Background
Mangelsdorf, Paul Christoph was born on July 20, 1899 in Atchison, Kansas, United States. Son of August and Mary (Brune) Mangelsdorf.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/143047291X/?tag=2022091-20
( Corn is among the most familiar of grains; it is also ...)
Corn is among the most familiar of grains; it is also one of the most mysterious. In this handsomely illustrated new book, Paul Mangelsdorf, perhaps the world's foremost expert on the corn plant, summarizes the work of a lifetime devoted to unraveling the enigma of corn. This unique grain--it has no close counterpart elsewhere in the plant kingdom--exists only in association with man, and it survives only as a result of his intervention. Thus, the story of corn is in many ways a story about people. Combining the skills of scientist and storyteller, Professor Mangelsdorf in his search for the origin of corn takes the reader to archaeological digs in once-inhabited caves in Mexico and the United States Southwest, to the discovery of fossil pollen in drill cores taken deep below Mexico City, and to experimental fields where the great diversity of corn is revealed and where the plant is hybridized with its relatives teosinte and Tripsacum. Drawing upon the evidence from botany, genetics, cytology, archaeology, and history, the author seeks to evaluate various hypotheses on the origin of corn. He concludes that the ancestor of cultivated corn was a wild form of pod corn; that corn may have been domesticated more than once in both Mexico and South America from different geographical races of wild corn; and that hybridizations between corn and its various relatives have resulted in explosive evolution leading to a diversity of varieties and forms unmatched in any other crop plant. This is a book about corn, but it is a book for biologists, agronomists, anthropologists, and historians, and for the interested layman who would like to know something about the grain which, "transformed, as three fourths of it is, into meat, milk, eggs, and other animal products, is our basic food plant, as it was of the people who preceded us in this hemisphere."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674171756/?tag=2022091-20
agronomist history educator Botany educator
Mangelsdorf, Paul Christoph was born on July 20, 1899 in Atchison, Kansas, United States. Son of August and Mary (Brune) Mangelsdorf.
Bachelor of Science, Kansas State College, 1921. Doctor of Laws (honorary), Kansas State College, 1961. Master of Science, Doctor of Science, Harvard College, 1925.
Doctor of Science (honorary), Park College, 1960. Doctor of Science (honorary), St. Benedict's College, 1965. Doctor of Science (honorary), University North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1975.
Doctor of Science (honorary), Harvard University, 1977.
In 1927 Mangelsdorf became a researcher at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, where he became interested in the genetic origins of maize. In 1940 he became a professor of economic botany at Harvard and continued his research there until his retirement in 1968. After his retirement, he continued his research at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Mangelsdorf is noted for studying the origins and hybridization of maize.
Hence he co-wrote the book The Origin of Indian Corn and Its Relatives with Robert G. Reeves. They worked on a "Tripartite theory" of origin.
According to the horticultural authority Noel Kingsbury, this theory enjoyed broad support on the strength of Mangelsdorf"s "undisputed. Mangelsdorf was in 1951 the president of the American Society of Naturalists, in 1955 the president of the Genetics Society of America, and in 1962 the president of the Society for Economic Botany.
( Corn is among the most familiar of grains; it is also ...)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Fellow American Society Agronomy. Member American Society Naturalists (president 1951), American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Botanical Society, North-East Botanical Society, Genetics Society of America (president 1955), American Philosophical Society, American Academy Arts and Sciences, Linnean Society London, Society Economic Botany (president 1962), Sigma Xi, Sigma Nu, Alpha Zeta, Gamma Sigma Delta. Clubs: Faculty.
Married Helen Parker, June 27, 1923 (deceased May 1979). Children: Paul Christoph, Clark Parker.