Beneath the Backbone of the World

Author(s):  
Ryan Hall

For the better part of two centuries, between 1720 and 1877, the Blackfoot (Niitsitapi) people controlled a vast region of what is now the U.S. and Canadian Great Plains. As one of the most expansive and powerful Indigenous groups on the continent, they dominated the northern imperial borderlands of North America. The Blackfoot maintained their control even as their homeland became the site of intense competition between white fur traders, frequent warfare between Indigenous nations, and profound ecological transformation. In an era of violent and wrenching change, Blackfoot people relied on their mastery of their homelands’ unique geography to maintain their way of life. With extensive archival research from both the United States and Canada, Ryan Hall shows for the first time how the Blackfoot used their borderlands position to create one of North America’s most vibrant and lasting Indigenous homelands. This book sheds light on a phase of Native and settler relations that is often elided in conventional interpretations of Western history, and demonstrates how the Blackfoot exercised significant power, resiliency, and persistence in the face of colonial change.

2014 ◽  
Vol 77 (6) ◽  
pp. 1005-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIE A. KURUC ◽  
FRANK MANTHEY ◽  
SENAY SIMSEK ◽  
CHARLENE WOLF-HALL

Ochratoxin A (OTA) is a toxin produced by some Penicillium and Aspergillus species around the world in a variety of food and feed, especially cereal grains, before harvest but primarily during storage. Durum and hard red spring (HRS) wheat samples were collected right after harvest as part of the U.S. regional crop quality survey in both 2011 (n = 560) and 2012 (n = 654) from the upper Great Plains. All samples were analyzed for OTA contamination using high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection. Overall, 2.1% of the samples were positive for OTA. In 2011, OTA was detected in 1.0% of the durum wheat samples but was not found in HRS wheat. In 2012, 8.3 and 1.4% of the durum and HRS wheat samples, respectively, were positive for OTA. Of the 25 samples that had detectable OTA, 3 samples (12%), all of which were durum wheat, had OTA that exceeded 5 ng/g.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Cherry

Around the world, the current political conjuncture is one of profound challenges for constitutionalism and the rule of law. In the United States, the executive has willfully engaged in a prolonged attempt to weaponize the machinery of the state and radicalize public opinion in order to undermine a democratic election. In the European Union, the increasingly authoritarian relationship between the executive and the judiciary in Poland and Hungary is posing the most profound threat to European constitutionalism in decades. In Hong Kong, the Chinese state is actively seeking to undermine legislative and judicial independence in the face of unprecedented pro-democracy mobilizations. In India, Lebanon, Bolivia, and elsewhere mass mobilizations are challenging, and being suppressed in the name of, the rule of law. Here in Canada, the Wet’suwet’en and their supporters, as well as the Tsleil Waututh, Haudenosaunee, L’nu (Mi’kmaq), Inuit, and members of countless other Indigenous nations are contesting the very nature of the rule of law, as they assert Indigenous laws against the law enforcement of the colonial state. Around the world, the use of emergency powers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is also raising profound constitutional concerns.


2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Abstract:The election of Barack Obama as the first African-descended president of the United States in 2008 was greeted with euphoria in the U.S. and around the world, including Africa. Little, however, changed in the substance of U.S.–Africa relations. This underscores the limits of the symbolic politics of race and presidential personalities in the face of the structural imperatives of U.S. power and foreign policy in which African interests remain marginal and subordinate to U.S. interests. The article explores the structural contexts of foreign policy-making in the United States and what might be expected from the second Obama administration.


Author(s):  
Gary Prevost

Cuba in the second decade of the new millennium remains as interesting as ever, commanding a place on the world stage much greater than its small size would indicate. Fidel Castro passed away in November 2016 after 10 years of retirement from public life, during which time his brother Raúl assumed the leadership of the country and led Cuba through some very important political and economic changes that are still being played out. In 2011, a long delayed Communist Party congress mandated the scaling back of government employment and the re-creation of a services sector of the economy dominated by private economic activity. These market mechanisms have threatened the island’s vaunted egalitarianism but have moved the economy forward after years of stagnation. In 2013 Raúl declared the political reform of a two-term limit on the presidency and in 2018 Miguel Diaz-Canal, a man in his fifties, assumed the presidency, signaling a shift of political control to a generation born after the revolution triumphed in 1959. The final results of these political and economic reforms, especially in the face of continued hostility from the United States, are not clear, but if they succeed it will not be the first time that Cuba will be an inspiration to those in the world seeking a successful model of social justice.


