One of my more offbeat reads was a history of salt. It's amazing how important the commodity was, mostly because of its use in food preservation, and how much history and geography it explains. When Gandhi began his campaign for independence from Britain he chose salt as his key issue because the British prohibited Indians from making salt and forced them to buy British salt.
The advent of refrigeration and modern canning and then Morton's industrialization of salt production put and end to local operations like Booneslick.