American Frontier Research Articles

Review: Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers, by Amy Kohout

Review: <i>Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers</i>, by Amy Kohout

“Consuming Romantic Ireland: Maria Edgeworth as Tourist In Ireland’s Wild West”

ABSTRACT Maria Edgeworth’s letter describing her 1833 tour of Connemara in Ireland’s wild west has received relatively little critical attention. Yet the letter has the candid spontaneity of writing never intended for publication, revealing a side of Edgeworth rarely glimpsed in her published works. So strong was her childlike curiosity regarding this alien world, which lay just a hundred miles from her home, that Edgeworth, then in her 60s, was willing to brave the inhospitable terrain to see its natural wonders. However, throughout the letter she expresses fear and suspicion of the “natives” whose mediation is necessary for her to access those wonders. To make sense of Connemara’s strange landscape and people, Edgeworth deploys three distinct constructions of “nature”: a rational nature that had been tamed and rendered productive; a picturesque, commodified nature of discrete sites the burgeoning tourist industry had identified as attractions; and a wild, Romantic nature of mythic prehistory that she longs to experience for herself. As this article argues, each of these “natures” founders in the contact zone, in part because the reality of the region exceeds the interpretive frameworks available to Edgeworth, but also because her own emotional responses defy her attempts at narrative regulation.

Illiberal Jewish-Christian Encounters: Political Temporalities in Amish Country Tourism

ABSTRACT Increasing numbers of ultra-Orthodox Jews are flocking to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to participate in Amish country tourism and to consume kosher dairy products, sometimes produced through economic collaborations between Orthodox Jews and local Amish/Mennonite farmers. Through an ethnographic examination of these phenomena, we demonstrate how Amish tourism fosters illiberal interreligious encounters among the triangle of ultra-Orthodox Jewish tourists, Amish/Mennonite farmers, and Christian tour guide mediators. Whereas historically tourism to the Amish was driven by white nostalgic longings for a European peasant past and the American frontier, Orthodox Jews project a nostalgic vision of the Eastern European shtetl onto the Amish and their dairy products. We borrow the concept of political temporalities (Little 2022) to explore an illiberal political temporality formed by the encounter among illiberal religious groups in a recreational tourist setting. Despite nostalgic projections, these religious groups converged over their visions of an American religious present and future.

Evaluation of food-water-energy sustainable development in China’s western frontiers during 2010–2021

ABSTRACT Food, water, and energy (FWE) are foundational resources that sustain human well-being and societal advancement. The examination of climate change effects on FWE resources is imperative, particularly in regions abundant in natural resources but ecologically fragile. In this context, we investigated the spatiotemporal changes of FWE resources in China’s western frontiers, where both resource wealth and climate vulnerability are critical. This study proposes an innovative approach to comprehensively analyze the dynamics of food production, surface water, and solar energy from 2010 to 2021 by integrating easily accessible and widely applicable variables, and utilizing remote sensing and statistical data within a sustainable development framework. The results show that: (1) both crop yield and cropland area display an upward trend; (2) the expansion of overall surface water area in Xinjiang is mainly driven by changes in precipitation and temperature, while in Xizang, such a relationship is not evident; (3) Xinjiang and Xizang have advantages in solar photovoltaic (PV) development due to their abundant solar resources. Our results suggest that such spatiotemporal dynamics in food production, surface water and solar energy resources can intuitively reflect the sustainable development status of FWE resources in China’s western frontiers.

Introduction

AbstractThis cluster of articles explores the gendered history of the military in the Russian imperial and Soviet contexts during periods of imperial conquest, war, and their complex aftermaths. The cluster began at the 2021 ASEEES virtual convention, when the contributors joined the Zoom panel while their respective countries were in various stages of lockdown. Chronologically, the cluster stretches from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1960s, with two articles on the Russian Empire and two covering the Soviet period. From the imperial borderlands of the Caucasus in the nineteenth century to the Nazi‐occupied western frontiers of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, ideas about appropriate feminine and masculine behavior shaped the enactment of and reactions to violence. Veterans of the Russo‐Japanese and Second World Wars drew on vocabularies of military masculinity to claim authority within their respective postwar societies. In this short introduction, we reflect on the relationship between gender history and military history and underline the importance of integrating the Russian/Soviet case into international historiographies of gender and war.

