STATE PER CAPITA INCOME CONVERGENCE SINCE 1950: SHARECROPPING'S DEMISE AND OTHER INFLUENCES*

ABSTRACT. Prevailing theories wrongly attribute post-1950 convergence of state per capita incomes to (1) neoclassical adjustment mechanisms, (2) institutional sclerosis, and (3) southern industrialization. But convergence-essentially a weakening of southern poverty–resulted mainly from the South's overcoming its legacy of slavery: the sharecropper-tenant system, agricultural dependence, high black population percentages, poor education, and low wage rates. Sharecropping was the dominant feature; abject poverty among sharecroppers dragged southern income to its knees. Sharecropping's collapse and attendant South-to-North migration affected the legacy's other features in ways that raised income. Manufacturing growth and transport improvements caused relative income in the West to decline.     

The Relations Bwetween Geography and History Reconsidered

The ideas of Sauer, Darby, Clark, and Meinig have had a formative influence on the making of modern Anglo–American historical geography. These scholars emphasized the spatial– and place–;focused orientation of geography, contrasting it with history’s concern with time, the past, and change. Historical geography was conceived as combining the spatial interests of geography with the temporal interest of history, creating a field concerned with changing spatial patterns and landscapes. This idea of historical geography avoided issues in the philosophy of history by making the historical geographer a kind of spectator to external changes in the ways things were ordered and arranged on the face of the earth. This “natural history” view of historical geography failed to deal with history conceived as an autonomous mode of understanding in which the scholar’s task is to understand human activity as an embodiment of thought. Historical geography is more adequately conceived as a Collingwoodian–type historical discipline, in which the task of the historical geographer is aimed at rethinking and displaying the thought of historical agents as their actions relate to the physical environment. The traditional subject matter of historical geography is not thereby redefined, but a change in the way geography is seen in its relation to history is necessitated.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF 1963–77 REGIONAL MANUFACTURING GROWTH: WHY THE SOUTH AND WEST GROW*

ABSTRACT. This paper analyzes 1963–77 manufacturing employment growth in the 48 contiguous states. Six factors jointly explain 96 percent of the variance. Markets explains 55 percent; climate, 15 percent; a rural state attraction, 11 percent; unionization, 6 percent; thresholds, 5 percent; and amenities, 4 percent. Resources, taxes, and business climate lack significance. Sunbelt-Frostbelt is a false dichotomy: the Northwest grew as fast as the South. The real contrast–largely caused by markets–is between growth rates of 6 percent in the Manufacturing Belt, 35 percent in its bordering Transition Zone, and 58 percent in the combined South and West.     

Effects of Economic and Environmental Reform on the Diffusion of Cleaner Coal Technology in China

Despite the urgent need to address severe air pollution problems caused by China's coal consumption, diffusion of cleaner coal technologies (CCTs) has been slow. This contribution utilizes the fragmented authoritarianism model to explain this slow diffusion by examining the structure of bureaucratic decision making and changes in incentives that have accompanied fiscal decentralization and enterprise deregulation. Case studies on the diffusion of two CCTs — flue gas desulphurization (FGD) and coal washing — highlight challenges of environmental policy design and implementation during the economic reforms of the past decade. Enterprises had little incentive to adopt FGD when central government agencies disagreed on promoting the technology and local agencies did not rigorously enforce national air pollution control policies. For washed coal, production slowed when coal pricing reform and coal industry restructuring were not co‐ordinated with environmental policies. Further promotion of CCTs in China requires changes in incentive structures for local governments and enterprises, as well as enhanced policy co‐ordination among central government agencies.     

From Sorcery to Laboratory: Pandemics and Yanyuwa Experiences of Viral Vulnerability

The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted renewed attention among health professionals, Aboriginal community leaders, and social scientists to the need for culturally responsive preventative health measures and strategies. This article, a collaborative effort, involving Yanyuwa families from the remote community of Borroloola and two anthropologists with whom Yanyuwa have long associations, tracks the story of pandemics from the perspective of Aboriginal people in the Gulf region of northern Australia. It specifically orients the discussion of the current predicament of ‘viral vulnerability’ in the wake of COVID‐19, relative to other pandemics, including the Hong Kong flu in 1969 and the Spanish flu decades earlier in 1919. This discussion highlights that culturally nuanced and prescribed responses to illness and threat of illness have a long history for Yanyuwa. Yanyuwa cultural repertoires have assisted in the process of making sense of massive change, in the form of past pandemics and the onset of sickness, the threat of illness with COVID‐19 and the attribution of ‘viral vulnerability’ to this remote Aboriginal community. The aim is to centralise Yanyuwa voices in this story, as an important step in growing understandings of Aboriginal knowledge of pandemics and culturally relevant and controlled health responses and strategies for communal well‐being.