17th Street Research Articles

On Violence, Seen Remotely

On Violence, Seen Remotely Elspeth Iralu (bio) Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above. By Caren Kaplan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 312 pages. $104.95 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War. By Ronak Kapadia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 352 pages. $104.95 (cloth). $28.95 (paper). Through the Crosshairs: War, Visual Culture, and the Weaponized Gaze. By Roger Stahl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 224 pages. $120.00 (cloth). $30.95 (paper). On Friday, June 5, amid protests of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the District of Columbia Department of Public Works painted two blocks of 16th Street by Lafayette Square, across from the White House, with the words black lives matter. The block letters stood thirty-five feet tall, yellow paint on black asphalt, followed by a DC flag, three stars in a row above two horizontal lines. On the same day, Black Lives Matter DC decried the mural on Twitter, calling the mural a "performative distraction" from the necessity of defunding the police. The following day, activists added to the mural. They painted over the three stars, leaving the two horizontal lines, and added another phrase so that the mural read: "black lives matter = defund the police." Over the next two weeks, dozens of similar murals appeared on city streets across the country. Drawing both critique and celebration, the murals have stirred a robust debate as to whether these murals are symbol without substance or a challenge to authority. What is striking about the murals is the impossibility of seeing them all at once from the ground. Photographs taken on the ground show only fragments of the murals. One must squint to decipher what letters the people in the photos are standing on. From the ground, you cannot read the whole phrase, let alone fit the entirety of one letter in the camera's frame while also including enough scope in the photo to identify landmarks or storefronts around the murals that might distinguish one city from the next. On social media, people share [End Page 1047] photos taken from above obliquely or vertically, thanking the photographers for climbing on top of a roof or flying a drone overhead to take the photo. Two weeks after the DC mural's appearance, Google maps updated the satellite imagery near the White House in Washington, DC, revealing the newly painted mural with both its sanctioned and insurgent halves. This perspective is also how we are asked to make sense of militarized police violence against Black lives: at a distance, from above. What does this remote mode of seeing reveal about how we relate to imperial and colonial state violence? How has the aerial perspective been normalized as way of seeing? How do militarized modes of seeing generate a structure of feeling such that we can sense from a distance? This review essay considers three recent monographs by Ronak Kapadia, Caren Kaplan, and Roger Stahl, all of which take on these questions to reckon with how war infiltrates contemporary ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the United States. All three books further situate themselves within a genealogy of scholarship on violence and visual culture, drawing from such scholars as Paul Virilio and Nicholas Mirzoeff. They build on and initiate conversation with scholarship from critical geography, media studies, and critical surveillance studies. These books ask how militarized technologies such as satellites, aerial photographs, drones, and biometrics shape not only how we look but what we look for, and suggest how we might expose the blinders these technologies erect. Kaplan's Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above traces the history of the aerial perspective as a tool and project of war. Kaplan's archive spans four centuries and four continents. With chapters arranged chronologically, Kaplan examines mapped military surveys, the technology of the hot-air balloon, the development of the panorama, aerial photography, and other aerial imagery to demonstrate how the aerial view-from-above is a "world-making visual culture" (26) that generates ways of knowing and structures of feeling. While Kaplan states that she began the project with an understanding that "aerial observation is...

Stigma Cities: The Reputation and History of Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas by Jonathan Foster

