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The smart devices that make up the Internet of Things induce consumers to cede control over the products they buy. Devices like smartphones offer real benefits, but combined with embedded software, network connectivity, microscopic sensors and large-scale data analytics, they pose serious threats to ownership and consumer welfare. From coffee makers and toys to cars and medical devices, the products we buy are defined by software. That code gives device makers an increasing degree of control over how, when, and whether those products can be used even after consumers buy them. That shift of control has profound implications for ownership.

This chapter provides a historical background of Illinois's prairies followed by a list of prairies by county. Each site is briefly described, followed by symbols showing site features, a brief location, and a phone number. Illinois lies in the Prairie Peninsula. When this area was discovered in 1673 by Jacques Marquette, a French-born Jesuit missionary, and Louis Jolliet, a Canadian explorer, it held 14 million acres of forest and 22 million acres of tallgrass prairie. However, arriving pioneers began farming and John Deere's invention of the first commercially successful steel plow in 1837 spelled the end of “untouched” land; by 1900 most Illinois prairie was gone. Today about 2,000 acres of high-quality, relatively undisturbed prairie, or about 0.01% of the original native prairie, exists in Illinois.

It Was a cold evening in early December 2006, and Tracy Warner had just returned home from Willits Primary School. Ryan had just sung in the “Winter Wonderland” musical there. Christmas lights dotted F Street, adding some warmth to her modest block in the heart of Monmouth, Illinois. She looked like a new woman, and, judging by her smile, she knew it. The jeans and T-shirt—the uniform of the anxious, soon-to-be-unemployed line worker and picketer of a couple years earlier—had been replaced by a red V-neck sweater, silk blouse, and an aura of confidence. She was wrapping up four fall semester classes and a journalism internship at the school’s news­paper, the Western Courier. She had done this while raising Ryan and frantically looking for a job. She was set to graduate on the following Saturday from Western Illinois University. The dream Warner had dreamt a thousand times while piecing together refrigerator doors on the Maytag line for over fifteen years was coming true. “Look at this,” she said, handing me an essay. “It’s a paper on Rawls’ theory of justice. He said that we have to stand behind a veil of ignorance to make fair decisions.” Her reference fit the moment. John Rawls’ 1971 Theory of Justice poses a hypothetical world in which all societal roles are shuffled behind a metaphorical “veil of ignorance.” Behind this veil, one does not know to what role he or she will be assigned in the new social order. It is only from there, Rawls argues, can one truly judge the fairness of various social roles and relations. The CEO, for instance, would have to experience the lives of workers he put out of work. Warner still saw Ralph Hake as a great villain—and it was not just because of the factory closing and the gutting of her working life as well as the working lives of her friends and co-workers. Warner had embraced the changes as best she could, and she and Ryan would find a way to survive.

This chapter provides a historical background of Kentucky's prairies followed by a list of prairies by county. Each site is briefly described, followed by symbols showing site features, a brief location, and a phone number. When white settlers arrived, Kentucky held 3 million acres of wide open prairie. Today, less than one one-hundredth of 1 percent remains. Settlers tamed Kentucky's prairies and replaced them with commercially important crops such as corn, wheat, barley, and tobacco. They planted grasses such as bluegrass on which to graze cattle and fine horses. Two factors helped settlers conquer the ancient prairie: overgrazing by cattle and the invention of a scour plow in the 1830s, a device that made blacksmith John Deere a household term.

It was Late on a sunny, but bitterly cold mid-February afternoon. Michael Patrick, red-eared from the chill, cast a long shadow across the rough concrete that used to be the Appliance City factory floor. A few months earlier, two-thirds of the expansive ruin had been razed. It was now an extended chinhigh pile of crumbled bricks, broken cinderblocks, mangled rebar, and cornyellow insulation chunks. Patrick, dressed in a corduroy jacket, wool trousers, and a brown wool fedora, remarked that there was little now to stop the bitter Arctic winds that swept through the enormous demolition site. One could see clear through to the Henry C. Hill Correctional Center across the tracks and farther north on Illinois Route 41. The razed portion of the former factory was big enough to fit twenty football fields, side by side. The newest part of the factory was still standing, but vacant. The California-based investment company that owned the property hoped that clearing the “old, antiquated industrial real estate” would make the remaining property more attractive to potential buyers. “When you’re here,” Patrick said, “you think about the people. It was the blood, sweat, and tears of the workers that made this place run. It was ours, you know? We had different owners come and go but we made it run.” He pushed his hands deep into his jacket pockets and shrugged. It was early 2013, and Patrick could mark fifty-four years since he and Bob Dennison, Doug’s father, started packing insulation at Admiral’s Midwest Manufacturing plant on January 26, 1959. Patrick lived alone in a modest brick house on South Pleasant Avenue, just across the BNSF tracks, less than a mile away. The 72-year-old retiree hibernated in the winter, but managed to make each of his granddaughter’s sixth-grade basketball games. When the weather warmed, Patrick took his late model minivan to antique shows, estate sales, and collectors’ conventions. He collected license plates and license plate toppers, die-cast cars, and other trinkets. Earlier that day, over lunch at the Landmark Cafe, we had discussed the wage pressures, retiree obligations, and foreign competition that faced Maytag in the early 2000s.

