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This dissertation offers a cultural history of a special interest group - namely, the range cattle ranchers in the intermountain West states of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico from 1945-1965. In these years, ranchers joined together in their special interest group organizations in unprecedented numbers and proceeded to create and present a dominant culture which helped them to appear more unified than perhaps they really were. This, then, is a cultural history of a political group as opposed to a study of the politics of a cultural group. Rather than taking for granted the status of their political, economic, and environmental power in the postwar decades, ranchers came to fear for their place in the West. This fear motivated them to gather together in their collective organizations and enabled them to present to the non-ranching public an image of a cultural group well-congealed. This dissertation utilizes ranchers' personal papers, ranchers' publications, and cattlegrower association records to examine the varied components of ranch culture that dominated ranchers' collective conversations (including their cultural valuation of masculine labor with cows, the importance of ranch women in promoting the culture, and the magnitude of technological modernization of the ranching industry) and suggests that in spite of profound tensions within ranch society, a dominant culture facilitated ranchers' unity and helped them to assert claims to political power. The shared symbolic universe of ranchers' everyday lives manifested itself in a cultural system of language and images (cow talk) that had prevailing patterns across the region. These patterns allowed ranchers to unify around a dominant culture. And although ranchers certainly did not agree on everything, their divergences were of degree so that while ranchers sometimes disagreed about specific policies or which insecticide really worked best on bed bugs, they did not disagree on cultural principles. They then used those principles to justify their claims to political, economic, and environmental power.

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.

This study describes the structural and depositional evolution in the KH field in West Natuna Basin, Indonesia. Data for the study were acquired by three-dimensional (3D) seismic reflection volume and a complete suite of well logs. The regional basin underwent transtensional, sinistral shear during the rift phase that reactivated during the early to middle Miocene inversion as a traspressional, dextral shear. The study identified four periods of tectonic activity in the area which are extension, quiescence, compression and another period of quiescence. A structural closure developed along a series of north-south trending, normal splay faults defines the area's trap play. Understanding how this structural play fits into the regional tectonic picture may suggest new approaches to hydrocarbon exploration in the area.

The purpose of this study is to explore the aspirations of parents of elementary children of Caribbean background in Montreal. Several studies show that these children tend to do poorly in Canadian schools. Research indicates that a significant variable in the home environment which influences school performance is the aspirations of parents for their children. The aspirations can be manifested through parental encouragement and are influenced by factors such as culture, class and/or ethnicity. / A sample of 20, English speaking West Indian parents agreed to participate in this research. An interview protocol was used to collect the data by telephone. The semi-structured interview was based on questionnaires used in similar studies and from issues emerging from the literature review. / The findings show that despite West Indian parents' high aspirations, their socioeconomic and/or ethnic status influence the outcome. They feel disadvantaged in a society where the realization of their perceptions of success are dependent on their ethnic status vis-a-vis the dominant group. Despite human rights legislation and multicultural policy, these parents anticipated racial and socioeconomic disadvantages for their children. The language factor in Quebec is seen as compounding the problem for English speaking Canadians of Caribbean origin.

This dissertation examines George Dawson’s efforts to traverse several of the significant blank spaces that pervaded the map of Western Canada in the two decades following Confederation in 1870-71 on behalf of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC). By analyzing how Dawson went about making these vast, remote and hitherto poorly-known territories legible we can better understand how he and his GSC colleagues helped to transform the Canadian West into a settler space that miners, traders, loggers, ranchers and many more could inhabit and exploit. As Dawson’s survey work in British Columbia and the North-West Territories reveals, the GSC helped to transform the Canadian West into settler space in two important ways. First, his western reconnaissance surveys yielded a wealth of practical knowledge about travel routes, natural resources, soils, climates, existing Native populations, potential hazards and the overall suitability of particular districts for settlement and resource extraction. This information was widely distributed in published reports and maps and served to draw the lands, natural resources and Indigenous inhabitants of the West more fully into the administrative orbit of the Dominion government. Moreover, Dawson’s reports and maps often depicted colonization as both inevitable and imminent, giving scientific weight and tangible expression to a colonial imaginary that, in practice, was never as certain nor as swift to unfold as these depictions intimated. Second, the GSC’s scientific surveys signified Canada’s desire and capacity to assert its epistemological dominion over the West. In this context, the work of a publicly-funded scientific survey was a profound symbol of authority because a state’s power to explore and map its national territory signified its power to rule over that territory. By exploring and reporting on these lands, Dawson and the Survey helped to cement the Dominion’s authority over its recent territorial acquisitions and affirm their status as a Canadian West. By offering important practical and symbolic contributions to Canada’s colonization of the West in the decades following Confederation, the Geological Survey of Canada played a vital role in transforming this region into a Canadian settler space. / Thesis (Ph.D, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-06 12:15:39.943

This thesis examines German advertising texts and their text linguistic properties within a system of text typologies. Four different text type classification methods representative of typologies in German text linguistics are considered. Of these, Katharina Reiss's 1976 model is shown to be the most efficient for a textual analysis of advertising texts. Her communicative-functional approach to text analysis permits distinction of three variants of advertisements: those which appeal to reason, those which appeal to emotion and those which are of a dual nature (mixed). The thesis concentrates on identifying text type and text type variant characteristics by analysing the text constituting techniques, text structure, and the appellative language means.

This thesis attempts to study the nature and development of al-Hajj Umar's jihad movement in the Western Sudan (1830-1864).