Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options? Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology. Meena Khandelwal, a feminist anthropologist, describes her collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, and others. She employs critical social theory and reflections from fieldwork to bring together research from a range of fields, including history, geography, anthropology, energy and environmental studies, public health, and science and technology studies (STS). In so doing she not only demystifies multidisciplinary research but also highlights the messy reality of actual behavior. Cookstove Chronicles critically examines why, despite extensive development efforts, use of the chulha persists. It offers an important new framework for looking at development, technology, environmental change, and human behavior.

Though confined to the great Dakota reservation in 1878, the still-defiant Sioux did not end their struggle with the white man until well into the twentieth century. Throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century the Sioux-finding themselves united for the first time in their history-waged a cold war with the United States Department of the Interior, the Indian Bureau, the various Indian agents sent to supervise Sioux Reservation life, and the so-called Indian Friends of the East, who sought to "school and church" the Sioux into submission.

Immigrants, Natives and nervous Spanish land barrons crash and collide just before the California Gold Rush of 1849. During the birth and death of one nation two other nations go to war. Maddie's Chronicle is the story of a young woman who moves to the sleepy village of Yerba Buena and witnesses history unfold. Like many immigrants, the people and events she encounters test her Christian faith. While the Mexican-American War, Fremont's Bear Flag Republic, and a Mormon Battalion flood the land, Maddie sees the California Dons, the Franciscan Padres and the missions fade. She meets Hudson Bay Fur trappers at Yerba Buena (soon to be renamed San Francisco) and travels to Sutter's Fort to await the outcome of the Donner Party. Romance, an ancient tribal mystery, and the beauty and diversity of her new home captivate Maddie. She chronicles her experiences with a candor emboldened by youth.