What do the Madagascan Poinciana tree, the South American Bougainvillea bush, and the Australian Casuarina pine have in common with 300,000 people of primarily West African descent? Firstly, they all contribute to making the Bahamas what it is—paradise. Secondly, they are all well-adjusted aliens; bright, buoyant, beautiful immigrants so well entrenched in Bahamian land, soil, and ways that one might assume they had been in the country for thousands of years. This is preferable. Witness the jaunty effervescence of the tourism jingle 'It's Better in the Bahamas'. As a nation whose livelihood is dependant on the appearance of bliss, it is clearly beneficial to perpetuate the concept of cheery, carefree natives—be they brown of skin or red of flower. Bahamians, it may be said, are like rows of crimson royal Poinciana arching to canopy across a Nassau avenue, like gardens brimming full with peach and fuchsia Bougainvillea, like lines of shore-shading Casuarinas; resplendent beings magnificently entrenched in the land. Gardening explores the identities of these allegedly well-adjusted aliens, both human and botanic. This means celebrating the Poinciana's fiery summertime blooms. This means dipping into the dirt exposed when said Poinciana is toppled, post-hurricane, its root system too weakly joined to the land's thin and rocky soil to withstand strong storm winds. If Bahamian people are like the plants that surround them, what are we to take from the Casuarina pine, an invasive import currently colonizing the island coastlines? And what from the national tree, Lignum Vitae, now virtually unknown? Gardening, through poetry and short fiction, explores the beauty and madness of what are currently considered Bahamian people and plants. This exploration is both explicit and indirect; some pieces ponder the significance of intermittently beautiful and fragile lives. Others seek to capture the incongruity of identity, classification, and everyday life in a land where the concept of indigenity is an enormous fraud.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 215-224).

Instrumental and observational records of climate in West Africa suggest that this region may be susceptible to abrupt, decades-long drought events, with potentially catastrophic impacts for the people living in this region. However, because of the dearth of long, continuous and high quality climate records from sub-Saharan Africa, little is known about the long-term frequency and persistence of drought events in this region. It is also unclear whether observed 20th century droughts are natural or due to human impacts. In the present study, we use several complementary approaches to develop a high-resolution record of paleoclimatic changes in West Africa from the geological record preserved at Lake Bosumtwi, Ghana.Our results suggest that West Africa has undergone significant hydrologic variations over the last ca. 10,000 years. The dominant influence on hydrologic changes over this interval was changes in northern hemisphere summer insolation and the associated feedback processes acting in the oceans and on land. This led to a more northerly position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and increased precipitation during the early to mid-Holocene. In the late Holocene, a second increase in precipitation occurred along the Guinea coast as a result of the southward migration of the ITCZ from its northern position. This maximum was followed by an abrupt decrease in precipitation at ca. 2.5-3 kyr.The West African monsoon also varies on timescales from millennia to decades. Millennial and century-scale variations appear to be partly paced by changes in solar irradiance, either directly or indirectly. On decadal timescales, variability appears to be dominated by changes in Atlantic sea surface temperatures. The dominant mode is a ca. 40 year oscillation, which in strongly coherent and in phase with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). It is unclear from this study, however, if drought conditions over the last century are related to this multidecadal oscillation, or if they are forced by anthropogenic changes.

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Thesis (D. Min.)--Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary, 1996. / This is an electronic reproduction of TREN, #090-0165. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

352 pages / What can be called the conventional view concerning the operation of family, kinship and other ascriptive ties during social change in non-Western countries is subjected to an extensive critique. The conventional view typically characterizes social organization in non-industrial areas as primarily subject to ascriptive principles. Social values are conceptualized as "tradition," "primitive," or "custom-bound," and it is asserted that an emphasis on family ties and ascription is part of an integrated set of phenomena found in non-industrial areas. With respect to industrial societies, the conventional view asserts that ascriptive principles do not operate to any important degree. These societies are described by concepts such as "modern," "civilized" or "individualistic," and it is argued that an emphasis on individual achievement and competition are part of an integrated set of phenomena found in more developed societies. The conventional view stresses the interrelatedness of all parts of society and therefore societies at different levels of development must have different social structures and social values. In this view, social change becomes a shift from phenomena which characterize the "traditional" society to phenomena which characterize the "modern" society. Since these two societies are in opposition at so many points it is asserted that the shift is generally sudden and dramatic. This dissertation criticizes the conventional view for its assertion that societies can be divided into these two types and that social change generally can be conceived of as a transition between these types. Societies with different levels of technology may in fact have similarities in their social organization. Social relationships are regular and recurrent but the same regularity may be found at different technological levels. In addition to offering a unique theoretical synthesis, the dissertation offers empirical data on the existence of achievement orientations among tribal peoples. A total of 1330 workers were sampled at four rubber plantations in Liberia, West Africa. The majority can be described as achievement oriented. Variables reflecting the conventional view, e.g. "modernization," "industrialization," and "urbanization" were used in an attempt to explain these findings. Specifically studied were education, work experience, "adaption to wage-labor," self-conception and urban experience. Achievement orientation was not positively related to any of these variables. Instead, this dissertation accounts for the existence of an achievement orientation among tribal people by showing that the amount of achievement orientation varied by tribe. Two factor analyses and a cluster analysis show that although a basic similarity existed among the tribes, i.e. all stress achievement, men from three Kwa-speaking tribes in our sample, the Kru, Krahn, and Grebo, were more achievement oriented than men from the other seven tribes. This variation by language group suggested that an explanation for the existence of achievement responses should be sought in the social structure of the tribes. Historical and ethnographic data showed that the Kwaspeaking group have a distinctive history of occupying coastal jungle areas and governing themselves through decentralized political authority. They did not have secret societies nor did they congregate in dense populations. The Mande and West Atlantic-speaking peoples had been pushed toward the coast by expansionary pressures from the interior. These latter peoples were relatively more stratified, had secret societies, were more likely to have farmed, and had a centralized political authority. The existence of centralized authority and secret societies probably weakened individual achievement emphases. This evidence shows the existence of achievement orientations among tribal peoples and provides an explanation for it that contrary to expectations of the conventional view does not make reference to modernization.