Reviewed by: Stigma Cities: The Reputation and History of Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas by Jonathan Foster Jordan R. Cissell STIGMA CITIES: The Reputation and History of Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas Jonathan Foster. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK., 2018. xiv + 274 pp.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth) (ISBN-13: 978-0-8061-6071-9). Birmingham, Alabama; San Francisco, California; and Las Vegas, Nevada, are three American cities with three very different reputations: Birmingham as violently racist "Bombingham"; San Francisco as America's "gay Mecca"; and Las Vegas as debaucherous "Sin City." In Stigma Cities: The Reputation and History of Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, Jonathan Foster convincingly argues that the popular stereotype of each city has played and continues to play an influential role in shaping its social, cultural, and economic trajectories. Therefore, to understand each of these cities, it is imperative that we also understand its reputation. Toward this end, Foster catalogs the events that informed popular conceptions (and misconceptions) of each city, broader cultural shifts that alternately intensified or mitigated the stigmatization of each city by the American public, and the reactions of city residents and leaders to their stereotypical role in the public consciousness. The result is a vibrantly written, thoroughly researched, and highly readable work that will appeal to urban, historical, and cultural geographers, particularly those interested in the Southeastern and Western United States. Foster is a historian, and this book's theoretical and methodological framework draws primarily from the disciplines of history, sociology, and media studies, but the author's subject and approach is also inherently geographical. By applying sociological concepts of stereotyping and stigmatization to cities, Foster adds valuable perspective to explorations of place-based identity within the field of geography. Scale also represents an interesting thematic undercurrent throughout the book, as most of the events that inspired each city's reputation occurred within a relatively small portion of its physical footprint: the 16th Street Baptist Church and surrounding blocks in Birmingham, the Castro District in San Francisco, and Fremont Street and the Strip in Las Vegas. The book is organized into six body chapters bookended by introduction and conclusion chapters. The six body chapters are paired by city: Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Birmingham, Chapters 4 and 5 on San Francisco, and Chapters 6 and 7 on Las Vegas. [End Page 87] The first chapter in each pair details the development of the stigma for each city, while the second examines the impact of the stigma on the city, its residents, and its position in the American cultural and economic landscapes. In each of these body chapters, Foster examines both the specific historical events and the national cultural contexts associated with the development and impact of stigmatization for each city. To do so, he draws upon an extensive array of sources, including scholarly publications, travel guides, inflight magazines, personal letters, online comments sections, and (most prominently) local and national news media. Birmingham began the 20th century as an industrial beacon of New South modernization. But the violent and highly publicized resistance to Civil Rights era reforms by some city residents and officials, including the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church and brutal anti-demonstration tactics from city commissioner Bull Connor, coincided with an American cultural and political shift toward condemnation of overt racism and segregation. In a nation keen on validating its new role as a moral compass for the post-WWII world, Birmingham was cast as the racist misfit in an otherwise progressive United States of America. This "Bombingham" image has continued to shape negative perceptions of Birmingham into the present day, with contemporary media portrayals of both related and unrelated events often referencing the 1963 bombing. Its origins as a Spanish mission, history of port-town cosmopolitanism, and associations with the Beat Generation and 1960s counterculture had long characterized San Francisco as "not quite American" (p. 70). This perceived otherness set the stage for the stigmatization of the city as the center of the United States' gay community, a stereotype firmly entrenched in the American consciousness by national coverage of Harvey Milk's election to the San...

Books Received

Books Received John Hersey. The Algiers Motel Incident (Revised Edition). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 397. Paper: $34.95. First published in 1968, this work from Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey (1914-1993) utilizes local police reports, witness interviews, contemporary media stories, and court transcriptions to paint a stark, startling image of 1967 Detroit. An experienced war correspondent, Hersey arrived in Detroit shortly after the 12th Street Rebellion. Through the use of interviews with native Detroiters, local police, and city officials, Hersey delves into the late-night murder of three black teenagers at the Algiers Motel by Detroit law enforcement and National Guardsmen on July 26, 1967. Though three police officers and a private security officer were tried, none were convicted. With a new foreword by award-winning author Danielle L. McGuire, The Algiers Motel Incident provides readers with a chilling, thought-provoking look at racism and the criminal justice system in Michigan. Dolores Wharton. A Multicultured Life. New York: Doeclif Publishing, 2019. Pp. 264. Appendix. Illustrations. Index. Cloth: $24.95. Born into a life as the daughter of an influential black businessman, Dolores Mae Duncan experienced a vivid childhood set within the bounds of dynamic, diverse New York City in the 1930s. Educated at the progressive Little Red School House in Greenwich Village, Wharton then spent her adolescent years in a mostly white, middle-class New England town. Upon marrying pioneering black economist and corporate executive Clifton R. Wharton Jr., Dolores was able to gain valuable firsthand experience observing the unequal treatment of women and minorities across the world and in nearly every type of setting. She was able to use her position to create multiple corporate programs designed to change the lives of those most in need. A Multicultured Life is the story of a woman determined to foster her love of learning, strengthen her family, and explore black culture and civic duty in America. Lindsay Elizabeth Doran Central Michigan University ...

