<i>Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the U.S. Heartland</i> by Cynthia Clampitt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Midwest Maize: How Corn Shaped the U.S. Heartland, by Cynthia Clampitt. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2015. xxii, 288 pp. $95.00 US (cloth), $19.95 US (paper). In Midwest Maize, popular history writer Cynthia Clampitt successfully explains the history of corn in a regional context. This is no easy task. Com was and remains significant in several American regions, not just the Midwest, requiring the author to maintain focus while shifting from regional to national contexts throughout the book. The author also deserves credit for telling such a big story so succinctly. In fifteen brief chapters, Clampitt synthesizes secondary scholarship on corn farming, foodways, processing, and related topics. Readers learn about the migration of plants and people, different races and varieties of com, technological change, and dietary habits. The author relies mostly on secondary accounts, occasionally using primary sources; most significantly interviews with representatives from almost every link in the commodity chain. Midwest Maize begins long before there was a Midwest, although most of the coverage is of the nineteenth century to the present. The author traces the domestication of corn in Mexico and the subsequent spread into the mid-continent. The author pays attention to both city and country, narrating how the growth of farm country depended on the growth of urban markets, manufacturing, and developments in transportation such as canals and railroads. Historians will recognize the significant impact of William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (New York, 1991) on the book at numerous places. Naturally, farmers figure prominently in the book. The utility and adaptability of corn as human and animal food is shown throughout. There are two chapters on living with in which farmers' voices are prominent. One of the later chapters includes historical recipes for corn dishes as well as context for their preparation and consumption. Readers will learn about sweet corn and the associated canning industry, how popcorn became a popular snack, and the leading roles that Midwesterners played in those events and processes. There are several praiseworthy aspects of the book. General readers will be rewarded with an appropriate recognition by the author of the many contributions of First Nation's people to the development of com. There is a good discussion of the role of corn in the beef industry that compares grass-fed versus grain-finished beef. The author also makes sense of com as food through a discussion of the process of nixtamalization as well as breeding and genetically modified organisms. The author reflects the contemporary scientific consensus that the process of genetic modification has produced far more benefits than problems, despite critiques that contemporary breeding practices designed to maximize quantity have resulted in a crop of diminished quality. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".