Tells how settlers on the treeless plains built houses from the prairie sod itself.

Food historian Cynthia Clampitt pens the epic story of what happened when Mesoamerican farmers bred a nondescript grass into a staff of life so prolific, so protean, that it represents nothing less than one of humankind's greatest achievements. Blending history with expert reportage, she traces the disparate threads that have woven corn into the fabric of our diet, politics, economy, science, and cuisine. At the same time she explores its future as a source of energy and the foundation of seemingly limitless green technologies. The result is a bourbon-to-biofuels portrait of the astonishing plant that sustains the world.

"No one so well knows the life of pioneer settlements," writes Addison E. Sheldon in the foreword to this book, "as the country doctor, and the country editor, and it might be added, the country postmaster who (in the popular pioneer belief) knew every letter written or received by every person in the community and read all the postcards." No wonder, then, that Dr. Sheldon considered Cass G. Barns uniquely well equipped as a local historian, for Barns served his community in all three capacities. A country doctor who combined farming with medicine, he had a part in the founding and management of the first industries of Boone County, Nebraska, became the editor of a newspaper, county commissioner, and postmaster. The Sod House is a personal narrative?the intimate story of the settlement and frontier years (1867-1897) of the Nebraska prairie country lying between the Elkhorn and Loup rivers. In the worlds of Dr. Sheldon, himself a pioneer Nebraskan, "It preserves for all future generations a faithful picture of the period and the region which it describes."