American Frontier Research Articles

Understanding the Development (and Surprising Deficiencies) of England's Storied Self-Defense Law

Self-defense, often referred to as “the ancient right” or the “first civil right,” is among the handful of criminal law subjects enjoying substantial academic (and, increasingly, public) attention. And deservedly so, given the recognized foundational role it plays in criminal justice systems the world over. Even more, the current debate about over-policing, violence, and the exercise of self-preferential force has vividly brought to the forefront the challenges inherent in setting boundaries between the state’s claimed monopoly on force and the individual’s right to deploy self-preferential violence against an attacker. In the United States, the names George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Kenneth Walker, Joe Horn, and Trayvon Martin have each, in their own—and tragic—way, substantially contributed to this reform-minded re-examination that presently underway in both the public square and legislative halls. Within the broader Anglo-American context, the media, law school professors, public intellectuals, and legislators have long instructed that US self-defense law is particularly loose and unregulated. They often characterize it as reflecting a distinctly “wild west” or even “barbaric” approach. In stark contrast, England’s approach to self-defense is frequently characterized as sensible, humanitarian, and civilized. But, as this article reveals, these perceptions reverse reality. Outlining and then deploying what has been termed the value-based model of self-defense as the appropriate analytical yardstick, this article demonstrates that it is, in fact, England’s self-defense law that fairly deserves to be characterized as unduly harsh. For example, unlike US law, English law accords entirely unreasonably mistaken actors the right to cloak themselves in the doctrine of justification, provided their mistakes are honest. Further, it rejects any requirement of safe retreat prior to exercising deadly self-preferential force. But the result of such an approach can have serious consequences. In fact, this article will argue that England’s self-defense law devalues important systemic interests, such as overall violence-reduction, protecting the lives of the morally innocent, ensuring equal standing between people, and maintaining the legitimacy and creditworthiness of the legal order in the public’s eyes. Taking this closer look at self-defense value-judgments, reveals the deficiencies of our common law ancestor’s approach to resolving the inescapable conflict created when rights and interests lock horns. This is all the more so since those judgments are often unstated and almost never explored. A critical study of US and English self-defense law, therefore, contributes mightily to the legal literature, especially when that examination covers the similarities and key differences between the two legal systems—an endeavor this article tackles head on.

Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World by Oliver Charbonneau

Reviewed by: Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World by Oliver Charbonneau Cesar Suva OLIVER CHARBONNEAU Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 282 pages. Oliver Charbonneau’s Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World is a welcome addition to the relatively sparse literature on US imperial rule in the southern Philippines, an episode in twentieth-century American history that is too often ignored. Charbonneau challenges the still lingering undercurrents of exceptionalism in American imperial histories of this period by taking a “transimperial” lens, which considers the complex interplay between their rule in the southern Philippines and factors on a global scale. Civilizational Imperatives is the first book of the author, who is also a lecturer of American history at the University of Glasgow. This book considers the story of Moros and Americans between 1899 and 1941, backgrounded by a Spanish legacy of overrule stretching back to the seventeenth century. The Muslim locals of the southern Philippines, known as Moros, were also part of a complex and interconnected Islamic world. While many colonial tropes of Moros sought to portray them as untouched by civilization, isolated from the influence of modernity, Charbonneau outlines their extensive transborder kinship and commercial relations with the rest of Southeast Asia. In addition to contending with colonial forays into their world, with reactions ranging from acquiescence to resistance, the Moros were also subject to their own internal shifting power structures, which Americans often misinterpreted as indicative of their lawless and chaotic nature. Charbonneau describes how American imperial exceptionalism centered on a transformative vision of colonial rule. The US adopted the forms and practices of other empires but still felt inherently better equipped to civilize subject peoples. Upon returning from the Philippines in the early 1900s, Hugh Scott, former governor of the Sulu Archipelago, told the attendees of the annual Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of Indians and Other Dependent Peoples in upstate New York that the US was more “altruistic” in their colonial aims than any other colonizing nation in the Orient (40). Americans at this time saw Muslim people in general as a challenge unlike other subject peoples, and the imperialists deemed Moros as being particularly difficult. While the colonizers saw Moros to [End Page 315] be even less civilized than their Christian counterparts to the north, their martial spirit and stubborn independence made them “redeemable” in the American imperialist imagination. This redemption became a centerpiece of the Americans’ self-styled role in the imperial endeavor. Occupation, subjugation, and suppression became necessary tools in the tutelary process, resulting in a tension between pacification and the remaking of Moros in the American image. The reality, however, when taken in the transimperial context that Charbonneau weaves, was that despite the moral fantasy of their occupation the Americans accomplished very little in the four decades that this book covers. After reviewing a short history of the Moros in the introduction, Charbonneau considers how the American imagination regarded Moros in the first chapter, how colonial policies purported to bring about modernity into the Moro region of Mindanao and Sulu in the second chapter, and how education and Westernization sought to render permanent positive change in the third. The fourth chapter examines how American imperialists also saw repression as tutelary, “corrective” violence, and the fifth chapter discusses how the colonizers controlled and shaped the physical environment to draw clear lines between civilized Anglo-Saxon imperialists and uncultured Moro “fanatics.” Chapter 6 considers how the American tutelary mission over the Moros was imprinted into pop culture, and the seventh chapter provides fresh emphasis on the continued interconnectedness of the Moro world with the rest of the globe throughout the forty years of colonial rule. As they began their occupation, Americans imagined the southern Philippines as a conceptual extension of the continental US and their experience with indigenous peoples there. Governors general Leonard Wood, Hugh Scott, and John Pershing all spent the early years of their military careers on the western frontier. John Finley, district governor of Zamboanga, was keen to develop the link between native Americans with Moros, advocating for the study of the western frontier to avoid the same mistakes...

They Called Him … Buckaroo Sam: The Imagined Life of a Chinese Cowboy

“They Called Him . . . Buckaroo Sam” features the life of a Chinese pioneer in Grant County, northeastern Oregon. His story dispels misconceptions that often permeate history of Chinese pioneers in America. It is not generally known, for example, that there were Chinese cowboys, or vaqueros and wranglers, in the American West. While it is indisputable that they would have faced racial prejudice, discrimination, and persecution, racial harmony nevertheless prevailed for Buckaroo Sam and his contemporaries in this mining region of Oregon. For several years, he worked on the Stewart Ranch before becoming ranch foreman at the Harve Fields Ranch, one of the earliest ranches that employed an all-Chinese crew in the John Day Valley. Using a graphic medium, Dale Hom imagines and conveys this cowboy’s lifestyle and circumstances, expanding the conventional view of Chinese pioneers on the western frontier.

