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This paper grows out of the author's ongoing interest in the Calgary Stampede, the world's most extravagant celebration of cowboy culture in Alberta. The article focuses on how Calgarians exploit the symbolic resources at their disposal, including the image of the cowboy, to construct their regional and municipal identities. The author highlights the important role of Marcus Belmont Marcell, a U.S.-born adventurer who photographed Calgary Stampede, in documenting the event and suggesting that, working in the tradition epitomized by pictures of such western artists as Frederic Remington, Charlie Russell, and Edward Borein. Marcell played a significant role in popularizing an image of the wild West in general and of the Canadian West in particular.

The purpose of this article is to reveal that the settler life writing preserves the all-but-forgotten wisdom of traditional mixed-farming methods. My study focuses on the farm logs or journals kept by three members of the Sheppard family, British immigrants who settled in southern Alberta in the late nineteenth century to establish ranches. Pioneers such as the Sheppards imagined the prairies as an Eden where they could lead prosperous lives and radically transformed the prairies, changing the nature of that life form. I explore the Sheppard journals through a lens shaped by Virgil’s Georgics. There is value in the Georgics as a model of sustainability; thus, such analysis reveals a traditional, cyclical agrarian pattern in the journals from which emerges an ethic of sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While improving the “hard” resources of the physical infrastructure is important to facilitating cross-border trade, studies of global supply chain logistics performance suggest that expanding the focus to include “soft” infrastructure resources will be critical for future gains. Border management is increasingly important to North American trade facilitation, yet little is known about what constitutes the soft infrastructure of border crossings or how to design and manage this infrastructure for improved performance. Hence, this study uses an exploratory research design to examine the nature and dimensions of the soft infrastructure of border crossings. The research relies on a grounded-theory analysis of primary data collected in an exploratory case study of two border crossings between Alberta, Canada, and Montana, US. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that socio-economic analyses of reserve casino projects, specifically those studies structured to offer an overall assessment of success or failure, need to embrace mixed methods approaches. In particular, eliciting community-based perspectives through qualitative data gathering techniques is essential to provide a level of context required to better understand the casinos' overall influence. To date researchers tend to rely on First Nations leaders projections and assessments as the baseline data for their analysis. This article compares the impacts of two casinos in northern Alberta communities, and shows how focus groups provided a grassroots perspective of the casinos' positive and negative impacts that were not captured by the quantitative data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of regionalism has long been an important element of scholarly work in both Canada and the United States. The study of regionalism and political culture in the United States is meaningful because the very expression of social, economic, and political differences along geographic lines is considered to be part and parcel of American political life. The province of Alberta and the state of Idaho lie within the Mountain West region of North America and hence, should share a number of cultural, social, and political similarities that bind them together. Spurred on by the already substantial trade links between Alberta and Idaho — in the year 2000, Alberta's exports to Idaho were over $252 million, and Idaho's exports to Alberta were over $143 million — Alberta Premier Ralph Klein agreed to reinvigorate relations in such areas as agriculture, forestry, transportation, trade, technology, education, tourism, and the environment. Despite these intergovernmental efforts, the fact remains that the people of Alberta and Idaho — including their governmental leaders — know little about the other's history or political culture. The province of Alberta and the state of Idaho, while vastly different in many ways, possess commonalties that might surprise many in both locations. Both have a small proportion of minorities, with Alberta's aboriginal and Asian populations and Idaho's Hispanic population steadily increasing in size and activity in the public arena. Both Alberta and Idaho are marked by the unique presence of Mormons that was fostered by emigration out of Utah in the 1800s.