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The study of narratives in a variety of disciplines has grown in recent years as a method of better explaining underlying concepts in their respective fields. Through the use of Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), political scientists can analyze the role narrative plays in political discourse.

Matt Anderson's father and their neighbor devise a plan: Have their children marry and merge the two ranches. The only problem is, Rachel Maxwell has stated emphatically that will never happen.

Presents scholarly views on the comparison of the Canadian and American Wests and the various methodologies involved.

In a few short decades before the First World War, Calgary was transformed from a frontier outpost into a complex industrial metropolis. With industrialization there emerged a diverse and equally complex working class. David Bright explores the various levels of class formation and class identity in the city to argue that Calgary's reputation as a prewar centre of labour conservatism is in need of revision.

Prostitution, gunfights, barroom brawls and cattle rustling - while prevailing images from the American old West - have typically been absent from histories of the Canadian frontier. In Cowboys, Gentlemen, and Cattle Thieves Warren Elofson demonstrates that the Canadian frontier was less restrained, law-abiding, and insulated from death and violence than has been believed. He challenges traditional views that Canadian ranching society was a microcosm of the "Old World," arguing that the greatest influence on ranchers and settlers was the need to deal with the frontier environment.

Annie Proulx is one of the most provocative and stylistically innovative writers in America today. She is at her best in the short story format, and the best of these are to be found in her Wyoming trilogy, in which she turns her eye on America's West-both past and present. Yet despite the vast amount of print expended reviewing her books, there has been nothing published on the Wyoming Stories. The Lost Frontier fills this critical void by offering a detailed examination of the key stories in the trilogy: Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), Fine Just the Way it Is (2008). The chapters are arranged according to western archetypes-the Pioneer, Rancher, Cowboy, Indian, and, arguably, the most important character of them all in Proulx's fiction: Landscape. The Lost Frontier offers students a clear sense of the novelist's early life and work, her stylistic influences and the characteristics of her fiction and an understanding of where the Wyoming Stories, and Annie Proulx's work as a whole, fits into traditional and contemporary writing about the American West.

A visually rich, historically epic tale of cattle ranching in southern Alberta, focusing on multi-generational family-owned ranches that are still in existence today. In the 1880s, a group of fledgling cattle ranchers descended on the plains of southern Alberta. They were drawn by the promise of the West, where the grass seemed endless and they could ranch under the arch of the Chinook-the warm Pacific wind that swooped down the eastern slopes of the Rockies to melt the snow and clear the land for year-round grazing. They came with wild optimism, but their ambition was soon tempered by the brutal reality of a frontier land. Ranching under the Arch is a tale of survival, perseverance, and prosperity in the face of struggle, loss, and loneliness. Following over a dozen ranches still in operation that have roots dating to the late nineteenth century, historian D. Larraine Andrews recounts the culture that developed around this unique vocation. These ranches have endured as vibrant enterprises, sometimes into the fifth generation of the same family, sometimes with new faces and dreams to change the focus of the narrative. Drawing from historical archives, diaries, and personal accounts, and illustrated by informative maps, fascinating archival imagery, and stunning contemporary photography, Ranching under the Arch is an epic portrait of the "Cattle Kingdom" and its place in Alberta history.

Farming across Borders uses agricultural history to connect the regional experiences of the American West, northern Mexico, western Canada, and the North American side of the Pacific Rim, now writ large into a broad history of the North American West. Case studies of commodity production and distribution, trans-border agricultural labor, and environmental change unite to reveal new perspectives on a historiography traditionally limited to a regional approach. Sterling Evans has curated nineteen essays to explore the contours of “big” agricultural history. Crops and commodities discussed include wheat, cattle, citrus, pecans, chiles, tomatoes, sugar beets, hops, henequen, and more. Toiling over such crops, of course, were the people of the North American West, and as such, the contributing authors investigate the role of agricultural labor, from braceros and Hutterites to women working in the sorghum fields and countless other groups in between. As Evans concludes, “society as a whole (no matter in what country) often ignores the role of agriculture in the past and the present.” Farming across Borders takes an important step toward cultivating awareness and understanding of the agricultural, economic, and environmental connections that loom over the North American West regardless of lines on a map. In the words of one essay, “we are tied together . . . in a hundred different ways.”