Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Public Inputs And Dynamic Producer Behavior: Endogenous Growth In U.S. Agriculture, Alejandro Onofri, Lilyan Fulginiti

Department of Agricultural Economics: Faculty Publications

This paper is an attempt to understand the impact of public R&D and public infrastructure on the performance of the U.S. agricultural sector during the last part of the twentieth century. A neoclassical Solow growth model is not sufficient for this understanding given the sustained growth performance of the sector. We base our analysis on a well known endogenous growth model, the 'AK model' where nonconvexities are introduced through non-rival inputs. Based on these models and within the dynamic models that rationalize private and public decision making, we have identified three testable hypotheses regarding the aggregate agricultural production technology. They …

Most Popular Downloads -- March 2008

Institutional Repository Information

The month of March 2008 saw a record number of downloads from (73,204) and uploads to (814) the Digital Commons. Of 12,663 available open-access articles, 9,138 were downloaded at least once (72.2%). Overall, articles averaged 5.78 downloads for the month.

The 15 Most-Downloaded, March 2008:

The Probe, Issue 213 – November/December 2000 (3,523 downloads) — Monthly newsletter of the National Animal Damage Control Association. This issue is so amazingly popular because it contains a product review of the “Collarum,” a non-lethal device for capturing coyotes and stray or feral dogs. All those Internet users that you didn’t know were dogs …

Tibet, 228, And Ta-Pa-Ni: Some Lessons For Us All

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

As we struggle to make sense of the maelstrom of violent resistance and its suppression, not to mention cope with our own feelings as concerned observers, it might be useful to consider the following:

*Such outbreaks are invariably sparked by a complex combination of socioeconomic, ethnic, and religious factors.

*The violence is never a case of black and white; it is simply red, with aggressors and their victims far outnumbering any heroes. When tensions boil over, the initial targets tend to be symbols of authority (policemen, officials), but can also include men and women who are stigmatized and persecuted as …

The Anti-Speculation Doctrine And Its Implications For Collaborative Water Management, Sandi Zellmer

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

From Texas tycoon T. Boone Pickens to former corporate conglomerate Enron, grandiose schemes to profit from large-scale, transbasin water transfers have proliferated in the past decade. Reactions range from outrage at the commoditization of this precious resource to support for letting the market and its pricing signals move water to the most efficient use. The long-standing prohibition against speculation in water is an impediment to commoditization and, consequently, water marketing in the western United States. By contrast, acquiring real estate, grain, art, and other types of property in hopes of profiting from future market fluctuations is not at all unusual. …

Increasing Impact Of Scholarly Journal Articles: Practical Strategies Librarians Can Share, Laura Bowering Mullen

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

Researchers are extremely interested in increasing the impact of their individual scholarly work, and may turn to academic librarians for advice and assistance. Academic librarians may find new roles as consultants to authors in methods of self-archiving and citation analysis. Librarians can be proactive in this new role by disseminating current information on all citation analysis tools and metrics, as well as by offering strategies to increase Web visibility of scholarship to interested faculty. Potential authors of journal articles, especially those faculty seeking greater research impact, such as those seeking promotion and tenure, will find practical suggestions from librarians …

Back To Basics: Reviving Ethical Practice In Library Management, Suzanne Milton

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

This paper examines the last twenty years of literature on the subject of organizational ethics. It reflects on the cultural tide and reasserts the need for establishing core values as a basis for management practice. It concludes with steps towards achieving a viable organization.

Old Maids, Policeman, And Social Rejects: Mass Media Representations And Public Perceptions Of Librarians, Maura Seale

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract This paper investigates the relationships between mass media representations of librarians and users’ perceptions and consequent use of librarians and libraries by asking three questions: 1. How are librarians depicted by the mass media? 2. How does the public perceive librarians and how might these views relate to mass media representations? 3. What are the potential effects of these representations and perceptions? Representations of librarians by the mass media generally fall into one of five somewhat discrete categories. Public perceptions of librarians are somewhat different; although librarians are often described in positive terms, there is nearly no awareness as …

Trend Setters: Computers In The Commons Environment, Kim Granath, Sue Samson

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

A multi-year, trend study of public computer usage was conducted to determine use patterns of The University of Montana Mansfield Library public computers before, during, and after the implementation of an Information Center commons environment. Sampling methodology was developed and implemented in 3-year increments beginning in 1999. Analysis provided information for data-driven decisions on staffing patterns, expansion of public computer access, decisions on software and imaging management, and the modification of study design. Results were compared to other library data and underscore the need to embed assessment in academic library services to maintain continuity with the changing needs of …

