Westward Expansion Research Articles

XIT: The Story of Land, Cattle, and Capital in Texas and Montana by Michael M. Miller

Reviewed by: XIT: The Story of Land, Cattle, and Capital in Texas and Montana by Michael M. Miller Kevin Kipers XIT: The Story of Land, Cattle, and Capital in Texas and Montana. By Michael M. Miller. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. 288 pp. Illustrations, tables, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth. In XIT, Michael M. Miller examines the XIT Ranch’s cattle business activity by contextualizing the company’s place in the American livestock industry and against the broader context of an ever-emerging economic system of capitalist enterprise, often run by businessmen overseas, on a disappearing western frontier. Miller weaves together his narrative through examinations of XIT cattle activity in Texas and Montana from 1885 to 1912. Events in chapters 2 and 3 represent the setup for Miller’s narrative about the ranch’s origins and subsequent business growth until its operations ceased in the early twentieth century. In chapter 2, Miller discusses provisions in the 1876 Texas constitution aimed at promoting open settlement for average small farmers, yet loopholes around and constant legal increases in acreage limits resulted in many public lands falling into corporate ownership. Miller, in chapter 3, details the chaotic set of events surrounding reconstruction plans for and disagreements about the Texas capitol between 1881 and 1888 and the role XIT associates played in it while dysfunctional leadership delayed project completion. Although this chapter tells an important story about how an expensive real estate venture ultimately inclined XIT to invest in cattle as a potentially more profitable market, Miller does not make this premise explicit until chapter 4. For the remainder of the book, Miller effectively describes XIT’s transition from investing in real estate to cattle, as well as the challenges company officials encountered in securing desired levels of revenue. XIT owners started their initial cattle operations in 1885 on lands purchased in the Texas panhandle. There they intended to profit through selling the livestock to prospective settlers hoping to obtain land in the waning era of open westward expansion. Miller highlights several underlying sets of obstacles that plagued goals of XIT affiliates and settlers alike, including cattle diseases, harsh winters, and difficulties securing transportation contracts with railroad companies. Cattle frequently suffered fevers that spread among herds, for which XIT operators in Texas constantly received blame, hindering efforts to expand when nearby jurisdictions imposed laws restricting transport of cattle. Securing transport agreements with railways like the Fort Worth & Denver City, and eventual additional land purchases for cattle grazing in Montana, initially helped offset some of the issues with dwindling property availability in Texas and business growth. Still, XIT businessmen were ultimately unable to accomplish long-term sustainability and profits. Cattle prices and demand among buyers declined into the early years of the twentieth century, and the company mismanaged its operations. Miller’s work skillfully sheds light on a declining livestock market in a period when open western settlement was also diminishing. [End Page 359] Kevin Kipers Department of History Washington State University, Tri-Cities Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Genetic Structure and Colonization of North America by Depressaria depressana (Fabricius 1775) (Lepidoptera: Depressariidae) over 15 Years; Contrasts with Westward Expansion of Depressaria radiella (Goeze, 1783) over 160 Years.

Simple SummaryAs invasive insect species can disrupt agriculture, ecosystem functions, and human health, monitoring the spread of newly invasive insects is a high priority. The purple carrot-seed moth Depressaria depressana, a European species first reported in North America in 2008, specializes on reproductive structures of taxa throughout the family Apiaceae and thus presents a potential threat to native North American umbellifers. We assessed interpopulational genetic diversity of D. depressana across its eastern North American invasion front and compared those values to available data for European populations. We also compared this diversity with genetic diversity estimates for populations of Depressaria radiella (parsnip webworm), a European species introduced to North America more than 160 years ago that is essentially restricted to two apiaceous genera throughout its native and invasive ranges. Documenting the historical spread of D. radiella with museum and literature records, we found D. depressana displays greater genetic diversity than D. radiella and is colonizing North America more rapidly; greater genetic diversity may facilitate faster colonization via establishment on a wider range of hostplants. The contrast in colonization by these two species may inform management practices for invasive insects utilizing a broad versus narrow array of hosts within a single plant family.Depressaria depressana, the purple carrot seed moth, is a Eurasian species first reported in North America in 2008 and currently undergoing range expansion. This invasion follows that of its Eurasion congener Depressaria radiella (parsnip webworm), first documented in North America 160 years ago. Unlike D. depressana, which utilizes hostplants across multiple tribes of Apiaceae, Depressaria radiella is a “superspecialist” effectively restricted in its native and non-indigenous ranges to two closely related apiaceous genera. We investigated the genetic structure of D. depressana populations across latitudinal and longitudinal gradients in the eastern United States by constructing COI haplotype networks and then comparing these with haplotype networks constructed from available COI sequence data from contemporary European D. depressana populations and from European and North American D. radiella populations. Haplotype data revealed higher genetic diversity in D. depressana, indicating high dispersal capacity, multiple introductions, and/or a genetically diverse founding population. Museum and literature records of D. radiella date back to 1862 and indicate that range expansion to the West Coast required more than 50 years. Higher levels of genetic diversity observed in D. depressana compared to its congener may indicate a greater propensity for dispersal, colonization and establishment in its non-indigenous range.

