American Inventions Research Articles

Enshrining hunting as a foundation for conservation – the North American Model

The hunter-conservationist movement of Canada and the USA arose in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Many complex forces influenced its emergence as one of the great North American inventions: citizen activism for nature based principally upon sustainable use and vested interest – the North American Model of Conservation. Although unrestrained slaughter by commercial hunters had endangered North America’s wildlife legacy, regulated hunting became the origin of the world’s longest standing continental movement for wildlife protection, use and enhancement.

Unstructured By Design

The term “tinkering” has a variety of connotations. The original term referred to tinsmiths, whose profession revolved around the care and maintenance of various objects made from tin and other metals. Over time, tinkering evolved into a catchall term for making slight modifications to existing objects. It has become somewhat synonymous with the general terms “tweaking” and “hacking.” Although what to call the act of playing around with objects for fun or profit has changed, the central mind-set of poking and prodding systems has been around for ages, and according to author Alec Foege, the tinkering tradition is a crucial part of the continued success of the U.S. on the global stage. The tradition, he says, is also being neglected. Foege takes tinkering seriously. His book, “ The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great,” explores the history of American innovation, its current status, and what ought ...

In Search of Patent Republics

This Article presents an original study of the internal governance of patent licensing collectives. This investigation is prompted by a developing belief among legal commentators that cooperative institutions such as patent pools and research consortia point the way forward for American innovation. Until now, however, scholars have not examined the internal governance of such groups. As a result, it has remained unclear whether patent pools encourage innovation, and if so, how. Drawing on fifty-two collective patent licensing agreements in force between 1856 and 2013, this Article shows that patent pools arguably have not encouraged innovation by serving as forums for collective patent valuations. Instead, many such groups incorporate “rough and ready” rules that offer the greatest innovation incentives to repeat players. In light of the unappreciated impact that patent pool design has on innovation, this Article presents a new proposal to mandate the recording of collective patent agreements with a federal agency.

In Memoriam: Banning Gray Lary (1924–2013)

Banning Gray Lary, an American surgeon and innovator, passed away at his home in South Miami on January 3, 2013 at the age of 88. Born in Winchester, Kentucky, Banning was the son of Virgil Pendleton and Thelma Gray Lary. During Lary’s freshman year at a junior military academy near Cookeville, Tennessee, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, which led him to enlist in the U.S. Army. His company was sent to fight in North Africa, but he was held back, made a platoon sergeant, and assigned to train the next wave of recruits. At age 18, he was transferred to an Army specialized officer training program at Ohio State University and became a cadet colonel. His acumen for medicine emerged, and he was sent to the University of Illinois to train as an Army doctor. When the war ended, he continued his studies under the G.I. Bill and graduated with a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1948. During his medical school years in Chicago, Lary fell in love with Katherine Lee Tedrow, a lovely young woman from Princeton, Illinois, who attended Northwestern University. They married in 1948 and had four sons, each of whom found success later in their chosen fields. Their youngest son Brett sadly passed away at the age of 22. Lary interned at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, where he rotated through the various specialties. It was surgery, however, for which he felt his greatest affection. He was especially entranced with the work and writings of Dr. Warren H. Cole, with whom he spent a year focusing on gallbladder disease research. While in Cole’s laboratory, Lary made a pivotal discovery. Earlier studies had shown that oxygen delivered in large bubbles could be fatal. Working on canine subjects, Lary found a way to make small bubbles using a wetting agent. When those tiny bubbles were introduced into the venous system, they were able to supply life-saving oxygen for the first time without delivering it through the lungs. His work was published in the Surgical Forum and was presented at the 1952 annual meeting of the American College of Surgeons. A few years later, Richard DeWall, a research fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Walton Lillehei, developed the first DeWall–Lillehei bubble oxygenator, which made feasible creation of the heart–lung machine. Their experimental work in 1955 was based on a similar method of passing small oxygen bubbles through a series of small hypodermic needles to allow oxygenation of blood. When the Korean War broke out, Lary was called up from the Air Force Reserves, but St. Luke’s Hospital managed to get him deferred as chief resident. He worked with Drs. Harold Wiggers and Raymond Ingraham, who at that time were researching hemorrhagic shock with Banning Gray Lary (1924-2013)

We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States by Richard Bell (review)