Historical Origins and Festive Activities of the Westward Migration Festival of the Sibe Tribe in China

The Sibe people, an ancient ethnic group in China, accomplished the historical feat of moving westward to Xinjiang to settle and garrison the border in the Qianlong period, making important contributions to the defense and construction of China’s western frontier. The Westward Migration Festival is the carrier of the historical memory of the westward migration of the Sibe people, which embodies the ethnic cultural characteristics of the Sibe people, inherits the spirit of westward migration, and has an important value and role in the construction of the sense of community of the Chinese ethnic in the western frontier region. This paper collects and organizes the research results related to the history and culture of the westward migration of the Sibe people, and summarizes the historical origin and ceremonial activities of the Westward Migration Festival to provide reference for further research work in the future.

State-Building through Public Land Disposal? An Application of Matrix Completion for Counterfactual Prediction

This article examines how homestead policies, which opened vast frontier lands for settlement, influenced the development of American frontier states. It uses a treatment propensity-weighted matrix completion model to estimate the counterfactual size of these states without homesteading. In simulation studies, the method shows lower bias and variance than other estimators, particularly in higher complexity scenarios. The empirical analysis reveals that homestead policies significantly and persistently reduced state government expenditure and revenue. These findings align with continuous difference-in-differences estimates using 1.46 million land patent records. This study’s extension of the matrix completion method to include propensity score weighting for causal effect estimation in panel data, especially in staggered treatment contexts, enhances policy evaluation by improving the precision of long-term policy impact assessments.

EXCAVATIONS OF THE RUDNIA BARROW CEMETERY IN POLACK DZVINA REGION IN 1961

Barrow cemetery Rudnia (Polack district, Viciebsk region, Republic of Belarus) has repeatedly attracted the attention of researchers. Its first excavations were carried out in the middle and second half of the 19th century (1852 and 1889). Scientific research of the necropolis was carried out in 1928, 1961 and 1967. A total of 23 barrows were excavated during this period. The materials obtained in the course of these works made it possible to attribute the Rudnia barrow cemetery to the Smolensk-Polack Long Barrows Culture. The article discusses in detail the results of the 1961 excavations, which had not previously been completely published. Analysis of the chronology of the grave goods allows us to date two barrows (3/17 and 1/15) with relative certainty. A review of the finds and burial rite of the barrows explored in 1928 and 1967 suggests that all the relatively narrowly and reliably dated barrows of the Rudnya cemetery were erected in the middle/second half of the 10th — early 11th centuries. The two discovered inhumation burials could obviously have been performed not earlier than the end of the 10th century. It is possible to assume that their construction could have taken place over a long period of time from the end of the 10th century and throughout the 11th century, but in reality, the dating of these barrows is probably determined within the framework of the end of the 10th century and the first half of the 11th century. Individual inhumation burials on the cemeteries of the Smolensk-Polack Long Barrows Culture at the final stages of their existence are registered in several necropolises of this culture on the western boundaries of its area. As we can see, such transformation of burial rite could take place not only in the western frontiers of the culture, but also in the vicinity of Polack.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West, cowboys, and the fate of the western in Italy

Abstract This article examines the first tour of Buffalo Bill's Wild West in Italy and the so-called ‘sfida dei butteri’ (the challenge of the Italian cowboys of the Pontine marshes), which took place in Rome in March 1890. Analysing nineteenth-century Italian newspapers and photographs, I demonstrate that populist, anti-capitalist, and anti-American sentiments marked the Italian media's responses to the American show. In the historical context of Italy's socioeconomic crisis and of the first phase of colonial expansion in Africa (1870–1922), the mixed reception of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, amplified by the media event of the sfida, shaped the fate of the western genre in Italy.