Perceptions Of Lis [Library And Information Science] Professionals About Digital Libraries In Pakistan: The Pakistani Perspective, Ashfaq Hussain, Khalid Mahmood, Farzana Shafique

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

The concept of the digital library is new in Pakistan. Although LIS professionals in Pakistan are users of digital libraries, setting up local digital libraries is very rare here. This study analyzed the perceptions of Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals in Pakistan concerning digital libraries. Six research questions were asked:

1. What is the concept of the digital library?
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of digital libraries?
3. What is the situation of digital libraries in Pakistan?
4. What are the problems in setting up digital libraries in Pakistan?
5. What are the needs and requirements for setting up digital libraries …

Review Of Welcome To The Homeland: A Journey To The Rural Heart Of America's Conservative Revolution By Brian Mann, Donald Haider-Markel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Brian Mann's Welcome to the Homeland weaves together astute observations of the American political system with a personalized journey into the oonservative base of American politics. Mann's thesis is that the political divisions in America can be best characterized by an urban versus rural divide that has evolved over the past eighty or so years. Mann refers to rural voters as homelanders who have increasingly turned to the Republican Party in pursuit of their version of an America with nineteenth-century traditional values. City folk, meanwhile, are dubbed metros, and their increasingly cosmopolitan, multiethnic, and secular world view has led them …

Review Of The Rise Of The Centennial State: Colorado Territory, 1861-76. By Eugene H. Berwanger, Stephen J. Leonard

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ever since 1866 when Junius E. Wharton published his History of the City of Denver from Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, Coloradans have been churning out histories. Practically every city, town, and railroad has gotten attention, as have a fair sampling of politicians and entrepreneurs. Consequently, today the trees obscure the forest. In The Rise of the Centennial State, Eugene H. Berwanger tends to both trees and forest so well that scholars and students will thank him for at least the next century.

Berwanger's focus on the 1861 to 1876 period makes sense. Colorado's years as …

Notes And News- Spring 2008

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD

2008 NEBRASKA SUMMER WRITERS' CONFERENCE

CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

2008 WILLA CATHER SPRING CONFERENCE & SYMPOSIUM

Review Of Alexander's Bridge. By Willa Cather, Elizabeth Ammons

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Willa Cather tried to disown Alexander's Bridge (1912). In her 1922 preface reprinted in this impressive scholarly edition, she compared her first novel invidiously to her second, O Pioneers! (1913): "The difference in quality in the two books is an illustration of the fact that it is not always easy for the inexperienced writer to distinguish between his own material and that which he would like to make his own." Whereas most of Cather's long fiction would concentrate on the Great Plains, the region she knew best and loved most deeply, this first novel takes place in Boston, England, and …

Review Of Jim Lane: Scoundrel, Statesman, Kansan By Robert Collins, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

No one who ever sat down in a room with James H. Lane or heard him on the platform could doubt that he was a dramatic, mesmerizing personality. Any historian of Bleeding Kansas can testify to his importance. Indeed, he was doubtless the key figure in the affair. Journalists at the time and biographers since have tried to create accounts worthy of Lane himself, but, as Lloyd Lewis pointed out many years ago, he has largely eluded them. Lane remains a "shadowy figure," with many of his instincts and motivations subject to speculation.

A major problem is sources. Robert Collins …

Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 28 / Number 2 / Spring 2008

CONTENTS

EXTENDING THE SECURITY NET: THE IMPACT OF RANGELAND INSURANCE ON RANCHING ECONOMY AND CULTURE

CONTRUCTING A HOME ON THE RANGE: HOMEMAKING IN EARLY-TWENTIETH-CENTURY PLAINS PHOTOGAPH ALBUMS

LIFE AND LANDSCAPES IN THE POST-OFFICE COMMUNITIES OF HOLT COUNTY, NEBRASKA

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of A Fate Worse Than Death: Indian Captivities In The West, 1830-1885 By Gregory And Susan Michno, Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The field of captivity narrative studies has been expanding and evolving since the early 1990s. Thirty academic books have appeared since then, including individual editions, anthologies of narratives, studies of individual captives, and critical and historical monographs. Two aspects of Gregory and Susan Michno's volume contribute to captivity narrative studies in a very limited way: first, it considers the still underexamined captivity narratives from the West and Midwest; and second, like a biographical dictionary, it provides basic information about unfamiliar captives and captivities mostly taken from the narratives themselves. The book also includes maps, illustrations, and various appendices and tables. …