Foreign Affairs and the Ratification of the Constitution in New York

Foreign Affairs and the Ratification of the Constitution in New York Robert W. Smith (bio) No state considered the Constitution at greater length and depth than New York. It produced more literature than any other state and thus provides the best opportunity to examine the evolution of the foreign policy argument. The traditional narrative, best articulated by Frederick Marks in Independence on Trial, has the Federalists as nationalists making foreign policy a central point of their argument, with the Antifederalists as localists avoiding it as a losing issue. Marks describes the foreign policy interests of New York, but as the local details of a national argument. More recent studies assert the primacy of foreign affairs in the drafting of the Constitution. Max M. Edling argues that the Constitution was drafted to create a fiscal and military state capable of competing with similar states in Europe. David M. Golove and Daniel J. Hulsebosch contend that the Constitution was designed to gain entry into the European state system. Eliga H. Gould advances a similar claim, that the Constitution was intended to create a "treaty-worthy" nation, in recognition that the United States was part of the European state system. To Tom Cutterham, the Constitution was necessary to reconnect the United States to the trading networks of the Atlantic world. David C. Hendrickson considers the Constitution a "peace pact" among sovereign states. However, all these works treat foreign affairs as the province of nationalist-minded Federalists, with little attention given to local implications. Hendrickson differs somewhat by discussing local interests at the Constitutional Convention but does not address the ratification debates.1 In New York, most studies pit the agrarian and [End Page 327] localist majority party of Governor George Clinton against a mercantile and cosmopolitan minority.2 The traditional view, updated by recent scholarship, is partially true, but it is not the whole picture. New York Federalism included such nationalists as John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and Robert R. Livingston. They initially made nationalist arguments based on the need for a stronger union, the decline of the American reputation abroad, defense, and the promotion of trade. However, New York best shows how the Federalists shifted the foreign policy argument to fit local circumstances. The nationalists realized that a purely national argument would not work, and they had to appeal to New York's interests. In the first phase of the debate, from the arrival of the Constitution to the beginning of 1788, the Federalists emphasized national themes. In the second phase, from the end of 1787 through the ratifying convention, they switched to a focus on local foreign policy interests, such as the eviction of the British from the northwestern forts, the defense of New York on its vulnerable frontiers, and the promotion of local trade. As the other states ratified, New York Federalists included relations with the other states as an aspect of New York's diplomatic interests. The Antifederalists did not disagree on the nature of New York's interests. Rather, they focused on the dangers the tools of foreign policy posed to domestic liberty. They believed the nation's problems were not caused by the Articles of Confederation and would not be solved by the Constitution. The Antifederalists never emphasized New York's interests. At the convention, much of the Federalist foreign policy case centered on the interests of New York and the dangers to those interests if New York did not ratify. The Federalists argued for a New York exceptionalism, that New York was either uniquely situated to prosper under the Constitution or uniquely vulnerable to disunion. It was, in the end, the Federalists' strongest case, made stronger once New Hampshire and Virginia ratified. Like other states, New York moved to secure its foreign policy interests after the war. The fur trade on the northern and western frontiers was worth some £200,000 per year. Great Britain ceded seven of the eight forts that controlled the trade to the United States in the Treaty of Paris. Of those seven, five—Niagara, Oswego, Oswegatchie, Point au Fer, and [End Page 328] Dutchman's Point—lay within New York. In March 1783 the legislature passed a resolution calling for New York...

Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone

Reviewed by: Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone Robin C. Henry Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. 212 pp. $45.00 (cloth). The examination of queer spaces in U.S. history has led to a greater understanding of the relationship between marginalized people and public space. Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone’s Queering Kansas City Jazz expands this understanding, moving beyond the identification of queer space and people in the famous Missouri Midwest jazz city. Indeed, she argues that Kansas City jazz has a fluid and intersectional identity; it originated, she stresses, in brothels and working-class bars frequented by immigrants and Black people. She further argues that the relatively unknown nature of the connection between jazz and gender nonconformity can be traced to jazz histories that have systemically erased queerness and gender experimentation, including gender nonconforming dress and presentation, in jazz performances and spaces. The reclaiming of these voices, personalities, and spaces forms the heart of her project. Clifford-Napoleone’s book is divided into two parts. The first provides a history of Kansas City, focusing especially on the rise of the Pendergast family. That family not only ruled the city’s political scene, but also shaped the nightlife of saloons, clubs, and brothels in its West Bottom section. This is well-trod history, but Clifford-Napoleone shows the ways in which people of color, working-class people, and gender nonconforming people were always part of the city’s fabric. Kansas City, she explains, rested at the edge of the much-mythologized American frontier, whose diverse residents—reformers and temperance activists on the one hand and individuals who wanted to keep the city’s entertainment district as open to new acts and people as possible on the other—found space. Kansas Citians’ conflicting agendas, however, led city leaders and planners to make strategic choices that, over time, narrowed spaces for experimentation. This analysis in the section of her book lays the foundation for later chapters by emphasizing [End Page 169] that these happenings were choices, not inevitabilities. As the city developed, discordant messages caused conflict over whose city and whose jazz and entertainment scene it really was. At every turn, marginalized people, especially those who experimented with gender, lost their connection to and place within jazz. It is Clifford-Napoleone’s presentation of this conflict within the oft-told history of Kansas City that reminds readers that the city’s origin stories did not conform to a standard rhythm. Rather, they resembled the experiments in syncopated time that made the city’s music so famous. Clifford-Napoleone’s argument develops most fully and her major contribution is most clear in the second half of her book. She examines two tracks: first, the historical record and, second, how that record was created. In her analysis, the historical record continues to show more evidence of queerness in the jazz scene than previous historians of jazz and of Kansas City have identified. It is here that Clifford-Napoleone’s work truly moves into new spaces. For her, queerness is not limited to same-sex acts or homosexual identifications. Instead, she opens up queerness to also encompass race and class identities that lie beyond White middle-class norms, as well as to include nonconforming professions, such as prostitution. The result is a portrait of Kansas City’s jazz scene that is truly intersectional and much queerer than previously known. In Clifford-Napoleone’s study, that scene becomes a space where understandings of gender experimentation, class, and race cannot be separated from one another or removed from the whole. Throughout the book’s second section, Clifford-Napoleone points out that much of this intersectional, queer space is not only neglected in standard jazz and Kansas City histories but also missing in jazz archives. She argues that the process of collecting some types of archival material but not others has effectively erased the existence of queer performers and places. The former include Mr. Half and Half; the latter include Dante’s Inferno and the Paradise Club. Possibly worse, Clifford...

Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond ed. by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips

Reviewed by: Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond ed. by Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips Cathryn Halverson Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips, eds., Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond. Oxford: U of Mississippi P, 2020. 256 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30. Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond is an engaging collection of fourteen essays contributed by scholars at all [End Page 393] stages of their careers. The book grew out of a roundtable at the 2015 meeting of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) inspired by the publication of Wilder's memoir, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. Editors Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips explain that rather than simply celebrating Wilder the group wanted to critically analyze her books and influence. Acknowledging that her racial views have made her a controversial writer, they argue for why we should continue to read and study her nonetheless. Grouped into four sections—"Wilder and 'Truth,'" "Wilder and Constructions of Gender," "Wilder, Plains Studies, and the American Literature Canon," and "Cultural and Intercultural Wilder"—the book's many excellent essays complement each other without growing repetitive. Their diverse subjects include, among others, the antimodernist dimension of Wilder-related tourism (Anna Thompson Hajdik), Wilder's and Rose Wilder Lane's differing political views (Dawn Sardella-Ayres), Wilder's perspective on rural women's education (Jericho Williams), and Wilder's use of horses to imagine "Anglo-Indian Womanhood" (Vera R. Foley). Examining Laura's "two terrible mistakes" in respect to both Indians and the "abundant nonhuman world" around her (192), Margaret Noodin's "A Little Place in the Universe: An Ojibwe, Osage, and Dakota View of Laura Ingalls" is a highlight. Full of precisely expressed readings, the book offers many fresh insights: that Little House on the Prairie can be read as a captivity narrative, with Charles Ingalls the terrifying captor (Christine E. Farnan); that Laura's infamous desire to possess a black-eyed Indian baby builds on her attachment to her button-eyed rag doll (Jenna Brack); that the historical record upholds the fictional portrayal of the Wilders' equitable marriage (Melanie J. Fishbane); that Laura's fate in becoming a white mother is to acquire an aversion to Indians (Sonya Sawyer Fritz); that the "ceaseless acts of repetition" generated by the series are the source of its "semblance of truth" (Katharine Slater, 3). One might expect a book on this topic to include several scholars who specialize in western studies or at least make reference to established, influential works in the field. That expectation, [End Page 394] however, is not fulfilled, and as a consequence the collection lacks essays that deliberately situate Wilder within regional literary traditions while engaging with the existing scholarship to theorize her work. Even Annette Kolodny's classic The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers and Amy Kaplan's essential "Manifest Domesticity" are not invoked, nor is Nina Baym's more recent, quantitative Women Writers of the American West. Ann Romines's Constructing the Little House and Frances W. Kaye's "Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve" are critical touchstones throughout the volume, but a study like Linda Karell's Writing Together/Writing Apart: Collaboration in Western American Literature would have provided specific regional insight into the Wilder and Lane partnership that interests so many of these scholars, as would Christine Bold on gender and western cultural production, Susan Rosowski and Brigitte Georgi-Findlay on women's frontier narratives, Krista Comer on landscape, Victoria Lamont on Westerns, and many others that readers of this journal are surely familiar with. While the editors maintain that the relative critical neglect of Wilder is "emblematic of the way critics have historically dismissed many commercially successful women writers" (xv), it is also symptomatic of the widespread tendency to read and write about western women writers in isolation from each other, which in turn reflects the marginalization of western studies at large. Lamont's review essay in Legacy (SSAWW's home journal), "Big Books Wanted: Women and Western American Literature in the Twenty-First Century," explores the cluster of factors that have led...

Three Quaker Meeting Houses in Pasadena, California: An Architectural Study

Three Quaker Meeting Houses in Pasadena, CaliforniaAn Architectural Study Judson Emerick (bio) Between 1882 and 1909 Quakers established three meetings in the American frontier town of Pasadena, California, incorporated in 1886—two quite progressive, and one very conservative. During that quarter century each of the three groups in question built radically different places of worship in the city, each drawing upon and/or resisting the long Quaker architectural tradition they inherited. This study thus starts by tracing that inheritance from its beginning in George Fox's England to colonial North America. It savors an American Quaker architectural invention, the "ideal Quaker plan" that emerged in the mid eighteenth century (and dominated Quaker building for more than a century thereafter). The paper then goes to Pasadena to examine, in chronological order, meeting houses built by the evangelical Quakers at First Friends Church, then to that erected by conservative Friends at the Pasadena Monthly Meeting, and finally to the meeting house of the Orange Grove Monthly Meeting, the setting for liberal Quakers in the city. Each of these speaks (or spoke) clearly of its builder's intentions and commitments. Only two of the original three meetings still survive today (the Pasadena Monthly Meeting was laid down in 1988). First Friends Church, moreover, moved in 1949 to a new property in the city, then slowly evolved thereafter to become the Foothills Community Church in the late 1990s. Among the three meeting houses in Pasadena, that belonging to the Orange Grove Monthly stands out for its novelty and originality. This study aims to reveal and celebrate that special achievement. [End Page 66] Early Friends Meeting Houses in Britain From the start Quakers gathered in their houses to worship, pray, and seek the light within.1 But as followers of George Fox (1624–1691) grew in number, household dwellings could no longer have sufficed. Although Quakers did meet outdoors for worship on occasion, even ideally, shelter for meetings was needed. As with so much else of established religion in seventeenth-century England, Fox scorned the religious architecture of his own time, growling about its excessive pretention. He found nothing to admire in the Anglican churches of his day—not even those that the celebrated architect Sir Christopher Wren built all over London after the Great Fire in 1666 (fig.1). "Steeple houses" (Fox's words) could not serve the Religious Society of Friends. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. St. James, Piccadilly (1672–84), designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Photo: Tony Hisgett, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. [End Page 67] But more to the point, architectural pretention aside, no ordinary church could ever have met Quaker needs.2 Like other early dissidents who had long objected to the remaining aspects of Catholicism in the Anglican church, like Puritans and Presbyterians who thought the Anglican Protestant church not Protestant enough, Quakers too rejected any notion that a place of worship might itself count as holy. The Anglican church, like Roman Catholic churches throughout medieval and modern times, housed altars in impressive settings presented as the venerable tombs and memorials of the saints where believers gathered on special feast days dependent upon priests to mediate their joining with God in the eucharist. Zealous English and Scottish protestants during the last half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth rejected the altars, the saints' relics, and the sanctoral liturgy that spun around them.3 (By Fox's day, during the second and third quarters of the century, Quakers had dispensed with the temporal liturgy as well.4) The seventeenth-century dissidents pushed instead to focus worship upon personal transformation, to provide each member of a congregation the fullest opportunity to take responsibility for their own salvation—by their own light or knowledge. Among the dissidents it was the community of believers itself that comprised the "church," properly speaking, and not any kind of building. They saw places of worship as mere "meeting houses." This Pauline dogma that all believers, past, present, and future, constituted members of Christ's body and were all thereby equal in holiness, all thus "sanctified," underpinned Christian doxa from the beginning, and in the seventeenth...