Reviewed by: We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States by Richard Bell Russ Castronovo (bio) We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States. Richard Bell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. 332 pp. Even though suicide seems an intensely personal action that emerges from the depths of despair, it resounds with more public meanings about the proper balance between individual will and collective social feelings in US democracy. Richard Bell makes this argument in We Shall Be No More by refusing to psychologize—and hence privatize—the forlorn souls who took drastic steps toward self-murder. Instead, Bell reads the suicide’s final act as an elusive political expression, one that combines and confuses protest with resignation, ultimate defiance with submission, and severe autonomy with oversensitivity to cultural influence. Tracking these themes from the days of Puritan settlement to the crisis over slavery and secession, Bell covers a large swath of national history by exploring how suicide became a heated flash point in debates over novel reading, philanthropy, capital punishment, religious salvation, and resistance to slavery. This survey depends on a careful scouring of newspapers, pamphlets, and other print culture artifacts that Bell sets amid a rich backdrop of historical crisis. Many of these crises, such as the worries surrounding excessive sentimentalism or the distrust of Universalism, Bell argues, erupt from the unprecedented and ever-increasing availability of printed material in America. If suicide was an epidemic, as alarmed social observers frequently claimed, then newspaper columns often seemed to be foremost in spreading the contagion. The earliest instance of what Bell calls “suicide politics” involves a 1690 item in Boston’s Public Occurrences about a recent widower, who, deranged [End Page 771] by grief, listened to the devil and took his own life (249). Within a hundred years, such events would accrue heightened cultural significance, as American revolutionaries often found it completely understandable why cowardly Loyalists would commit suicide. The partisan view of such tragedies suggests to Bell “the connection between suicide and the disintegration of social authority” (12). Political readings of suicide are not an American invention, however. Lucretia’s act of self-murder, after being raped by Tarquin, is said to have provided the impetus for the founding of the Roman Republic. Joseph Addison’s Cato (1712), a favorite among eighteenth-century American republicans, exemplified for George Washington and other Whigs of his class just how far men of virtue were willing to go to withstand tyranny. Bell does not examine what attracted Americans to these classical topoi of suicide and the meanings they might have wrested from these myths of self-sacrifice, which befits a study that is more thematic than theoretical or critical. And precisely because he does not dwell on a few texts, he is able to range across the diverse geographies of popular print culture, from the pietistic heights of religious sermons to the sensational accounts of murder-suicides. As he sagely observes, the proliferation of newspapers in the early Republic, which increased more than tenfold between 1760 and 1814, occasioned a dramatic increase in the reporting of suicides in ways that both interested and anguished readers during this era. The danger that print could unhinge readers, especially young men and women attracted to suffering and self-consumed heroes, often centered on one particular novel in America, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Bell begins his first case study by tracking how ministers, medical doctors, and elders fretted over the influence that Goethe’s lachrymose tale of thwarted love exercised over impressionable minds. While these complaints against novels will be familiar to literary critics and book historians, Bell’s contribution lies in connecting this perceived danger to transatlantic publishing. The simile he employs to suggest the dimensions of this epidemic of novel reading—“suicide spread through the pages of fashionable fiction like yellow fever”—fits with the late eighteenth-century landscape, where cities such as Philadelphia and New York were decimated by hemorrhagic disease (60). Bell might also have spoken of a flood of teary fiction that inundated the reading public with sentimental excess, since the next chapter examines the many lifesaving and...

Reviewing the South: Lillian Smith, South Today, and the Origins of Literary Canons

