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Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio State University, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-59).

in English Germany has a long history of political fragmentation, with local and regional identities playing a crucial role in the making of Germanhood. In the last decades, historical scholarship has depicted the process of rallying local identities to the national cause. Dealing with this issue is essential because it shows the variety of the concept of Heimat [home or local homeland]1 in various territories of imperial Germany. Nevertheless, this process on the local level was not yet thoroughly examined in the case of the Giant Mountains' region before the First World War. Due to to its geographical position and the strong local cohesion shaping the homeland, this case study enables to further such historical researches, which often concentrates on the German historical regions, and not on the study of a local territory shaped by tourism. The object of the following thesis is to question the meanings assigned to the notion of Heimat in the Silesian Giant Mountains for the local activists and inhabitants, and thus, to write the history of the construction of Heimat. By using a methodology based upon different disciplines (respectively, the French "géohistoire", literary theory, sociology), the research analyses many phenomena attached to other and recent historiographic domains, such as...

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Palaeobotanical records of Holocene climate change in the southern Coast Mountains identify a cooler/wetter Neoglacial period subsequent to 6600 BP. Geomorphic evidence of alpine glacier advance suggests that there were three distinct cooler/wetter periods during the Neoglacial, but this pattern has not been identified in palaeobotanical studies. By careful selection of a sensitive alpine site this thesis has recognised this structure in a palynological record of Neoglacial climate. This continuous record of Neoglacial climate which has the same basis as records of early Holocene climate (i.e. palynological) and hence allows more direct comparisons of the two periods. Pollen spectra, conifer needle macrofossils, organic matter content, and magnetic susceptibility were assessed for a 4800 year continuous sequence of sediment from an alpine lake. Calibration of the Picea/Pinus pollen ratio by using an altitudinal transect of surface pollen samples allowed partial quantification of shifts in treeline. Treeline at the site was at least 85 m above the present level from 4800-3800 BP, suggesting that summer temperatures were at least 0.6°C above the present. High treeline until 3800 BP indicates a relatively late date for the Hypsithermal/Neoglacial transition at this site. Alternatively, the apparent complexity of this transition in the Coast Mountains may be due to difficulties of separating temperature and precipitation signals in many climatic records. Treeline declined to near present levels by 2500 BP and was lower than present from 2500-1500 BP and from 1200 BP until close to the present. Estimates of equilibrium line altitude depression for Coast Mountain glaciers during the Little Ice Age suggest that these periods of lower treeline were due to a cooling of up to 0.8°C. During the last 5000 years the Southern Coast Mountains have experienced fluctuations on the order of 1.5°C. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

This study examines the Uralian iron and steel industry distribution, its changes through time and the reasons for these changes. At present, this is one of the important iron and steel producing regions in the world. At one time it was the most important. In order to obtain the information on which to base this study, it was necessary to resort mainly to published materials, largely Soviet. The American Iron and Steel Institute also supplied some non-published material. In order to collect the published materials it was necessary to make use of the libraries of the University of British Columbia the University of Washington and the Geographical Branch of the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys in Ottawa. Other Ottawa libraries, the personal collections of Dr. Hooson and Dr. Jackson, various bookstores, notably Kamkin's bookstore in Washington, D. C, the bookstore at the United Nations in New York and Davis bookstore in Montreal, were also very useful. The primary problem when conducting a study of this nature is the collecting of sufficient relevant materials for a balanced appraisal of the phenomena being examined. A knowledge of Russian is mandatory and an acquaintance with French is also useful. The information gathered was organized into tables and plotted on maps. These bodies of data were then described and analyzed. Analysis of the Uralian iron and steel industry indicated that this industry was initially essentially located on the iron ore supply. But none of the major plants are at present located on iron ore resources that are large enough to amortize the plant. Also the major plants are on the whole, based on low quality ores. The major economic advantage of the Uralian iron and steel industry production is its association with the Eastern coal supplies. But this advantage is common to all Eastern plants. Expansion at Magnitogorsk will result in more expensive production than the construction of new plants would, even though Magnitogorsk is the most efficient Uralian plant. The Urals is well located for the introduction of natural gas into its metallurgy. This is proceeding. Nevertheless, the use of natural gas is only a partial solution to the fuel problem because it can not completely replace coke. Therefore, the Urals will have to continue bringing in coking coal over great distances. The de-emphasis of iron and steel announced in 1962 will help the Urals to perpetuate its present status as a producer (it supplies about one-third of the Soviet production). On the other hand, no significant increase in its relative importance can be expected. The bulk of the Uralian iron and steel production is located in the Eastern Urals, more particularly in the South Eastern Urals. In 1956, the three largest plants: Magnitogorsk and Chelyabinsk in the South Eastern Urals, and Nizhne Tagil'sk in the Central Urals produced 77 per cent of the Uralian pig iron and 67 per cent of the steel smelted. This has not significantly changed subsequently. Considerable expansion, based on Kachkanar ores, is planned for Nizhne Tagil'sk. But, all things considered, most of the expansion will be located at the major South Uralian plants. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

