Expansion Books

Charlesworth is highly respected by his contempories as well he should be. He tackled some impossible scrolls and did it right. This read, the 2nd book of pseudepigrapha, is remarkable to say the least.

A detailed, still useful, well archived, and cautionary look at the historically entangled expansionism of the US and Japan in an earlier phase of capitalist globalization.

I thought that the content of this book was extrodinary. It was about the same as the first one but I always had wondered what the fossil TCG would be like. When I collected the full collection of PKMN cards I was delighted. I share the collection with my friend Philip who is just as mad about Pokemon as I am. The book is very helpful because in my old one I ticked of al of the ones I had so it was a great help. It also gives you lots of Pictures of cards at least not in Japanese so I am venturing towards being the ultimate PKMN trainer. The book describes the cards perfectly so I can develop my skills on playing and defeating against my opponent. I hope everyone who gets the book enjoyed as much as me. Bye!

You wont go wrong with this, It provides a solid foundation for any one wishing to develop their skills, The examples will have you creating the most wonderful dishes to the highest standard. And perhaps the most important thing, You will gain a deep understanding of the basics that are common to all techniques, with this comes the ability to create menus that become a gift to the pallet

This book is great if you want to know about the gold rushes of America. She organized it in good ways to keep the different aspects of the rushes interesting.

The authors of this book predicated their work with a claim that the Webster-Ashburton and Oregon treaties of the 1840's have too long laid in the shadows of the Mexican-American and the Civil War, but they were important because they laid the foundations for the concept of Manifest Destiny that came of age during the Polk Administration.

Howard Jones and Donald Rakestraw devote roughly equal coverage to the two major international crises between America and Great Britain in the 1840's - the Maine-Canada border crisis and the Oregon border question. As part of these overarching crises, individual events that led to greater prospects for war, such as the Creole slave mutiny and the destruction of the ship Caroline, are discussed in the work.

The authors of the text have done a good job of explaining why such major incidents were settled by diplomacy, thus avoiding a third military conflict between the two Atlantic nations. To accomplish this, the largest focus is on diplomacy between the countries, but diplomatic exchanges are skillfully interwoven with stories of events that could have led to armed hositilities.

The section on the Oregon treaty is not populated with so many perilous adventures that could have led to war; instead, it focuses largely on the political endeavors undertaken to negotate a settlement of the disputed boundary. It is this section where the concept of Manifest Destiny is truly introduced. The idea that Manifest Destiny is spawned from the American desire to incorporate Oregon into the Union may not be a novel concept, but the authors have done a solid job in explaining why this particular territory was the stepping stone to further ambitious territorial grabs by Polk.

Overall, I found the book to be well written and interesting - it does not deal specifically with Manifest Destiny, but, as the title suggests, it addresses the period leading up to this mad rush to govern all of the land from sea to shining sea.

This article, published by the Indiana Academy of Science on January 1, 1999, is an excellent introduction into the methods of range expansion in medium-sized fossorial carnivores in open grasslands or other treeless habitats. In this case the mammal in question, the badger (Taxidea taxus,) has been expanding southward in Indiana due to a confluence of reasons. This southward range expansion has been seen many times before in similar mammals, perhaps most notably the thirteen-lined ground squirrel (Spermophilus tridecemlineatuls) and in other similarly agrarian areas, notably southern Illinois. The main issues allowing expansion involve trapping, protection, and available habitat.

Badgers were legal furbearers in Indiana until 1966; that combined with the dramatic decrease in the number of licensed fur trappers in the state has resulted in an apparent population increase in badgers. Legal protection for badgers came in 1969 when the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) declared them an endangered species. Finally, increasingly available nesting grounds for badgers, notably reclaimed strip mines, are extremely suitable for foraging and denning.

Although badgers have never been especially common in Indiana, the author surveyed 230 IDNR employees for badger sightings and compared the results with earlier studies dating back to the works of Evermann and Butler in 1894. Several other studies are cited, making this an excellent piece of longitudinal research in Indiana badger habitation. The first official badger census is dated in 1936, and documents the presence of badgers in 24 Indiana counties, mostly in the northern third of the state (although isolated populations appeared, interestingly, in Franklin and Vermillion counties.) A 1955 survey placed the badger in 33 counties, while a 1969 study documented them in 53 counties. By 1982, badgers existed in at least 63 Indiana counties, and this report cites badgers in 92 counties. A map was produced documenting the drift southward of badger populations, and was correlated with Indiana Natural Heritage Program badger sighting and road kill database records.

The article is extremely well researched, and will be of keen interests to mammologists and environmental researchers. The discussion section is well developed, and the author, Kim A. Berkley, questions whether the badger still meets the legal requirements as an endangered species. It is far easier to designate a species as endangered than to remove it from the list, but given the steady habitat expansion of badgers in Indiana, this article strongly suggests that badgers are no longer legally endangered.

It really shed light on some concepts that other books simply do not discuss. It is also the only one I know that gives a theoretical basis for understanding dimensional regularization.

This is a very useful collection of ten essays by University of Wisconsin/Harvard University historian Frederick Jackson Turner written through out his career. Edited and introduced by John Mack Faragher, this book is a very fine entrée point to the thought of Turner. The first of the essays published here is Turner's seminal work, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," an essay that defined a whole field of research. Read at the 1893 annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, this paper has exerted an enormously powerful force on the historiography of the United States, in no small measure because of its powerful statement of American exceptionalism. Turner took as his cue an observation in the 1890 U.S. census that the American frontier had for the first time closed. He noted, "Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development."

