Browsing by Subject "Midwest"
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Item Complete data and statistical code for: Diversity of bumble bees and butterflies in Minnesota roadsides depends on floral diversity and abundance but not floral native status(2024-01-25) Darst, Ashley L; Verhoeven, Michael R; Mitchell, Timothy S; Evans, Elaine; Tonsfeldt, Luke; Kjaer, Savannah; Snell-Rood, Emilie C; darstash000@gmail.com; Darst, Ashley LThe goal of our study was understand how roadside pollinator communities respond to planting pollinator-friendly seed mixes in roadsides in Minnesota, USA. We used a field study of mixed-age roadside plantings to assess this response by comparing bumble bee and butterfly communities in roadsides planted with status quo non-native seed mixes to those planted with pollinator friendly, native seed mixes. We show that while pollinator diversity is positively related to floral diversity in roadside plantings, the pollinator diversity in roadsides planted with pollinator-friendly native seed mixes was not different from those planted with status quo non-native seed mixes. This repository contains the complete datasets as a comma-separated-value files and Program R code necessary to replicate the data prep, exploration, analysis, and visualizations presented in the manuscript.Item Complete data and statistical code for: Seeding roadsides is necessary but not sufficient for restoring native floral communities(2024-06-13) Mitchell, Timothy S; Verhoeven, Michael R; Darst, Ashley L; Patterson, Cate; Snell-Rood, Emilie C; tsmitchell09@gmail.com; Mitchell, Timothy SThese data were collected in support of a Minnesota Department of Transportation funded study evaluating roadside plantings. The goal of our study was understand how roadside pollinator forage is affected by planting pollinator-friendly seed mixes in roadsides in Minnesota, USA. We used a field study of mixed-age roadside plantings to assess this flower diversity in roadsides planted with status quo non-native seed mixes to those planted with pollinator friendly, native seed mixes. We found that while these native seed mixes did increase the abundance of native flowers, the roadsides' flower communities of native and non-native seedmixes converged through time to grass dominated and unplanted colonizing species. This repository contains the complete datasets as a comma-separated-value files and Program R code necessary to replicate the data prep, exploration, analysis, and visualizations presented in the manuscript.Item The Heartland of Empire: Queer Cultural Imaginaries of Filipinas/os in the Midwest(2014-07) Sarmiento, ThomasThis dissertation, "The Heartland of Empire: Queer Cultural Imaginaries of Filipinas/os in the Midwest," postulates that normativity and queerness are not simply socio-cultural phenomena but rather spatial ones as well. By interpreting popular, literary, and visual cultural representations of Filipinas/os rooted in and routed through the Midwest since the turn of the twentieth century from a queer diasporic Filipina/o Midwestern perspective, I expose the workings of US imperial power within the US nation-state as opposed to outside of it, beyond its geographic national borders proper, in the so-called over theres. Focusing on the scale of the local and the regional within the national, I put forward a Critical Midwestern Studies that uses region as a method for unpacking the complexities of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and empire and that reworks dominant cultural narratives about the interior US so as to avoid perpetuating the Midwest as a site of lack for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Queer Studies, and Post/colonial Studies scholarship. In so doing, I interrogate the Midwest's discursive status as the supposed real America and decenter the coasts as the exclusive locus for queer and Asian American theorizing; I also remap the boundaries between homeland and diaspora, colony and metropole, and normative and queer. Such an epistemological intervention re-imagines the Midwest as not merely the heartland of the US nation but more importantly as the heartland of US empire. This project begins with the idea that while Filipinas/os--who represent the second largest Asian ethnic group in the US--figure as out of place in the US national imaginary, their existence in the Midwest proves even more anomalous. In both instances, the ideology of US exceptionalism serves to smooth over the contradiction of Filipinas/os being forcibly incorporated into, yet racially excluded from, the American body politic as a result of US imperial expansion in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century. However, this post/colonial ambivalence speaks not simply to Filipina/o racial difference but also to its alleged deviance from white bourgeois heteronormativity; and as the quintessential embodiment of Middle or "normal" America, the Midwest brings these dynamics into relief. Thus, I argue that dominant cultural imaginaries of the interior US not only whitewash the region's settler colonial history, evacuate the presence of people of color and queer people, and conceal the nation's ideological, epistemological, and ontological beliefs; they also deter Asian American and Queer Studies scholarship from moving past the West Coast and coastal metropolises such as San Francisco and New York, respectively. In foregrounding geography in the analysis of socio-cultural phenomena, place functions not as a passive backdrop but instead becomes a critical pivot on which stories can turn. Traveling all over the Midwest and spanning the last one hundred years, each chapter features a key Filipina/o figure whose presence in the heartland interpellates the Midwest as a critical geography of US empire. In the first chapter, I reread the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair's eroticization of the displayed "primitive" Igorot "dogeater" through Jesse Lee Kercheval's short story "The Dogeater" (1987) to emphasize the attractive, as opposed to repulsive, forces of US imperialism. In the second chapter, I turn to the pensionada/o-cum-exile sent especially to a number of Midwestern colleges and universities during the colonial era as a way to create a Filipina/o intelligentsia in the image of the US and depicted in distinguished Filipino/American author Bienvenido Santos's fiction and memoir. The third chapter focuses on the Filipino farm workers who labor for love in a 2009 Minneapolis production of Lonnie Carter's stage adaptation of renowned Filipino/American author Carlos Bulosan's short story "The Romance of Magno Rubio" (posthumously published in 1979). My attention to the Midwest in these latter two examples illustrates how regional particularity can amplify the queer forms of kinship US imperialism engenders. Chapter 4 addresses the specters of US imperialism embodied by the entertaining actors/singers of Filipina/o descent on the hit television show Glee, which is set in Ohio, to hold in tension the past that dominant US culture wishes to forget and the present that refuses such a repressive desire. In the coda, I gesture toward the queer horizons obstructed by the confines of multiple normativities through the alternative family formations the Filipina/o latchkey youth of A. Rey Pamatmat's contemporary play Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them create on a non-working farm in the so-called middle of nowhere. Together, the five case studies I present unsettle dominant cultural imaginaries that position queerness and Filipina/o-ness as out of place in the heartland; they also chart an alternative cartography of the US nation and the Filipina/o American diaspora wherein a queer Filipina/o Midwest seems perfectly possible.Item The impact of access to rail transportation on agricultural improvement: The American Midwest as a test case, 1850–1860(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2011) Atack, Jeremy; Margo, RobertDuring the 1850s, the amount of farmland in the United States increased by 40 million hectares (100 million acres), or more than one-third. Moreover, almost 20 million hectares, an area almost equal to that of the states of Indiana and Ohio combined, were converted from their raw, natural state into productive farmland. The time and expense of transforming this land into a productive agricultural resource represented a significant fraction of domestic capital formation at the time and was an important contributor to American economic growth. Even more impressive, however, was the fact that almost half of these total net additions to cropland occurred in just seven Midwestern states, which constituted somewhat less than one-eighth of the land area of the country at that time. Using a new GIS-based transportation database linked to county-level census data, we estimate that at least a quarter (and possibly two-thirds or more) of this increase in cultivable land can be linked directly to the coming of the railroad to the Midwest. Farmers responded to the shrinking transportation wedge, which raised agricultural revenue productivity, by rapidly expanding the area under cultivation and these changes, in turn, drove an increase in farm and land values.Item “This is our home!” Chicana Oral Histories: (Story)telling life, love and identity in the Midwest(2010-12) Creel, Kandace J.Tracing the lives of eight Midwestern Mexican American women, my dissertation interrogates the role of stories and storytelling in familial relationships and community building. I engage with Chicana feminist understandings of identity through these Midwestern Chicanas' stories of growing up in the Midwest (in the 60s and 70s) and their lives as women – while paying particular attention to the intersectional categories of gender, race, class and sexuality. Chapter One situates a “mestiza methodology” and the process of collecting oral histories with three women who are immediately related to me and five who are not. Weaving in women's stories, Chapter Two deals with Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the borderlands (as an in–between space of creative strategies for survival and affirmation) in relation to Midwestern Mexican American woman's experiences. By situating Anzaldúa’s metaphorical borderlands in the Midwest (Kansas and Minnesota), I argue that while the physical border may be miles away the cultural clashes/borders that exist due to isolation, racism, and initially small communities of color have nevertheless mapped the borderland onto Chicanas in the Midwest and yet, their narratives are full of opportunities for re–envisioning politicized identities through the firm planting of roots, self–definition, and claiming an alienating space as home. Chapter Three uncovers the complicated understandings of silence in relation to Chicana sexuality and la familia. I explore how these women often resist the gendered roles they might feel constrained by in order to move the reader to think about their actions as underground feminist acts. Lastly, the conclusion synthesizes these eight Midwestern Chicana voices around the theme of storytelling. It reiterates the importance and value of the family and how storytelling has served as a means to pass on cultural knowledge. In exploring the bonds that women specifically build through storytelling I characterize the sharing of stories for these greater purposes as actos de amor, (acts of love). I assert that through dissolving the strict borders between ethnography and oral history, or testimonio and storytelling we can write Midwestern Chicanas into larger histories and explore alternative meanings of feminist identities in these geographic places far from the U.S./Mexico border.