Presence of spraint at bridges as an effective monitoring tool to assess current Eurasian fish otter distribution in Austria

Monitoring carnivore populations requires sensitive and trustworthy assessment methods to make reasonable and effective management decisions. The Eurasian fish otter Lutra lutra experienced a dramatic population decline throughout Europe during the twentieth century but is currently recovering in both distribution range and population size. In Austria, most assessments on otter distribution have applied a modified version of the so-called “British” or “standard” method utilizing point-wise surveys for otter spraints at predefined monitoring bridges. In this study, we synthesize several recent statewide assessments to compile the current otter distribution in Austria and evaluate the efficiency and sensitivity of the “monitoring bridge” approach in comparison to the “standard” method. The otter shows an almost comprehensive distribution throughout eastern and central Austria, while more western areas (Tyrol and Vorarlberg) are only partially inhabited, likely due to a still ongoing westward expansion. Furthermore, the bridge monitoring method utilizing presence/absence information on otter spraints reveals itself to be a time- and cost- effective monitoring tool with a tolerable loss of sensitivity for large-scale otter distribution assessments. Count data of spraints seem to be prone to observer bias or environmental influences like weather or flooding events making them less suitable for quantitative analyses.

Assessment of Eurasian lynx reintroduction success and mortality risk in north-west Poland

Despite recent local reintroductions of the Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx in central and north-eastern Poland, the increase in its population was not followed by its westward expansion. To address this problem and restore the lynx population in north-western Poland, 61 captive-born individuals of Baltic population origin were released in the province of Western Pomerania in 2019–2021. Prior to their release, all the animals underwent an adaptation training phase. They were then set free according to a hard-release protocol and subsequently monitored by means of GPS telemetry. In order to assess the short-term reintroduction success, the survival and causes of death of the released individuals were studied as a function of sex, age, training time, and release time and place. The overall survival rate was 71.15%, the median survival time 202 days. Most mortality, due to environmental factors, i.e. scabies (> 200 days) or traffic collisions (< 200 days), was recorded during the first 300 days following release. Age, year of release and training time were significantly related to survival, indicating that the older the lynx was when released, the better its survival changes. In contrast, the longer the training time, the poorer were the chances of survival. There was no evidence of any effect of sex, month of release or place of release. Based on these results, recommendations were made for the planning of further releases and measures to manage the restored population.

Environmental Drivers of Gulf Coast Tick (Acari: Ixodidae) Range Expansion in the United States.

In the United States, the Gulf Coast tick (Amblyomma maculatum Koch) is a species of growing medical and veterinary significance, serving as the primary vector of the pathogenic bacterium, Rickettsia parkeri (Rickettsiales: Rickettsiaceae), in humans and the apicomplexan parasite, Hepatozoon americanum, in canines. Ongoing reports of A. maculatum from locations outside its historically reported distribution in the southeastern United States suggest the possibility of current and continuing range expansion. Using an ecological niche modeling approach, we combined new occurrence records with high-resolution climate and land cover data to investigate environmental drivers of the current distribution of A. maculatum in the United States. We found that environmental suitability for A. maculatum varied regionally and was primarily driven by climatic factors such as annual temperature variation and seasonality of precipitation. We also found that presence of A. maculatum was associated with open habitat with minimal canopy cover. Our model predicts large areas beyond the current distribution of A. maculatum to be environmentally suitable, suggesting the possibility of future northward and westward range expansion. These predictions of environmental suitability may be used to identify areas at potential risk for establishment and to guide future surveillance of A. maculatum in the United States.

Free Pass Through the Pillars of Hercules? Genetic and Historical Insights Into the Recent Expansion of the Atlantic Blue Crab Callinectes sapidus to the West and the East of the Strait of Gibraltar

The invasive Atlantic blue crab Callinectes sapidus has considerably extended its distribution along the Gulf of Cadiz and Moroccan coasts in the northeast Atlantic. This could indicate a new introduction event in the Gulf of Cadiz from the native area, in case of detectable genetic differences from the Mediterranean Sea populations. To test this and reconstruct the invasion, we assessed the genetic structure of crabs in the Gulf of Cadiz and Alboran Sea. We used sequences of the mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI), in almost its full length (1511 basepairs), of 149 individuals from three sites along the Spanish Mediterranean coast, two in the Alboran Sea, and two in the Gulf of Cadiz. Our data reveal low genetic variability, with only two haplotypes (here referred to as CSWM1 and CSWM2), compared to its known high genetic diversity in the native range, indicating a strong founder effect in the study region. Here we document an inversion of haplotype predominance between regions, haplotype CSWM2 being dominant in most of the Spanish Mediterranean coast, but less frequent in the Gulf of Cadiz and Alboran Sea. This suggests a secondary introduction of propagules into the investigated area, rather than a new introduction from the native area, nor a natural westward expansion with environmental selection of one haplotype over the other. Further studies with additional populations would help to better unveil the history of yet another invasive species in the Gulf of Cadiz.

