Explore the vast range of titles available.

This dissertation explores, ethnographically, what the terms \"family,\" \"home,\" and \"place\" mean for individuals in a specific place, the Texas Hill Country. Contemporary mobility makes the meanings of these terms complex and crucial. While most academic research dismisses nostalgia, I argue that it continues to have powerful familial, regional, national, and even transnational attraction. Such nostalgia suggests a longing for connectedness to the stories and memories embedded in places. It relies especially on rural, or marginalized areas to convey some feeling of richness and fullness, what theorists identify as an \"aura of authenticity,\" for modern urban culture. Through storytelling I evoke local practices that create a sense of place. I also show how rural places like the Texas Hill Country become identified as places of tradition and rootedness to the earth where mobile, urban Americans eagerly seek connection by purchasing antiques and sacred objects. This dissertation lays intellectual and emotional groundwork by orienting the reader to the place and people of the Texas Hill Country, then continues with several narratives focused on a single site to explore how \"place\" can become a container for memory and story. Subsequent sections include a more essayistic grappling with family, home, and place; a life history of an 80-year old native of Blanco County, Texas; and an examination of the problematics of the social construction of Fredericksburg, Texas, as a \"home\" and place of history. While I partially focus on narratives of history and how they are constructed, I also tell stories about people of my own times--about how we live in cities created either as placeless, ahistorical malls, or in towns self-consciously constructed as tourist sites; what we do with a commodified history; what life is like in a problematic world of questions regarding our places.

Background As it becomes increasingly possible to obtain DNA sequences of orthologous genes from diverse sets of taxa, species trees are frequently being inferred from multilocus data. However, the behavior of many methods for performing this inference has remained largely unexplored. Some methods have been proven to be consistent given certain evolutionary models, whereas others rely on criteria that, although appropriate for many parameter values, have peculiar zones of the parameter space in which they fail to converge on the correct estimate as data sets increase in size. Results Here, using North American pines, we empirically evaluate the behavior of 24 strategies for species tree inference using three alternative outgroups (72 strategies total). The data consist of 120 individuals sampled in eight ingroup species from subsection Strobus and three outgroup species from subsection Gerardianae , spanning ∼47 kilobases of sequence at 121 loci. Each “strategy” for inferring species trees consists of three features: a species tree construction method, a gene tree inference method, and a choice of outgroup. We use multivariate analysis techniques such as principal components analysis and hierarchical clustering to identify tree characteristics that are robustly observed across strategies, as well as to identify groups of strategies that produce trees with similar features. We find that strategies that construct species trees using only topological information cluster together and that strategies that use additional non-topological information (e.g., branch lengths) also cluster together. Strategies that utilize more than one individual within a species to infer gene trees tend to produce estimates of species trees that contain clades present in trees estimated by other strategies. Strategies that use the minimize-deep-coalescences criterion to construct species trees tend to produce species tree estimates that contain clades that are not present in trees estimated by the Concatenation, RTC, SMRT, STAR, and STEAC methods, and that in general are more balanced than those inferred by these other strategies. Conclusions When constructing a species tree from a multilocus set of sequences, our observations provide a basis for interpreting differences in species tree estimates obtained via different approaches that have a two-stage structure in common, one step for gene tree estimation and a second step for species tree estimation. The methods explored here employ a number of distinct features of the data, and our analysis suggests that recovery of the same results from multiple methods that tend to differ in their patterns of inference can be a valuable tool for obtaining reliable estimates.

Abstract We report de novo genome assemblies, transcriptomes, annotations, and methylomes for the 26 inbreds that serve as the founders for the maize nested association mapping population. The data indicate that the number of pan-genes exceeds 103,000 and that the ancient tetraploid character of maize continues to degrade by fractionation to the present day. Excellent contiguity over repeat arrays and complete annotation of centromeres further reveal the locations and internal structures of major cytological landmarks. We show that combining structural variation with SNPs can improve the power of quantitative mapping studies. Finally, we document variation at the level of DNA methylation, and demonstrate that unmethylated regions are enriched for cis-regulatory elements that overlap QTL and contribute to changes in gene expression. One sentence summary A multi-genome analysis of maize reveals previously unknown variation in gene content, genome structure, and methylation. Competing Interest Statement RJS is a co-founder of REquest Genomics, LLC, a company that provides epigenomic services. All other authors declare no competing interests. Footnotes * https://github.com/HuffordLab/NAM-genomes