Growing American Rubber : : Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security / / Mark R Finlay.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Rutgers University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Finlay, Mark R,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2009]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in Modern Science, Technology, and the Environment
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (360 p.) :; 24

Growing American Rubber explores America's quest during tense decades of the twentieth century to identify a viable source of domestic rubber. Straddling international revolutions and world wars, this unique and well-researched history chronicles efforts of leaders in business, science, and government to sever American dependence on foreign suppliers. Mark Finlay plots out intersecting networks of actors including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, prominent botanists, interned Japanese Americans, Haitian peasants, and ordinary citizensùall of whom contributed to this search for economic self-sufficiency. Challenging once-familiar boundaries between agriculture and industry and field and laboratory, Finlay also identifies an era in which perceived boundaries between natural and synthetic came under review. Although synthetic rubber emerged from World War II as one solution, the issue of ever-diminishing natural resources and the question of how to meet twenty-first-century consumer, military, and business demands lingers today.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. The American Dependence on Imported Rubber: The Lessons of Revolution and War, 1911-1922 -- Chapter 2. Domestic Rubber Crops in an Era of Nationalism and Internationalism -- Chapter 3. Thomas Edison and the Challenges of the New Rubber Crops -- Chapter 4. The Nadir of Rubber Crop Research, 1928-1941 -- Chapter 5. Crops in War: Rubber Plant Research on the Grand Scale -- Chapter 6. Sustainable Rubber from Grain: The Gillette Committee and the Battles over Synthetic Rubber -- Chapter 7. Resistance to Domestic Rubber Crops and the Decline of the Emergency Rubber Project -- Chapter 8. From Domestic Rubber Crops to Biotechnology -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author