This chapter turns again to David Potter, who argued compellingly that American exceptionalism emerged neither from a practical, nonideological political genius nor a prevailing faith in an inherited ideology, but rather from the influence of widespread and enduring economic abundance on the American character. Potter’s People of Plenty argued that the broad availability of abundance became the nation’s single most defining characteristic. Potter’s argument proved especially convincing during the broadly shared prosperity of the post-World War II years. Yet Potter’s explanation never quite accounted for the enduring postbellum poverty of the American South that lingered long enough for President Franklin Roosevelt to label the South the “nation’s no. 1 economic problem” in 1938. Additionally, as the nation’s economic growth slowed significantly and inequality worsened since 1980, there are new reasons to question whether Potter’s argument can remain influential if growing economic inequality and the related class anger persists or worsens.

The hospital industry in many countries is characterized by right-skewed distributions of hospitals’ sizes and varied ownership types, raising numerous questions about the performance of hospitals of different sizes and ownership types. In an era of aging populations and increasing healthcare costs, evaluating and understanding the consumption of resources to produce healthcare outcomes is increasingly important for policy discussions. This chapter discusses recent developments in the statistical and econometric literature on DEA and FDH estimators that can be used to examine hospitals’ technical efficiency and productivity. Use of these new results and methods is illustrated by revisiting the Burgess and Wilson hospital studies of the 1990s to estimate and make inference about the technical efficiency of US hospitals, make inferences about returns to scale and other model features, and test for differences among US hospitals across ownership types and size groups in the context of a rigorous, statistical paradigm that was unavailable to researchers until recently.

The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

Chapter One examines Rogers’ youth in the Cherokee Territory of Oklahoma. It stresses his upbringing as the scion of a prominent Cherokee family and the ongoing tension with his father over the boy’s dislike of schooling and reluctance to pursue a traditional career as a rancher/businessman. Young Rogers cherished the free life of the cowboy riding the range. The chapter also explores Rogers’ "double consciousness" as an American Indian outsider who expressed pride in his lineage and culture, sought to succeed in white America, but betrayed a subtle resentment about the need to do so.

The introduction presents Rogers as a figure straddling major divides in American history. He was a Cherokee Indian seeking suceess in a WASP society, and a cowboy from the rural republic of the nineteenth century who becomes a wildly popular humorist, writer, and movie star in the urban society of the twentieth century. In particular, it frames him as a historical figure reflecting four important shifts in this era: the end of the frontier, the development of a consumer culture of abundance and personality, the emergence of modern celebrity, and the sharpening of a populist ethos in culture and politics. Finally, it frames Rogers as a historical mediator who helped Americans ease their way from one historical era to another.

The long evolution that had been transforming the Iberian economy since the fifth century found its excipient in the Islamic invasion at the beginning of the eighth century. A consequence was the division of the peninsula into two parts separated by a territorial strip as a border. In the south side, the Muslim al-Andalus settled new population, generally repeating its tribal and traditional structure; applied changes in the tenure and exploitation of agricultural systems; and consolidated the preeminence of urban centres. On this basis it was established a monetary economy connected to the political and social evolution of Mediterranean Islam, applying economic policies that involved public expenditure, taxation and market regulation. Meanwhile, in the northern side, the Christian kingdoms and counties were strengthened thanks to the increase of agrarian land, including the absorption of the border strip. From the eleventh century onwards, feudal structures favoured the kingdoms and counties expansion over the Muslim south. Urban capitals articulated the new territories, at the same time that the Camino de Santiago attracted European immigration which promoted urban activities. Commercial development linked to centres beyond the Pyrenees and, through the Mediterranean, to urban centres of Provence and Italy.

This chapter sets out the basic structure of the book. Through the intellectual biography of Max Sering we will learn the history of the evolution of Germany’s relationship with Eastern Europe from 1871 to 1945. This chapter shows the connection between Max Sering’s journey to North America in 1883, the settlement he saw there on the western frontier, and how he returned to campaign for the same kind of program on Germany’s eastern frontier. The idea of “emptiness” or “fullness” in the colonial gaze, and the definition of “inner colonization” are explored, as is the historiography that links the American West to the German East. This book uses biography to tell the history of a nation.

This chapter suggests that the chief subject of Western genre fiction is the politics of individual freedom. Novels that take the American West as their principal setting and subject, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), Louis L’Amour’s Hondo (1953), Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985), and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), along with short stories such as Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (1997), ask questions that are fundamentally about liberalism. The chapter suggests that early genre Westerns tend to imagine the American West as a romantic space of absolute individual autonomy, whereas post-1970s Westerns reimagine the genre with a critical eye, as if to acknowledge the myriad ways in which the frontier myth was too often a cover story for conquest. Over the course of its twentieth-century invention and reinvention, one persistent feature of the Western genre was the many ways in which it positioned the signifiers of the West in order to imagine individualism in America.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Until 1988, little was known about the extent of massacres of Aboriginal people and British settlers across the Australian frontier 1788-1928. Since then the question has dominated Australian historiography and raised the critical question: Were the massacres an expression of genocide? This chapter surveys the debate’s origins in the 1970s and the opposing schools of thought that emerged in response: settler genocide versus Aboriginal resistance. In the 1990s the debate focussed on the level of violence on the colonial frontier in Victoria. A decade later the debate shifted to the colonial frontier in Tasmania and changed direction. Historians of Aboriginal resistance were accused of inventing frontier massacres and fabricating footnotes while others claimed there were very few massacres and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were responsible for their own demise. In response new methods emerged to understand the characteristics of frontier massacre and interrogate the disparate sources of evidence. New texts argued that frontier massacres were a critical component of Tasmanian Aboriginal dispossession. Today digital mapping technologies have identified more than 300 sites of frontier massacre across Australia, providing new evidence that they constitute genocide.

This chapter describes and analyzes the contemporary map of Paraguay, based on its most representative cultural experiences, including that of the Taller Manuel Ortiz Guerrero poets, from which tangara poetry emerges; the poetic work of Jorge Canese, spearhead of several experimentations of current literature; the narrative in Guarani language, of which we choose the novel Kalaíto Pombéro by Tadeo Zarratea (1981) as pivot; and the frontier cartography following the narrative of Damián Cabrera. The democratization process of the Paraguayan society, which started in the 1980s, assures suitable conditions for the publication and dissemination of literature and accompanies the emergence of new aesthetics. The tangara poetry, initiated with the book Tangara tangara (1985) by Ramón Silva, expands the range of Guaraní poetry toward radically different forms compared to the traditional forms. Further, Paraguayan Guarani literature becomes more complex with the jopara, which debuts as a literary language with Ramona Quebranto (1989) by Margot Ayala, and with the display of Guarani narrative. Finally, we find hybridizations used by several authors attempting to reshape their literary language, such as interactions with Portuguese, enhancing a literary and cultural area in the Triple Frontier. These changes turn twenty-first-century Paraguayan literature into a map of high indetermination.

The book finishes with an epilogue that shows how examining encounters in the deep interior helps to further contextualise one of the most well-known episodes in coastal East Africa’s nineteenth-century history, namely the urban riots of 1888 and the subsequent outbreak of the Abushiri Rebellion (1888–90). Far from being an unimportant periphery, Lake Tanganyika was key a frontier zone of the Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth century, the conditions in which affected the broader trajectory the wider Indian Ocean World’s history, especially the history of the East African coast.