Turner insisted that the frontier made Americans American, gave the nation its democratic character, and ensured the virtues of self-reliance, community, egalitarianism, and the promise of justice. He noted that cheap or even free land provided a "safety valve" that protected the nation against uprisings of the poverty-stricken and malcontented. The frontier also produced a people with "coarseness and strength...acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical and inventive turn of mind...[full of] restless and nervous energy...that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom." It gave the people of the United States, in essence, virtually every positive quality they have ever possessed.

Despite criticisms, through at least the 1950s vision of the frontier reigned supreme as an underlying definer of American character. It conjured up an image of self-reliant Americans moving westward in sweeping waves of discovery, exploration, conquest, and settlement of an "untamed wilderness." And in the process of movement, the Europeans who settled North America became an indigenous American people. In Turner's characterization, the frontier concept has always carried with it the ideals of optimism, democracy, and meritocracy. It also summoned in the popular mind a wide range of vivid and memorable tales of heroism, each a morally justified step toward the modern democratic state. The popular conception of "westering" and the settlement of the American continent by Europeans has been a powerful metaphor for the uniqueness of America in the twentieth century.

As explained in Faragher's introduction, in the latter half of the twentieth century historians increasingly questioned Turner's frontier ideal, arguing that it reduced the complexity of events to a relatively static morality play, avoided matters that challenged or contradicted the myth, viewed Americans moving westward as inherently good and their opponents as evil, and ignored the cultural context of westward migration. They determined that Turner's "Frontier Thesis" was excessively ethnocentric, nationalistic, and somewhat jingoistic. His rhetoric excluded more than it covered, moreover, failing to do justice to diverse western people and events.

In addition to the title essay, this excellent collection of the essays of Frederick Jackson Turner includes such articles as "Social Forces in American History," "The Western and American Ideals," and "The Significance of Sections in American History."

This is an indispensable source for the thinking of Frederick Jackson Turner and his influence on thinking about the history of the American West.

Having just completed The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, a book about farmers in the Dust Bowl, I found this to be a refreshing counterpoint. Dr. Davis' thesis in RtGoR is that the French colonists created a narrative in which Algeria was once a vast green sea of forests and grain, but that the nomads (read: barbaric Arabs) ruined it with their primitive farming and especially herding methods. This "declensionist narrative" was used to justify the result: the French were morally obligated to re-civilise Algeria and restore the region to its former glory.

The trouble was that it wasn't true.

There were several topics in the book that intrigued me. Dr. Davis discusses various types of property recognized by the indigenous Algerians, including communal property used to rotate grazing animals to allow some land to remain fallow. She also briefly explores the interrelationship between deforestation and dessicationist theories that instructed 19th century environmentalism and their foundation in Christian mythology. An important theme in the book is the idea of environmentalism as a means of social control (colonists over natives). Finally, she describes how the declensionist narrative worked its way into early 20th century botanical science, resulting in continuing negative consequences for the region.

The discussion of property interests me as an example of alternative social organization. Among other varieties of property, Davis describes briefly the concepts of melk, achaba, habous, and arsh: private property, "pasture contract" exchanging grazing rights for labor, land reserved for religious institutions, and communal property, respectively. Arsh (mostly pasture but some cultivation) is curious: if the system was stable, it challenges the Tragedy of the Commons meme. Under some circumstances -- perhaps only those of small, nomadic, strictly religious tribes -- communal property may be sustainable and productive.

At university, I had an environmentalist friend who preached that North America had once been entirely covered in forest. It's awfully hard to believe Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Iowa, Kansas, etc. were "covered" in forest. On another occasion, I ran into a co-worker who believed the mirror image, that England had recently been completely barren of trees. It would have been awfully difficult to build half-timbered houses, hide in the Sherwood forest, build the world's most fearsome navy in the 19th century, or any number of other things if there were no trees on the island.

Indeed, both ideas are born of the same myth, the idea that the world was once covered in forests (Eden), but since man's fall from grace, the forest has gradually given way to deserts. In part, this narrative was used to demonize and justify the French treatment of the Algerian natives who used fire as an agricultural tool (North Americans did the same with our natives). Call them reservations, cantonments, or concentration camps, colonists claim that nomadic peoples must be controlled, "attached" to the land, and turned into farmers if possible and imprisoned if not. In Algeria, they also forced them to use money by forcing them to pay taxes in cash rather than in kind. Having deprived them of their traditional, nomadic, pastoral ways, and having also forced them out of barter and into the cash system, many had no choice but to enter the workforce as a laborer for the new French masters.

Algeria went from a land of traditional herding and farming to a colony of small farmers to a corporation-dominated extension of France. Likewise, the American Plains transitioned from the land of the buffalo to a land of small land-grant farmers to ADM's central production facility. Both changes happened under cover of conservationist narratives - as it happens, those providing moral cover with a Christian-fall-from-Eden myth were almost literally Baptists to the corporate-colonial Bootleggers. The temptation to force such narratives onto history is strong; Jared Diamond made similar claims about Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that have since been debunked, and for similar reasons (European colonial policies).

Other areas of interest included a review of art and literature of the 19th century. Dr. Davis shows how the narrative was created and propagated through various social, academic, political, and popular avenues.

The book concludes much stronger than it begins. The description of the route by which the declensionist narrative entered botanical science and thereby continues to influence policy is frightening. We think of science as being rational and above politics, but Dr. Davis shows persuasively -- in this case at least -- that the accepted science is built on an artificial, racist, state-capitalist scam. She notes that the UN and several North African countries have spent millions on misguided attempts to restore a forest that never existed. Can we think of other "science-based" environmental programs on which politicians are proposing to force social change and expend scarce resources on a massive scale? Just how sure of the science are we?