Reviews of \u3ci\u3eHunger for the Wild: America\u27s Obsession with the Untamed West\u3c/i\u3e By Michael L. Johnson and \u3ci\u3eFrontiers: A Short History of the American West\u3c/i\u3e By Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher

Whither the grand narrative in historical scholarship? For years, critics have cautioned us that narratives are, in Hayden White\u27s words, little more than a form of emplotment whose order and coherence oversimplify the inherent messiness of the past. Yet the inconvenient fact remains that human beings are unparalleled storytelling creatures. Whether or not events occur in a narrative format, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, we tend to perceive them in this way-and to relate them in this structure to one another. Still, not all narratives are created equal. In keeping with the postmodern turn, historians have been increasingly drawn of late to quirky, eccentric tales, rendered more often than not as microhistories or in other, novel genres. Such stories find their value less in their typicality than in their atypicality and their ensuing ability to disrupt conventional interpretations of the past. Far rarer-and more suspect-is the attempt to craft a master narrative that presents an authoritative overview of a subject or time period. Nevertheless, there remain those scholars bold enough to propose the broad, sweeping master narrative. Western history seems particularly prone to this impulse. After all, what was Frederick Jackson Turner if not the author of perhaps the most successful master narrative in all of American history? Even the New Western History, despite its sharp critique of Turner, remained wedded to the master narrative ideal, merely situating conquest or aridity or markets as the great new story of the West. In the decades since the bold statements of Patty Limerick\u27s Legacy of Conquest (1987) and Richard White\u27s It\u27s Your Misfortune and None of My Own (1991), however, few have taken up the challenge of trying to craft a new Western history master narrative. The recent arrival of two ambitious works doing precisely that by senior scholars of the West therefore marks an important moment, one that allows us to revisit once again the question of narrative and Western history

Reviews of \u3ci\u3eHunger for the Wild: America\u27s Obsession with the Untamed West\u3c/i\u3e By Michael L. Johnson and \u3ci\u3eFrontiers: A Short History of the American West\u3c/i\u3e By Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher

Whither the grand narrative in historical scholarship? For years, critics have cautioned us that narratives are, in Hayden White\u27s words, little more than a form of emplotment whose order and coherence oversimplify the inherent messiness of the past. Yet the inconvenient fact remains that human beings are unparalleled storytelling creatures. Whether or not events occur in a narrative format, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, we tend to perceive them in this way-and to relate them in this structure to one another. Still, not all narratives are created equal. In keeping with the postmodern turn, historians have been increasingly drawn of late to quirky, eccentric tales, rendered more often than not as microhistories or in other, novel genres. Such stories find their value less in their typicality than in their atypicality and their ensuing ability to disrupt conventional interpretations of the past. Far rarer-and more suspect-is the attempt to craft a master narrative that presents an authoritative overview of a subject or time period. Nevertheless, there remain those scholars bold enough to propose the broad, sweeping master narrative. Western history seems particularly prone to this impulse. After all, what was Frederick Jackson Turner if not the author of perhaps the most successful master narrative in all of American history? Even the New Western History, despite its sharp critique of Turner, remained wedded to the master narrative ideal, merely situating conquest or aridity or markets as the great new story of the West. In the decades since the bold statements of Patty Limerick\u27s Legacy of Conquest (1987) and Richard White\u27s It\u27s Your Misfortune and None of My Own (1991), however, few have taken up the challenge of trying to craft a new Western history master narrative. The recent arrival of two ambitious works doing precisely that by senior scholars of the West therefore marks an important moment, one that allows us to revisit once again the question of narrative and Western history

The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries

Review of: The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries. Leopold, Aldo

The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries

Review of: The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations and Commentaries. Leopold, Aldo

CAST constraints on the axion-electron coupling

In non-hadronic axion models, which have a tree-level axion-electron interaction, the Sun produces a strong axion flux by bremsstrahlung, Compton scattering, and axiorecombination, the "BCA processes." Based on a new calculation of this flux, including for the first time axio-recombination, we derive limits on the axion-electron Yukawa coupling gae and axion-photon interaction strength ga using the CAST phase-I data (vacuum phase). For ma <~ 10 meV/c2 we find ga gae < 8.1 × 10−23 GeV−1 at 95% CL. We stress that a next-generation axion helioscope such as the proposed IAXO could push this sensitivity into a range beyond stellar energy-loss limits and test the hypothesis that white-dwarf cooling is dominated by axion emission

Last millennium northern hemisphere summer temperatures from tree rings: Part I: The long term context

Large-scale millennial length Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature reconstructions have been progressively improved over the last 20 years as new datasets have been developed. This paper, and its companion (Part II, Anchukaitis et al. in prep), details the latest tree-ring (TR) based NH land air temperature reconstruction from a temporal and spatial perspective. This work is the first product of a consortium called N-TREND (Northern Hemisphere Tree-Ring Network Development) which brings together dendroclimatologists to identify a collective strategy for improving large-scale summer temperature reconstructions. The new reconstruction, N-TREND2015, utilises 54 records, a significant expansion compared with previous TR studies, and yields an improved reconstruction with stronger statistical calibration metrics. N-TREND2015 is relatively insensitive to the compositing method and spatial weighting used and validation metrics indicate that the new record portrays reasonable coherence with large scale summer temperatures and is robust at all time-scales from 918 to 2004 where at least 3 TR records exist from each major continental mass. N-TREND2015 indicates a longer and warmer medieval period (∼900–1170) than portrayed by previous TR NH reconstructions and by the CMIP5 model ensemble, but with better overall agreement between records for the last 600 years. Future dendroclimatic projects should focus on developing new long records from data-sparse regions such as North America and eastern Eurasia as well as ensuring the measurement of parameters related to latewood density to complement ring-width records which can improve local based calibration substantially

Science Perspectives on the CCSP Strategic Plan

Scientists offer comments on the Climate Change Science Program Strategic Pla

Conceptual Art

Providing a re-examination of what Osborne identifies as a major turning point in contemporary art, this monograph takes a chronological and stylistic look at conceptual art from its “pre-history” (1950-1960) to contemporary practices that use conceptual strategies. Osborne surveys the development of the movement in relation to the social, cultural and political contexts within which it evolved. With extended captions, key works are compiled according to ten themes that also serve to present a collection of critical texts, artists’ statements, interviews and commentaries. Includes biographical notes on artists (6 p.) and authors (2 p.), a bibliography (2 p.) and an onomastic index (4 p.) Circa 150 bibl. ref