Two Weeks After BusinessWeek lauded Maytag’s remarkable success, the company broke clean from a century-old tradition. On August 12, 1999, Lloyd Ward replaced Leonard Hadley by a vote of the board of directors. Ward was the first executive never to have worked for Maytag. He had not been raised in the idiosyncratic Maytag culture. He was not even an appliance guy. Hadley had been grooming Ward for the CEO’s position since Ward came to the company as president of the home appliance division in 1996. Two internal candidates had been groomed and judged unfit for the CEO’s job; Ward was their last hope. Still, the board’s choice shocked many. Ward was anything but short on confidence though. He had wrestled a childhood of poverty and a career touched often by racism and had won. He had captained the Michigan State basketball team. He had earned a black belt in karate. He was now a star of business on the rise. When Ward became only the second African American to become a CEO at a Fortune 500 company, Black Enterprise declared it a “watershed moment.” It was easy to see why Hadley liked Ward: he brought Maytag a magnetic personality, inspirational leadership, and some badly needed diversity. Hadley said he “drooled” when he saw Ward’s resume and relished bringing in this bold, extroverted marketing man. Even before he became CEO, Ward began to revamp Maytag’s old-fashioned culture with an “unapologetically macho” leadership style. He began to shift Maytag’s focus to brand management, lower-end products, and sophisticated consumer research. Ward also brought in people from outside the appliance industry, from P&G and PepsiCo mainly. Ward’s ascendance won praise, including a fawning cover story in BusinessWeek. Joe Krejci, a Galesburg logistics manager who reported directly to Newton, was taken by Ward’s irresistible charm. Ward, still a diehard Michigan State Spartan, once came into Krejci’s office and stomped on his University of Michigan doormat with a theatrical smile. They then “shot the shit” about Big Ten football and basketball.

In April 1974, Admiral was absorbed into Rockwell International’s growing empire. The Vietnam War contractor was, according to the New York Times, on a “debt-financed acquisition binge that lasted almost a decade” as it spread its reach into aircraft, defense, aerospace, electronics, and appliances. Admiral, meanwhile, was still churning out televisions, radios, and home appliances at factories across the Midwest. Productive as it was, the little company couldn’t afford the massive capital outlays required to modernize, market, and survive in the increasingly brutal electronics and appliance businesses. Accustomed to the massive revenues and fat profits of big government contracts, Rockwell International trimmed employment at the plant, investing $25 million to automate the chest-freezer line. In 1975 Rockwell added a 60,000-square-foot microwave oven facility, and in 1978 it spent $12 million to retool the top-mount refrigerator line and erect the “Blue Goose,” a massive machine the length of a football field that spat out finished metal cabinets. In earlier times, investment meant more jobs. Under Rockwell’s rigorous ethic of scientific management, it usually meant fewer. Admiral accounted for about an eighth of Rockwell’s revenues. “We weren’t even peanuts to Rockwell,” Michael Patrick said. It was a new era for Appliance City. One afternoon in the mid-1970s, Dave Bevard was let out of work an hour and a half early. Production workers were instructed to gather in the vast parking lot across the street from the factory. Under a circus tent, a Rockwell representative and the Admiral plant manager told workers about the importance of the B-1 bomber to the nation’s defense, to Rockwell’s future, and, consequently, to Galesburg jobs. By this time Rockwell had production of the B-1 in over forty states, making itself the model practitioner of militaryindustrial growth. The plan was to use its nonmilitary production facilities in a lobbying campaign to maintain one of the most lucrative military contracts in history—around $10 billion at the time. Workers signed premade postcards for their congressman and went home early that day.

On a Blistering morning in July 2007, four middle-aged men, already quite drunk, stood shaded under the eaves of a long, white stucco building. The building, which was derelict, sat in the middle of Agua Dulce in semitropical northern Veracruz. Our guide, Orlinda Garcia, asked the four men where we could find an hoja (husk) processing plant. Mayor Javier Gonzalez and Treasurer José Cruz stood with us as well. Gonzalez’s sky-blue municipal office was just a few hundred feet away, on the other side of the vacant town plaza. The adjacent plaza was littered with rusty rides and empty prize booths from a traveling summer carnival that had recently ended. “This is it!” a man in a Pittsburgh Pirates cap shouted. He pointed to a concealed entrance. Part of the wavy clay tile roof was missing and had been replaced with corrugated metal sheets. Plastic bags and bottles specked the ground outside. A slick, red PRI campaign banner hung on an electric pole next to the building with a candidate’s portrait. “Fiel a ti” (Loyal to you), the banner read. The plain building stretched alongside a wide, bumpy road—deserted except for a few chickens. It did not look like the site of a profitable foreign-trade operation. A young encargada (supervisor) named Marisol greeted us from behind a black metal gate. We asked her if we could see inside the facility. “The patron is not here,” she said. “I cannot let you in.” She was apologetic but firm. In a pink blouse, capri pants, and faux gem-studded flip-flops, she appeared to be dressed more for a Saturday of shopping in Monterrey than managing an export business in this half-ghost town in far-flung Veracruz. “The boss is very particular, and he doesn’t allow people from the outside to see the operation.” Another neatly dressed young woman looked at us while she embroidered some clothing in a chair behind Marisol. She sat next to a pile of plastic bags swollen with corn husks (called hojas or totomoxtle).