East Lansing, Michigan

Greeley, Colorado

On July 10, 1973 the Bahama Islands, with full pomp and ceremony, became the sixty-second country to achieve sovereign status since 1950 and joined the ranks of some thirty-two other independent member states of the British Commonwealth.1 Like most former British possessions the Bahamas aspired to shed its colonial title convinced that independence would bring social and economic betterment. To some, this expectation might be surprising since seldom is this diminutive country associated with traditional notions of "oppressive colonialism" or the so-called "struggling underdeveloped" nations of Latin America. More often, the Bahamas conjure up images of prosperity and progress founded on a flourishing tourist trade and salubrious business climate which has attracted more than 350 banking and other financial institutions to the capital city of Nassau. Indeed, there are few of the conspicuous maladies of underdevelopment; overpopulation is not a problem, literacy, exceeds ninety percent and unemployment has been kept at less than ten percent. More impressive is the national annual income figure of $1,500 per person undefined highest in Latin America.2 Against this background, the Bahamas seem eminently suited for sovereign nationhood.

Akron, Ohio

A civilization is the joint product of the cultural heritage and experience of its settlers and the physical or natural environment of the region which those settlers and their descendants have occupied. Of necessity one constituent part is closely connected to the other. Few rural cultural features are more distinctive than the great nineteenth century barns and silos which dot the countryside of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, these structures are rapidly disappearing from the landscape and a time can be foreseen when only scattered relics vestiges of a formerly extensive cultural landscape, will remain. Even with these structures disappearing, little systematic study has been devoted to barns and silos as settlement landscape features. There is not even a widely accepted and comprehensive basic classification of barn and silo types. It is proposed in this article to offer a typology for barns and silos in Pennsylvania which also can be applied in other states or areas; to examine, from a geographic point of view, the 1798 direct tax materials which provide some information on Pennsylvania barns at the beginning of the 19th century; and finally to attempt a distributional study of barns and silos as they exist in the state today.