Elofson, Warren. Somebody Else's Money: The Walrond Ranch Story, 1883-1907. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009.
The Walrond Ranch, a cattle and horse operation in the foothills of southern Alberta, was one of the four giants of the livestock grazing industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At its height, the Walrond ran over 10,000 cattle along with several hundred well-bred Clydesdale and Shire horses on nearly 300,000 acres of land.
Ultimately, however, the Walrond failed. The driving force behind the ranch, Dr. Duncan McNab McEachran, had high aspirations and communicated his optimism to Sir John Walrond and the rest of the British investors funding the venture. But reality quickly set in. Winter storms, drought, disease, and predators constantly depleted the Walrond's herds and the operation inexorably slipped toward bankruptcy. McEachran's poor management played just as large a role as the environmental challenges in the ranch's downfall; his stubborn reluctance to admit failure prolonged the inevitable, wasting more and more investor dollars in the meantime.
Somebody Else's Money is the first close environmental and economic study of one of the so-called "great" ranches on the northern Great Plains of North America. Author Warren Elofson examines the business side of large-scale, open range grazing and describes the myriad of natural and man-made obstacles that barred it from success. He argues that, financially, the Walrond was doomed from the beginning because its management approach and grazing practices were unsuited to both the natural and economic conditions of the frontier environment.
About the Author
Warren Elofson is the head of the history department at the University of Calgary, where he has taught since 1986. He has written several books on British and western Canadian history, including Cowboys, Gentlemen and Cattle Thieves: Ranching on the Western Frontier (2000) and Frontier Cattle Ranching in the Land and Times of Charlie Russell (2004). Much of Dr. Elofson's expertise in western Canadian agriculture comes from many years of personal experience ranching and farming in Alberta.
Hill, Alexander A. The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-1945: A Documentary Reader. (Abingdon, Oxon/New York: Routledge, 2009).
This book consists of extracts from key documents, along with commentary and further reading, on the ‘Great Patriotic War’ of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, 1941-45.
Despite the historical significance of the war, few Soviet documents have been published in English. This work provides translations of a range of extracts from Soviet documents relating to the titanic struggle on the Eastern Front during World War II, with commentary. This is the only single-volume work in English to use documentary evidence to look at the Soviet war effort from military, political, economic and diplomatic perspectives. The book should not only facilitate a deeper study of the Soviet war effort, but also allow more balanced study of what is widely known in the West as the ‘Eastern Front’.
This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of military history, Soviet history, and World War II history
About the Author
Alexander Hill gained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in the summer of 2001, after which he was Teaching Fellow in Russian at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow; Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; and Lecturer in Contemporary Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He joined the History Department as an Assistant Professor in Military History in the summer of 2004.