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Though it authorized our nation's earliest imperialistic land grab outside our continent, the 1856 Guano Islands Act is little known today. The act stated that the United States could claim any island ...

Blame it on "guano mania." A craze for natural fertilizer made from bird droppings spurred the U.S. to take possession of a group of remote Pacific islands in the 19th century, and now those islands ...

Want to live on your very own island? Of course you do. Believe it or not, there’s a federal law which could (at least in theory) help you snag one for free. First, you’ll need to make sure that it’s ...

The worldwide boom in commodities has come to this: Even guano, the bird dung that was the focus of an imperialist scramble on the high seas in the 19th century, is in strong demand once again. ISLA ...

Mummy of Christopher Delano; image from the 1864 French translation of the 1854 A Descriptive Narrative of the Wonderful Petrifaction of a Man into Stone. Image Credit: Courtesy of Garrett Scott Bird ...

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Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. It was a treasure for the Incas, the cause of a war, and once a backbone of Peru's economy. Now as the world hungers for sustainable ...