JORDAN J. DOMINY Savannah State University Reviewing the South: Lillian Smith, South Today, and the Origins of Literary Canons WHILE CLASSROOMS OF UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES SEEM THE FRONT LINES in the academic study of literature, literary and critical periodicals have served an important role in forming dominant ideas about American literature and culture. At no time was this truer than during the years leading up to and during World War II, when English departments as we know them today began to emerge, influenced greatly by novel critical approaches and the model of scholarly discourse conducted through the literary quarterly. Many successful quarterlies found university backing, and some, such as Kenyon Review and Southern Review, were edited by English professors who promoted the New Criticism. Unsurprisingly, its tenets became the dominant mode of engagement with literature in classrooms and scholarship for a generation. However, attempts to influence notions about literature have not been limited to large quarterlies with strong circulation numbers. Smaller, non-academic periodicals have certainly had agendas concerning the best purpose for literature, its scholarship, and canonicity. South Today, a small literary magazine edited and published by Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling out of Clayton, Georgia, from 1936 to 1945, highlights this agenda in the particular case of literatures of the US South. The concurrent publication of South Today with major critical quarterlies demonstrates important, divergent trends in how intellectuals and authors in the United States were thinking at that time about the canonicity and the institutionalization of literary studies because of its attention to global politicalandsocialissuesinaliterary,regionalcontext.Scholarlyinterest in a canon of Southern literature arose during the World War II years and coincided with a collective desire for a national literature of democratic values, a desire that eventually led South Today into obscurity. Placing South Today in dialogue with more recognizable quarterlies and the larger magazine culture of the early to middle twentieth century in terms of purpose, editorial policy, and scholarly approach is quite 30 Jordan J. Dominy fruitful, especially in terms of revising predominant narratives of the modern as related to the development of the formalized study of Southern and American literature. Indeed, as George Core stated at a conference on Southern letters celebrating the fiftieth year after the founding of Southern Review.: The critical quarterly as we now know it was largely founded in response to modernism—to the work of writers like Ford,Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Joyce. At first, magazinessuchasFord’sEnglishReviewandhisTransatlanticReviewwereintended primarily to provide outlets for fiction and poetry; then increasingly the emphasis turned to criticism—a criticism that would explain the obscure and pithy indirectionsofthemodernistmannerandstylebypenetratingitsmasks,illuminating its shadowed modes, and translating its muted voices. The major American literary quarterlies since 1935—the Southern, Kenyon, Sewanee, and Hudson reviews—therefore have existed largely to explain modern literature. (190) This suggests that the advent of scholarly literary reviews was a definitive early indicator of the late modernism Fredric Jameson defines asthe“ideologyofmodernism,”thatis,thecodificationandcanonization by intellectuals, art critics, and literary critics of the artistic practices and works of pre-war modernists, especially high modernists. Jameson calls late modernism “an American invention” and “a product of the Cold War” (165). With strict adherence to codified modernist aesthetics, late modernism valued form over content, and Jameson points to the New Criticism as a key factor in the late modernist turn. Such emphasis in art and literature became significant in the post-war years for America’s battle against communism because it enabled the intelligentsia to keep leftist and progressive politics in check. For late modernism, Jameson explains, “high literature and high art mean the aesthetic minus culture, the aesthetic field radically cleansed and purified of culture” (179). Art and literature with all of its contexts—political, social, or otherwise —strippedbecomes democratically safe, but only in regardstotechnique and forms. The purging of contexts came on the heels of a leftist turn in American culture during the Great Depression, as union membership increased and artists, writers, and intellectuals became more active in leftist politics. At nearly the same moment that publications such as Partisan Review and New Masses began to define and extol to young, aspiring writers a proletarian literature that joined working-class realities,radicalpolitics,andartisticinnovation(Denning201...