Native American Women as Palimpsestic Apparitions in Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu’s The Revenant

Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu’s mythic retelling of the Hugh Glass story revises and critiques the grand narratives of American exceptionalism born of the frontier. It highlights the violence bred of racism that weaves throughout the history of westward expansion, undercuts the genre’s tendency toward white privilege through multi-lingual narratives, and centers a counter-narrative focused on Indigenous families and women. Building from and reflecting on my earlier work in Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film, this essay reads the film’s representation of Native/First Nations women as palimpsestic apparitions of the Celluloid Indian Maiden trope that are both progressive and problematic in their ability to counter white hegemonic narratives of power and ongoing racism. This reading engages the dialogical tension between Iñárritu’s representation of his two primary Indigenous women—the “ghost” of Glass’ wife and Powaqa—allowing us to explore the hegemonic power of cinematic tropes in residual form. Ultimately, as Indigenous responses are brought to bear witness, we are asked to consider our ongoing attachment to particular tropes and depictions of Indigenous women even as we attempt to critique them.

Study on Ecological Loss in Coal Mining Area Based on Net Primary Productivity of Vegetation

Opencast mining contributes to the severe disturbance of vegetation and serious damage to the ecological environment. Scientific assessment of the ecological losses may provide guidance for the sustainable land use in mining areas. This study uses the Carnegie Ames Stanford Approach (CASA) model to estimate the net primary productivity (NPP) of vegetation in the Pingshuo mining area from 2006 to 2020 and uses statistical analysis and mathematical models to study the impact of mining and land reclamation on NPP. The results show that NPP decreased slowly at a rate of 0.809 gC/(m2·month) per year. In 2006, the urban area of Pinglu and the opencast coal mining area were located in the western part of the study area, while the eastern part was distributed with a large amount of grassland, forested and cultivated land, and the NPP showed a high pattern in the east and low in the west. With the continued eastward movement of Antaibao and Anjialing mining areas, as well as the construction and continuous westward expansion of the East opencast mine, the pits of all three opencast mines moved to a central location in 2020, changing the spatial distribution of NPP to high in the surroundings and low in the middle. The NPP within the three opencast mines decreased significantly, but the change in NPP increased from −7.34 gC/(m2·month) to 7.15 gC/(m2·month) as the reclamation area increased, indicating that mining increased ecological losses while land reclamation mitigated them. The variation of NPP within 600 m outside the mining area is 2.06~7.45 gC/(m2·month), and 0.11~1.00 gC/(m2·month) from 600 m to 1000 m, indicating that NPP is sensitive to the influence of mining. The results may provide guidance for further analysis of the impact of mining on local environments and exploration of more appropriate land reclamation measures.

Pioneers in the Attic: Place and Memory along the Mormon Trail

Pioneers in the Attic: Place and Memory along the Mormon Trail

Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay A. Yarbrough

Reviewed by: Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay A. Yarbrough Clarissa W. Confer Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country. By Fay A. Yarbrough. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 280. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) This slim volume traces the Choctaws’ wartime experience in a few chapters, which are book-ended by other chapters covering traditional Choctaw culture and the Reconstruction period, including an unpersuasive foray into the imagined effect of war on masculinity. The author’s research entails a fairly standard use of available sources—tribal nation papers, the Indian-Pioneer Papers collection at the University of Oklahoma, W.P.A. narratives, and government records—that I, Mary Jane Warde, and others have also used in analyzing the nations of Indian Territory in the mid-nineteenth century. In this case, Fay Yarbrough looks at the material through the lens of slavery and race relations. Her expressed intent to connect this past to issues of the present sets the tone for her work. The book begins with a standard history of the Choctaw people, explaining traditional aspects of social structure, such as matrilineal descent and the role of clans. Like so many Native groups, the Choctaws experienced extensive change in the nineteenth century, brought on primarily by White expansion westward. One example is gender roles. As the century progressed, Native women lost their status as agricultural producers. Although the author attributes this entirely to the development of slavery, this change actually stems from a wide range of factors, most notably White male expectations. In that and many other ways, Choctaw society began to look more like White southern culture. The Choctaw were one of the five Native nations removed to Indian Territory from the southeastern United States who practice slavery; however, because enslaved people made up only 14 percent of the Choctaw population by 1860, a much smaller percentage than in any of its neighboring states, there are marked differences between Choctaw culture and the Deep South. Unlike in slave states, the Choctaw nation had a path for citizenship for slaves through blood ties to a Choctaw. Deep South plantations would have looked very different had White masters offered citizenship to blood relations among their slaves. Like their slaveholding neighbors, however, the Choctaw also tightened the legal structure governing bondage in the post-Nat Turner period of the 1830s. Although Choctaw citizens’ engagement in this slave economy influenced their decision to participate in the Civil War, this was only one of several such influences. The question of how and why Indian nations chose sides in the national conflict has been examined and debated in many books, and Yarbrough revisits that question. The core principle for all the nations was tribal sovereignty, and the attractive alliance package offered by Confederate leaders seemed the best way to preserve it. The Choctaw followed a path [End Page 124] similar to the Cherokees, seeking neutrality first, eventually allying with the Confederacy, and then forming armed mounted units for the Confederate army. The author leans heavily on Cherokee history to flesh out the story of the Choctaw, but the problem with this strategy is that the Cherokee were uniquely divided by the removal experience, and those fissures shaped their responses. In contrast to the Cherokee, the Choctaw remained loyal to the Confederacy throughout the war, despite breeches of treaty promises. The Confederacy, for that matter, did not adequately support any of its Native allies, resulting in poor wartime conditions, desertions, and leadership lapses among them. The Civil War in Indian Territory, as scholars have been arguing for decades, devolved into an internal civil war. No Native nation gained from the experience. The Choctaw location on the southern edge of Indian Territory made that area a popular destination for a flow of refugees from the war, which put corresponding pressures on the nation, although that is not discussed here. Even so, the Choctaw maintained their unity throughout the war. Unfortunately, the chapter about Reconstruction focuses only on the Choctaw freedpeople and does not examine the intriguing situation in which Choctaws negotiated a more favorable peace treaty than the other nations who fought the United States. The...