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee”: Dickinson’s Manufacturing of the Wild West

This essay examines a number of western landscapes in Dickinson’s works in relation to the westward expansionism and settler colonialism of her time. It rethinks how Dickinson’s poems of the western sublime speak to a consistent geo-poetic imagination about moving westward as a national cultural thought experiment and a social-economic necessity, vacillating between industrial advancement and pastoral idealism, between utilitarianism and symbolism. The intricate connection between these enmeshed perceptions of the American West is manifested in a number of western scenarios, such as the sunset, the gold rush, and the prairies. The various western (or westward-moving) topographies gesture towards an expansionist enthusiasm for the pragmatic (as well as symbolic) value of the American West, yet not without acknowledging predicament, tension, and fracture. In particular, by comparing one prairie poem by Dickinson with William Cullen Bryant’s 1833 poem “The Prairies,” a poem informed by colonialistexpansionist ideology, the essay reveals how Dickinson’s westward-looking poetic production speaks to the concerted and yet conflicted cultural efforts of her time to both represent and to reimagine, to utilize and to aestheticize, to preserve and yet also to sanitize American place identity by manufacturing her own poetic wilderness.

Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West. By H. W. Brands (New York: Basic Books, 2019), xvi+524pp.

This is a review of Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West by H. W. Brands.

Eurocentric Perception of Asian-ness in 1870s American Frontier Melodrama

In the second half of the nineteenth century, many East Asians traveled to the United States for various reasons. To Euro-Americans they were regarded as unfamiliar and strange. Due to economic reasons pertaining to the growing number of East Asian immigrants, the American print media invented degrading stereotypes that eventually became standard characters in the frontier melodramas of the 1870s American Theatre. This study examines three stereotypes of East Asian people and their application in four frontier melodramas that were written by prominent authors of the time: Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876) by Bret Harte, Ah Sin (1877) by Bret Harte and Mark Twain, The Danites in the Sierras (1877) by Joaquin Miller, and My Partner by Bartley Campbell (1879). By highlighting examples of how these playwrights reinforced attitudes of prejudice toward Asians in that time period, this study provides a contribution to the understanding of the long history of racism in the United States and the power of the performing arts to strengthen or weaken an ideology.

Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. By Benjamin E. Park

<i>Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier.</i> By Benjamin E. Park

Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. By Benjamin E. Park. New York: Liveright, 2020. 324 pp. $28.95 cloth.

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Admirable Alterity on the Frontier: French Women’s Agency in the Hollywood Western (1931-1980)

The article explores a corpus of Hollywood Westerns spanning a fifty-year period between 1931 and 1980 in which Frenchwomen are prominent agents on the Western frontier. It suggests that while the American film industry has had a long-standing esteem for French culture, it was during the 1950s that Hollywood began to promote systematically positive representations of Frenchwomen in the Western. It proposes that a genre of “Frenchness Westerns” emerged in the 1950s as a sub-genre of commercially successfully “Frenchness films” (Schwartz 2007) such as An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958). Issuing from a general climate of American post-war Francophilia, Frenchwomen in the “Frenchness Western” are intelligent and daring, even outdoing American male heroes. These women are understood as incarnating an “admirable alterity,” and are often compared to indigenous and Mexican women, sometimes aiding the latter in the sphere of interracial romance. These broadly positive representations of the Frenchwoman as agent and potential ally to other women would last until 1980 and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. This essay suggests that the commercial failure of this film seems likely to have had a hand in ending the presence of Frenchwomen in the Hollywood Western—Frenchness becoming synonymous with the financially unviable.