The Judicial Bookshelf

The Judicial Bookshelf DONALD GRIER STEPHENSON, JR. “The first task of a President after taking the oath of office,” observed Professor Edward S. Corwin long ago, “is to create ‘an administration’; that is to say, a more or less integrated body of officials through whom he can act.”1 Corwin’s statement in turn can be read as merely a paraphrase of Chief Justice (and former President) Taft’s earlier insistence that the “vesting of the executive power in the President was essen­ tially a grant ofthe power to execute the laws. But the President alone and unaided could not execute the laws. He must execute them by the assistance of subordinates.”2 Both Corwin and Taft stated a truth often overlooked on Election Day by voters who, understandably perhaps, are singularly focused on the task at hand: casting a ballot for the nominee of one party or another. Yet, in reality, voters are choosing far more than a President and Vice President, for any incoming President will both sooner and later make an indeterminate number of appointments over the course of even a single term. Coupled with the new chief executive’s personality, values, objec­ tives, and the events that happen on his watch, it is these personnel selections that lend a distinct cast or color to each administration, distinguishing it from both those that came before and from those that will follow. In light of the unique nature of the Presidency—the office was, after all, an American invention, one without true parallel elsewhere—the significance ofthe appointing power in the larger scheme of the political system was realized practically at the outset. “It should never be forgotten, insisted Justice Joseph Story in his Commentaries on the Constitution “that in a republican government offices are established and are to be filled, not to gratify private interests and private attach­ ments; not as a means of corrupt influence or individual profit; but for purposes of the highest public good; to give dignity, strength, purity, and energy to the administration ofthe laws.”3 Furthermore, as legal scholar and Story contemporary William Rawle of Penn­ sylvania believed, the appointment process revealed as much about the person who made the appointment as about the one who received it. “A proper selection and appoint­ ment of subordinate officers is one of the strongest marks of a powerful mind.”4 Simi­ larly, in his biography of George Washington, Chief Justice John Marshall placed consider­ able emphasis on the care with which the first THE JUDICIAL BOOKSHELF 439 President constructed “his cabinet council” where “[i]n its composition, public opinion as well as intrinsic worth had been consulted, and a high degree ofcharacter had been combined with real talent.”5 Yet Washington learned first-hand that the appointing power, shared with the Senate, included thejudiciary as well, a responsibility he took very seriously. Indeed, it was one of his first major concerns as President: who would sit on the Supreme Court ofthe United States? “Impressed with a conviction that the true administration of justice is the firmest pillar ofgood government,” he wrote soon-tobe Attorney General Edmund Randolph in 1789, “I have considered the first arrangement of the judicial department as essential to the happiness of our country and the stability of its political system.” Under the Articles of Confederation, which the recently ratified Constitution had replaced, there had been no nationaljudiciary. The Court’s role in the new political system was therefore unclear, but Washington realized the impact the Court might have in the young Republic. This required, he told Randolph, “the selection of the fittest characters to expound the laws and dispense justice . . ,”6 As he selected the six Justices Congress had authorized in the Judiciary Act of 1789, Washington also made sure that each section of the nation was represented and that the six were strong supporters of the new Constitution, leading Marshall later to affirm that in his choices for “high judicial offices” the first President had been “guided by the same principles”7 that drove his selections for the Cabinet. Thus in electing a President, voters are choosing someone who will not only con­ struct an administration, but one who...

Practice Corner: To Build a Fire

HomeRadioGraphicsVol. 33, No. 1 PreviousNext EditorialsPractice Corner: To Build a FireDouglas E. Green , Michael F. McNeeleyDouglas E. Green , Michael F. McNeeleyAuthor AffiliationsFrom the Department of Radiology, University of Washington, 1959 NE Pacific St, RR215, Box 357115, Seattle, WA 98109.Address correspondence to D.E.G. (e-mail: [email protected])Douglas E. Green Michael F. McNeeleyPublished Online:Jan 1 2013https://doi.org/10.1148/rg.331125180MoreSectionsFull textPDF ToolsImage ViewerAdd to favoritesCiteTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked In References1 Gertner J. The idea factory: Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation. New York, NY: Penguin, 2012. Google Scholar2 Isaacson W. Steve Jobs. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Google ScholarArticle HistoryReceived: Aug 21 2012Accepted: Sept 17 2012Published online: Jan 1 2013Published in print: Jan 2013 FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsRecommended Articles Customer Service in Radiology: Satisfying Your Patients and ReferrersRadioGraphics2018Volume: 38Issue: 6pp. 1872-1887Fundamentals of Diagnostic Error in ImagingRadioGraphics2018Volume: 38Issue: 6pp. 1845-1865Increasing Median Time between Interruptions in a Busy Reading RoomRadioGraphics2021Volume: 41Issue: 2pp. E47-E56Radiomic Features at CT Can Distinguish Pancreatic Cancer from Noncancerous PancreasRadiology: Imaging Cancer2021Volume: 3Issue: 4Deep Learning to Detect Pancreatic Cancer at CT: Artificial Intelligence Living Up to Its HypeRadiology2022Volume: 306Issue: 1pp. 183-185See More RSNA Education Exhibits How to Read an Abdominal CT: Guidance for Radiology Residents from the Visual and Cognitive SciencesDigital Posters2020Artificial Intelligence for Early Detection of Pancreatic Cancer: Preliminary Observations and ChallengesDigital Posters2019National Patient Safety Goals: Is Radiology Ready?Digital Posters2020 RSNA Case Collection Pancreatic lymphomaRSNA Case Collection2020Primary pancreatic lymphoma RSNA Case Collection2020Acute pancreatitisRSNA Case Collection2020 Vol. 33, No. 1 Metrics Altmetric Score PDF download