1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. A. LEE

This study represents part of a long-term research program to investigate the influence of U.K. accountants on the development of professional accountancy in other parts of the world. It examines the impact of a small group of Scottish chartered accountants who emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Set against a general theory of emigration, the study's main results reveal the significant involvement of this group in the founding and development of U.S. accountancy. The influence is predominantly with respect to public accountancy and its main institutional organizations. Several of the individuals achieved considerable eminence in U.S. public accountancy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-107
Author(s):  
Richard Francis Wilson

This article is a theological-ethical Lenten sermon that attempts to discern the transcendent themes in the narrative of Luke 9-19 with an especial focus upon “setting the face toward Jerusalem” and the subsequent weeping over Jerusalem. The sermon moves from a passage from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying through a series of hermeneutical turns that rely upon insights from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Will Campbell, Augustine, and Paul Tillich with the hope of illuminating what setting of the face on Jerusalem might mean. Tillich’s “eternal now” theme elaborates Augustine’s insight that memory and time reduce the present as, to paraphrase the Saint, that all we have is a present: a present remembered, a present experienced, and a present anticipated. The Gospel is a timeless message applicable to every moment in time and history. The sermon seeks to connect with recent events in the United States and the world that focus upon challenges to the ideals of social justice and political tyranny.


2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-429
Author(s):  
Robert N. McCauley

Abstract Since the late 1950s, the rest of the world has come to use the dollar to an extent that justifies speaking of the dollar’s global domain. The rest of the world denominates much debt in U.S. dollars, extending U.S. monetary policy’s sway. In addition, in outstanding foreign exchange deals, the rest of the world has undertaken to pay still more in U.S. dollars: off-balance-sheet dollar debts buried in footnotes. Consistent with the scale of dollar debt, most of the world economic activity takes place in countries with currencies tied to or relatively stable against the dollar, forming a dollar zone much larger than the euro zone. Even though the dollar assets of the world (minus the United States) exceed dollar liabilities, corporate sector dollar debts seem to make dollar appreciation akin to a global tightening of credit. Since the 1960s, claims that the dollar’s global role suffers from instability and confers great benefits on the U.S. economy have attracted much support. However, evidence that demand for dollars from official reserve managers forces unsustainable U.S. current account or fiscal deficits is not strong. The so-called exorbitant privilege is small or shared. In 2008 and again in 2020, the Federal Reserve demonstrated a willingness and capacity to backstop the global domain of the dollar. Politics could constrain the Fed’s ability to backstop the growing share of the domain of the dollar accounted for by countries that are not on such friendly terms with the U.S.


2019 ◽  
Vol 123 ◽  
pp. 01003
Author(s):  
Volodymyr Bondarenko ◽  
Olena Svietkina ◽  
Kostiantyn Prokopenko ◽  
Baochang Liu

The growth of prices for traditional energy sources prompts Ukraine to seek new approaches to solving energy problems. Today, the country has intensified its work in this direction, in particular, legislative support is being developed and improved, and the investment climate for alternative energy projects is improving. In many countries of the world, it has long been understood how serious and necessary is the development of alternative energy. At present, in the face of various gas contradictions and unstable oil prices, the need for energy carriers is constantly increasing, which makes it necessary to seek the latest solutions to the energy problem. Many leading countries in the world are engaged in the search for alternative sources of energy, one of which is natural gas hydrates. This relatively new resource offers great opportunities both for economic growth and stability of states, and for the development of scientific institutions in this field. Flagships in the study and development of gas-hydrated deposits are the United States, China, Japan and Canada. Along with them should be noted the achievements of scientists in India, EU countries, Ukraine, Russia and Bulgaria.


2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Stocker

Nuclear weapon free zones (NWFZs) were an important development in the history of nuclear nonproliferation efforts. From 1957 through 1968, when the Treaty of Tlatelolco was signed, the United States struggled to develop a policy toward NWFZs in response to efforts around the world to create these zones, including in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Many within the U.S. government initially rejected the idea of NWFZs, viewing them as a threat to U.S. nuclear strategy. However, over time, a preponderance of officials came to see the zones as advantageous, at least in certain areas of the world, particularly Latin America. Still, U.S. policy pertaining to this issue remained conservative and reactive, reflecting the generally higher priority given to security policy than to nuclear nonproliferation.


1992 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Higgs

Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that “war prosperity” prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is that during the war the economy was a huge arsenal in which the well-being of consumers deteriorated. After the war genuine prosperity returned for the first time since 1929.


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