From True Grit to “Big Damn Heroes”: Cowboys, Pirates, and Relational Ethics

When I was a kid, cowboys ruled. Every week, my heroes—Lucas McCain, the Cartwrights, Matt Dillon, Paladin, Big John Cannon—were taming the “wild west.” These were good guys, in charge and on a mission. But in the world around us, everything was changing. 1969 was a turning point. Everything was suddenly in Technicolor, and as we gave up on the West and turned to outer space for our hero-adventures, our heroes morphed from Cowboys to Space-Pirate-Cowboys. These space-pirate-cowboys (or big damn heroes) manage to do the right thing as they improvise their (opportunistic) ethics of friendship.

The Wild West of Emergency Use Authorizations for SARS-CoV-2 Testing: What Could Be the True Sensitivity?

Introduction/ObjectiveSARS-CoV-2 is a pandemic that has required mobilization to meet urgent needs. In this mobilization, emergency use authorizations (EUA) have been issued by the FDA to expedite the deployment of these tests. This has led to a situation whereby sensitivity has not been rigorously studied for any of the assays with EUAs. Estimates can be extrapolated from the limited samples documented by the company in their instructions for use (IFU). Although the nationwide shortage of testing reagents prevent parallel testing of multiple platforms on all specimens, observations of repeat specimens at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) provides the first study in the literature of more complete data for SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid (RT-PCR) assay on sensitivity on the Abbott (Abbott Park Ill) and Cepheid (Sunnyvale CA) assays.MethodsA retrospective search was performed for all test results for SARS-CoV-2 by RT-PCR from 3/1/2020 to 4/14/2020 at Corporal Michael J. Crescenz Medical Center, in order to evaluate the sensitivity on Abbott m2000 and Cepheid platforms. Results across multiple reference laboratories and in-house testing platforms were collated in a table with all patients clinically requiring repeat testing recorded.Results114/863 patients had repeat testing. The tests were performed initially by outside reference laboratories (25 patients), on the Abbott m2000 (63 patients), and Cepheid Infinity (26 patients). 15/114 (13%) had discordant results on repeat testing. This included 1 test initially done by a reference laboratory. 8 days after the initial result from the reference lab, a positive for the same patient was identified on the Abbott platform. 11 initial Abbott results were discordant on further repeat testing on two platforms - Abbott (6 patients) and Cepheid (5 patients) 1-6 days later. In addition, 3 initial Cepheid were discordant on further repeat testing by the same Cepheid platform (1-16 days later).ConclusionWhile the instructions for use for both platforms suggest 100% sensitivity and specificity (due to the 100% positive and negative percent agreement in limited specimens), the true sensitivity is less than 100%, particularly early in the course of the infection. In our study, the positive percent agreement (surrogate for sensitivity) was 83% for initial Abbott tests, 88% for initial Cepheid tests, and 95% by Reference laboratory platform.

Review: Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, by Michelle Delaney

Book Review| October 23 2020 Review: Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, by Michelle Delaney Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill's Wild West by Michelle Delaney. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. xii + 235 pp.; appendices, notes, bibliography, index, illustrations; clothbound, $45.00; eBook, $30.00. Laura J. Arata Laura J. Arata Oklahoma State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2020) 42 (4): 201–203. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2020.42.4.201 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Laura J. Arata; Review: Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, by Michelle Delaney. The Public Historian 23 October 2020; 42 (4): 201–203. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2020.42.4.201 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Population, Temperature and Feeding Rate Effects on Individual Feed Efficiency in European Sea Bass (Dicentrarchus labrax)

