As her family traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852, Mary Ellen Todd taught herself to crack the ox whip. Though gender roles often blurred on the trail, families quickly tried to re-establish separate roles for men and women once they had staked their claims. For Mary Ellen Todd, who found a “secret joy in having the power to set things moving,” this meant trading in the ox whip for the more feminine butter churn. In Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier, Cynthia Culver Prescott expertly explores the shifting gender roles and ideologies that countless Anglo-American settlers struggled with in Oregon’s Willamette Valley between 1845 and 1900. Drawing on traditional social history sources as well as divorce records, married women’s property records, period photographs, and material culture, Prescott reveals that Oregon settlers pursued a moving target of middle-class identity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Prescott traces long-term ideological changes, arguing that favorable farming conditions enabled Oregon families to progress from accepting flexible frontier roles to participating in a national consumer culture in only one generation. As settlers’ children came of age, participation in this new culture of consumption and refined leisure became the marker of the middle class. Middle-class culture shifted from the first generation’s emphasis on genteel behavior to a newer genteel consumption. This absorbing volume reveals the shifting boundaries of traditional women’s spheres, the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, and the second generation’s struggle to balance their parents’ ideology with a changing national sense of class consciousness.

The first book devoted exclusively to teaching and documenting Userland Frontier, a collection of powerful, pre-written scripts for total web site management, this book teaches readers Frontier from the ground up. The guide is packed with examples, advice, tricks, and tips.

This is a new Wittgensteinian account of the American Constitution that provides a fresh perspective on how judges can follow a legal document written in flexible language. The book shows why originalism is incompatible with the American legal system and challenges the views o...

Modern textbook presentations of production economics typically treat producers as successful optimizers. Conventional econometric practice has generally followed this paradigm, and least squares based regression techniques have been used to estimate production, cost, profit and other functions. In such a framework deviations from maximum output, from minimum cost and cost minimizing input demands, and from maximum profit and profit maximizing output supplies and input demands, are attributed exclusively to random statistical noise. However casual empiricism and the business press both make persuasive cases for the argument that, although producers may indeed attempt to optimize, they do not always succeed. This book develops econometric techniques for the estimation of production, cost and profit frontiers, and for the estimation of the technical and economic efficiency with which producers approach these frontiers. Since these frontiers envelop rather than intersect the data, and since the authors continue to maintain the traditional econometric belief in the presence of external forces contributing to random statistical noise, the work is titled Stochastic Frontier Analysis.

Byzantium's Balkan Frontier is the first narrative history in English of the northern Balkans in the tenth to twelfth centuries. Where previous histories have been concerned principally with the medieval history of distinct and autonomous Balkan nations, this study regards Byzantine political authority as a unifying factor in the various lands which formed the empire's frontier in the north and west. It takes as its central concern Byzantine relations with all Slavic and non-Slavic peoples - including the Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians and Hungarians - in and beyond the Balkan Peninsula, and explores in detail imperial responses, first to the migrations of nomadic peoples, and subsequently to the expansion of Latin Christendom. It also examines the changing conception of the frontier in Byzantine thought and literature through the middle Byzantine period.

A comprehensive history of the continent, “full of engaging and attention-catching information about North America’s geology, climate, and paleontology” (The Washington Post Book World). Here, “the rock star of modern science” tells the unforgettable story of the geological and biological evolution of the North American continent, from the time of the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago to the present day (Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel). Flannery describes the development of North America’s deciduous forests and other flora, and tracks the migrations of various animals to and from Europe, Asia, and South America, showing how plant and animal species have either adapted or become extinct. The story spans the massive changes wrought by the ice ages and the coming of the Native Americans. It continues right up to the present, covering the deforestation of the Northeast, the decimation of the buffalo, and other consequences of frontier settlement and the industrial development of the United States. This is science writing at its very best—both an engrossing narrative and a scholarly trove of information that “will forever change your perspective on the North American continent” (The New York Review of Books).

This three-volume handbook includes state-of-the-art surveys in different areas of neoclassical production economics. Volumes 1 and 2 cover theoretical and methodological issues only. Volume 3 includes surveys of empirical applications in different areas like manufacturing, agriculture, banking, energy and environment, and so forth.

Extraordinary change is under way in the Alto Urubamba Valley, a vital and turbulent corner of the Andean-Amazonian borderland of southern Peru. Here, tens of thousands of Quechua-speaking farmers from the rural Andes have migrated to the territory of the Indigenous Amazonian Matsigenka people in search of land for coffee cultivation. This migration has created a new multilingual, multiethnic agrarian society. The rich-tasting Peruvian coffee in your cup is the distillate of an intensely dynamic Amazonian frontier, where native Matsigenkas, state agents, and migrants from the rural highlands are carving the forest into farms. Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier shows how people of different backgrounds married together and blended the Quechua, Matsigenka, and Spanish languages in their day-to-day lives. This frontier relationship took place against a backdrop of deforestation, cocaine trafficking, and destructive natural gas extraction. Nicholas Q. Emlen’s rich account—which takes us to remote Amazonian villages, dusty frontier towns, roadside bargaining sessions, and coffee traders’ homes—offers a new view of settlement frontiers as they are negotiated in linguistic interactions and social relationships. This interethnic encounter was not a clash between distinct groups but rather an integrated network of people who adopted various stances toward each other as they spoke. The book brings together a fine-grained analysis of multilingualism with urgent issues in Latin America today, including land rights, poverty, drug trafficking, and the devastation of the world’s largest forest. It offers a timely on-the-ground perspective on the agricultural colonization of the Amazon, which has triggered an environmental emergency threatening the future of the planet.

All empires fall, and America is no exception. What comes next?