William G. Robbins

Opportunity and Persistence in the Pacific Northwest: A Quantitative Study of Early Roseburg, Oregon

HISTORIANS WHO DESCRIBE the American West as offering optimum opportunity assume, usually without reference to adequate evidence, that initiative, frugality, innovation, and hard work assured economic success. According to these writers, such qualities were characteristic of the westward movement in the nineteenth century.1 This vision of the American West is especially prominent in memoirs, local histories, and travel accounts.2 In most instances the vision is based on the selective testimony of people who recorded their experiences. Moreover, studies expressing this theme employ traditional rather than quantitative research methods to examine opportunity and success on the frontier. Consequently, they usually deal with stable populations. Often such an approach results in a history that is only a catalog of colorful incidents and anecdotes.

In Pursuit of Historical Explanation: Capitalism as a Conceptual Tool for Knowing the American West

Suggesting the need to bring the margins and peripheries of our stories together in some form of interpretive synthesis, this essay posits the argument that we can better understand the American West through interpretations grounded in the theoretical and empirical workings of capitalism.

The United States Forest Service and the Problem of History

The U.S. Forest Service: A History by HAROLD K. STEEN. Seattle, Wash., and London, Engl.: University of Washington Press, 1991; xvi + 356 pp., map, notes, appendices, notes on sources, index; paperbound,

Voluntary Cooperation vs. Regulatory Paternalism: The Lumber Trade in the 1920s

14.95. Decade of Change: The Remaking of Forest Service Statutory Authority During the 1970s by DENNIS C. LE MASTER. Westport, Conn., and London, Engl.: Greenwood Press, 1984; xvi + 290 pp., notes, tables, graphs, appendices, bibliography, index; clothbound,

Ideology and culture in the Oregon country: the landscapes of a planting society

37.50. 100 Years of Federal Forestry by WILLIAM W. BERGOFFEN. United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Agriculture Information Bulletin No. 402. Washington, D.C.: USDA Forest Service, 1990; 200 pp., photographs; paperbound,

Western History: A Dialectic on the Modern Condition

12.00. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire by STEPHEN J. PYNE. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982; xvi + 654 pp., notes, bibliographic essay, index; clothbound,

The "Plundered Province" Thesis and the Recent Historiography of the American West

60.00; paperbound,

The Social Context of Forestry: The Pacific Northwest in the Twentieth Century

15.95. U.S. Forest Service Grazing and Rangelands: A History by WILLIAM D. ROWLEY. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1985; xvi + 272 pp., tables, notes, photographs, figures, bibliography, index; clothbound,

Company town : Potlatch, Idaho, and the Potlatch Lumber Company

29.50.

The Newman brothers : an essay in comparative intellectual biography

In the 1920s, leaders of the lumber business tried to bring stability to their industry through vigorous trade association activity conducted with the encouragement of then Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover. Despite the optimism of association spokespeople and publicists, the hoped for stability was not attained because the associations were incapable of relieving the intra- and inter- industry competition lumbermen confronted. Nevertheless, the efforts of those involved threw into sharp relief attitudes in business and government about the nature of the political economy of the “New Era.”