Word: loess
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...scene was Honan, a province about the size of Missouri, but inhabited by 32 million peasants who grew wheat, corn, millet, soybeans, and cotton. Honan was a fine flat plain whose soil was a powdered, yellow loess which, when wet with rain, oozed with fertility. And which, when the rains did not come, grew nothing; then the peasants died. The rains had not come in 1942, and by 1943, Honan peasants, we heard in Chungking, were dying...
...musings on our manifest destiny--he looks out over "the watershed of the Mississippi, the valleys of Ohio and the plainslands of Missouri, a continent in itself as surely designed for America's use as a woman's womb for the seed of humanity"--and memories of the red loess in the mountains of Siam. The whole thing gets to be a little diffuse...
Ensconced in the ancient caves of Yenan, dug into the loess foothills of the Liang Mountains, the Chinese Reds began to recoup their losses and regain their strength. Then, with the Japanese pressing south from Manchuria, the stage was set for a rapprochement between the Communists and the Nationalists. Now a division commander, Lin made his debut against the Japanese the high point of his military career: at dawn on Sept. 25, 1937, Lin's men ambushed the Japanese Itagaki Division in the shadow of the Great Wall. The defeat is still recalled with awe in the bars...
...Historian Benjamin Shambaugh helped make the entire state history-conscious; Paleontologist Samuel Calvin became the ranking U.S. authority on the Pleistocene age of North America; bearded Thomas H. Macbride became the "Father of Iowa Conservation"; and Geologist Bohumil Shimek won international fame for his theory on the origin of loess (loam) fossils...
...MacWilliams spotted his first landmark-the Huai River, a glint of grey on a black ground. On the plain below, the first signs of China's civil war appeared. The orange flashes of shell explosions pocked the grey blanket of half light. Just south of Suchow's loess hills, five villages arched in a semicircle burned brightly...