Exhibiting Scotland: Objects, Identity, and the National Museum
Author: Alima Bucciantini In 1707 Scotland ceased to exist as an independent country and became part of Great Britain. Yet it never lost its distinct sense of identity, history, and politics. To preserve the country's unique antiquities and natural specimens, a Scottish earl founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1780, at the beginning of the Enlightenment's museum boom. Now numbering twelve million objects and specimens and representing everything from archaeology to applied arts and design, from social history to science and the natural world, these collections formed the foundation for what eventually became the National Museum of Scotland.In Exhibiting Scotland, Alima Bucciantini traces how these collections have helped tell the changing stories of this country for centuries and how the museum reflects the Scots' continuing negotiation of their place within modern Britain.
Author: Blair L. M. Kelley
Through a reexamination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Blair Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. Right to Ride chronicles the litigation and local organizing against segregated rails that led to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 and the streetcar boycott movement waged in twenty-five southern cities from 1900 to 1907. Kelley tells the stories of the brave but little-known men and women who faced down the violence of lynching and urban race riots to contest segregation.Focusing on three key cities--New Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah--Kelley explores the community organizations that bound protestors together and the divisions of class, gender, and ambition that sometimes drove them apart. The book forces a reassessment of the timelines of the black freedom struggle, revealing that a period once dismissed as the age of accommodation should in fact be characterized as part of a history of protest and resistance.
Author: Jill Esbenshade
Monitoring Sweatshops offers the first comprehensive assessment of efforts to address and improve conditions in garment factories. Jill Esbenshade describes the government's efforts to persuade retailers and clothing companies to participate in private monitoring programs. She shows the different approaches to monitoring that firms have taken, and the variety of private monitors employed, from large accounting companies to local non-profits. Esbenshade also shows how the efforts of the anti-sweatshop movement have forced companies to employ monitors overseas as well. When monitoring is understood as the result of the withdrawal of governments from enforcing labor standards as well as the weakening of labor unions, it becomes clear that the United States is experiencing a shift from a social contract between workers, businesses, and government to one that Jill Esbenshade calls the social responsibility contract. She illustrates this by presenting the recent history of monitoring, with considerable attention to the most thorough of the Department of Labor's programs, the one in Los Angeles. Esbenshade also explains the maze of alternative approaches being employed worldwide to decide the questions of what should be monitored and by whom.
Author: Alice Feiring
In 2011 when Alice Feiring first arrived in Georgia, she felt as if shed emerged from the magic wardrobe into a world filled with mythical characters making exotic and delicious wine with the low-tech methods of centuries past. She was smitten, and she wasnt alone. This country on the Black Sea has an unusual effect on people; the most passionate rip off their clothes and drink wines out of horns while the cold-hearted well up with tears and make emotional toasts. Visiting winemakers fall under Georgias spell and bring home qvevris (clay fermentation vessels) while rethinking their own techniques. But, as in any good fairy tale, Feiring sensed that danger rode shotgun with the magic. With acclaim and growing international interest come threats in the guise of new wine consultants aimed at making wines more commercial. So Feiring fought back in the only way she knew how: by celebrating Georgia and the men and women who make the wines she loves most, those made naturally with organic viticulture, minimal intervention, and no additives. From Tbilisi to Batumi, Feiring meets winemakers, bishops, farmers, artists, and silk spinners. She feasts, toasts, and collects recipes. She encounters the thriving qvevri craftspeople of the countryside, wild grape hunters, and even Stalins last winemaker while plumbing the depths of this tiny countrys love for its wines.For the Love of Wine is Feirings emotional tale of a remarkable country and people who have survived religious wars and Soviet occupation yet managed always to keep hold of their precious wine traditions. Embedded in the narrative is the hope that Georgia has the temerity to confront its latest threatmodernization.
Author: CLAIRE GERUS
In New York City in 1939, neither eighteen-year-old Jack Jake Jacobson nor his comrade Murray Duke Davison had any intention of joining the military. Their sights were set on playing club dates in what Duke called the upholstered sewers of Manhattan. Jake, a comic, and Duke, a jazz trumpet player, were amateur entertainers looking for their big break, not men in uniform readying themselves for war. That all changed after Pearl Harbor. Newly inspired, Jake and Duke decided to act honorably and enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. En route to their first assignment in North Africa, Jake and Duke persuaded Gen. Lewis Brereton of the Ninth Air Force to allow them to perform for their fellow soldiers and boost morale. Spurred by Jake and Dukes success, Brereton subsequently created the first Combat Special Services Entertainment Unit. The eventual formation of this fifteen-piece troupe of comics, singers, and musiciansdubbed the Sky Blazerslightened the spirits of combat troops across the Middle East, England, and France during the war. In their two and a half years overseas, they would have many close calls with the enemy as they struggled to put on their shows for the weary Allied forces. The Sky Blazers would also be privy to the glitz of the entertainment business, even performing for Egyptian royalty and at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Rife with glamorous highs and lifethreatening lows, Jacobsons wartime story continues to entertain.
