Westward Expansion, Technology, and Tornado Fatalities

The U.S. Westward Expansion

The U.S. economic development in the nineteenth century is characterized by the westward movement of population and the accumulation of productive land in the West. What are the quantitatively important forces driving this phenomena? This paper presents a model of migration and land improvement, to address this question. Counterfactual experiments reveals that two forces are key in accounting f...

Tornado Warnings and Tornado Fatalities : The Case of May 22 , 2011 Tornado in Joplin , Missouri

Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Tornado Fatalities in the United States: 1880–2005

A dataset of killer tornadoes is compiled and analyzed spatially in order to assess region-specific vulnerabilities in the United States from 1880 to 2005. Results reveal that most tornado fatalities occur in the lower–Arkansas, Tennessee, and lower–Mississippi River valleys of the southeastern United States—a region outside of traditional “tornado alley.” Analysis of variables including tornad...

Ancient crops provide first archaeological signature of the westward Austronesian expansion.

The Austronesian settlement of the remote island of Madagascar remains one of the great puzzles of Indo-Pacific prehistory. Although linguistic, ethnographic, and genetic evidence points clearly to a colonization of Madagascar by Austronesian language-speaking people from Island Southeast Asia, decades of archaeological research have failed to locate evidence for a Southeast Asian signature in ...

Westward Expansion, Preappointment Politics, and the Making of the Southern Slaveholding Supreme Court

In this article, I trace the historical lineage and dynamic processes leading to the creation of the Southern slaveholding Supreme Court of antebellum America. Supported by case studies of several Jeffersonian and Jacksonian era legislative battles over judicial reform, I argue that the complex, multistage creation of the Southern slaveholding Court—the Court that decided cases such as Prigg v....