Assembling, Flaming, Ringing: Listening to Julius Eastman's Gay Guerrilla

Assembling, Flaming, Ringing:Listening to Julius Eastman's Gay Guerrilla Ethan Philbrick (bio) julius eastman was a Black gay composer, pianist, vocalist, conductor, and dancer. Born in Harlem in 1940 , eastman trained classically in piano and composition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. After graduating in 1966, he joined Creative Associates at suny Buffalo in 1968, one of the hotbeds for the new music scene in the United States under the direction of lukas foss, and began to frequently perform and compose theatrical, electroacoustic, and improvisation-heavy chamber music works with the S.E.M. Ensemble. In 1973, eastman rose to national prominence as a performer for his virtuosic vocal performance on a Grammy-nominated recording of peter maxwell davies 's Eight Songs for a Mad King, and in that same year he premiered a minimalist chamber composition with S.E.M. Ensemble entitled Stay On It, which prefigured many of the encounters between minimalism and popular music that took hold later in the decade. In 1976, he relocated to New York City, where he traversed the downtown, uptown, disco, and new music scenes—performing with composer-choreographer meredith monk, collaborating with cellist and disco producer-songwriter arthur russell, appearing frequently at the performance and new music venue [End Page 351] The Kitchen, and playing in jazz combos with his guitarist brother gerry eastman. Eastman also became deeply enmeshed in the Manhattan queer scene during this time, with reports that he sometimes went by the nickname "Mr. Mineshaft" (after the notorious gay leather bar and sex club on Little West 12th Street). 1 Throughout his career, Eastman theorized his own compositional practice as operating under an "organic principle," meaning that his pieces took on a structural logic of accumulation. 2 In many of Eastman's compositions, musical phrases never simply replace other musical phrases as the piece unfurled in time; instead phrases and motifs persist dissonantly even as new material is introduced on top of and around them. The past of Eastman's pieces piles up even as new sounds are introduced. No musical material ever disappears; it is only buried. By calling his compositional technique "organic," Eastman evokes life cycles, chemical transformations, and the ecological returns of rotting matter; and yet Eastman's compositions also sound like history to me: slow and heavy, repetitive and yet morphing as they accumulate. Melody and harmony become texture in Eastman's gradually mutating blocks of sound. The formal structures that undergird Eastman's compositions are audible—an additive structure slowly being built and breaking down simultaneously under its own weight, older material sonically covered over by the accretion of new material. Eastman created musically violent structures that resonated critically with the structural violence he navigated throughout his life. By 1979, Eastman was touring his formally insurgent works across the United States and Europe, often challenging the division of labor between the composer and the performer by performing his own works and putting his body on the line in an overwhelmingly white "By calling his compositional technique "organic," Eastman evokes life cycles, chemical transformations, and the ecological returns of rotting matter; and yet Eastman's compositions also sound like history to me: slow and heavy, repetitive and yet morphing as they accumulate." [End Page 352] and straight new music scene. But by the early 1980s, his trajectory of increasing institutional success despite the institutions' whiteness and heteronormativity seemed to spin out of control. In 1983, he was evicted from his apartment, many of his scores were destroyed in the process, and a hoped-for faculty position at Cornell failed to materialize. This is where things get blurry in the written accounts of Eastman's life. Reportedly, Eastman all but disappeared from the downtown music scene for the next seven years; he developed an intimate relationship with harder drugs, bounced between residing in Tompkins Square Park and shelters in Buffalo, and eventually died in a hospital in Buffalo in 1990 of uncertain causes—perhaps due to complications related to AIDS, perhaps not. What is known by musicologists and music historians is that it took eight months for news of his death to reach colleagues in the Manhattan music world through an obituary...

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

2019 American Pancreatic Association Presidential Address

From the Division of Hematology and Oncology, Department of Medicine, UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco, CA. Address correspondence to: Margaret A. Tempero, MD, Department of Medicine (Hematology Oncology), UCSF Medical Center, Mission Bay Campus, Mission Hall 550 16th Street, Box 3211, San Francisco, CA 94143 (e-mail: [email protected]). The author declares no conflict of interest.

Why Does Planning Matter in Microclimate Management and Urban Heat Mitigation?

In this paper, we examine two mixed-use redevelopment projects in the United States, including both regulatory and procedural contexts, to assess how decision-making processes affected microclimate outcomes. We investigate Belmar in Lakewood, CO and 29th Street Mall in Boulder, CO. Measurements and simulations of microclimate show that Belmar mitigates urban heat more effectively. Policies including building height, street patterns, and landscaping standards were key variables in this outcome. Through interviews and content analysis, we found five main factors shaping those policy choices: (1) urban vision, (2) land use and form controls, (3) design guidelines, (4) public financing, and (5) ownership/condemnation factors.