Calhoun: American Heretic by Robert Elder

Reviewed by: Calhoun: American Heretic by Robert Elder Melissa DeVelvis (bio) Calhoun: American Heretic. By Robert Elder. (New York: Basic Books, 2021. Pp. 656. Cloth, $35.00.) In his sweeping and timely biography of John C. Calhoun, Robert Elder brings a “titan” of the U.S. Senate into the twenty-first century. Rather than viewing Calhoun as a man “out of step with the flow of history,” Elder argues that he “belongs at the center of the stories we tell about our past” (xiv). Elder painstakingly unpacks Calhoun’s political philosophy as it developed over fifty years to argue that he was a modern politician, not a demagogue clinging to slavery and the past, as some have claimed. A proponent of free trade, westward expansion, and internal improvements, Elder’s Calhoun was dedicated to the Union, provided that this union preserved slaveholding privileges. In telling the story of Calhoun’s life, from 1782 to 1850, Elder also crafts a story of the United States. This origin story—of both man and nation—is dependent on the subjugation and enslavement of Africans and African Americans. Calhoun’s political philosophy and its evolution, expressed publicly throughout his career but culminating in two posthumous treatises, A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States (both published in 1851), receive the most attention in Elder’s work. Elder convincingly argues that Calhoun’s ideas of the concurrent majority and his belief that the United States was not a nation but a “federal republic of sovereign states” have shaped constitutional thinking into the twenty-first century (488). The concurrent majority, or “unanimous consent of all the interests in a given society” (484), would provide minority interests with veto power and protect a country from the “absolutism” of a pure democracy (482). Elder guides the reader through Calhoun’s thought processes, from fully endorsing the War of 1812, to inventing and justifying nullification, to fiercely debating the addition of California and Oregon to the Union. Through every milestone, Elder informs the reader when Calhoun was acting in line with his stated beliefs and when, perhaps in the name of his own ambition or to preserve slavery, he contradicted his principles. The readability of these sections says much about Elder’s skills as an author. Elder also creates a nuanced picture of Calhoun as a man. Calhoun’s closest confidantes were often women, such as his mother-in-law, Floride Bonneau Colhoun, and favorite child, Anna. He highly valued Anna’s [End Page 262] political mind, to the point that she frequently accompanied Calhoun to Washington and served as his secretary. In the case of Calhoun’s wife Floride, Elder encountered the historian’s worst nightmare: most of her correspondence was either destroyed or lost. Without this resource, Elder cannot tell us much about the Calhouns’ relationship or Floride’s notable ostracism of Peggy Eaton. In her surviving letters, however, we learn that she was far from a benevolent slave owner and frequently expressed her frustrations from the plantation at Fort Hill when her husband refused to sell enslaved people whom she found difficult. What is perhaps most remarkable about Elder’s work is his attention to the enslaved men and women that surrounded Calhoun. It is more widely known that Calhoun was a white supremacist who reshaped slavery from a “necessary evil” to a “positive good” and asserted that Black slavery was “the best guarantee to equality among whites” (178). Elder, however, gives names to the people Calhoun enslaved whenever possible. In tracing Calhoun’s life, we also follow the lives of Sawney, his wife Tilla, and his children, Issey and Young Sawney, who resisted the Calhouns’ control through arson and running away. Elder reminds the reader of the Black families separated during every move, marriage, and death of the white Calhoun family. Calhoun’s state, idealized nation, and livelihood were entirely dependent on slave labor. Yet Calhoun’s dedication to slavery, Elder notes, did not mean he was “old-fashioned” (340). Instead, Calhoun argued that American progress could not exist without U.S. slavery, and he applied an international lens to support his antiabolitionist stance. Elder’s argument...

Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism by Ben Wright

Reviewed by: Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism by Ben Wright April Holm (bio) Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. By Ben Wright. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 253. Cloth, $45.00.) Historians have long connected the rise of the antebellum abolitionist movement with the growth of evangelical Christianity in the early decades of the nineteenth century. However, we more frequently approach the relationship between religion and abolition from the perspective of abolitionists than from within evangelical denominations. In Bonds of Salvation, Ben Wright examines the relationship between evangelical Christianity and abolitionism from the vantage point of the major evangelical denominations. He argues that the ideological approach that made Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists so successful ultimately dictated the contours of American abolitionism and the limits of antislavery action within the churches. Wright takes seriously the priorities of American evangelicals, even as he reveals how those priorities paved the way for denominational schism over the sinfulness of slavery. He begins his book with a question: How could so many white antebellum evangelicals privately condemn slavery and at the same time oppose abolitionism? Wright finds his answer in the millennial dreams of universal salvation through conversion that dominated American evangelicalism in the nineteenth century. While many evangelicals disapproved of slavery, Wright argues, they viewed it as one of a range of social ills that would be remedied by the salvation of the world. [End Page 272] By this logic, the best way to end slavery—and all earthly suffering—was through the conversion of souls to Christianity. Wright calls this ideology “conversionism.” Conversionists, he explains, viewed the United States itself as a divine agent of salvation. They dominated American evangelicalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. Wright is particularly adept at explaining how conversionism intersected with denominational growth and the development of American nationalism. He argues that the focus on salvation within American Christianity accommodated a wide range of antislavery views and helped fuel both the colonization movement, promoted as a way to spread Christianity in Africa, and westward denominational expansion, a mechanism for “continental conversion” (110). Wright makes a compelling point about the role of conversionism in developing American nationalism during the early nineteenth century. Denominational growth, especially in the West, was key to the goal of converting the nation. Conversionism also conveniently allowed white evangelicals to avoid debates over slavery that could threaten the success of these Christian nationalist projects. Wright explains that conversionism as a solution to slavery never went unchallenged. Even as conversionists promoted colonization, westward expansion, and denominational growth, Black Christians and some white allies maintained that the church must be purified of the sin of slavery. Through their unceasing activism, Wright argues, these “purification-ists” helped to spawn the abolitionist movement that created fault lines in American churches and American politics. To counter purificationist demands that the church rid itself of slavery, white southern Christians made the conversionist argument that slavery provided access to the souls of enslaved people. Fearful of dividing the churches, antislavery conversionists retreated into a conservative alliance with proslavery evangelicals. In the 1830s and 1840s, the debate over the sinfulness of slavery divided the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist denominations into separate sectional bodies, both foreboding and hastening the coming of secession and war. Bonds of Salvation offers valuable insight into the limits of conversionism. It is one thing to oppose something on principle and quite another to oppose it with action. Believing that slavery was wrong carried very few consequences for white antebellum evangelicals. Acting on those beliefs, as Wright demonstrates in later chapters, most certainly did. Conversionists opposed slavery but prioritized conversion as “more urgent and its result as more radically transformative” than abolitionism (3). It would save the souls of both the free and the enslaved and potentially bring forth the millennium, which would, among other things, occasion the end of slavery. [End Page 273] Wright shows how, as the century progressed and abolitionists made more demands on their denominations, this passive opposition to slavery faded into a conservative stance aligned with proslavery members of the denomination against abolitionism. Wright’s work engages with a...

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship by Christopher James Bonner

