America’s First Interstate—The National Road and its Reach Toward St. Clair County, Illinois

The National Road was to span from Maryland to the Mississippi River, but never made it—in part due to a political battle over the location of the new Illinois state capital in the 1830s

Revisiting Progressive Era Lessons for Understanding Today

This essay reviews four books on the Progressive Era, and draws lessons from those books to help explain contemporary political events. It explores topics such as proportional representation, efficiency of service delivery, business-driven reforms, and voter heterogeneity. All of these books provide a meaningful understanding of cities in the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s) and beyond. However, the issues and lessons from a century ago still challenge us today, so we may be in a new “Gilded Age” and headed toward yet another era of progressivism

Revisiting Progressive Era Lessons for Understanding Today

This essay reviews four books on the Progressive Era, and draws lessons from those books to help explain contemporary political events. It explores topics such as proportional representation, efficiency of service delivery, business-driven reforms, and voter heterogeneity. All of these books provide a meaningful understanding of cities in the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s) and beyond. However, the issues and lessons from a century ago still challenge us today, so we may be in a new “Gilded Age” and headed toward yet another era of progressivism

St. Louis Currents: The Bi-State Region after a Century of Planning

This collection of essays by leading scholars examines urban issues facing the St. Louis region in the 2010 era, which is 100 years after the first city plan in the US in 1907

St. Louis Currents: The Fifth Edition

Includes a history of African American entertainment in St. Louis Metro East and a history of Homer G. Phillips Hospital, among the current socio-economic issues facing St. Louis metropolitan area, Missouri and Illinois

A City Plan for St. Louis 1907

This is the 1907 city plan. It was the first comprehensive (not just downtown) city plan in the United States. This copy was provided from the Andrew J. Theising collection to accompany the digital version of St. Louis Currents: The Bi-State Region after a Century of Planning in 2009

Invading the Occupied Niche: How a Parasitic Copepod of Introduced Oysters Can Expel a Congener From Native Mussels

In species introductions, non-native species are often confronted with new niches occupied by more specialized natives, and for introduced parasites this conflict can be amplified because they also face novel hosts. Despite these obstacles, invasions of introduced parasites occur frequently, but the mechanisms that facilitate parasite invasion success are only rarely explored. Here, we investigated how the parasitic copepod Mytilicola orientalis, that recently spilled over from its principal host - the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas, managed to invade the niche of blue mussel Mytilus edulis intestines, which is densely occupied by its specialist congener, Mytilicola intestinalis. From field observations demonstrating invasion dynamics in nature, we designed a series of experiments addressing potential mechanisms facilitating a successful occupation of the new niche. As expected the specialist M. intestinalis can only infect mussel hosts, but displayed higher infection success there than M. orientalis in both principal host species combined. In the absence of direct competitive interactions M. orientalis compensated its lower infection success (1) by recurrent spill-over from its high-fitness reservoir oyster host, and (2) by active aggregation interference enhancing its own mating success while limiting that of M. intestinalis. The introduced parasite could thus avoid direct competition by changing its own epidemiology and indirectly decreasing the reproductive success of its competitor in the new host. Such mechanisms outside of direct competition have seldom been considered, but are crucial to understand invasion success, parasite host range and community assembly in the context of species introductions

Analysis and functional classification of transcripts from the nematode Meloidogyne incognita

BACKGROUND: Plant parasitic nematodes are major pathogens of most crops. Molecular characterization of these species as well as the development of new techniques for control can benefit from genomic approaches. As an entrée to characterizing plant parasitic nematode genomes, we analyzed 5,700 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from second-stage larvae (L2) of the root-knot nematode Meloidogyne incognita. RESULTS: From these, 1,625 EST clusters were formed and classified by function using the Gene Ontology (GO) hierarchy and the Kyoto KEGG database. L2 larvae, which represent the infective stage of the life cycle before plant invasion, express a diverse array of ligand-binding proteins and abundant cytoskeletal proteins. L2 are structurally similar to Caenorhabditis elegans dauer larva and the presence of transcripts encoding glyoxylate pathway enzymes in the M. incognita clusters suggests that root-knot nematode larvae metabolize lipid stores while in search of a host. Homology to other species was observed in 79% of translated cluster sequences, with the C. elegans genome providing more information than any other source. In addition to identifying putative nematode-specific and Tylenchida-specific genes, sequencing revealed previously uncharacterized horizontal gene transfer candidates in Meloidogyne with high identity to rhizobacterial genes including homologs of nodL acetyltransferase and novel cellulases. CONCLUSIONS: With sequencing from plant parasitic nematodes accelerating, the approaches to transcript characterization described here can be applied to more extensive datasets and also provide a foundation for more complex genome analyses

Observations on the changing language of accounting

The meaning of words can change over time. In addition, new words may enter a language, sometimes replacing other words. This article extends prior literature on language change in accounting by drawing to a larger extent on theories from linguistics, and by placing greater emphasis on mechanisms of and motivations for change. Particular emphasis is placed on the need to verbalize new concepts, and sociocultural change. The latter is illustrated with examples from the development of accounting as an occupational interest group, and the adoption of Anglo-American accounting terminology and culture. The article concludes that language change in accounting, including transmission between languages and cultures, can inform accounting historians about the transfer of technical developments, as well as about socio-economic, political or ideological processes, power relationships, and the importance of terminology in jurisdictional disputes

Sequencing of the Sea Lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) Genome Provides Insights into Vertebrate Evolution

Lampreys are representatives of an ancient vertebrate lineage that diverged from our own ∼500 million years ago. By virtue of this deeply shared ancestry, the sea lamprey (P. marinus) genome is uniquely poised to provide insight into the ancestry of vertebrate genomes and the underlying principles of vertebrate biology. Here, we present the first lamprey whole-genome sequence and assembly. We note challenges faced owing to its high content of repetitive elements and GC bases, as well as the absence of broad-scale sequence information from closely related species. Analyses of the assembly indicate that two whole-genome duplications likely occurred before the divergence of ancestral lamprey and gnathostome lineages. Moreover, the results help define key evolutionary events within vertebrate lineages, including the origin of myelin-associated proteins and the development of appendages. The lamprey genome provides an important resource for reconstructing vertebrate origins and the evolutionary events that have shaped the genomes of extant organisms