Use of IoT sensing and occupant surveys for determining the resilience of buildings to forest fire generated PM2.5.

Wildfires and associated emissions of particulate matter pose significant environmental and health concerns. In this study we propose tools to evaluate building resilience to extreme episodes of outdoor particulate matter using a combination of indoor and outdoor IoT measurements, coupled with survey-based information of occupants' perception and behaviour. We demonstrated the application of the tools on two buildings with different modes of ventilation during the Chico Camp fire event. We characterized the resilience of the buildings on different temporal and spatial scales using the well-established I/O ratio and a newly proposed E-index that evaluates indoor concentration in the context of adopted 24-hour exposure thresholds. Indoor PM2.5 concentration during the entire Chico Camp Fire event was 21 μg/m3 for 4th Street (Mechanically Ventilated) and 36 μg/m3 for Wurster Hall (Naturally Ventilated). The cumulative median I/O ratio during the fire event was 0.27 for 4th Street and 0.67 for Wurster Hall. Overall E-index for 4th Street was 0.82, suggesting that the whole building was resilient to outdoor air pollution while overall E-index was 1.69 for Wurster Hall suggesting that interventions are necessary. The survey revealed that occupant perception of workplace air quality aligns with measured PM2.5 in the two buildings. The results also highlight that a large portion of occupants wore face masks, even though the PM2.5 concentration was below WHO threshold level. The results of our study demonstrate the utility of the proposed IoT-enabled and survey tools to assess the degree of protection from air pollution of outdoor origin for a single building or across a portfolio of buildings. The proposed survey tool also provides direct links between the PM2.5 levels and occupants' perception and behavior.

Studying and evaluating the performance of pedestrian crossing facilities in Babil governorate

Walking is one of the oldest means of mobility. It is an indispensable necessity to reach destinations despite the fact that walking or walking is one of everyday activities of man, which have positive effects on health, and activity on the one hand; vehicles cannot reach destinations only required by often walking from the other. The main problem address by the research is the random passage of the sieve and uncontrolled when it is most designs for the city’s road network have not addressed. This fundamental problem as well as the lack of a city to the safe facilities to cross the pedestrian. Therefore, this paper is a trial to study and analyze the current reality of crossing the sap then find solutions and treatments that reduce or limit the overlap between different traffic events and events crossing the pedestrian. Field data on the syllabic traffic volumes collected in all areas of the study (peak hour volume) and the photographic technique method. The study chose four areas to study the sap (60th Street, 40th Street, Al-Hussein, intersection circle at Babel Health Department), which are residential, commercial and educational zones, representing diversity in land use and scheme sidewalk and the design of the city of Hilla. The study attempted to show the state of lateral walks. The study also used the questionnaire method (interview survey) to determine the suitability of pedestrian bridges in transit and land transit. The study concluded that the area of Al-Hussein represents the highest traffic volumes of the sieve in addition to the lack of it the sidewalks in terms of absorption and quality and abuses. As well as the reluctance to use pedestrian bridges in transit in the area of 60th Street through high ground transit time, which necessitates the establishment of dual-step (fixed and mobile) – legislation and education through all means.

“12th Street is Dead”: Techno-Heritage and Neoliberal Contestation in the Maya Riviera

In 2017, the Beats Per Minute (BPM) electronic music festival was banned from Playa del Carmen following a horrific shooting that left five dead and fifteen injured. The city’s response was to crack down on electronic music, arguing the scene posed a unique danger to the safety of the city and that electronic music was not part of Playa’s cultural identity. Those in the scene argued something else was underway, suggesting that the scene was being pushed out of the city to make room for higher end, luxury tourism development. The ousting of electronic music from the city raised important questions about the city’s cultural identity and the direction of tourism development the city would take. This essay takes a critical look at these events, tracing the way Playa’s particular electronic music scene grew to global notoriety as both a cause and consequence of the Maya Riviera’s impressive tourism expansion over the last two decades and how those in the scene believed themselves to be an essential part of the city’s heritage. The city government’s decision to oust BPM reveals how struggles over cultural heritage are at the very heart of how urban space is organized in tourism zones. Using the concept of “contestation”, this ethnographic account demonstrates how disputes over heritage and culture frame important questions of neoliberal, political-economy and can lead to counterintuitive outcomes.

Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington D.C. Riots of 1968

Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington D.C. Riots of 1968

Inclusive sustainability withinfavelaupgrading and incremental housing: The case of Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro

AbstractThis paper addresses two different urban phenomena that currently take place in Rocinha, the most prominentfavela(slum) of Rio de Janeiro, with more than 100 000 inhabitants. On the one hand, that of the houses' expansion typically accomplished through constructions on the rooftop (the upper slab), operations locally known as theconstrução de laje(upper slab construction). On the other hand, new urban spaces as a result of public resettlement operations consisting of the clearing of tangled webs of narrow, dark and unhealthy alleys that crisscross up and down thefavela. As an example, we will take the case of the 4th Street operation, a multidimensional process of de‐densification that involved heavy demolition, the removal of many houses and relocation of the dwellers. This urban renewal was carried out with resources from a federal programme and conducted by the state government, but with the involvement of different local actors, including local associations and community activists. The study focuses on the social sustainability issues underlying the private and public process, analysing the roles played by the different stakeholders and their interactions. The collection of data and subsequent analysis comprises diverse methods including literature review, examination of architectural and urban projects, surveys, interviews with architects and other municipal and private technicians, as well as inquiries to the householders. These interviews and inquiries revealed thefavela's dwellers' perception regarding the two‐year process and, in particular, the role played by the different actors involved. The conclusions highlight the social networks that arose and consolidated during the slum upgrading process and analyse the interactions among the members of those networks.

Discussion: Craniometric Analysis of Endoscopic Suturectomy for Bilateral Coronal Craniosynostosis.

Philadelphia, Pa. From the Division of Plastic Surgery, University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of University of Pennsylvania Received for publication April 25, 2018; accepted June 7, 2018. Disclosure:The authors have no financial interest to disclose in relation to the content of this Discussion or of the associated article. Jesse A. Taylor, M.D., Division of Plastic Surgery, University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, 34th Street and Civic Center Boulevard, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, [email protected]

The Imbalanced Trade for Salvation: Money in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

The Imbalanced Trade for Salvation: Money in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood Yasuhiro Takeuchi Despite being known as a Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor often writes about what is apparently less spiritually elevated: money. When she writes in her letters “I never believe nothing until I got the money” (Habit 33) or “I hate articles but I like money” (Habit 405), she seems only playfully to suggest her reasonable need for the material basis of an earthly life. But when she says “If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal” (Mystery 78), the value of money is curiously elevated to the equivalent of salvation. Indeed, in the eye of the religious novelist, human beings seem to be in need of both God and money: “Just as in the sight of God we are all children, in the sight of the novelist we are all poor, and the actual poor only symbolize for him the state of all men” (Mystery 132). If, for O’Connor, the spiritually humbling position of human beings is equated with their materially dire situation, it is no wonder that money plays a crucial role in Wise Blood (1952), whose protagonist, Hazel Motes, is known for his idiosyncratic search for God. Critics have already noted O’Connor’s penchant for money-related motifs in Wise Blood and discussed their significance. Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., for instance, contends that O’Connor’s frequent references to wages or prices of products serve to criticize material prosperity for hindering people’s spiritual growth. Since “Material prosperity makes man’s salvation more difficult or impossible,” Littlefield says, “The only one saved is Haze, and that is possible only after . . . he loses his car—the symbol of material prosperity” (130). In a similar vein, Jon Lance Bacon focuses on the significance of salesmen [End Page 233] and of advertisements in the novel such as billboards and posters, and observes that Hazel and the other characters are “circumscribed by the material world . . . in which the spiritual has no place . . . [and] in which everything is for sale” (35). Susan Amper contends that people’s interest in “money and faith” (43) in the late 1940s is reflected in both Wise Blood and the movie Miracle on 34th Street, which appeared contemporaneously. Amper agrees with Bacon that O’Connor “is adamant about the evils of commercialism” (53) and contrasts Hazel’s faith with that of Mrs. Flood, his landlord, “who immerses herself in the world of the material” (56). On the other hand, in the movie, although it advocates the importance of faith (in Santa Claus), “the spiritual and material worlds never diverge” because “faith offer[s] the surest path to happiness and success” (51). These commentators thus regard the novel as a critique of modern materialism, whereas Susan Edmunds, in her historical and political approach to the novel, sees it more radically as an implicit condemnation of the US welfare state in the postwar era—an apparently good and charitable use of money by the government—because, in her view, “O’Connor associates the welfare state’s secular project of social amelioration with a corruption of charity’s biblical meaning” (183). Simply put, God’s love and charity are not fungible with money. Whatever nuanced differences there may be in their arguments, all these critics seem to concur that money and faith are antithetical: the deeper people get involved with commercialism-consumerism or with government-sponsored charity, the further they stray from God. Money could be a source of evil in the real world, as they seem to suggest, but I argue that it is not necessarily so in O’Connor’s fiction. However curious it may sound, the more Hazel is involved with monetary transactions, the closer he can get to Jesus and salvation. In the midst of the market, or the worldly economy, Hazel experiences the economy of God, albeit willingly and unknowingly. Whether Hazel is in search of or in exile from God, the grace of God is present in Hazel’s frequent experiences that may...

