My research examines, expands, and retells histories we thought we understood about our past. For example, in Jungle Laboratories, I examined the production of The Pill from the perspective of peasants who picked the wild yams from which the first viable oral contraceptive was derived. It is a larger story about the pharmaceutical industry’s global search for plants that heal and the impact of this quest on local communities. In The World in a Wheat Field, I turned to local communities and not famed scientists to explore how silver-bullet solutions of the development era have lasting social and environmental consequences at both the local and global level.