Using breeding programs to improve feed efficiency, the ratio between fish body weight gain (BWG) and feed intake (FI), could increase aquaculture sustainability through reduced feed costs and environmental impact. To this end, individual phenotypic information is required. Individual FI can be measured by isolating each fish. Under these conditions, restricting the feeding rate has proved relevant to improve feed efficiency indirectly by selecting faster-growing animals. Moreover, a restricted feeding rate reduces the work load of collecting uneaten pellets after each meal. The approach assumes the most efficient fish at high and low feeding rates are the same, but this assumption remains untested. In European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax), feed efficiency is likely to be impacted also by population, temperature, and their interaction, as already demonstrated for growth in this species. To investigate these issues, 200 European sea bass from three wild populations, Atlantic (AT), West Mediterranean (WM) and East Mediterranean (EM), were reared individually at two temperatures, 18°C and 24°C. Their BWG and FI were measured at six different feeding rates, from ad libitum (100% ADL) down to fasting. A trade-off between performance at 100% ADL and at fasting was observed: more efficient fish at 100% ADL showed a stronger decrease in BWG (standardized to metabolic weight) when the feeding rate was progressively lowered and lost more weight at fasting. The most efficient fish were not the same depending on the feeding rate, suggesting the feeding rate used to phenotype fish in selective breeding programs must be the same as that used in commercial practices. The slope in the linear relationship between BWG and FI (both standardized to metabolic weight) was similar among populations and temperatures. However, EM fish had a higher intercept than others, suggesting this population grew more and thus was more efficient for an equal feeding rate. Similarly, fish reared at 18°C were more efficient for an equal feeding rate. When feed efficiency was studied in fish fed at 100% ADL, the temperature effect disappeared but the population effect remained. This highlights the complex interplay between population, temperature and feeding rate when evaluating individual feed efficiency.

But This Time IS Different—COVID Recession

Earlier this year, the US economy dropped from historical highs to a severe downturn almost overnight due to the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. The pandemic affected all sectors of the economy, including the MBS market. Historically, there has been a direct link between an economic downturn and the fundamentals of the financial markets leading up to the downturn. As we saw in the Great Recession, the exuberance in the mortgage market, poor mortgage loan underwriting quality, and the exponential leverage resulting from the derivative markets contributed to financial disaster. The recent economic downturn resulted not from overleverage and the kind of ‘wild west’ behavior observed in the early to mid-2000s, but from the deliberate shut down of the US economy in an effort to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. Unlike the Great Recession and the Great Depression, the events leading to the current economic downturn were exogenous to the market. As a result, the economy and the MBS market rebounded quickly. TOPICS:MBS and residential mortgage loans, financial crises and financial market history Key Findings • The forced shutdown of the economy resulted in an economic downturn paralleling the Great Depression. • Delinquency rates on residential mortgages and forbearance requests rose quickly, with a knock-on effect on MBS pricing and prepayment speeds. • Due to the strength of the economy and the MBS market pre-COVID, the time to recovery has been shorter than in previous downturns.

Paul Warde, The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny c. 1500–1870

The issue of sustainability, and the idea that economic growth and development might destroy its own foundations, is one of the defining political problems of our era. This groundbreaking study traces the emergence of this idea, and demonstrates how sustainability was closely linked to hopes for growth, and the destiny of expanding European states, from the sixteenth century. Weaving together aspirations for power, for economic development and agricultural improvement, and ideas about forestry, climate, the sciences of the soil and of life itself, this book sets out how new knowledge and metrics led people to imagine both new horizons for progress, but also the possibility of collapse. In the nineteenth century, anxieties about sustainability, often driven by science, proliferated in debates about contemporary and historical empires and the American frontier. The fear of progress undoing itself confronted society with finding ways to live with and manage nature.

Frontiers of American Vengeance: The Frontier Thesis, the Zero Tolerance Policy, and the Interpersonal Process of Creative Shame

During the Spring of 2018, the United States Federal Government, in accordance with its new Zero Tolerance immigration policy, separated at least 2,654 infants and children from their parents at its southern border. This was done with no plans for reuniting these families which, in many cases, has proven extremely difficult if not impossible. These acts echo the vengeance that occurred on the original American Frontier and included the Native-American genocide. Although the specifics and severities greatly differ, the psychodynamics and related processes are similar. Also, certain associated national foundational myths of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny 1 are manipulated and exploited in similar ways. Unlike with the genocide, however, these acts are occurring in the present day and offer an opportunity for Americans to engage in the interpersonal, potentially remedial, process of creative shame. The author’s experience of this generative process is presented, including an example from his clinical work.