In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America

Review of: "In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America" by Wilson J. Warren

The Yards, A Way of Life: A Story of the Sioux City Stockyards

Review of: "The Yards, a Way of Life: A Story of the Sioux City Stockyards," by Marcia Poole

Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America

Review of: Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America, by J. L. Anderso

In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America

Review of: "In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America" by Wilson J. Warren

Farmers vs. Wage Earners: Organized Labor in Kansas, 1860–1960

Review of: "Farmers vs. Wage Earners: Organized Labor in Kansas, 1860–1960," by R. Alton Lee

Crossing the Educational Rubicon without the TAH: Collaboration among University and Secondary-Level History Educators

In April 2011, Congress slashed funding for a majority of programs tied to education. Several programs related to professional development for teachers did not survive. While cut severely—from $119 million in Fiscal Year 2010 to$46 million (a loss of $73 million or 61% of its funding)—Teaching American History (TAH) grants lived, albeit by their fingertips, another day. Yet, given the economic challenges the United States faces and what appear to be prevailing attitudes in regard to social services and teacher development, it has become clear that history educators cannot rely on federal funding to support efforts to improve the teaching of history. Nevertheless, meaningful collaboration among K-12 teachers and academic and public historians continues to be vital. This essay describes in detail a current collaborative relationship between a history department and high school in western Michigan. Focusing specifically on four levels of interlocking benefits of collaboration—benefits for high school teachers, for teaching candidates, for high school students, and for historians—the essay documents the strengths of this collaborative effort and notes areas where purposeful concentration and improvement might benefit all parties. Significantly, the relationship examined here, between the history department at Western Michigan University (WMU) and Portage Central High School (PCHS), developed without a promise or expectation of financial incentives. It demonstrates that collaboration, while challenging, can survive in the twenty-first century without funding from a TAH grant

454-Pyrosequencing: A Molecular Battiscope for Freshwater Viral Ecology

Viruses, the most abundant biological entities on the planet, are capable of infecting organisms from all three branches of life, although the majority infect bacteria where the greatest degree of cellular diversity lies. However, the characterization and assessment of viral diversity in natural environments is only beginning to become a possibility. Through the development of a novel technique for the harvest of viral DNA and the application of 454 pyrosequencing, a snapshot of the diversity of the DNA viruses harvested from a standing pond on a cattle farm has been obtained. A high abundance of viral genotypes (785) were present within the virome. The absolute numbers of lambdoid and Shiga toxin (Stx) encoding phages detected suggested that the depth of sequencing had enabled recovery of only ca. 8% of the total virus population, numbers that agreed within less than an order of magnitude with predictions made by rarefaction analysis. The most abundant viral genotypes in the pond were bacteriophages (93.7%). The predominant viral genotypes infecting higher life forms found in association with the farm were pathogens that cause disease in cattle and humans, e.g. members of the Herpesviridae. The techniques and analysis described here provide a fresh approach to the monitoring of viral populations in the aquatic environment, with the potential to become integral to the development of risk analysis tools for monitoring the dissemination of viral agents of animal, plant and human diseases