Time against race: Aesthetic ‘merit’ and histories worth preserving on an American frontier

ABSTRACT This article examines the appetite for historic preservation in Miami within broader colonialist and moralising discourses of ‘civilising’ the wilderness and of aesthetic ‘merit’ that go back to the foundation of the city. It argues that a growing sense of anxiety, stoked by increasing waves of migration into Miami, is at the heart of this emphasis upon historic preservation, but is also at work in the delineation of what types of structure merit preservation in local law and policy. It analyses the effects of these policies upon peoples of colour, and argues that the effects of Jim Crow segregation law can still be seen in Miami’s cityscape through the present-day delineation of which structures ‘count’ as historic, and therefore worth preserving for the future.

'The wild west of medicine': A qualitative investigation of the factors influencing Australian health-care practitioners' delivery of medicinal cannabis.

Strong patient interest in the use of medicinal cannabis to treat various clinical indications has sparked global legislative changes. Practitioners are vital in implementing regulatory changes and facilitating patient access to medicinal cannabis, however, little is currently known about the factors influencing practitioners' uptake. Recent rapid increases in practitioner applications to prescribe medicinal cannabis in Australia provides a unique backdrop to examine the current factors influencing prescribing behaviours. This qualitative study examined Australian practitioners' perspectives on prescribing medicinal cannabis to provide a comprehensive exploration of the potential factors influencing uptake in clinical practice. Seventeen semi-structured interviews were conducted with Australian health-care practitioners. Transcripts were analysed using the Framework approach to thematic analysis and cross-mapped to appropriate domains of the Theoretical Domains Framework. We identified four themes related to the barriers and facilitators to prescribing medicinal cannabis: (i) clinical capabilities needed to prescribe; (ii) prescribing an unapproved therapeutic good; (iii) negative attitudes towards prescribers in the medical community; and (iv) divergent beliefs about clinical utility. Practitioners face multiple pervasive barriers to prescribing medicinal cannabis. Beliefs about clinical utility appear to be highly influential in shaping prescribing behaviours. Moreover, our findings suggest that a medicinal cannabis 'specialisation' has emerged within the Australian medical community. Findings demonstrate that a range of complex and multifaceted factors influence practitioners' medicinal cannabis prescribing behaviours. We highlight several considerations for policy and practice to support safe and appropriate patient access to medicinal cannabis in this emerging area of clinical practice.

Six Pioneer Accounts of Life on the Old North-West American Frontier, 1790–1850: A Critical Reading

Six Pioneer Accounts of Life on the Old North-West American Frontier, 1790–1850: A Critical Reading

Finn Murphy: Rocky mountain high: a tale of boom and bust in the new wild west

Finn Murphy: Rocky mountain high: a tale of boom and bust in the new wild west

Multiproxy approach to characterize the sedimentary process of Cape Darnley Bottom Water flow through the Wild Canyon, East Antarctica

To reconstruct the interaction between Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) and global climate change, extracting information about past AABW formation from the sedimentary record is crucial. The Prydz Bay region, East Antarctica, has high glacier outflow and is a region of vigorous formation of AABW associated with sea ice formation. The Cape Darnley Bottom Water (CDBW), a primary AABW precursor, flows into Wild Canyon west of Prydz Bay. Thus, the sedimentary record of Wild Canyon can serve as an archive for CDBW flow. In this study, to identify the sedimentary processes and mineral compositions characteristic of CDBW flow, we evaluate deep-sea camera imagery, X-ray computed tomography images, grain-size data, and optical and chemical mineralogical analyses. Heavy minerals in the surface sediments are characterized by pyrope-rich almandine garnets (up to 80% of the heavy-mineral assemblage, 0.2%–3.7% of the dry bulk sediment by weight) typical of nearshore sediment derived from Mac. Robertson Land. In addition, ripples on the channel floor indicate sediment transport occurred as tractional bedload, whereas settling of suspended sediment prevailed on the canyon levee. We propose that modern CDBW flow is the dominant process of sediment reworking through sustained high flow velocities, distinctly different from turbidity currents triggered by ice sheet expansion and rapid retreat. Our results further suggest that fine-grained sediments are transported to the canyon levee as CDBW flows through the submarine canyon. These findings will be a key for reconstructing past AABW formation, which is crucial for understanding the response of AABW to future climate change.