Review Of Muting White Noise: Native American And European American Novel Traditions By James H. Cox, Susan Bernardin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

If, as James Cox argues, "the origin of colonialism is imaginative," and narrative "the force that sets colonialism in motion," then which stories have anchored Eurowestern colonialism? Conversely, what are the enduring stories of survivance and sovereignty that have sustained Native peoples through five hundred and more years of what Gerald Vizenor has termed "the word wars"? Taking as his premise that words create worlds, that stories carry within them "real world implications," Cox focuses his attention on half of his subtitle: Native American Novel Traditions. More specifically, he considers a prominent strand of this tradition: the artful revising and …

Extending The Security Net The Impact Of Rangeland Insurance On Ranching Economy And Culture, Rex J. Rowley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Humans have a complex relationship with the land. At the base of it lies our need for what the land can give: materials for shelter, food and water for sustenance, and scenic beauty for pleasure. But, similar to our interactions with other humans, our relationship with the land is not always perfect. The land can often be our worst enemy. Storm, drought, famine, and pestilence are common words from the historical record representing times when this connection between humans and nature is challenged.

Crop insurance is a relatively recent invention that attempts to level the playing field in our contest …

Review Of Lady Blackrobes: Missionaries In The Heart Of Indian Country By Irene Mahoney, William Furdell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Sister Irene Mahoney has made a valuable contribution to the history of her Ursuline Order's work among Indians in Montana during the latter years of the nineteenth century, the "golden age" of the western missions. Beyond that, she has provided a useful model for historians who might wish to follow her lead eschewing "presentism" in favor of historical context and perspective.

She offers solid information and reasoned insights into the lives and work of the missionaries, noting that their motives may have been "flawed" by today's understanding, but also that there could be no doubt that the Ursulines who came …

Constructing A Home On The Range Homemaking In Early-Twentieth-Century Plains Photograph Albums, Christina E. Dando

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

These lyrics capture a yearning for a place to call home. But what landscape is associated with this longing? For people living near the coasts or mountains of America, it must be hard to imagine longing for a "home on the plains"-but many Americans have had, and still have, a home on the Plains. The stereotypical American image of the Plains is flatness, austerity, emptiness. Not all would consider this an ideal landscape for home. So how did the people who settled on the Plains "view" this landscape? What did they see? How did this land come to be recognized …

Life And Landscapes In The Post-Office Communities Of Holt County, Nebraska, Rebecca A. Buller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Thumb through the pages of a DeLorme gazetteer of any Great Plains state .and you will find small black diamonds, each with its own place-name, scattered throughout the large-scale maps. For those who are familiar with the area, the existence of some of the diamonds, supposedly marking the location of a community, can be confusing since these markers do not represent contemporary towns. Additionally, when you travel country roads in rural areas of the Great Plains you will stumble upon markers that identify a nearby post office, which, also no longer exists. What do these diamonds on the map represent? …

Review Of The Cowboy Girl: The Life Of Caroline Lockhart By John Clayton, Karen Walcott

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The back cover of Cowboy Girl promises the story of Caroline Lockhart, "a woman whose work and life teetered between realism and romanticism, who wrote novels 'like a man' yet ran her businesses and love affairs like a liberated feminist." What John Clayton delivers is the life story of a racist and elitist who spent much of her free time trying to "get" her enemies.

Lockhart's second novel, The Lady Doc (1912), is a book about revenge, literally. Lockhart wrote the novel to attack the character of one of her enemies, Dr. Frances Lane. Its main character, Dr. Emma Harpe, …

Review Of The Cherokee Nation In The Civil War. By Clarissa W. Confer., Brad Agnew

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Because military action in Indian Territory had negligible impact on the Civil War, most accounts of America's deadliest conflict are focused elsewhere. Few Civil War buffs realize the magnitude of death and destruction suffered by the Cherokees and neighboring tribes. Clarissa W. Confer's study of the impact of the conflict on the Cherokee Nation documents and personalizes the tragedy that decimated its people, destroyed the work of a generation following the Trail of Tears, and left a legacy of strife and animosity.

