The Canadian-American borderlands have been configured and reconfigured by dynamic flows of trade, investment, migration, family connection, cooperation, and community across the border. One can view this and other borderlands as a dynamic spatiotemporal network with flows, gateways, corridors, and places or as a matrix: a complex web of interactions and dependencies that can in many places at different times be seen to be embedded in unequal economic relations. This article focuses specifically on migration flows in the Canadian-American borderlands during the turn-of-the-twentieth-century period. Flows of people during this period integrated communities on both sides of the border, but such movements varied among the regions that make up the borderland zone. The article uses Canadian and American border-crossing records to show that Canada-U.S. migration must be viewed in relation to patterns of regional transborder development.

In this article I consider the bottom-up, narrative process through which traditions are invented, using rejoneo (mounted bullfighting) as a case study. I explore the construction of rejoneo as “the newest but also the oldest” form of bullfighting. To understand this apparent contradiction, I synthesize “narratives of tradition” with Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's (1995 [1983]) “invented tradition.” In doing so, I consider rejoneo through multiple and overlapping narratives structured into historical “chapters” with common narrative elements of heroes, villains, tragic downfalls, and triumphant comebacks. These narratives are contextualized in periods of intense social, political, and economic transformation in Spain over the past three centuries. This article combines a review of the lay and expert understandings of the history of the Spanish bullfight with ethnographic fieldwork undertaken with mounted bullfighters in Andalusia from 2000 and 2001. It redresses a significant lack of attention to the mounted bullfight in relation to the footed bullfight, thereby contributing to a more comprehensive literature of bullfighting in Spain. Moreover, this article provides a model for understanding that one of the ways traditions are invented is through narratives of tradition, contextualized by the wider social, political, and economic forces emphasized by the invented traditions approach.

The interaction of Spanish and indigenous peoples during the conquest of Mexico yielded a wide variety of actions and decisions. Native groups sometimes battled the Spanish but in other instances cooperated. The Spaniards often attacked when facing overwhelming odds but in other situations retreated with meager gains. Insight into those decisions and actions is gained by looking at human wants and preferences. The Friedman-Savage utility function is applied to specific important events of the conquest of Mexico to clarify the decision making of the participants. An interdisciplinary approach is employed in constructing the expected utility of wealth model, where the maximization of the expected utility of wealth and movement between socioeconomic classes is critically analyzed. Evidence from the Juan de Grijalva expedition, interactions with coastal villages, Hernán Cortés's approach to Tenochtitlan, and the Tlaxcalan decision to ally with the Spaniards are used to clearly illustrate the relationship between the utility of wealth and decision making. Looking through the lens of the Friedman-Savage utility function at events up to Cortés's meeting with Moteucçoma, it is clear that the utility of wealth and the unprecedented opportunities to move to a new socioeconomic class were strong factors in the decision making of the participants.

Historians have generally presumed that Irish immigrants in the late nineteenth century suffered from ethnic job discrimination. However, empirical scholarship reports conflicting evidence. The present article presents new evidence on the issue based on data from Major League Baseball circa 1880. These data are unique in that “firms” (teams) and individual “employees” (players) can be identified along with “job assignments” (positions played) and “performance” (e.g., batting averages). Linking the players' names with U.S. census enumeration records allows relatively accurate identification of ethnicity. I test various hypotheses derived from Gary S. Becker's economic theory of discrimination. The main results are that Irish players outperformed non-Irish players both on average and at the margin, were (generally) relegated to less central positions in the field, were more often required to fill in at nonregular positions, and were less likely to be hired as managers. In addition, the proportion of Irish on ball clubs and in their host cities was positively correlated, and team win percentage had a (weak) positive correlation with the team's proportion of Irish. Overall, the results generally support anti-Irish discrimination against skilled workers in this highly visible, albeit small, “industry.”