The Blue Flower and the Account Book

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Anne F. Hyde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
American West ◽  
Fur Trade ◽  
Blue Flower ◽  
Racial Category ◽  
North American West ◽  
Mixed Blood ◽  
Anglo American

This essay, a revised version of the August 2015 talk, examines the story of two mixed-blood women, indigenous and Anglo American, who lived in the fur trade North American West. The essay examines a racial category, mixed blood or “half-breed” and considers the challenges for people who lived in and used that category in the nineteenth century. The essay illuminates the challenges of using different kinds of personal records to understand how these nineteenth-century women might have thought about identity, a word they never would have used.

Styles of Sovereignty: Parataxis, Settler–Indigenous Difference, and the Transnationalisms of the Great Basin

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Timothy Donahue
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Great Basin ◽  
North American ◽  
American West ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
North American West ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty

Abstract This essay shows how literary parataxis serves as an engine of transnational thought in the nineteenth-century North American West. I focus, in particular, on how Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) and Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes (1883) employ paratactic forms to present the Great Basin as a space where no single nation rules as sovereign. Amidst US settler colonialism, I argue, such paratactic aesthetics prove politically double-edged. While parataxis’ tendency to destabilize hierarchies allows the form to undermine US claims to sovereignty, the same deconstructive proclivity can occlude Indigenous political distinction and historical priority. Twain and Winnemucca respond to this aesthetic scenario differently, and their writing, consequently, presents competing conceptions of transnationalism. Twain’s unchecked embrace of paratactic forms yields a transnational vision whose emphasis on social movement and mixture proves antithetical to Indigenous sovereignty. Winnemucca, by contrast, employs a modulated parataxis in order to locate the transnational in collisions of countervailing polities and thereby better represents the political standing and agency of the Paiute people. Winnemucca’s accounts of her work as a translator, I further argue, suggest that amidst such collisions, political sovereignty takes a distinctive shape, as a relational and comparative project.

Scots in the North American West, 1790-1917

2002 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 1514
Author(s):  
J. M. Bumsted ◽  
Ferenc Morton Szasz
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
American West ◽  
North American West ◽  
The North

scholarly journals Changes in Winter Atmospheric Rivers along the North American West Coast in CMIP5 Climate Models

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Warner ◽  
Clifford F. Mass ◽  
Eric P. Salathé
Keyword(s):  
Water Vapor ◽  
North American ◽  
West Coast ◽  
American West ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Water Vapor Transport ◽  
The West ◽  
North American West ◽  
The North ◽  
Extreme Precipitation Events

Abstract Most extreme precipitation events that occur along the North American west coast are associated with winter atmospheric river (AR) events. Global climate models have sufficient resolution to simulate synoptic features associated with AR events, such as high values of vertically integrated water vapor transport (IVT) approaching the coast. From phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), 10 simulations are used to identify changes in ARs impacting the west coast of North America between historical (1970–99) and end-of-century (2070–99) runs, using representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5. The most extreme ARs are identified in both time periods by the 99th percentile of IVT days along a north–south transect offshore of the coast. Integrated water vapor (IWV) and IVT are predicted to increase, while lower-tropospheric winds change little. Winter mean precipitation along the west coast increases by 11%–18% [from 4% to 6% (°C)−1], while precipitation on extreme IVT days increases by 15%–39% [from 5% to 19% (°C)−1]. The frequency of IVT days above the historical 99th percentile threshold increases as much as 290% by the end of this century.

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