AATS 2012: “To model excellence”

In Dr Schaff’s exceedingly generous introduction, you have learned more than you need to know about this 60-year-old smiling public man. These introductions often evoke 2 reactions: of predestination and inevitability, looking back, or uncertainty, even impossibility, when trying to imagine looking forward from the past. I score myself highly on the impossibilities. Not that many years ago, I stood in the back of this meeting and very sincerely doubted that I would ever be a member, let alone your President, and for this miracle I am humbly grateful to you all—and, like everyone who has stood here before, I owe much of my good fortune to many, many others, who I cannot begin to enumerate. A select few include my administrative staff (Figure 1), our physician’s assistants (Figure 2), the cardiac anesthesia team (Figure 3), and the perfusion team (Figure 4). Seymour Schwartz is an amazing, multitalented man who convinced me to train at Columbia Presbyterian—once he accepted that I could not be dissuaded from what he called ‘‘that cardiac junk’’ (Figure 5). At Columbia, I had the good fortune to be trained by many outstanding surgeons—Henry Spotnitz, Tom King, and Fred Jaretzki and, in very special ways, by Eric Rose and Fred Bowman (Figure 6). I also had the privilege of training under 2 previous American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) presidents, Jim Malm and Keith Reemtsma (Figure 7). Dr Malm was my host at my first AATS meeting, and I am honored that he and Connie are here today. Standing out, even among these standouts, are the 4 people who make it all work every day, and I am flattered that Angie, Suzanne, Dana, and Larry are also here today (Figure 8). Last, but not least, I thank the outstanding group of

The Cause of Baseball: Baseball and Nation-Building in Revolutionary Cuba

Sports have long been a source of national pride for Cubans. Today, in a country lacking shopping malls and other commercial forms of entertainment, youths can be found playing pick-up games of soccer, volleyball, and baseball at any given hour of the day or night. Older aficionados gather at places such as the famous Esquina Caliente, or Hot Corner, in Havana's Central Park to discuss and debate the particulars of sporting events. While Cubans have embraced niche sports chess and fencing, baseball has always occupied a rarified stratum in Cuba's sporting culture despite its historical association with American imperialism. This has continued to be the case despite drastic changes to the way the game was organized and presented to the Cuban public after 1959. In the wake of the Revolution, the sport came to have great importance to the state as a symbol of revolutionary ideals and defiance. nature of the game leant itself to politicization by state actors. British anthropologist Thomas F. Carter writes that, like all sports, baseball is all about the increasingly refined and controlled movement of bodies--a concern of all state-building projects as well. (1) In order to better capture the hearts and minds of the Cuban public, the revolutionary government set about shaping baseball into a spectacle that was equal parts training program and patriotic theater. Postrevolutionary Cuban baseball, rather than a game that was integrated with its American counterpart as a sort of farm system for potential major leaguers, became an insular system, retaining its finest players to represent Cuban self-sacrifice and patriotic fervor. Even the biggest stars renounced the material rewards of professionalism in favor of the purity of amateur play. Furthermore, producing athletes who could compete on the international stage served as proof that the island nation stood on equal ground with the United States, the country against which Cubans measured their progress and standing in the world. idealistic image of Cuban players as altruistic defenders of national honor has been challenged, however, by the Cuban stars who have heeded the siren call of American Major League Baseball and the wealth it bestows on the select few with the physical gifts to compete in its ranks. flow of Cuban baseball talent to the US market is, in part, an expression of the persistent bond between the two countries, cemented by a shared history and passion for the game of baseball. This connection posed a conundrum to Cuban revolutionaries who sought to reshape the game to conform to the revolutionary national project despite its history as an American invention. BASEBALL BETWEEN EMPIRES, 1860-1959 As Louis Perez argues in On Becoming Cuban, the United States had an integral role in the formation of a Cuban national identity as the island distanced itself from Spanish norms in the nineteenth century. Perez writes, The two cultures converged on each other, interacting and merging, and fused in dynamic adaptation and accommodation. Cubans and North Americans occupied a place in each other's imagination and in their respective fantasies about each other. (2) US material culture had flooded Cuba well before the American military intervention of 1898. American capital and consumer products steadily poured into Cuba, bringing with them myriad cultural trappings. (3) Among the many American institutions introduced to Cuba was baseball, a sport that was burgeoning into an iconic American cultural touchstone. Cubans' enthusiastic embrace of baseball was a product of this affinity for all things American. According to Thomas Carter, the game was introduced to Cuba by university students returning home from the US in the 1860s--around the same time that the sport was becoming the national pastime in the United States itself. (4) Long covetous of Spain's remaining Caribbean colonies, the US saw Cubans' adoption of baseball as a sign of America's waxing influence in the region and the hemisphere as a whole. …