Notes and Comments

Notes and Comments Arpad V. Klimo Association News The annual meeting of the American Catholic historical Association will be held in New York City from Friday, January 3, to Monday, January 6, 2020. The headquarters and sessions will be in the Sheraton Hotel, 811 7th Avenue, with the Mass at St. Francis Xavier Church, 30 West 16th Street, between 5th Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas (6th Avenue), and a reception at the nearby Old Town Bar. Registration opens on the new ACHA website www.achahistory.org. in late September. The American Society of Church History will be headquartered in the Parker New York Hotel, 64 West 39th Street. The over-arching theme of its conference will be "Whose America: New Perspectives, Contours, and Connections in Church Histories." For more information, please see www.churchhistory.org. Fellowships The Newberry Library of Chicago is offering for academic year 2020-21 Long-Term Fellowships for postdoctoral scholars in continuous residence at the Newberry for periods of four to nine months at the rate of $4,200 per month to conduct research in its collections and to participate in active intellectual exchange in it programs. The deadline for application is November 1, 2019. Short-Term Fellowships for postdoctoral scholars, PhD candidates, and those with terminal degrees who live and work outside the Chicago metropolitan area are available for one to two months at the rate of $2,500 per month. The deadline is December 15, 2019. For more information, contact research@newberry.org. The Istituto Sangalli of Florence, Italy, is offering three residential fellowships worth €2,000.00 for young scholars in religious history and religious studies. The deadline is October 15, 2019. See https://www.istitutosangalli.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Call-TSFF-2020-en.pdf. Prize The Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University is offering a prize of $1,500 for an essay about Catholicism in the Western Hemisphere by a new scholar whose PhD or ThD was awarded no earlier than 2013. The essay must have been published or accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal or scholarly collection within twelve months of the deadline of February 15, 2020. Special consideration will be given to essays that advance the understanding of historically underrepresented Catholics (e.g, of Latino/a, Indigenous, African, or Asian heritage). Applicants should submit a curriculum vitae, [End Page 588] abstract of 500 words, essay of 12,000 or less words in either English or Spanish, documentation of its acceptance and timetable for publication, and a letter from a colleague or mentor in the relevant field testifying to the essay's contribution to Catholic studies. The winner will be announced in April 2020. For more information, contact caca@fordham.edu or https://www.fordham.edu/homepage/6592/new_scholar_essay_prize_for_catholic_studies_in_the_americas Conferences On October 17, 2019 the Vatican Apostolic Library will host a conference as part of its "Cultural Agenda" to be held in the Barberini Hall on the "Mellon Project" that deals with annotated manuscripts using IIIF. Two sessions will explain some of the technical work behind the project. Session I will treat software and platforms for interoperability, digital manuscript futures, coordination of the project, and lessons learned. Session II will be dedicated to web thematic pathways (e.g., Latin and Greek paleography, Latin classics, Vatican palimpsests, and the manuscripts of Duke Federico da Montefeltro). In the Salone Sistino will be an exhibition of some selected original manuscripts. Participants need to pre-register. See https://www.vaticanlibrary.va. On November 13–15, 2019 the Istituto Maria SS.ma Bambina in collaboration with the Sezione Romana dell'Associazione Internazionale di Studi Tardo Antichi will sponsor an international conference on the theme "Pagani e cristiani: conflitto, confronto, dialogo. Le trasformazioni di un modello storiografico." Among the papers to be presented are: "'The Last Pagans of Rome': la fine del paganismo a Roma, tra consensi e polemiche" by Ritsa Lizzi Testa; "'Il regno dei cieli si fa strada con violenza' (Mt 11: 12). Variazioni storiografiche sul ruolo della violenza nel confronto tardo-antico tra cristiani e pagani" by Giovanni Filoramo; "Pagani e cristiani ancora: nuove metodologie per nuovi...

Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, D.C. Riots of 1968 by J. Samuel Walker

Reviewed by: Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, D.C. Riots of 1968 by J. Samuel Walker Michael W. Flamm (bio) Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, D.C. Riots of 1968. By J. Samuel Walker. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 185. $24.95 cloth; $24.95 ebook) In March 1968, the director of public safety in Washington was optimistic that the nation's capital would not suffer a major outbreak of urban violence, unlike Newark and Detroit the previous summer. "I am completely confident we will be able to prevent any disorder, or shall we say serious disorder, in this city," declared Patrick V. Murphy (p. 47). Then, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis on April 4. In the days that followed, more than one hundred American cities endured large-scale unrest. But Washington was the hardest hit, with 13 deaths (none due to actions by the National Guard or U.S. Army) and $27 million in property damage (p. 98). In this clear and concise account, J. Samuel Walker, former historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ably contextualizes the tragic events of a horrific week in a traumatic year. The first two chapters set the stage by describing how the "other Washington," which few tourists ever saw, came into existence and why the threat of civil unrest loomed large by 1968. The middle two chapters offer a vivid narrative of the rioting and looting that followed news of King's assassination. The final two chapters carefully address the consequences, both in the immediate aftermath and during the long road to economic recovery. Throughout this well-researched book, the author provides evenhanded and sober-minded assessments of controversial matters. Rejecting ideologically-loaded terms like "rebellion" or "uprising" to describe what happened, he correctly notes that the vast majority of residents never participated and "the great majority of participants neither burned and looted to make a political statement nor acted with a political objective in mind" (p. 102). At the same time, he properly emphasizes the underlying conditions—poor housing, high [End Page 644] unemployment, and substandard housing—that fed the fires of frustration. And Walker aptly labels as "vastly exaggerated" the claims by government officials and conservative politicians that SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael triggered the violence when he waved a pistol at a Howard University student rally and warned that "there's going to be some shooting" (pp. 62, 100). Some scholars may wish that the author had explored certain topics in greater depth. For example, although the D.C. National Guard was almost 25 percent African American—a disproportionately large share compared to the much-criticized National Guard in Michigan and New Jersey—Walker devotes only a single page to the "verbal abuse" black soldiers faced (p. 87). The difficult experiences of African American policemen and reporters similarly receive little attention. The author notes that whites owned 86 percent of the burned or looted businesses, but he also does not discuss in detail whether long-standing tensions between Jewish storeowners and black residents may have contributed to this outcome (pp. 70, 98). Perhaps a paucity of sources or the brevity of the book—only 135 pages of text—precluded deeper analysis of these issues. Most of 14th Street Is Gone nevertheless provides a compact introduction to the complicated history of the nation's capital and a balanced examination of a painful episode. The broadest and most readable account of the urban upheaval of April 1968 is still A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (2009) by Clay Risen, which the author briefly acknowledges at the very end. But fifty years after Washington erupted in violence, Walker has produced a valuable study which appropriately concludes by reminding us that similar explosions remain a potential threat to America's cities. [End Page 645] Michael W. Flamm michael w. flamm teaches modern U.S. history at Ohio Wesleyan University. He is the author of Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (2005) and In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of...

Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968 by J. Samuel Walker

Reviewed by: Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968 by J. Samuel Walker Sam Abramson Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968. By J. Samuel Walker. (New York: Oxford University Press, Pp. x, 185. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-19-084479-0.) 2018 In many respects, the details of the rioting in J. Samuel Walker's Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968 are familiar. A violent flashpoint—in this instance, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.—triggered a wave of reactionary violence in poor, predominantly black urban areas in 1960s America. Disaffected rioters smashed windows, looted businesses, and set fire to entire city blocks, leaving in their wake destruction and fear. What distinguishes these particular 1960s American riots, however, is that while President Lyndon B. Johnson was accustomed to the procedure of responding to riots, he was not accustomed to responding to riots he could actually see. Walker's detailed accounts of the April 1968 Washington, D.C., riots unfold in spaces familiar to those in the White House; rather than reading dispatches on the carnage from Los Angeles, Newark, or Detroit, they saw the smoke rising themselves. Anyone familiar with riot narratives of the 1960s may find this particular narrative a bit surreal, as Johnson made his way through riot-torn areas of Washington en route to a memorial service for King at the National Cathedral. After several summers of chaos in cities across the country, the riots were finally at the president's doorstep. That riots occurred in the nation's capital is of particular interest to Walker. Most of 14th Street Is Gone bypasses the "monumental Washington" that so many tourists know in favor of examining a residential city with "a long, shadowy, and frequently contentious history" (pp. 7, 5). Walker attributes the formation of the overcrowded, dilapidated neighborhoods that erupted into violence to a number of political, economic, and social factors that began long before April 1968. The degree of neglect and squalor in areas of the city made the riots seem almost inevitable, he argues—decades in the making and just waiting for a national or local instigator. Those less familiar with the city will appreciate the maps, photographs, and detailed geography of areas such as 7th Street and 14th and U Streets that suffered so much damage. Walker does an excellent job of constantly orienting his readers so that they always know the [End Page 226] exact location of the scene he describes. The entire account is relatively spare—135 pages before endnotes—but it is packed with harrowing tidbits and manages to contextualize the D.C. riots in both the larger scheme of 1960s America and as a stand-alone event. There is scant literature on these particular riots, but that is, in part, what makes Walker's work a useful contribution, blending urban history, local history, and political history to show how the timeline of certain D.C. neighborhoods descending into smoldering ruins was both typical in its specifics and exceptional in its location. Walker eschews the symbolism of the Washington Mall in favor of a harsher portrait, but that does not make the symbolism of the city itself irrelevant; if conditions were this dire and anger this fervent in America's political center, what does that say about the state of America in 1968? Walker need not answer that question, preferring to let the horrifying, normalized specifics and hotly contested aftermath of the riots offer both the answer and the centerpiece of his narrative. In the wake of the murder of America's greatest civil rights icon, a president mulled deploying U.S. troops, business owners fled as their stores were demolished, and Vietnam War veterans said that the scenes in D.C. were "just like the front line" (p. 65). Ultimately, Most of 14th Street Is Gone is a carefully researched, valuable addition to the local history of Washington, D.C., and the national history of urban riots. Sam Abramson St. John's School, Houston, Texas Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

On Mindfulness as an Alternative to Mindless Modern Consumption

Book Review| December 01 2018 On Mindfulness as an Alternative to Mindless Modern Consumption The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love—Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits. By Judson Brewer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 256 pp. Hardcover, $25. Adam Alter Adam Alter New York University’s Stern School of Business, 40 West 4th Street, Room 811, New York, NY 10012, E-mail: aalter@stern.nyu.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The American Journal of Psychology (2018) 131 (4): 510–513. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.131.4.0510 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Adam Alter; On Mindfulness as an Alternative to Mindless Modern Consumption. The American Journal of Psychology 1 January 2018; 131 (4): 510–513. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.131.4.0510 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressThe American Journal of Psychology Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Application of 2D ambient noise tomography to levee safety assessment in New Orleans

To develop noninvasive methods for levee inspection, we carry out shallow, active, and passive seismic investigations at three sites along levees in the New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, area: Industrial Canal, London Avenue Canal, and 17th Street Canal. These sites sustained damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and have since been rebuilt. Recorded ambient noise data are processed using the common-midpoint spatial autocorrelation method. Dispersion curves obtained with active surface-wave methods and passive wave methods, which use both L-shaped and linear sensor arrays, show internally consistent similarities. Minimum frequencies range from 0.6 to 2 Hz and maximum frequencies range from 10 to 30 Hz. Nonlinear inversion of 2D S-wave velocity models generates velocity-depth cross sections that extend approximately 400–1000 m along levees and provide information to depths of 40–60 m. Resultant S-wave velocity (VS) profiles are generally consistent with existing drilling logs and the results of laboratory tests. Beneath the London Avenue Canal wall, VS values (130–170 m/s) likely correspond to saturated, unconsolidated sands, and a low-velocity (50–100 m/s) zone at depth to 15 m beneath the 17th Street Canal matches low-rigidity clays observed in geotechnical logs. Comparison to active surface-wave methods at the Industrial Canal site display similar results but highlight that while active methods have better resolution in the upper few meters, passive methods may be acquired more quickly.

Meg R. Jackson. Review of "Wall Writers: Graffiti in Its Innocence" by Trina Calderon, Roger Gastman, and Caleb Neelon and "Basquiat before Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979–1980" by Nora Burnett Abrams.

Meg R. Jackson. Review of "Wall Writers: Graffiti in Its Innocence" by Trina Calderon, Roger Gastman, and Caleb Neelon and "Basquiat before Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979–1980" by Nora Burnett Abrams.