Lake sediments have been identified as an alternative to contemporary stream monitoring to establish catchment sediment yields and infer erosion rates. This is due primarily to the longer time period over which the former is based, which makes established yields and rates more representative of means or trends in sedimentation. Studies using lake sediments to establish sediment yields have generally assumed that all the sediment contained within a lake is derived from erosion of the catchment under investigation. This study undermines this assumption by constructing a comprehensive lake sediment budget to asses the relative contributions from various sources. Late Holocene (the last 2350 years) rates of sediment yield and erosion are established for 3 small (<1 km²) catchments that straddle timberline (1620 - 1850 m above sea level) in the Coast Mountains of British Columbia. Due to the temporal and spatial variability of sedimentation in lakes, sediment cores for each lake were taken using a multiple-core approach. Chronology was established by the presence of a dated tephra layer. Once the cores were extracted, corrections were made for sediment derived from aquatic productivity (organic matter and biogenic silica), regional aeolian dust input, the erosion of lake banks and for outflow losses. These sources of sediment could account for between 55 and 99% of the sediment contained within the 3 lakes. Lake trap efficiency ranges from low to >70%. Once corrected, estimates of sediment yield range from 4 and 244 kg km⁻²yr⁻¹. The rate of regional aeolian deposition indicates that, in certain areas, these catchments are undergoing net deposition and not net erosion. The implications for lake sediment-based sediment yields and erosion rates are examined. When placed in a regional context sediment yields are more than 1 order of magnitude lower than larger scale basins due to changes in sediment storage. The spatial and temporal representativeness of the data are also evaluated. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

The research reported here constitutes an investigation into features of internal ordering of stories narrated in natural conversation. Following the work of Sacks, Schegloff and other sociological analysts of conversational structure, this report focuses on methodical ways in which utterances are interpretable by reference to, e.g., sequential placement. An existing literature on the social organization of the telling of jokes and stories suggests that slots designed for utterance-types can be analytically identified. The present study aims to show that there is an identifiable position, story closing, which provides for orderly expectations concerning the items that may be found in such a location. The report argues that there are two independently describeable organizations which structure naturally occuring stories: the course-of-action framework and an organization oriented to giving a grounding identity to the story's teller. The former is concerned with the series of connected, temporally unfolding events, marked by beginning and end, which the story proposes to represent by a sequence of utterances. In that story-tellers exhibit selectivity and coherence, it is evident that such stories are formulated from the point of view of the character that teller allocates to self within the narration. The latter organization provides for the story's recipients a "members adequate sociological explanation" of the teller's character's point of view. It does so by assigning to teller's character a social identity which is the locus of commonly known, socially organized motives and attitudes. The story closing is a sequential position that closes off the course-of-action from the teller's character's point of view. The expectation that such an item will fill that slot can be used by the story's recipients to decide among different possible interpretations of a story's last utterance. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

A more than 2000 m thick sequence of Hadrynian to Paleozoic Snowshoe Group metasedimentary rocks of the Omineca Belt (OMB) is exposed near Niagara Peak in the western Cariboo Mountains, central British Columbia. This package contains the northern extremity of the Shuswap Metamorphic Complex and lies 30 km northeast of the accretionary boundary with Intermontane Belt (IMB) Mesozoic sedimentary and volcanic rocks (Quesnellia Terrane) and Upper Paleozoic (?) ophiolitic and sedimentary rocks (Slide Mountain Terrane). Four phases of folding (D₁-D₄) are recognized. D₁ consists of isoclinal folds and transposed compositional layering. D₂ commonly forms southwest verging, open to close folds with subhorizontal axes and moderately northeast dipping axial surfaces. In the eastern part of the area, divergent fanning of D₂ axial surfaces and a reversal of vergence direction occur about a map-scale synform characterized by greater strain, bimodal fold style and a locally penetrative axial planar cleavage. D₃ and D₄ form orthogonal upright open buckles with respective northwest and northeast trending axes. Steeply dipping normal and minor reverse faults crosscut all fold structures, displaying minor offsets. Prograde regional metamorphism reached greenschist grade late in D₁. Staurolite and kyanite growth accompanied D₂, followed by postkinematic sillimanite generation under conditions of approximately 635° C and 5 kb. D₃ associated sericite-chlorite retrogression of porphyroblasts occurs in sub-sillimanite grade rocks in the western part of the area. Synmetamorphic veins represent polyepisodic hydraulic fracture development during progressive dewatering of a sedimentary pile by prograde metamorphism. Eastward obduction of Quesnellia and Slide Mountain Terranes onto theOmineca Belt took place in the Middle Jurassic. Shortly following this event, the IMB-OMB tectonic suture was deformed, forming map-scale folds of cuspate/lobate geometry. / Science, Faculty of / Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Department of / Graduate