Creating innovators: the making of young people who will change the world

In this ground-breaking book, education expert Tony Wagner provides a powerful rationale for developing an innovation-driven economy. He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators. He profiles compelling young American innovators, revealing how the adults in their lives nurtured their creativity and sparked their imagination, while teaching them to learn from failure and persevere. Wagner identifies a pattern-a childhood of creative play leads to deep-seated interests, which in adolescence and adulthood blossom into a deeper purpose for career and life goals. Play, passion, and purpose: these are the forces that drive young innovators. Wagner then looks more widely at the education system and shows how we can apply this knowledge as educators, and what parents can do to compensate for poor schooling. He takes readers into the most forward-thinking schools, colleges, and workplaces in the country, where teachers and employers are developing cultures of innovation based on collaboration, interdisciplinary problem-solving, and intrinsic motivation. The result is a timely, provocative and inspiring manifesto that will change how we look at our schools and workplaces, and provide us with a roadmap to creating the changemakers of tomorrow.

The idea factory: Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation

From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs - officially, the research and development wing of AT&T - was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs. In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. At its heart this is a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant and eccentric men - Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and Bill Baker - who spent their careers at Bell Labs. Today, when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offers us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.

“Religion and Nonviolence in American History”

AbstractNonviolence has long been an important aspect of American religion. Understanding the tradition of religious nonviolence helps illuminate such subjects as the growth and limits of state power, the character of political dissent, and the significance of race in the nation’s history. In the colonial period, Quakers tried to square the nonviolent ideal with the vagaries of pluralism and cultural conflict. Nineteenth‐century nonresistants led by William Lloyd Garrison tied the problem of violence to the injustice of slavery. The connections between peace and justice were revitalized in the decades after the First World War, when Mohandas Gandhi’s efforts in India suggested the viability of nonviolent direct action as a practical strategy for social change. That modern form of nonviolence achieved great success in the civil rights movement, as Martin Luther King, Jr. and other African American innovators used it to defeat white supremacy. Religious nonviolence was also at the center of antinuclear protests and the campaign to end the Vietnam War. More recently, nonviolence has appeared in the prolife movement and the opposition to United States military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity Andrea White Mallios, Peter . Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010. 468 pp. Conrad's influence on American writers is well known, as is the popular reception of Chance in the US followed by his much heralded trip there. But it might come as some surprise that the country so denigrated in Conrad's fiction and even referred to in one infamous instance as a last resort—"I vill an Amerigan citizen begome," protests the despicable Patna captain—supported a veritable Conrad industry in the early twentieth century. Former studies of transatlantic connections have been concerned with influence and consumption. The present study distinguishes itself by focusing on production—the ways "Conrad" was constructed in the US especially during the years of the Great War and its aftermath, his fictions serving as grist to disparate domestic social-political mills. While both Robert Weisbuch in The Atlantic Double-Cross (1986) and Mallios complain of the paucity of work in Anglo-American comparative study, Mallios's claim goes much further. In a more focused manner and for a more distinct purpose than "influence" and its anxieties, Mallios employs "a critical approach predicated on the minute investigation of the constitution and contestation of 'domestic' spaces by 'foreign' signs" (ix). This study of "the modern American invention of Joseph Conrad as a 'master' literary figure between 1914 and 1939" constitutes an effort, Mallios argues, to "transnationize the terms of global literary and cultural studies" (ix), and to better understand the arbitrariness of literary national borders. That Conrad's fictions could be so variously construed (and misconstrued) in these various American "productions" was a function particularly, Mallios claims, of a certain heterotopic quality intrinsic to Conrad's writings. Here he recuperates [End Page 254] Foucault's ideas about "other spaces," to focus on the heterotopic textual spaces in Conrad's fiction in order to help explain the multiplicity of their often contradictory receptions," those spaces "always unsettling and refusing confinement within any authorized, legalized, moralized, or ideological plane of discourse" (62). That Conrad's fictions were so commodious, so comprehensive, so capable of disparate readings, from diverse, even, contradictory points of view, was "a general property of Conrad's fiction," Mallios argues (31), that also served his various American "producers" well. His study examines the ways in which Conrad's American reviewers and critics constructed "Conrad" so that readers were made to see the many points of congruence between his fictions and America's distinctive sense of itself in the early twentieth century. Those "many points of resonance" included "a slippery discourse of Englishness, capable of both suturing and subverting U.S. 'Anglo-Saxon' articulations of world relation and domestic boundary and hierarchy," "the idea of revolutionary/Bolshevik Russia," "global practices of imperialism and the race ideologies subtending them," and "the idea of the nation itself" (34). The focus on these constructions is undertaken in this study within specific historical contexts and particular institutional constraints: the journals, newspapers, magazines of the day and the domestic narratives—often changing—each sought to advance. The book is divided into three parts. The first, which comprises almost half of the book and is entitled"The Nation in the World, the World in the Nation," examines the work of three "contra Anglo-Saxon" constructions of Conrad, all, in their rather different ways, engaging his "foreignness," enlisting him heterotopically for their particular purposes. Here Mallios provides a detailed study of H.L. Mencken's creation of "Conrad" in his many reviews, books, and articles as a counter-argument to the then raging pressures against immigration and for isolationism and nativist Anglo-Saxonism. The German-American, whose writings were marked by his own sense of alienation and homelessness, was especially keen on celebrating Conrad as "an unmelted British immigrant" (54) and a cosmopolitan figure of a profoundly comprehensive point of view. If we might wonder, as Conrad did and vehemently protested, why Mencken insisted on Conrad as "Slav," Mallios provides an answer. As a Slav, Conrad figured for Mencken as foreign, not Anglo-Saxon and as "a template for the un-national, "anti-national," and "true cosmopolitan,"(79) and in...