The Bison in the Room: Hunting, Settler Colonialism and Gender Performance on the American Frontier, 1865–1895

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between outdoor sports and the age of empire on the American frontier using the lens of gender performance. Focused on the years from the mid to the late nineteenth century, it provides an exploration of hunting as a vector of imperial masculine journey and a physical and imaginative pursuit where hunters stalked and shot the iconic animals of the western states on behalf of settler colonialism. In the first part of the paper, contemporary testimonies are used to plot the ways in which hunting desires to own the animal body fuelled a powerful homosocial culture grounded in ideas of primal pageantry. Sport and game in this context represented essential elements of a performative leisure economy in which pursuit and capture dictated the terms of human-animal engagement and refracted broader impositions of colonial political authority. From here, it turns to dynamics of community on the game trail where the primacy of the sporting hero was confirmed and recalibrated along racial, class and gender lines, before travelling indoors to examine how the afterlife of the hunt (expressed in taxidermy) allowed the authority of the victorious hunter to be performed in the ‘great indoors’ and for colonial claims over space to be materially and symbolically affirmed. Today, the stories of the imperial hunter elite and their taxidermy trophies represent traumatic historical artefacts. However, they also denote important remnants of empire whose complicated provenance helps to explain how mutually supportive mechanisms of masculinity and colonialism operated to sanction the killing and (later) the conservation of game species. Offering a closer look at ‘the bison in the room’ and its embodied story of pursuit and capture, this paper provides valuable insights into the dynamics of sport in colonial space and the value of performance as a useful category for contextualising human-environmental relations in the age of empire.

Micro Partitions: Interrogating ‘Punjabi Refugee’ Identities

This special section on micro partitions follows ‘the reduction in scale’ from macro in national to meso in regional and micro in micro-regional histories in the field of Partition studies through focusing on micro-narratives of Partition from Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan after the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. The focus of the essays is on affective memories of Partition in testimonies and cultural representations to examine the microhistories of displaced persons in micro-regions in West Punjab, including the North Western Frontier Province (Kohat, Bannu, Derajat), South Punjab (Multan, Bahawalpur) and the Mewat region in India, resettled in metro and non-metro cities and towns in India, Pakistan and the UK, through the lens of microhistory or microstoria and affect theories. The section hopes to examine the Partition’s affective charge embodied in ‘vernacular’ languages and representational forms left out of print cultures, 1 which include both traditional genres such as ritual theatre, folk-songs, folk music, folk-tales and proverbs as well as contemporary ones like popular music, ritual practices, festivals and pilgrimage sites through which communities from these micro-regions have represented Partition’s collective trauma. It draws on the methods of microhistory to closely analyse narratives of small local events, communities and neighbourhoods in Punjab’s micro-regions and subregions to connect the stories of these small places and ‘little’ people with the macro-narrative or grand narrative of Partition, so as to inquire what microhistory can bring to the understanding of Partition, as well as whether the micro-narratives relate to or throw new light on metanarratives. 2

Settler Colonialism and Harte’s Frontier Ecogothic in “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad”

The paper proposes to examine the tangled relationship between race and environment in the nineteenth-century American literary tradition by looking at the gothic representation of the three vagabond characters in relation to the Californian coastal landscape in Bret Harte’s “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad” (1900). Critically seen as a reworking of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Harte’s story continues the questioning of the civilization/wilderness dichotomy in Twain’s work, but the story complicates its racialecological dynamics by shifting the focus from a white boy and a black slave to a Chinese orphan, a Native American vagrant, and a dog, and relocating their tramping and foraging from the Mississippi river to the pine forest and marshland at the Pacific coast of a frontier town in California. Harte’s repositioning of racialized (as well as politicized) persecution at the western frontier articulates an ecogothic allegory on a transcontinental (as well as transglobal) scale, in which a seemingly ordinary western settlement is turned from what Leo Marx considers a pastoral-industrial “middle landscape” into a liminal haunting (as well as hunting) ground. 1 The paper examines how Harte’s account of Trinidad topographies reveals a multi-layered ecological space and a haunted Romantic landscape that unsettles environmental as well as social order, reflecting racialized political exclusions during the course of the nineteenth century through legalized policies, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1855 Vagrancy Act, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricting the spatial mobilities of Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and other minority groups. The paper will focus on the intersection of orientalism, settler colonialism, and environmentalism, rethinking how the enmeshed race-environment relationship in Harte’s writing, informed by the social and political practices of westward expansionism and racial segregation of his time, might reveal a subtler process of ecological othering, unveiling the parasitical relationship between racial exploitation and environmental destruction.

