Robert Kuhn McGregor – författare

In 1947, as the integration of Major League Baseball began, the once-daring American League had grown reactionary, unwilling to confront postwar challenges--population shifts, labor issues and, above all, racial integration. The league had matured in the Jim Crow era, when northern cities responded to the Great Migration by restricting black access to housing, transportation, accommodations and entertainment, while blacks created their own institutions, including baseball's Negro Leagues.As the political climate changed and some major league teams realized the necessity of integration, the American League proved painfully reluctant. With the exception of the Cleveland Indians, integration was slow and often ineffective. This book examines the integration of baseball--widely viewed as a triumph--through the experiences of the American League and finds only a limited shift in racial values. The teams accepted few black players and made no effort to alter management structures, and organized baseball remained an institution governed by tradition-bound owners.

The re-established forests of the Upper Delaware exist as a living reminder of centuries of both exploitation and good intentions. Emerging after the last glaciation, they were first modified by Native Americans to promote hunting and limited agriculture. The forests began to disappear as Europeans clear-cut farmland and fed sawmills and tanneries.The advent of the railroad accelerated demand and within 30 years industry had consumed virtually every mature tree in the valley, leaving barren hillsides subject to erosion and flooding. Even as unchecked cutting continued, conservation efforts began to save what little remained.A century and a half later, a forest for the 21st century has emerged--an ecological patchwork protected by a web of governmental agencies, yet still subject to danger from humans.

Thoreau in his early career did not consider nature a worthy subject for his pen. Beginning with only a superficial knowledge of nature--even while living at Walden Pond--he later began to study the subject more intensely in 1849. Over the next dozen years, he applied himself especially to botany and ornithology, seeking to integrate knowledge into the larger patterns of life.Independently deriving what today would be considered an ecological worldview, Thoreau devoted the last years of his writing career to nature studies, written in his own distinctive voice.In this revised edition of a standard study of Thoreau and nature, the author traces the origins and development of Thoreau's shift in viewpoint and his painstaking efforts thereafter.

This book outlines the history of rickets, a disease commonly associated with childhood, and studies its association with race and its long-reaching effects on childbirth. For centuries, the condition was poorly understood. For females, rickets could pose a double jeopardy: suffering in childhood and severe danger in adulthood when giving birth. The disease could result in a contracted pelvis that obstructs the birth canal. Medical researchers were faced with two distinct challenges: unravelling the etiology of rickets and ensuring the safety of women giving birth--both proved especially difficult.Thought variously to be a disease of industrial cities and children of the poor, grounded in lack of exercise or sunlight, or the of product racial difference, the condition defied analysis until the discovery of vitamin D early in the 20th century. The dangers of rickets radically diminished. Medical intervention in childbirth continued, and childbirth increasingly shifted from the home to the hospital. Medical practitioners justified intervention by emphasizing the dangers of pelvic disproportion, continually enlarging the definition to gain full control of birth. Often conditioned by racial assumptions, surgical experimentation promoted common use of anesthesia and a radical increase in caesarean sections, and birth became a colder, more clinical experience.

Lord Peter Wimsey-amateur detective, man of fashion, talented musician, and wealthy intellectual-is known to legions of readers.  His enduring presence and popularity is a tribute to his creator, Dorothy L. Sayers, who brought Lord Peter to life during “the long week-end” between the First and Second World Wars, as British aristocracy began to change, making way for a modern world.In Conundrums for the Long Week-End, Robert McGregor and Ethan Lewis explore how Sayers used her fictional hero to comment on, and come to terms with, the social upheaval of the time: world wars, the crumbling of the privileged aristocracy, the rise of democracy, and the expanding struggle of women for equality.

Lord Peter Wimsey-amateur detective, man of fashion, talented musician, and wealthy intellectual-is known to legions of readers.  His enduring presence and popularity is a tribute to his creator, Dorothy L. Sayers, who brought Lord Peter to life during “the long week-end” between the First and Second World Wars, as British aristocracy began to change, making way for a modern world. In Conundrums for the Long Week-End, Robert McGregor and Ethan Lewis explore how Sayers used her fictional hero to comment on, and come to terms with, the social upheaval of the time: world wars, the crumbling of the privileged aristocracy, the rise of democracy, and the expanding struggle of women for equality.