Author: Fred Block
Socialist Review Book Award, Socialist Review, 1987 This volume makes available in one place a complete statement of Fred Block's perspective for students and participants in the ongoing debate on state theory. His substantial Introduction serves as an intellectual autobiography in which he assesses the field-including the theories of Domhoff, Poulantzas, and Skocpoland situates his own work within it. Block also discusses his relationship to different strands of Marxism. In his analysis of the relationship between business and the state, Block argues that while business interests have far more influence over state policy than other constituencies, state actors still have substantial autonomy in formulating policies. In particular, the business community's internal divisions and difficulties in assessing its own interests limit its capacity to control events. Block insists that when business influence is greatest, as during the Reagan years, state policies will be least successful in solving the society's problems. What is at work here is a relatively simple sociological dynamic--that institutionalized relations of power tend to become visible only when they weaken. When these institutionalized relations are most effective, they tend to be invisible, precisely because the justifying ideologies so dominate people's commonsense understandings. The classic recent example is the existence of women's subordination. In the fifties, people would have responded to the claim that women were systematically discriminated against in American society with incredulity because they had so totally accepted an ideology that justified differential treatment of men and women as normal and natural. The full-blown analysis and critique of male domination emerges only in the seventies, when patriarchal arrangements are already weakening.... In state theory, the development is analogous. In the fifties, pluralist arguments dominate because the exercise of power has been rendered invisible. The relation between business and the state works so well that it leaves few traces. Moreover, there is little real debate about how the society should be structured, so the extent to which everyone's basic assumptions fit with the interests of corporate capitalism is not at all obvious. Since nobody was even asking the big questions of who should make investment decisions and how should income and wealth be distributed, it was not apparent that the narrow limits of debate fit exactly with the interests of business.... However, the cumulative impact of Vietnam and racial conflict in the late sixties, the drama of Watergate, and the growing economic difficulties of advanced capitalist societies in the early seventies served to make the exercise of power in American society widely visible. The previous functional relation between the state and business had been disrupted and the efforts by each side to advocate its own interests became more apparent. --From the Introduction
Author: Joseph Eldon Molto
A synthesis of biological relationships during the Woodland period of southern Ontario prehistory is presented. The database consists of a battery of discontinuous nonmetric cranial traits which is used to compute C.A.B. Smiths Mean Measure of Divergence (MMD) between 17 large (N>20 crania) Woodland samples. The research design tests a series of hypotheses formulated from a review of previous skeletal and archaeological studies in the research area. The main strategy is to eliminate those factors potentially biased toward producing Type I or Type II statistical errors and emphasize the selection of an appropriate battery of traits to compare the samples, since inappropriate data would ruin attempts to estimate biological distance from the start.
Author: Tiffany A. Sippial
Celia Sanchez Manduley (19201980) is famous for her role in the Cuban revolution. Clad in her military fatigues, this first female guerrilla of the Sierra Maestra is seen in many photographs alongside Fidel Castro. Sanchez joined the movement in her early thirties, initially as an arms runner and later as a combatant. She was one of Castro's closest confidants, perhaps lover, and went on to serve as a high-ranking government official and international ambassador. Since her death, Sanchez has been revered as a national icon, cultivated and guarded by the Cuban government. With almost unprecedented access to Sanchez's papers, including a personal diary, and firsthand interviews with family members, Tiffany A. Sippial presents the first critical study of a notoriously private and self-abnegating woman who yet exists as an enduring symbol of revolutionary ideals.Sippial reveals the scope and depth of Sanchez's power and influence within the Cuban revolution, as well as her struggles with violence, her political development, and the sacrifices required by her status as a leader and New Woman. Using the tools of feminist biography, cultural history, and the politics of memory, Sippial reveals how Sanchez strategically crafted her own legacy within a history still dominated by bearded men in fatigues.
Author: Gary L. Frost
The commonly accepted history of FM radio is one of the twentieth centurys iconic sagas of invention, heroism, and tragedy. Edwin Howard Armstrong created a system of wideband frequency-modulation radio in 1933. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA), convinced that Armstrongs system threatened its AM empire, failed to develop the new technology and refused to pay Armstrong royalties. Armstrong sued the company at great personal cost. He died despondent, exhausted, and broke. But this account, according to Gary L. Frost, ignores the contributions of scores of other individuals who were involved in the decades-long struggle to realize the potential of FM radio. The first scholar to fully examine recently uncovered evidence from the Armstrong v. RCA lawsuit, Frost offers a thorough revision of the FM story. Frosts balanced, contextualized approach provides a much-needed corrective to previous accounts. Navigating deftly through the details of a complicated story, he examines the motivations and interactions of the three communities most intimately involved in the development of the technologyProgressive-era amateur radio operators, RCA and Westinghouse engineers, and early FM broadcasters. In the process, Frost demonstrates the tension between competition and collaboration that goes hand in hand with the emergence and refinement of new technologies. Frost's study reconsiders both the social construction of FM radio and the process of technological evolution. Historians of technology, communication, and media will welcome this important reexamination of the canonic story of early FM radio.
Author: By Philip Andrews-Speed, Sumit Ganguly, Manjeet S. Pardesi, Mikkal E. Herberg, Hormoz Naficy, and Jean-Francois Seznec
This report explores the historic shift in energy trade and relations between Asia and the Middle East.