A laboratory curiosity at first, lithium is now a part of our society. Unknown to most people, it is being used in many practical applications, such as ceramics, greases, electronics, medicine, and hopefully in the future, will be used in a fusion that would solve world’s energy problems. While lithium has been the subject of many specific publications, no comprehensive book covering all aspects of lithium has been published so far. This book discusses the original discovery of lithium, its development from a mineral of curiosity to an expanding industry, its geological occurrences, and its various applications, culminating in its present use in the ever-expanding electromotive industry. The author’s wonderful and exciting experiences of his long lithium career shared in the book will satisfy the readers’ curiosity about this expanding industry.

This is a pathbreaking study of Tejano ranchers and settlers in the Lower Río Grande Valley from their colonial roots to 1900. The first book to delineate and assess the complexity of Mexican-Anglo interaction in south Texas, it also shows how Tejanos continued to play a leading role in the commercialization of ranching after 1848 and how they maintained a sense of community. Despite shifts in jurisdiction, the tradition of Tejano land holding acted as a stabilizing element and formed an important part of Tejano history and identity. The earliest settlers arrived in the 1730s and established numerous ranchos and six towns along the river. Through a careful study of land and tax records, brands and bills of sale of livestock, wills, population and agricultural censuses, and oral histories, Alonzo shows how Tejanos adapted to change and maintained control of their ranchos through the 1880s, when Anglo encroachment and changing social and economic conditions eroded most of the community's land base.

A community without knowledge of its history is like a man without knowledge of his soul. Catherine Morison Rehart's captivating vignettes extend to all of us an invitation to learn something of California's Central Valley history. It is here in Rehart's near near-magical journey through time that we are privileged to view the sacrifices and successes, the toils and triumphs of those who preceded us, each contributing his or her measure to the legacy of this extraordinary place. In Legends & Legacies, a five volume series, Rehart sojourns at the wellspring of local history, chronicling with warmth and affection the intriguing, exciting, humorous, and poignant stories of the vibrant, colorful Valley inhabitants who created the legends and bestowed the legacies on those of us who now roam the same cherished ground.

The first comprehensive book about the history of Henry Fred Dangberg and his family details the exhilarating rise and the devastating fall of one of Nevada's most prominent pioneers. The book contains hundreds of personal family photographs along with rare documents and letters never seen before.

Between the late colonial period and the Civil War, the countryside of the American northeast was largely transformed. Rural New England changed from a society of independent farmers relatively isolated from international markets into a capitalist economy closely linked to the national market, an economy in which much farming and manufacturing output was produced by wage labor. Using the Connecticut Valley as an example, The Roots of Rural Capitalism demonstrates how this important change came about. Christopher Clark joins the active debate on the "transition to capitalism" with a fresh interpretation that integrates the insights of previous studies with the results of his detailed research. Largely rejecting the assumption of recent scholars that economic change can be explained principally in terms of markets, he constructs a broader social history of the rural economy and traces the complex interactions of social structure, household strategies, gender relations, and cultural values that propelled the countryside from one economic system to another. Above all, he shows that people of rural Massachusetts were not passive victims of changes forced upon them, but actively created a new economic world as they tried to secure their livelihoods under changing demographic and economic circumstances. The emergence of rural capitalism, Clark maintains, was not the result of a single "transition"; rather, it was an accretion of new institutions and practices that occurred over two generations, and in two broad chronological phases. It is his singular contribution to demonstrate the coexistence of a family-based household economy (persisting well into the nineteenth century) and the market-oriented system of production and exchange that is generally held to have emerged full-blown by the eighteenth century. He is adept at describing the clash of values sustaining both economies, and the ways in which the rural household-based economy, through a process he calls "involution," ultimately gave way to a new order. His analysis of the distinctive role of rural women in this transition constitutes a strong new element in the study of gender as a factor in the economic, social, and cultural shifts of the period. Sophisticated in argument and engaging in presentation, this book will be recognized as a major contribution to the history of capitalism and society in nineteenth-century America.