TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 363 habits that humans carried to new environments, and new breeds of plants and animals as purposeful innovations, not mere accidents, Hudson trenchantly illuminates the relationship of technology and culture. The author can be criticized for weighting the southern influence too heavily when he asserts that “there was no significant Yankee influence in creating the region” (p. 103). Instead of awarding credit to either northerners or southerners, one could argue that the Corn Belt’s prosperity is due precisely to the amalgamation of diverse cultures. Indeed, many regions of the Midwest were settled by a mixture of migration streams, where the Yankee store was as important to the region’s economy as the corn and hogs that farmers produced. Finally, although the scope is broad, the dense detail of this specialized monograph at times obscures the underlying argu ment. Nevertheless, the book contributes to the new rural history which cares less about technology than the cultures of capitalism. It successfully marries technology and culture to explain the history of the Corn Belt, a core region that has come to symbolize the prosper ity of America itself. Susan Sessions Rugh Dr. Rugh is assistant professor of history at St. Cloud State University. She is com pleting a book on the role of diverse regional cultures in the making of the midwestern family farm in 19th-century Illinois. The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expan sion. By Jimmy M. Skaggs. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Pp. xii+334; notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $45.00. To 19th-century American manufacturers, there was something profoundly irresistible about the industrial conversion of animal parts into consumer goods. From bone, horn, ivory, and hides to blood, oil, feathers, and hair, the marketplace and the entrepreneur combined to yield an alphabet soup of dry goods from the animal kingdom. Within decades, the synthetic imitations of the 20th cen tury supplanted this menagerie, product by product, leaving leather goods as one of our few animal-based industrial product lines. To day, combs, piano keys, hats, pillow stuffing, billiard balls, and han dles need only imitate certain aspects of the old animal part. NowJimmy Skaggs, professor of economics at Wichita State Uni versity, adds the guano trade to our understanding of this robust era of American industrial expansion. Skaggs spends no time embed ding bird droppings within the larger narrative of our industrialzoological dependence; he focuses instead on guano as a vivid exam ple of American government support and management of the na tion’s so-called free-enterprise, open-market system. The bulk of this 364 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE book examines case after case of American businessmen first laying claim to remote, guano-rich rock islands in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, and then seeking official U.S. sanction for private rights to these rich deposits, under the authority of the remarkable Guano Islands Act of 1856. Commercial guano generally has been defined as the dried excre ment of sea birds such as gulls, gannets, pelicans, and cormorants. Rich in phosphates, nitrogen, and potassium, ocean guano quickly attracted American farmers as a wonder fertilizer beginning in the 1840s, soon after Peruvian officials began exporting guano from their Pacific Islands. Some deposits were over one hundred feet thick. The near-miraculous ability of guano to replenish exhausted farming soils produced a guano rush, a guano fever, a guano mania, a guano gospel that expired only when guano, too, was replaced by man-made alternatives in the 20th century. The business of acquiring rights to guano-rich islands, and then the difficult process of extracting and shipping the guano, form the basis of the book. Guano’s absence from the historical literature in spires Skaggs to use this opportunity to range across every aspect of guanodom but, amazingly, he furnishes not one image of his subject matter or the birds that make it. Skaggs’s main objective, however, is more economic and political than it is technical, as he demon strates how guano furnished the basis for American acquisition of the nation’s first foreign lands or “appurtenances.” Senator William H. Seward masterminded an act of Congress in...