Timber and Town: Post-War Federal Forest Policy, Industrial Organization, and Rural Change in Oregon's Illinois Valley

In the recent political furor over disposition of the remaining old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, focus has been directed at the ecological shortcomings of the federal sustained yield forest management doctrine. This has occurred in part at the expense of evaluation of these policies based on social criteria. Yet the sustained yield paradigm and the post-war compact between private capital and federal forest agencies were justified in part to foster stable rural timber economies. Nowhere has this compact been more significant than in rural Oregon. And yet nowhere are its failings more apparent. The central argument of this paper is that the failure of federal sustained yield policies to sustain rural communities stems from an implicitly naive model of industrial capitalism. By ignoring the inherently destabilizing character of capitalist industry, by further failing to refine the notion of community stability, and by failing to take genuine steps to defend rural society from the upheavals of industrial change, the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have allowed community stability to languish in the dogged pursuit of accelerated cutting rates. This paper explores industrial change in Oregon's forest products sector in the post-war era of federal sustained yield management, looking specifically at southwest Oregon's Illinois Valley.     

Afghanistan observed

Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. xvii + 378 pp. No price given.

Barnett R. Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. xi + 190 pp. US$25.00 (paper).

David B. Edwards, Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. xviii + 306 pp. No price given.

J.L. Lee, The ‘Ancient Supremacy’: Bukhara, Afghanistan and the Battle for Balkh, 1731–1901. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996. i + 695 pp. No price given.     

Pioneer Life on the Bay of Quinte: an Evaluation of Genealogical Source Data in the Study of Migration

The movement of people, goods, and ideas into new frontiers is one of the most important and prevalent themes in Canadian historiography.¹ For all that emphasis, however, the literature on the historical demography of the Canadian frontier does little to address the dynamics of frontier migration at the family level or to draw out the contributions of successive generations of pioneer families to the movement of the frontier itself. The difficulty of obtaining data is an obvious explanation, although a few recent studies have shown the usefulness of such sources as church registers, newspapers, residence histories, and naturalization records.² The purpose of the present essay is to draw further attention to the value of this approach by focusing on a specific Ontario example - a volume entitled Pioneer Life on the Bay of Quinte. ³ This book was published in 1904 and it contains data which permit the nineteenth-century migrations of some Bay of Quinte families and their descendants to be traced.