Frontiers

Challenging Frontiers: The Canadian West is a multidisciplinary study using critical essays as well as creative writing to explore the conceptions of the "West," both past and present. Considering topics such as ranching, immigration, art and architecture, as well as globalization and the spread of technology, these articles inform the reader of the historical frontier and its mythology, while also challenging and reassessing conventional analysis.

Why has the flow of big, world-changing ideas slowed down? A provocative look at what happens next at the frontiers of human knowledge. The history of humanity is the history of big ideas that expand our frontiers—from the wheel to space flight, cave painting to the massively multiplayer game, monotheistic religion to quantum theory. And yet for the past few decades, apart from a rush of new gadgets and the explosion of digital technology, world-changing ideas have been harder to come by. Since the 1970s, big ideas have happened incrementally—recycled, focused in narrow bands of innovation. In this provocative book, Michael Bhaskar looks at why the flow of big, world-changing ideas has slowed, and what this means for the future. Bhaskar argues that the challenge at the frontiers of knowledge has arisen not because we are unimaginative and bad at realizing big ideas but because we have already pushed so far. If we compare the world of our great-great-great-grandparents to ours today, we can see how a series of transformative ideas revolutionized almost everything in just a century and a half. But recently, because of short-termism, risk aversion, and fractious decision making, we have built a cautious, unimaginative world. Bhaskar shows how we can start to expand the frontier again by thinking big—embarking on the next Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Apollo mission—and embracing change.

Owing to their unique magnetic, phosphorescent, and catalytic properties, rare earths are the elements that make possible teverything from the miniaturization of electronics, to the enabling of green energy and medical technologies, to supporting essential telecommunications and defense systems. An iPhone uses eight rare earths for everything from its colored screen, to its speakers, to the miniaturization of the phone?s circuitry. On the periodic table rare earth elements comprise a set of seventeen chemical elements (the fifteen lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium). There would be no Pokémon Go without rare earths. Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography. Klinger looks historically and geographically at the ways rare earth elements in three discrete but representative and contested sites are given meaning.

Cameron Strang takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the natural world in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South. People often dismissed by starched northeasterners as nonintellectuals--Indian sages, African slaves, Spanish officials, Irishmen on the make, clearers of land and drivers of men--were also scientific observers, gatherers, organizers, and reporters. Skulls and stems, birds and bugs, rocks and maps, tall tales and fertile hypotheses came from them. They collected, described, and sent the objects that scientists gazed on and interpreted in polite Philadelphia. They made knowledge. Frontiers of Science offers a new framework for approaching American intellectual history, one that transcends political and cultural boundaries and reveals persistence across the colonial and national eras. The pursuit of knowledge in the United States did not cohere around democratic politics or the influence of liberty. It was, as in other empires, divided by multiple loyalties and identities, organized through contested hierarchies of ethnicity and place, and reliant on violence. By discovering the lost intellectual history of one region, Strang shows us how to recover a continent for science.

A transformative approach to public health, political economy and social care in the wake of Covid-19

Unsettled Frontiers provides a fresh view of how resource frontiers evolve over time. Since the French colonial era, the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands have witnessed successive waves of market integration, migration, and disruption. The region has been reinvented and depleted as new commodities are exploited and transplanted: from vast French rubber plantations to the enforced collectivization of the Khmer Rouge; from intensive timber extraction to contemporary crop booms. The volatility that follows these changes has often proved challenging to govern. Sango Mahanty explores the role of migration, land claiming, and expansive social and material networks in these transitions, which result in an unsettled frontier, always in flux, where communities continually strive for security within ruptured landscapes.

Historians of the American West, perhaps inspired by NAFTA and Internet communication, are expanding their intellectual horizons across borders north and south. This collection of essays functions as a how-to guide to comparative frontier research in the Americas. Frontiers specialist Richard W. Slatta presents topics, techniques, and methods that will intrigue social science professionals and western history buffs alike as he explores the frontiers of North and South America from Spanish colonial days into the twentieth century. The always popular cowboy is joined by the fascinating gaucho, llanero, vaquero, and charro as Slatta compares their work techniques, roundups, songs, tack, lingo, equestrian culture, and vices. We visit saloons and pulperias as well as plains and pampas, and Slatta expertly compares clothing, weather, terrain, diets, alcoholic beverages, card games, and military tactics. From primary records we learn how Europeans, Native Americans, and African Americans became the ranch hands, cowmen, and buckaroos of the Americas, and why their dependence on the ranch cattle industry kept them bachelors and landless peons.