Confer focuses on a single tribe among the so-called Five Civilized Nations which she suggests "encapsulated much of …

Review Of Notebooks Of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Jace Weaver

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the preface to this new edited volume, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn notes that while she learned to read and write English as a small child growing up on South Dakota's Crow Creek reservation, it took "many decades" for her to learn to use the language "efficiently." She writes, "I published nothing until I was forty." That would have been 1970, barely two years into what has become known as the Native American Literary Renaissance.

The Dakota writer and scholar certainly made up for lost time. In the ensuing decades, she has produced a formidable corpus of work, both in terms of …

Review Of Mennonites In Texas: The Quiet In The Land Text And Photographs By Laura L. Camden And Susan Gaetz Duarte., Marilyn E. Lehman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This arresting collection of black-and-white prints, complemented by concise, historically and culturally sensitive narrative text, documents two distinct groups of Mennonites who have found refuge in the Great Plains. As the title and cover photo suggest, a place to live out distinctive non-mainstream lifestyles-apart and in peace-is important to these separatist groups of Mennonites. And the Plains of Texas have provided a fitting refuge. Along with "a series of immigrants fleeing the Old World-Germans, Czechs, Russians, Irish, and more," as former governor and Texas icon Ann Richards writes in the preface, these SwissGerman and German-Russian religious ethnic groups have found …

Review Of Cowtown Wichita And The Wild, Wicked West. By Stan Hoig, Robin C. Henry

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Stan Hoig traces the development of Wichita, Kansas, from a nexus of Native American trading and hunting to a fledgling frontier town, to a crossroads of both the cattle and railroad industries, to an emerging modern city at the close of the nineteenth century. Poised at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers, Wichita's location, Hoig notes, made it ideal for trade and interaction among Indians, military, and cattlemen, and immigrant, African American, and Anglo settlers, all of whom contributed to the city's history.

In his introduction, Hoig states his intention is not to place his narrative into …

Review Of Migrations: New Directions In Native American Art. Edited By Marjorie Devon, Janet Catherine Berlo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Tamarind Institute is a well-known and well-respected venue where contemporary artists collaborate with master printmakers to realize their work in multiples, principally in limited edition lithography. In the decades since its establishment in New Mexico in 1970, artists as diverse as Elaine de Kooning, Ed Ruscha, Fritz Scholder, Judy Chicago, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, James Havard, and Jose Bedia have been in residence. As the above sample indicates, Native artists have long been a part of the collaborative mix.

This volume considers the work of six Native artists who collaborated with master printmakers to produce new work: Steven Deo (Creek), …

Review Of Hard Passage: A Mennonite Family's Long Journey From Russia To Canada By Arthur Kroeger, Royden Loewen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Hard Passage is an intelligent, innovative, and eloquently written family history. It recounts the last years of Heinrich and Helena Kroeger's life in Russia, upheaval and exile in the Soviet Union, and their migration to and settlement in Alberta. It also recounts the eventual acculturation of the Kroegers' five sons and a daughter to middle-class, liberal Canadian life. The author, Arthur Kroeger, was one of the sons and the one who was able to attend university-the University of Alberta and then Oxford; he subsequently developed a successful career in Canada's foreign service, earned multiple appointments as federal deputy minister, and …

Review Of After Lewis & Clark: The Forces Of Change, 1806-1871. By Gary Allen Hood, Suzan Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the late 1940s, the wealthy Tulsa oilman Thomas Gilcrease collected western art he believed best told the story of America. His unwavering determination led him to collect more than 100,000 objects, which became the founding collection of the Gilcrease Museum.

This beautifully designed volume, which accompanied an exhibition at the Gilcrease in 2006, features the work from the museum's collection by well-known and lesser-known artists who were lured west following Lewis and Clark's epochal expedition, eager to portray the land and peoples of the exotic terra incognita that was now in America.

While this story of exploration and discovery …

Review Of Beyond The Missouri: The Story Of The American West By Richard W. Etulain, Julie Courtwright

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his Beyond the Missouri: The Story of the American West, Richard Etulain, a self-proclaimed "radical middler," proposes to provide a "center-of-the-road book" that tells of the complex and changeable American West without allowing heroes and villains to overwhelm the narrative. This he does remarkably well. Etulain places his text within a school of Western history, recently emerged, that emphasizes complexity over the old frontier thesis and over the more recent conquest-oriented New Western histories.

Writing a balanced history from the prehistoric landscape to the post-1980s, Etulain takes a broad view of his topic, skillfully weaving a story that …