'Entertaining' a New College Athlete Unionization Structure

Between athletes still feeling short-changed despite name, image, and likeness (NIL) compensation and coaches and administrators feeling generally unhappy with the unregulated, “wild west” landscape of NIL, college sports is faced with two competing forces pushing college athletics in two distinctly different directions. There is an obvious solution to all of the strife in college sports: the legal recognition of college athletes as employees and the creation of a formally recognized college athlete labor union, allowing athletes to collectively bargain for a share of media rights revenues and other work conditions, while also allowing the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to collectively bargain for more regulations and restrictions on NIL activity without facing antitrust scrutiny by virtue of the non-statutory labor exemption. There are several unique challenges to organizing a labor union comprised of athletes, including the breadth and variety of their negotiating interests. However, there is a robust union that has been in operation since the 1930s that may provide a baseline framework: the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). In this article, we explore potential frameworks for a college athlete union by using SAG-AFTRA and other major unions as templates. SAG-AFTRA’s unique national-local structure serves as a guide for how to create a robust and effective college athlete union that meets all sides’ interests in reforming college sports.

Last Remnants of the French Wild West: Remembering “Colorado” (1990)

Few settings are as quintessentially American as the Wild West. In games, the myth of the American frontier is the myth of American expansion. This myth explores, sometimes with enthusiasm, at other times with a tinge of regret, the conquest of the “wilderness” with its Native inhabitants and wildlife, and its replacement by “civilization” represented by settlers and railroads. Yet, European expansion on the frontier is not exclusively an Anglo-American story. It was the French explorers, traders, and trappers that first set out westward (and southward) along the rivers from Canada and the Great Lakes. The French experience of the frontier was radically different: for them, with the limited resources of their soon-to-be-sold colonial empire, the wilderness was effectively untameable, its Native inhabitants unconquerable: it was thus a place of permanent danger, where one might, with equal probability, eke out a living, earn a fortune, or simply perish. Only once has the French West appeared in a digital game, in Silmarils’s Colorado (1990). This paper examines Colorado as an artefact of French game development in the 16-bit era, as a unique depiction of the forgotten French West, and, finally, as a 2D predecessor of today’s sprawling 3D open-world games.

A possible production area of Chinese faience? Reference to beads decorating coffins from Shijia Yucun site, Gansu Province

AbstractShijia Yucun site is a northwestern settlement from the Zhou period (1046–221 BCE). Faience beads used as a personal ornament and coffin decoration are notable among plenty of funerary objects. Thirteen faience objects are determined using analytical electron probe micro‐analysis (EPMA) and scanning electron microscopy‐energy dispersive X‐ray spectroscopy (SEM–EDS). The information on their provenance indicates that the types of faience beads around bodies include the mixed‐alkali faience from Europe or the Eurasian Steppe, the soda‐enriched faience from West Asia, and the local products rich in potash. However, faience samples adorning coffins are all local products, and the quality is rougher compared to the faience decorating the body. This unique feature is hardly found in other tombs of Zhou elites. As faience was a precious personal ornament in other stronger polities, it was already available as a general coffin decoration in such a small‐economy feudal state, so faience samples decorating coffins were not likely to be precious gifts from other elites. It is reasonable to assume that faience beads adorning coffins might have been made near the ruins. This investigation is significant to reveal the cultural exchange in the western frontier of the Zhou realm that dates back to the power decline of the Western Zhou period and highlight a possible high‐potash faience production area.