| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 149 words from this article are provided below; about 399 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Global Gambits: Big Steel and the U.S. Quest for Manganese. By Tyler Priest. (Westport: Praeger, 2003. xxviii, 332 pp. $79.95, ISBN 0-275-97707-2.)

In this well-researched study, the historian Tyler Priest gives us "for the first time" the story of manganese as a strategic global commodity and how its discovery, extraction, transport, and use relate to U.S. foreign relations and international political economy from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth (p. xvi). Manganese, a metal, is important because when used in modern technologies, it generates chemical reactions that dramatically improve the capabilities of steel, a most critical of modern industrial products. Indeed, other than perhaps petroleum, steel has been the most important input to our modern industrial economy, and as Priest shows clearly in Global Gambits, relatively little of the commercial value of the product could have been realized without the addition of manganese.

. . .

There are about 399 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.