An Old Industry Takes New Root

Cider - the alcoholic or "hard" variety - was long the favorite drink of the United States, but a variety of factors relegated it to the background for many years. Now, this age-old beverage has returned to the forefront with New York and Cornell University leading the charge.

Chocolate has been described as being more than a food, less than a drug. This description points to the singular position this wildly popular confection plays in our lives. Popular to the tune of $74 billion annually, chocolate begins as a tiny blossom on a small tropical tree. Only three out of a thousand of these will produce the cacao pods that after a labor intensive and lengthy journey, with several chemically and technically complex steps along the way, will end up in your hand as a candy bar.

Since they were first domesticated, nearly 10,000 years ago, in South and Southeast Asia, chickens have accompanied human beings everywhere on the planet. When the early European settlers arrived in the Americas, they unloaded crates of chickens - no doubt squawking in protest - from their crowded, stinking ships. For the next several hundred years, chickens chased bugs and scratched in the dust in farmyards and backyards all over the country.

This exhibit features books from the Phillips Beekeeping Collection, a testament to the hard work and vision of one man, the dedication of hundreds of beekeepers and the labor of millions of bees. In 1925, Everett Franklin Phillips, the recently hired professor of apiculture at Cornell, began to act on his desire to create a great central collection of beekeeping literature, an "accessible storehouse of our knowledge of bees and beekeeping."