, Australia *Redcliffe Peninsula, a peninsula and suburban region in the Brisbane metropolitan area **Redcliffe Dolphins, a rugby league club **Redcliffe, Queensland, the central suburb of Redcliffe City **City of Redcliffe, the former Local Government covering Redcliffe **Electoral district of Redcliffe Western Australia *Redcliffe, Western Australia U.S.A. * Redcliffe Plantation State Historic Site, listed on the NRHP in South Carolina People * John Redcliffe-Maud (1906–1982), British civil servant and diplomat to South Africa, husband of Jean Redcliffe-Maud * Jean Redcliffe-Maud (1904–1993), British pianist and author, wife of John Redcliffe-Maud * Stratford Canning, 1st Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe (1786–1880), British diplomat, ambassador to the Ottoman Porte See also *Redcliff (other) *Radcliffe (disam ...
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William Hardy McNeill
William Hardy McNeill (October 31, 1917 – July 8, 2016) was an American historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in ''The Rise of the West'' (1963). He was the Robert Andrews Millikan, Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Emeritus#In academia, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987.. (Biographical details from bottom of page 95.) Early life and education William McNeill was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, the son of theologian and educator John T. McNeill, where he lived until age ten. The family then moved to Chicago, while spending summers on a family farm on Canada's Prince Edward Island. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1938 from the University of Chicago, where he was editor of the student newspaper and "was inspired by the anthropologist Robert Redfield". He earned a Mas ...
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Andes Mountains
The Andes, Andes Mountains or Andean Mountains (; ) are the longest continental mountain range in the world, forming a continuous highland along the western edge of South America. The range is long, wide (widest between 18°S – 20°S latitude), and has an average height of about . The Andes extend from north to south through seven South American countries: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Along their length, the Andes are split into several ranges, separated by intermediate depressions. The Andes are the location of several high plateaus—some of which host major cities such as Quito, Bogotá, Cali, Arequipa, Medellín, Bucaramanga, Sucre, Mérida, El Alto and La Paz. The Altiplano plateau is the world's second-highest after the Tibetan plateau. These ranges are in turn grouped into three major divisions based on climate: the Tropical Andes, the Dry Andes, and the Wet Andes. The Andes Mountains are the highest mountain range ou ...
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Altiplano
The Altiplano (Spanish for "high plain"), Collao ( Quechua and Aymara: Qullaw, meaning "place of the Qulla") or Andean Plateau, in west-central South America, is the most extensive high plateau on Earth outside Tibet. The plateau is located at the latitude of the widest part of the north-south-trending Andes. The bulk of the Altiplano lies in Bolivia, but its northern parts lie in Peru, and its southwestern fringes lie in Chile. There are on the plateau several cities in each of these three nations, including El Alto, La Paz, Oruro, and Puno. The northeastern part of the Altiplano is more humid than the southwestern part, which has several salares (salt flats), due to its aridity. At the Bolivia–Peru border lies Lake Titicaca, the largest lake in South America. Farther south, in Bolivia, there was until recently a lake, Lake Poopó, but by December 2015 it had completely dried up, and was declared defunct. It is unclear whether that lake, which had been the second-large ...
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European Potato Failure
The European Potato Failure was a food crisis caused by potato blight that struck Northern and Western Europe in the mid-1840s. The time is also known as the Hungry Forties. While the crisis produced excess mortality and suffering across the affected areas, particularly affected were the Scottish Highlands and, even more harshly, Ireland. Many people starved due to lack of access to other staple food sources. Potatoes at the time In 2013, researchers analysed biological collections in museums with DNA sequencing techniques to decode DNA from the pathogen in stored samples from 1845 and compare them to modern genetic types. The results indicated the "strain was different from all the modern strains analysed". After the blight, strains originating in the Chiloé Archipelago replaced earlier potatoes of Peruvian origin in Europe. Population decline The effect of the crisis on Ireland is incomparable to all other places, causing one million deaths, up to two million refug ...
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Great Famine (Ireland)
The Great Famine ( ga, an Gorta Mór ), also known within Ireland as the Great Hunger or simply the Famine and outside Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis which subsequently had a major impact on Culture of Ireland, Irish society and History of Ireland, history as a whole. With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the History of the Irish language#Nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Irish language was dominant, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as , literally translated as "the bad life" (and loosely translated as "the hard times"). The worst year of the period was 1847, which became known as "Black '47".Éamon Ó Cuív – the impact and legacy of the Great Irish Famine During the Great Hunger, roughly 1 million people died and more than 1 million Irish diaspora, fled the country, causing the country's population to fa ...
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International Potato Center
The International Potato Center (known as CIP from its Spanish-language name ''Centro Internacional de la Papa'') is a research facility based in Lima, Peru, that seeks to reduce poverty and achieve food security on a sustained basis in developing countries through scientific research and related activities on potato, sweet potato, other root and tuber crops, and on the improved management of natural resources in the Andes and other mountain areas. It was established in 1971 by decree of the Peruvian government.American Society for Horticultural Sciencebr>Origin of the International Potato Center./ref> CIP is one of the 15 specialized research centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, an international consortium of agricultural research organizations, having joined in 1972. In late 2015, they partnered with NASA to attempt to grow potatoes in a simulated Martian environment. In March 2017, they announced that preliminary indications are positiv ...
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Books About Food And Drink
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a bo ...
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2008 Non-fiction Books
8 (eight) is the natural number following 7 and preceding 9. In mathematics 8 is: * a composite number, its proper divisors being , , and . It is twice 4 or four times 2. * a power of two, being 2 (two cubed), and is the first number of the form , being an integer greater than 1. * the first number which is neither prime nor semiprime. * the base of the octal number system, which is mostly used with computers. In octal, one digit represents three bits. In modern computers, a byte is a grouping of eight bits, also called an octet. * a Fibonacci number, being plus . The next Fibonacci number is . 8 is the only positive Fibonacci number, aside from 1, that is a perfect cube. * the only nonzero perfect power that is one less than another perfect power, by Mihăilescu's Theorem. * the order of the smallest non-abelian group all of whose subgroups are normal. * the dimension of the octonions and is the highest possible dimension of a normed division algebra. * the first numb ...
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