The Lowdown on Denim by T. L. Kyi

Kyi, Tanya Lloyd. The Lowdown on Denim. Illus. Clayton Hanmer. Toronto: Annick Press, 2011. Print. It’s springtime: time to pick up a pair of the latest blue jeans for the new season. This year, however, thanks to The Lowdown on Denim, young fashionistas can also read about their pants, and consider the cultural, economic, political, and environmental issues surrounding them. The Lowdown on Denim provides an entertaining introduction to how jeans have evolved, who makes them, and what they’ve meant throughout the world. Author Tanya Lloyd Kyi, based in British Columbia, has created a wide variety of curiosity-sparking non-fiction titles; including 50 Underwear Questions (reviewed by T. Chatterley in this issue) and 50 Poisonous Questions (reviewed by K. Frail in Vol. 1, No. 1, 2011). Here, she applies an unobtrusive narrative frame; protagonists JD and Shred are sent to detention, having been caught blue-handed running their teacher’s jeans up the school flagpole. In detention, JD and Shred are tasked with writing a report on the history of jeans, which, as Shred points out, “have been around way longer than Google”. Kyi takes her protagonists on a tour of jeans beginning in the mid-19th century, and illustrator Clayton Hanmer carries the reader along by placing JD and Shred in each time and place along the way. They begin by panning for gold in California in garments woefully lacking in ruggedness. They go on to explore wartime periods, the cold war, rock’n’roll, disco, punk, hip hop, and more. Throughout, Kyi and Hanmer also touch upon issues including trade globalization, factory working conditions, marketing strategies, gender norms, and pesticide-intensive cotton. Hanmer’s award-winning illustrations are well-known thanks to publications such as OWL Magazine, National Geographic Kids, and The Globe & Mail, as well as several books. Here he effectively captures JD and Shred’s bewilderment at their whirlwind tour, while highlighting key moments of insight. The Lowdown on Denim is unfortunately mistitled. Kyi and Hanmer have actually given us The Lowdown on Jeans Beginning with Levi Strauss. Readers may unfortunately be left with the impression that jeans were a solely American invention; denim fabric’s European origins, for example, go unmentioned. Despite this, The Lowdown on Denim is a detailed, readable, engaging commodity history. It will draw in pre-teen and early teen readers, and could serve as a great launching point for a variety of classroom discussions and projects. Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Sarah PolkinghorneSarah is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta. She enjoys all sorts of books.