Reviewed by: Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship by Christopher James Bonner Andrew Diemer (bio) Citizenship, Slavery, African Americans, Freedom, Civil rights Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship. By Christopher James Bonner. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. 272. Cloth $34.95.) The U.S. Constitution, Christopher Bonner reminds us in the opening to this essential book, mentions the word "citizen" or "citizens" eleven times (4), and yet, just what it means by those terms and who is to be considered a [End Page 291] "citizen" was frustratingly ambiguous and would remain so for decades after the nation's founding. While this ambiguity provided reason to deny the rights of citizenship to free African Americans, it also presented opportunity, an opportunity seized upon by free Black writers and orators who, in the early decades of the republic capitalized on this ambiguity in order to stake their claim on American citizenship. Recent years have seen an outpouring of scholarship on this struggle for Black citizenship rights in the antebellum United States, which has taught us a great deal about how African Americans fought, and sometimes succeeded, in securing specific rights they broadly envisioned as the rights of citizens. Bonner's book is an essential contribution to this growing scholarship. To capture the sweep of Black politics in this era, Bonner looks to the abundant printed record of the public discourse of Black citizenship. He makes excellent use of printed accounts of speeches, meetings, and conventions and draws on the rich Black and abolitionist newspapers of the early nineteenth century. In contrast to other scholars who have focused in on a particular place in order to consider the granular details of the struggle for Black citizenship rights, Bonner pulls back the lens in order to provide the larger picture of the free Black activists of the North. What emerges is a vast network of men and women, contesting the status of free Black people, pushing to be considered as citizens in the land of their birth. The book takes up the story in the 1820s with the debate over African colonization and proceeds through six thematic but loosely chronological chapters, concluding with the legal transformations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The first chapter considers the struggle for suffrage, which Black activists argued was an essential right owed them as American citizens. At the same time, these same activists challenged the claims of colonizationists that free Black people did not belong in the United States at all. From here the book moves on to consider the connections between Black politics and the debates over the westward expansion of the United States. Bonner offers a particularly insightful chapter on the engagement of Black activists with the European revolutions of 1848. At a time when many Black abolitionists felt alienated from the land of their birth, the revolutionary struggles unfolding across the Atlantic allowed them to imagine "new kinds of communities with new criteria for belonging," communities "defined by an individual's work toward human liberation" (75). Ultimately, though, most Black activists continued to see the land of their birth as their true home and fought for the American citizenship they believed they were owed. From here, Bonner moves on to a [End Page 292] persuasive consideration of the importance of claims of citizenship for the protection of fugitive slaves. Black abolitionists saw security as a fundamental right of citizens, and argued that jury trials and other legal protections for accused fugitive slaves were therefore guaranteed by the Constitution. Next, Bonner shows us how Roger Taney's Dred Scott decision was a response to the protest tactics of African Americans which in turn spurred Black activists to renew their struggle for the very rights that Taney claimed they could never possess. Finally, the book carries the story through the tumultuous years of the Civil War, when Black service in the Union armed forces, and the pivotal contribution of that service to the defeat of the Confederacy, left African Americans with perhaps their most persuasive argument for the citizenship rights they had long claimed. Central to Bonner's picture of this struggle for Black...

Sarah Winchester: Silicon Valley Developer

Sarah Winchester:Silicon Valley Developer Homay King (bio) In San Jose, California, sits a sprawling mansion known as the Winchester Mystery House. The property is about fifty miles south of San Francisco, near the Junípero Serra Freeway, on the street now called Winchester Boulevard and was owned and expanded by Sarah Lockwood Winchester. By reframing both the Winchester Mystery House and the woman who developed it, this essay demonstrates that present-day computational personhood is informed by histories far more varied and nuanced than previously appreciated. Sarah Winchester was heiress to the fortune of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which was once one of the world's largest manufacturers of guns. Winchester rifles were known in particular for their pioneering designs in automatic and semi-automatic weapons, the predecessors of today's magazine guns.1 After enduring the deaths of her infant daughter Annie to a congenital defect and her husband William to tuberculosis, Sarah Winchester left the rifle company and her life in New Haven, Connecticut, and decamped to California, settling in the region that would later become Silicon Valley. In 1884, she bought a Victorian farmhouse and named it Llanada Villa, a misspelling of the Spanish for "home on the plains." She continued to renovate and expand this house for almost forty years, until her death in 1922. Her home was under near constant construction, with carpenters sometimes working twenty-four hours a day. As was not unusual at the time, Winchester reportedly consulted a psychic [End Page 188] following the losses of her husband and daughter.2 According to legend, the medium warned Winchester that the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles had cursed her family. While sold all over the world, including to foreign armies, the rifles enjoyed their greatest success as domestic weapons marketed to civilian settlers: the Winchester '73, immortalized in the 1950 film of that name starring James Stewart, was famously dubbed "the gun that won the West" and was responsible for the slaughter of untold numbers of both Native Americans and settlers during the Manifest Destiny era of westward expansion. The Blackfoot warriors of Montana called the Winchester Repeating Rifle "the spirit gun" for its capacity to reload itself automatically.3 The psychic predicted that the spirits of those slain would continue to haunt Winchester unless she moved to California and built a gigantic dwelling for them. This structure, Winchester was advised, should be colossal in size but also rigged with trapdoors, winding staircases, doors to nowhere, and other maze-like features so that the spirits would be tricked and unable to harm her: it was to be a ghost trap. The result was, in one critic's words, "a four-story jumble of mansards, turrets, gables, gingerbread tracery, and board and batten siding."4 At the time of her death, Winchester's house boasted 161 rooms, forty-seven fireplaces, over 10,000 panes of glass, and three elevators. The Winchester House—California State Historical Landmark no. 868—is currently privately owned and operated as a tourist attraction. Its promotional materials play to the property's Gothic, haunted house associations. They paint Winchester as a lonely eccentric who held séances in a private octagonal room constructed for this purpose, where she supposedly received messages from the dead with architectural blueprints for the home. According to this literature, Winchester's superstitious nature prompted her to configure ornaments, coat hooks, and other decorative details in groups of thirteen as a kind of numeric talisman. Accounts from tourist materials also note that she rarely if ever appeared in public.5 But some, including Winchester's biographer, Mary Jo Ignoffo, claim that the story of her obsessional attempts to exorcise her ghosts is at least partly a myth. While most accounts agree that Winchester did indeed visit a Boston spiritualist after the deaths of her child and husband, that [End Page 189] she did an inordinate amount of construction on her San Jose home, and that she was indeed a recluse, there are more mundane explanations for these aspects of her biography. Winchester was only four feet ten, intensely arthritic, and had difficulty walking. Her decision to settle in the more clement environment...

Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico Frontier by Rafael Acosta Morales

Reviewed by: Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico Frontier by Rafael Acosta Morales Cordelia E. Barrera Rafael Acosta Morales, Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2021. 246 pp. Hardcover, $55; e-book, $43.99. In Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes Rafael Acosta Morales argues for the impossibility of displacing affect from fictional and historical representations of cowboys, bandits, and desperadoes, “cultural heroes” that shape narratives of political violence on the US–Mexico frontier. In so doing, he probes the discourses and systems embedded in these archetypes alongside the unrecognized, nonconscious experiences of readers and audiences. Expanding on the work of noted scholars of affect, he proposes the notion of “affective assemblage” to examine the paradoxical persistence of these archetypes. The paradox lies in the gap between the immaterial structure of the narrative traditions themselves and the material forms they produce and replicate. These stories, bound by promises of regeneration through violence, redistributive justice, and the weaponization of historical trauma not merely disenfranchise entire segments of the population, they put into question the perverse sense of innocence that justifies the use of violence for national ends. The book is comprised of an introduction, three long body chapters, and an afterword. In alternating between US–Mexico and Mexico–US, the author illustrates interrelationships between fictional and historical representations of cultural heroes in a shifting territory. Because the frontier signifies a space where these icons belie dominant narratives of US political schema, Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes expands the frontier’s role in narratives of Mexican history. This is illustrated in chapter 1, “Drug Lords,” wherein Acosta Morales interprets banditry as a form of resistance to strategies of exclusion and excess capitalization shaped by modernity. Just as nineteenth-century corridos foreground historical [End Page 199] figures who oppose unequal distribution of capital, so too do novels like Luis G. Inclán’s Astucia (1865) and Yuri Herrera’s 2010 narco novel, Trabajos del reino, divulge how social banditry forms an affective loop that recreates the same adversarial system it seeks to topple. In further analyzing the struggle for legitimacy of contemporary drug lords in Mexico, Acosta Morales shows how affective assemblages shape models of behavior. In chapter 2 the cowboy is a point of departure for ideas about how legitimacy and violence are packaged for entertainment as well as how cowboy narratives justify violence and weaponize trauma. To uncover relationships among trauma, states of exception, violence, and subjectivity, the author looks to films like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1973) and Unforgiven (1992), and Cormac McCarthy’s epic novel of westward expansion, Blood Meridian (1985). A focus on affect reveals how these narratives bring neither regeneration nor judicial or bodily protection for those who require it most: women and sufferers of colonial conquest. Affect factors into the naturalization of the cowboy as a force of good. As such, it steers the preservation of a nostalgic past and an uncritical view of history within these narratives as well as influences action. Even revisionist Westerns like Unforgiven and the television series Justified, which question histories of oppression or turn the cowboy myth on its head, gloss over the “original sin” of colonial barbarism (149). As such, these stories retain the capacity to absorb violence, a quality of affect that instills a state of exception—for the white cowboy. Chapter 3, “Desperadoes,” examines stories of “icons of bandit-ry” (163) found in historical corridos that detail the exploits of cultural heroes like Gregorio Cortez and Joaquin Murrieta to illume how Mexican Americans experienced US law though an “applied and designed otherness” based in ingrained affective assemblages that inherently transmit a biased system of attitudes and laws (153). A close reading of Rolando Hinojosa’s fictional Belken County coalesces the ways that affect becomes a condition of thought produced by material circumstances continually responsive to them. The accounts of drug lords, cowboys, and desperadoes Acosta Morales surveys offer solutions that have already been accepted [End Page 200] by readers or viewers. As such, a focus on affect reveals how the...

Effects of Climate Warming on the Potential Northern Planting Boundaries of Three Main Grain Crops in China

The production of wheat, maize and rice accounts for more than 90% of the total grain production of China. Assessing the impact of climate warming on suitable planting regions, especially the potential northern planting boundaries of these crops, is therefore critical to help guide agricultural policymaking and further maintain food security. In this study, we analyzed the effect of climate warming on the potential northern planting boundaries of three specific crops (winter wheat, spring maize, double and triple rice cropping systems) during two time periods (1961–1990 and 1991–2020) using meteorological data from 2437 national weather stations. Results show that the potential planting boundaries of these crops present a northward movement and a westward expansion during the time period of 1991–2020 under the background of temperature increase compared with the time period of 1961–1990. Moreover, the boundaries of winter wheat and spring maize also show a trend of expansion to high-altitude areas (e.g., the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau). The average moving distance of these crops ranged from 20 km to 300 km. In general, the potential planting boundaries of winter wheat, spring maize, double and triple rice cropping systems changed significantly due to climate warming, and the suitable planting area was increased. Our study aims to provide a more recent and accurate result than those of previous studies, which is expected to strengthen our understanding of the effect of climate change on the potential northern planting boundaries of the three main grain crops in China.

