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Klappentext: Stretching from the Rockies to the Appalachians, the Corn Belt is America's heartland. Making the Corn Belt traces the geographical and agricultural evolution of this region, whose agriculture is based on the tradition of feeding corn to meat animals, especially beef cattle and hogs. The use of corn as a feed grain emerged in the westward movement of Euro-American farming people from the Upland South to the Ohio Valley. In the five islands of fertile land west of the Appalachians - the Nashville Basin, Pennyroyal Plateau, Bluegrass, Miami Valley, and Virginia Military District - corn emerged as the best crop to feed livestock. Thus was the Corn Belt born. Migrants from the Five Islands took corn-livestock agriculture west to the Mississippi Valley, and by 1850 the core of today's Corn Belt was a cultural region developed by a segment of the population whose ancestry could be traced back to the Ohio Valley. Corn Belt agriculture, however, spread northward more slowly than it did westward, partly because of the patterns of migration established in the spread of the frontier. The Civil War demonstrated that, even though its agriculture was distinctive, the larger region was divided in social and political terms. John Hudson traces these regional-agricultural themes into the rapid technological changes of the 1930s. The introduction of soybeans at about this time helped shift parts of the Corn Belt from livestock feeding to cash-grain production. Some of these trends continue today in parts of the region, while other areas have specialized in cattle feeding as the meat-packing industry has shifted westward. Farm residents in the 1990s account for less than 2 percent of the nationalpopulation. In the Middle West today, to be a "farm resident" no longer means what it once did: although nearly two-thirds of the men work primarily on the farm, nearly three-fourths of farm women are principally employed elsewhere. Many farmers have left the land and abandoned the "traditional" farm, but those who remain have been even more productive. The typical Corn Belt farm has disappeared, replaced by a small cluster of metal buildings surrounding a suburban tract home. John C. Hudson takes us to the heart of the Corn Belt and captures the essence of this most American region.

The author brings together a range of views on hostel régimes, warden styles, and residents' needs and points to the usefulness of there being some matching of them and coherence between them. He sug gests that the warden's role is critical and that, as the person on the boundary of the residential institution and the outside world, careful arrangements for support and consultation are needed.

In outlining the Liberal Democrat's 2015 General Election offering, Nick Clegg promised 'one of our front-page manifesto commitments will be to protect the education budget from nursery to 19-year-olds, from cradle to college'. In adopting the phrase 'from Cradle to College' he also unintentionally highlighted a sharp contrast with his party's promise at the 2010 Election to abolish tuition fees for higher education in England on the basis they were 'wrong' and 'unfair'.

QCA based methods have grown in popularity in recent years. Standing between quantitative and qualitative research, in principle they help balance the breadth of analysis provided by quantitative data with the depth of case study knowledge provided by qualitative analysis. The challenge of mixing depth and breadth has always been a particularly acute one for policy based research. Proponents of QCA techniques suggest they are better placed to handle the diversity of policy provision found in different spatial entities than standard linear quantitative methods, while also able to allow for hypothesis testing based upon a fine grained analysis that is more systematic in approach than the techniques typically employed in standard qualitative analyses. The full potential of these methods for policy analysis has yet to be realised however. Partly this is because knowledge of these methods remains at the margins of the policy analysis community, particularly amongst practitioners undertaking applied policy analyses such as policy evaluations. In the introduction to this volume we first outline some of the key principles of QCA research before moving on to identify some of its key advantages. We round off by highlighting key themes explored by the papers included within the volume.

AbstractLeague tables ranking performance outcomes within or between countries have become commonplace in most policy sectors in recent decades and there are numerous examples to be found in practice. UNICEF's 2007 Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries offered a comprehensive and widely cited comparative analysis of children's well being in 21 of the richest countries of the world. Utilising an additive index the authors distilled a large amount of quantitative data relating to children's well being and were able to provide the most comprehensive snapshot of outcomes to date. Whilst an advantage of the method — and certainly a key factor in generating media coverage — was the way it allowed for a ranking of nations, recent debates in the comparative policy analysis literature have pointed to the advantages of methods that aim to classify nations into qualitatively distinct types rather than ranking them in league tables. These debates have particular force when multiple components of analysis are conceptually distinct or cases have widely varying contexts. Fuzzy set ideal type analysis (FSITA) has become an increasingly popular alternative approach to the additive index, precisely because it addresses these concerns. In this paper we explore the potential for using FSITA for the comparative analysis of children's well-being. Drawing on the same data and conceptual foundations as the 2007 UNICEF study we explore the potential advantages of utilising a diversity oriented method such as FSITA as tool for policy evaluation that eschews ranking in favour of classifying.

"Diane Dubois takes a contextual approach to Northrop Frye's work and claims that it is best assessed in relation to his biographical circumstances. In context and in specific details, Dubois' book seeks to illuminate Frye's œuvre as a personal, lifelong project. This volume successfully situates Frye's work within the social, political, religious and philosophical conditions of the time and place of conception and writing. Dubois ranges from Frye's critical utopia and views on criticism and education through the university, church and William Blake to politics and the Canadian and academic milieu. This book, which is particularly good at tracing Frye's academic influences and his roots in Methodism and Canada, will have a strong appeal to an international audience of general readers, students, teachers and specialists. Frye is a key figure in the cultural and literary theory of the twentieth century, and Dubois' accomplished discussion helps us to see his work anew." Jonathan Hart, author of Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (1994), Interpreting Cultures (2006), Empires and Colonies (2008) and Literature, Theory, History (2011)