The world according to DARPA [Spectral Lines

The most famous name in American innovation today isn't Apple or Google. Nor is it Facebook, Boeing, or Intel. The iconic American innovator is a government agency that neither earns a profit nor sells a single consumer product. That DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, runs with the big dogs of commercial innovation reflects the importance of science and technology to national security. War, not necessity, is the mother of invention.

Non-Recourse Mortgages – A Fresh Start

In about a quarter of US states, all residential mortgages are essentially non-recourse, meaning that in case of default, the lender can only repossess the house but cannot collect on the private assets and future income of the borrower. This American innovation is now beginning to attract extensive interest abroad, but ironically in the US itself is getting a bad name. The law has been blamed for exacerbating the financial crisis, while stricken homeowners who take advantage of it have been scolded by lenders and even by the Secretary of the Treasury. We propose a fresh and more balanced look at mandatory non-recourse. Contrary to the view that non-recourse regimes lead to a vicious cycle of defaults, we point out that overall default rates have not in fact been meaningfully higher in non-recourse states. Contrary to the view that non-recourse is merely a populist response to over-indebtedness, we present a number of cogent policy justifications for it. Non-recourse can encourage fresh start with less impact on the credit market than bankruptcy; research shows that stricken homeowners are more likely to declare bankruptcy in recourse states. Non-recourse can enhance the accountability of lenders for mortgages. It can provide homeowners with a measure of insurance against loss of home value in cases where this protection would not be provided in the unregulated market due to market failure. We conclude that non-recourse legislation deserves serious, research-based consideration.

Innovation without Patents: Evidence from World’s Fairs

This paper introduces a unique historical data set of more than 8,000 British and American innovations at world’s fairs between 1851 and 1915 to explore the relationship between patents and innovations. The data indicate that the majority of innovations—89 percent of British exhibits in 1851—were not patented. Comparisons across British and U.S. data also show that patenting decisions were unresponsive to differences in patent laws. Cross-sectional evidence suggests that high-quality and urban exhibits were more likely to be patented. The most significant differences, however, occurred across industries: inventors were most likely to use patents in industries in which innovations are easy to reverse engineer and secrecy is ineffective relative to patents. In the late nineteenth century, scientific breakthroughs, including the publication of the periodic table, reduced the effectiveness of secrecy in the chemical industry. Difference-in-differences regressions suggest that this change resulted in a significant shift toward patenting.

America's Comeback Starts with American Innovators [Soapbox

According to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) semiannual forecast, the industry is thriving. With overall shipments surpassing US$190 billion in revenue in 2011, the industry's growth rate exceeds that of the U.S. economy. By next vear, shipment revenues are expected to hit an all time of US$197 billion. It is fortunate to work in an industry where the products are redefining and reimagining the way human beings work and live. From the VCR to the CD to the PC, the industry has pushed the boundaries of the possible. The success of the industry is also paved with failures. But that's the way of innovation. It's the way the industry has been able to dream the impossible-and make it happen. Every setback is just another route on the road to success. And no one can deny the success the CE industry has achieved.

Education Supports Racial and Ethnic Equality in STEM

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) workers are essential to American innovation and competitiveness in an increasingly dynamic and global marketplace. In this report, we examine demographic disparities in STEM education and find that educational attainment may affect equality of opportunity in these critical, high-quality jobs of the future.We find that regardless of race and Hispanic origin, higher college graduation rates are associated with higher shares of workers with STEM jobs. But non-Hispanic Whites and Asians are much more likely than other minority groups to have a bachelor’s degree. Other key findings of this report include: Non-Hispanic Whites comprise the largest group of STEM workers, accounting for about seven out of ten STEM worker, which aligns closely with their share of the overall workforce; Non-Hispanic Asians are most likely (42 percent) to graduate college with a STEM degree, while the propensities of other groups are fairly similar (17-22 percent); half of all non-Hispanic Asian workers with STEM degrees have STEM jobs, compared to 30% of Hispanics and non-Hispanic Black and American Indian and Alaska Native workers; one in five STEM workers is foreign-born, of which 63 percent come from Asia; STEM workers in all demographic groups, including the foreign-born, earn more than their non-STEM counterparts. Hispanics and non-Hispanic Blacks receive a significantly larger STEM premium than do non-Hispanic Whites.