Towards delimitation of the Echinococcus multilocularis parasite's southernmost range in France.

Alveolar echinococcosis is a severe, potentially fatal, parasitic disease caused by ingestion of microscopic eggs of Echinococcus multilocularis. The lifecycle of the parasite is essentially sylvatic, and based on a prey-predator relationship between red foxes and small rodents. A westward expansion from the eastern historical focus has been reported in France, though the parasite has also been detected in the southern Alps. While the focus in the Auvergne region (central France) was described in the 1980s, the southern delimitation of the actual endemic area, especially in the south, was unknown in the absence of dedicated surveys. Red fox samples were collected from 2013 to 2020 in the framework of other transversal epidemiological studies in five sampling areas from southwestern and southeastern France. One hundred and seven intestines were analysed by SSCT, and 221 faecal samples from intestines were analysed by copro-qPCR. None of the 328 foxes exhibited E. multilocularis worms or DNA. Although the presence of E. multilocularis cannot be totally excluded in the departments from the study areas, the sample size tested argues for an absence of the parasite in these studied areas, which is in accordance with the currently known endemic situation in France. These new data are helpful in determining the southernmost limit of E. multilocularis distribution in France. The warm, dry Mediterranean climate in the southeastern areas is less favourable to the transmission of E. multilocularis and especially to the survival of eggs in the environment than the climate in the French Alps or Liguria (Italy) climate where the parasite is present. The intermediate area between the southwestern study areas and the historical focus of Auvergne, which is separated by around 150km, will be investigated in the coming years. Moreover, an ongoing national surveillance programme on E. multilocularis in foxes is targeting French departements along the edge of the known endemic area both in the southeast and southwest. The data produced will supplement the results of this study, thus greatly helping to define the current distribution of E. multilocularis in France and to target prevention measures to reduce human exposure.

The genomic origins of the world’s first farmers

SummaryThe precise genetic origins of the first Neolithic farming populations in Europe and Southwest Asia, as well as the processes and the timing of their differentiation, remain largely unknown. Demogenomic modeling of high-quality ancient genomes reveals that the early farmers of Anatolia and Europe emerged from a multiphase mixing of a Southwest Asian population with a strongly bottlenecked western hunter-gatherer population after the last glacial maximum. Moreover, the ancestors of the first farmers of Europe and Anatolia went through a period of extreme genetic drift during their westward range expansion, contributing highly to their genetic distinctiveness. This modeling elucidates the demographic processes at the root of the Neolithic transition and leads to a spatial interpretation of the population history of Southwest Asia and Europe during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene.

Kristopher Maulden. The Federalist Frontier: Settler Politics in the Old Northwest, 1783–1840.

A traditional way of teaching United States ­­western expansion is to characterize it as a success of ­­Jeffersonian Republicans who opened land to benefit ­­yeoman farmers. Kristopher Maulden’s recent book, The Federalist Frontier: Settler Politics in the Old Northwest, a recent addition to the Studies in ­­Constitutional Democracy series edited by Justin B. Dyer and Jeffrey L. Pasley, reframes that narrative by placing Federalists at the center and tracing the influence of their institutions and policies well into the nineteenth century, long after the decline of the national party. Maulden carries two broad arguments about the legacies of Federalists in westward expansion. The first is that “Federalists created many new institutions that oversaw the generations-long march of white settlers to the Pacific,” and second that ­­“settlers in the Northwest came to appreciate how those institutions affected their lives, even as many of them preferred the libertarian rhetoric of Jeffersonian...

Human-vegetation dynamics in Holocene south-eastern Norway based on radiocarbon dated charcoal from archaeological excavations

Charcoal from archaeological contexts differs from off-site pollen samples as it is mainly a product of intentional human action. As such, analysis of charcoal from excavations is a valuable addition to studies of past vegetation and the interaction between humans and the environment. In this paper, we use a dataset consisting of 6186 dated tree species samples from 1239 archaeological sites as a proxy to explore parts of the Holocene forest development and human-vegetation dynamics in South-Eastern Norway. From the middle of the Late Neolithic (from c. 2000 BC) throughout the Early Iron Age (to c. AD 550) the region’s agriculture is characterized by fields, pastures and fallow. Based on our data, we argue that these practices, combined with forest management, clearly altered the natural distribution of trees and favoured some species of broadleaved trees. The past distribution of hazel ( Corylus avellana) is an example of human impact on the vegetation. Today, hazel is not even among the 15 most common tree species, while it is one of the most prevalent species in the archaeological record before AD 550. The data indicate that this species was favoured already by the region’s Mesolithic hunter-fisher-gatherers, and that it was among the species that thrived extremely well in the early farming landscape. Secondly, our analysis also indicates that spruce ( Picea abies) first formed large stands in the south-eastern parts of Norway c. 500 BC, centuries earlier than previously assumed. It is argued that this event, and a further westward expansion of spruce, was partly a consequence of a specific historical event – the first millennium BC farming expansion.