Men like Herbert Hoover standardized the mainland. Colonial rulers then imposed those standards on the territories. But both processes stopped at the border. Within the Greater United States, one way of doing things prevailed. Foreign countries had their own nursing practices and screw thread angles. In Hoover’s day, it was hard to imagine changing that. Getting brick manufacturers in one country to agree had been difficult enough. Who was going to get French brickmakers into agreement with Japanese ones? The difficulty of standardizing across jurisdictions explains why countries through the
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