The genetic architecture of the human cerebral cortex

The cerebral cortex underlies our complex cognitive capabilities, yet little is known about the specific genetic loci that influence human cortical structure. To identify genetic variants that affect cortical structure, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of brain magnetic resonance imaging data from 51,665 individuals. We analyzed the surface area and average thickness of the whole cortex and 34 regions with known functional specializations. We identified 199 significant loci and found significant enrichment for loci influencing total surface area within regulatory elements that are active during prenatal cortical development, supporting the radial unit hypothesis. Loci that affect regional surface area cluster near genes in Wnt signaling pathways, which influence progenitor expansion and areal identity. Variation in cortical structure is genetically correlated with cognitive function, Parkinson's disease, insomnia, depression, neuroticism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

The last resort: Tourism, growth, and values in twentieth-century Arizona

In 1950s Arizona, manufacturing and tourism replaced mining and agriculture as the leading sources of revenue in the state. Yet the images of Arizona found in the popular media emphasize rural vistas and rugged individualism. Arizona's success as a consumer commodity is based on the endurance of stylized "frontier" images. The endurance of these images, apart from their popularity with affluent Anglo-American consumers, rests on Arizona's preservation of cultural landscapes associated with the mythic past: the public lands, the Indian Reservations, and the Arizona-Sonora border. Boosters and consumers alike have emphasized the cultural and environmental differentiation that these borders or frontiers are seen as protecting. Since consumer preconceptions of Arizona are as varied as the consumers themselves, this celebration of difference poses difficulties for Arizona's pluralistic society

Frontiers of historical imagination: narrating the European conquest of native America, 1890-1990

The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers.