American Practice Research Articles

Why Intelligence Is Missing from American Education Policy and Practice, and What Can Be Done About It.

To understand why education as a field has not incorporated intelligence, we must consider the field’s history and culture. Accordingly, in this cross-disciplinary collaboration between a political scientist who studies institutions and a psychologist who studies intelligence, we outline how the roots of contemporary American Educational Leadership as a field determine its contemporary avoidance of the concept of intelligence. Rooted in early 20th century progressivism and scientific management, Educational Leadership theory envisions professionally run schools as “Taylorist” factories with teaching and leadership largely standardized, prioritizing compliance over cognitive ability among educators. Further, the roots of modern education theory do not see the intelligence of students as largely malleable. Hence, prioritizing intelligence is viewed as elitist. For more than a century, these assumptions have impacted recruitment into education as a profession. We conclude with ideas about how to bring intelligence into mainstream schooling, within the existing K-12 education institutional context. We believe that better integration of intelligence and broader individual differences research in education policy and practice would lead to more rapid advances to finding evidence based solutions to help children.

‘We Have Everything to Learn from the Americans’: Film Promotion, Product Placement and Consumer Culture in Italy, 1945-1965

The relationship between film promotion and the wider economy has scarcely been studied in Italy. This article explores the influence of American exploitation techniques in the peninsula in the years following World War Two and the responses of the Italian film industry. It is shown that, though many advocated imitating American practices in the fields of advertising and promotion, over time the industry learned not only to appropriate successful techniques but to adapt them in ways that were better suited to products that were often presented as being more ‘cultural’ than ‘commercial’. Attention is paid to the way film directors were drawn into campaigns to underline the cultural value of their works. By the same token, Italian stars were not cast as cheerleaders for the developing consumer economy in the way that American stars had been. Yet linkages between film making and advertising were nevertheless forged through practices of product placement that exploited the loophole of ‘verisimilitude’. Hollywood runaway productions like Roman Holiday set the tone for the insertion of Vespa scooters, automobiles and other goods in feature films. The article evaluates the interplay of the cultural and the commercial in Italy’s postwar economic revival and the role of cinema in its development as a mass consumer society.

The origins of the Special Olympics Movement in Poland in the 20th century

Since World War II, sport involving people with disabilities has gradually evolved in Poland, and people with intellectual disabilities had not participated in any sporting events until the end of the 1960s. They were treated as second-class citizens having no rights that they should be entitled to. The reason behind this was the State’s policy towards sport, where high-performance sport, especially Olympic sport, played a vital role that was supposed to testify to the high level of civilisation in communist Poland. People with disabilities were regarded as a shameful problem and were practically kept hidden away. They, therefore, did not participate in social life, including athletic activities. The first competition held in Poland under the name of the Special Olympics was not organised until 1969 in Poznan. On May 26, 1973, the first national sporting event for mentally retarded children (as they were referred to at the time) was called Spartakiad and was held in Warsaw. That was around that time that the sports movement in Poland began to draw on American practices, and in the 1980s it adopted the form of the Special Olympics, both in terms of organisation and sporting activities. This period was marked by active cooperation with the USA and other countries, where Polish athletes with intellectual disabilities began to compete in international competitions.

The Suffrage Centennial and Reading Black Feminisms

The Suffrage Centennial and Reading Black Feminisms Teresa Zackodnik Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African Americans had a capacious understanding of literature, which included writings on art, science, politics, and society. I focus on Black women’s letters to the editor as part of this broad sense of literature and as an index of how, to quote Joanna Brooks, “Blacks . . . entered the public sphere, not with the negative identity of the disinterested individual citizen, but through positive collective incorporation” (73; emphasis added). I do so in order to ask what might shift in our understandings of both Black feminisms and the suffrage movement in the United States if we were to read letters to the editor as counter-public practices and politics. What shifts when we read them for what Ashon Crawley calls practices of making not taking—“making space against the settler logic of taking and claiming and owning space through displacement” (14)?1 Data visualization as one protocol of reading Black women’s letters to the editor can help us to see the “circulation of discourse” through the periodical press as a primary organizing feature of Black feminisms (Warner 119), which then also enables us to map the national reach of Black feminist politics well before the emergence of the Black women’s club movement, which is typically mistaken as the inauguration of organized feminist politics among Black women. I see letters to the editor as a key form of what Judith Madera calls “black flow,” which “does as it makes” by “feeling out the normative organizational codes that cohere in oppressive power systems, and then finding disruptions in, contradictions to, and corridors through these codes” (5). Making place in print is a doing and making of Black flow that contests or disrupts who can speak publicly of what and where, as well as who can be, and who can move, where. As scholarship on Black politics has long argued, any understanding of the political must be recalibrated from a focus on formally organized and national politics to a focus on on-the-ground, informal, and infrapolitical forms and political practices.2 The circulation of politics can be difficult to document beyond known networks of political leaders, organizations, and political gatherings or associations, yet data visualization may offer us further insight into politics on the ground. Mapping a “circulating [End Page 315] commons” also makes it difficult to generalize about, or to delimit, Black feminisms at the level of the local or the regional once we see how politics are moving across scales (Madera 6). A paper’s circulation coupled with African American communal reading practices further complicate and magnify the mobility of politics registered in Black women’s letters to the editor. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. African American women’s letters focused on women’s rights, 1827 to mid-1870s. Based on visualization produced with QGis by Bamdad Aghilidehkordi and used with permission. The static data visualizations in figures 1 and 2 are based on letters that Black women wrote between 1827 and the mid-1870s to all fifteen Black-edited newspapers in publication at the time,3 as well as to William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, whose subscription base was 80 percent African American.4 These papers were based in the Northeast (New York, Rochester, Boston, Philadelphia);5 the South (Tennessee, Virginia, South Carolina, New Orleans);6 the Midwest (Cleveland);7 and the West (California).8 The visualization in figure 1 is based on keywords that reflect the recognized white feminist script of rights for women—women in abolition, woman’s place, women’s rights, woman suffrage, and education for women. This visualization [End Page 316] appears to show that feminism, so defined, was nascent in African American communities from the late 1820s through the mid-1870s. That such a focus on the pursuit of democratic liberal individualism and women’s access to it misconceives of nineteenth-century Black feminisms’ scope, intent, and constituencies becomes abundantly clear when we look at the data visualization in figure 2. Broadening keywords to political concerns such as education and education reform; Black civil rights; temperance; Black suffrage; racial progress and unity; Colored...

COVID-19 и мобилизация медицины на постсоветском пространстве

Those social changes that took place in the Spring and Summer of 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic were mainly related to information pressures, lockdowns, economic collapses, and, in most cases, to civil and governmental solidarity focusing on the idea to save human lives. The political elites of Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Armenia largely shared European and North American ideas and practices of combatting the pandemic, sometimes successfully using media power and quarantines to solve their political problems. Belarus followed a different path that eventually proved to be costly for its leadership. The second wave turned out to be heavier than the first one: as early as October, hospital beds were typically filled completely. Even in Georgia that managed to cope with the first wave of the epidemic by the early summer, morbidity and mortality set records in November. The article explores political elites, health care management systems, medical teams, and volunteer and community networks in post-Soviet countries reacted to and changed institutionally during the two waves of the pandemic.

Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945–1980 by Jim Glassman

Reviewed by: Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945–1980 by Jim Glassman Jerome Patrick Cruz JIM GLASSMAN Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945–1980 Leiden: Brill, 2018. 699 pages. With the contretemps of the US–China trade war still fresh in memory at the time of writing and trade tensions among other countries waiting in the wings, protectionist dynamics appear to have made their most dramatic resurgence at the world stage since the end of the Cold War and the advent of neoliberal globalization. Unsurprisingly, in recent years, allusions to the return of "geoeconomics" have grown commonplace, even as discussions over the rise of contending models of capitalism have intensified among the global punditry. Although immediately focused on developments in East and Southeast Asia during the Cold War, Jim Glassman's Drums of War, Drums of Development offers a maverick theorization of the dynamics between geopolitical currents and processes of capitalist development that is equally applicable to the critical analysis of these contemporary trends in the global political economy. Deploying a "Gramscian geo-political economy" approach, Glassman, professor of geography at the University of British Columbia, effectively reframes much of the conventional wisdom on the underlying drivers of the much-ballyhooed Asian Miracle as well as its unparalleled record [End Page 269] of industrial transformation. Although paradigmatic accounts have underscored the role of global market forces or of "developmental states" in the rapid industrialization of East and Southeast Asia, Glassman argues that the transformations experienced by the Asian tiger economies were indissociable from the broader geopolitics of the Cold War in the region—particularly from the efforts of the United States to consolidate anticommunist regimes among its regional allies. Commanding extensive archival material as well as secondary data on US military contracts and procurement activity, Glassman meticulously traces how the geopolitical maneuverings of American strategists—as well as those of political, economic, and military elites in countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore—coalesced over time to produce a counterrevolutionary "Pacific ruling class" (502) united by commitments toward anticommunism, military–industrial developmentalism, and, in most cases, authoritarianism. Through this process of class formation, he contends, the emergence of the region's showcases of industrial capitalism has been dialectically intertwined with American military spending practices (e.g., through offshore procurement), support provided by US advisers and operatives for conservative elites, the repression of subaltern populations as well as the occurrence of "East Asian massacres" (610) like the Korean and Vietnam wars. Across 629 pages and eight chapters, Drums of War, Drums of Development furnishes theoretical discussion on Glassman's Gramscian "geo-political economy" framework and the relationships among war, violence, and capitalist class transformation (chapters 1 and 2) as well as empirical accounts of the development of the Pacific ruling class within specific countries and across the region (chapters 3 to 6). Whether in the case of postwar Japan (chapter 3), South Korea (chapter 4), or Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore (chapter 5), security imperatives come to the fore as the binding force for the domestic and transnational class coalitions that presided over the region's economic miracle. In a context riven by insurgencies and radical formations born out of nationalist anticolonial struggles, and given American commitments toward rolling back the global advance of communism, leading political, military, and economic figures among US allies were progressively integrated into the ambit of the US military–industrial complex and its gargantuan mass of resources. Most notably, this process of incorporation was facilitated through [End Page 270] offshore procurement opportunities and also through militarization support, nonmilitary aid, domestic infrastructure and construction contracting as well as strategic direct investments by foreign firms and the US military. The historical contribution of these dynamics to jump-starting industrial development in the region is amply suggested by statistics compiled by Glassman. At its peak during the Korean War, offshore procurement and spending by the American military accounted for over one-third of Japanese foreign currency earnings; similarly, the total procurement...

ECOLOGICAL OR NATURALISTIC:A BRIEF REVIEW AND SEVERAL THOUGHTS ON CONTEMPORARY PLANTING DESIGN

<i>Nature</i> is a cultural construct, and a symbolic form to our cultural landscape. It plays a critical role in the profession of Landscape Architecture, shaping both the practice in the constructed environment as well as the conception of landscape in Pedagogy. This article evaluates contemporary landscape architecture practice in the U.S. through the lens of planting design and ecological design approaches. This retrospect situates selected individuals and their practices in the field of landscape architecture in the past two decades, in parallel with the evolving ecological understanding. These individuals and their works demonstrate the changes in planting design and ecological thinking in the professional practice, and most importantly how these changes contribute to current ecological design methodologies, landscape aesthetics, and public perception of landscape. In addition, the article aims to illustrate a shifting conception of <i>Nature</i> over time and in different cultural context, in which different conceptions of Nature facilitate various approaches to addressing environmental issues. By situating in such context, the article hopes to provide a critical view of contemporary American landscape architecture practice and the current ecological agenda, in order to enable discussions regarding the professional practice in the future.

Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York by Allan Amanik

Reviewed by: Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York by Allan Amanik Heather S. Nathans (bio) Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York allan amanik New York University Press, 2019 272 pp. "How best to organize the dead," Allan Amanik queries in the first chapter of Dust to Dust: A History of Jewish Burial in New York (16). Questions of organization, based on geography, law, money, politics, family, and faith, thread through Amanik's richly researched study and inform his nuanced exploration of the development of Jewish burial practices and traditions in New York from the time of the earliest Jewish settlement to the turn of the twenty-first century. As Amanik argues, studying the abiding quest for control of cemeteries and rituals for the dead or dying can offer significant insights into the challenge so many struggling Jewish communities faced in establishing or maintaining control against the pressures of a predominantly Gentile American culture. Amanik divides the study into five chapters, plus an introduction, a conclusion, and an epilogue. As he notes in chapter 1, "A dedicated Jewish graveyard not only represented the first communal and public space that Jews created in North America but counted among several legal, social, and religious privileges that paved the way for long-term settlement in the colony" (19). Amanik uses the struggle to establish the first Jewish burial ground to wrestle with the dream of permanent settlement in the young Dutch colony. He describes the reluctance of the Christian Dutch rulers to grant the 1655 petition of three Sephardic Jewish merchants to purchase land for a graveyard, even though no Jews had yet died in New Amsterdam. As Amanik astutely observes, the Dutch leaders denied the petition, "likely hoping to discourage permanent settlement" (19). But despite the efforts of the Dutch and then the British authorities, Jewish families began to establish themselves in New York City, and the controversy over burial practices shifted to reflect internal debates within the Jewish community. Those ranged from disputes over family burial versus chronological burial (many early congregations maintained that burials should be organized by date of death, rather than family name), to how or whether to bury the Christian spouses of those who had married outside the Jewish community, but who had not converted to Christianity. Additionally, synagogues faced hard financial realities in trying to maintain their activities among [End Page 895] comparatively small populations, and as Amanik notes, burial practices and the access to sanctioned burial spaces provided leverage for synagogue leaders to shore up their scanty resources by requiring that regular dues be paid (or be paid retroactively at the time of a loved one's death) in order to provide access to these all-important sites. Chapter 2 focuses on the ways in which death rituals and funerals helped to shape a new system of "grassroots Jewish burial societies" that pushed back against the authority of synagogue leaders and the community's wealthiest families (46). If the burial regulations of the colonial and early national era had defined who was "inside" and who was "outside" centers of power in Jewish New York, the rising fraternal organizations demonstrated that Jewish citizens were willing to establish their own structures based on "collectivism and mutual regard" (49). Perhaps not surprisingly, these emerging organizations mirrored the national rhetoric as it shifted toward a more sentimental concept of citizenship. While American Jewish communities might have gotten a later start in creating burial societies than some of their European or colonial counterparts, their post-Revolutionary activity shaped them into "transitional institutions" (55). As Amanik argues, the increasing schisms among late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century synagogues decentralized the synagogue's collective influence just as fraternal organizations began to demonstrate that they could offer more effective (and less restrictive) opportunities for Jewish philanthropy and community. In chapter 3, Amanik focuses on the "Rural Cemetery Movement," as a watershed moment in the history of Jewish American burial practices. The movement marked a trend toward establishing cemeteries outside of crowded city centers and making them resemble lavishly landscaped gardens. Moreover, in a reversal of earlier policy, the new Jewish cemeteries traded on being...

Механізми звільнення корпорацій від кримінальної відповідальності за порушення антимонопольного законодавства: порівняльно-правовий аспект

The purpose of the publication is to critically study the American law enforcement experience in terms of exempting corporations from criminal liability for violating US antitrust laws and to formulate relevant conclusions aimed at improving the domestic model of criminal law measures against legal entities. Methodology. The article uses the following scientific in an integrated mode: terminological, system-structural, formal-logical, comparative-legal. Scientific novelty. According to the results of a comparative analysis of the mechanisms of exemption of legal entities (corporations) from criminal liability for their violations of national antitrust law in the United States, it is determined that such grounds (conditionally effective remorse by a legal entity) are not provided in domestic criminal law; the author&rsquo;s position is expressed that during the draft law work on section XIV-1 of the Criminal Code it is necessary to critically use the experience of the USA in the researched field. Conclusions. Section XIV-1 &ldquo;Measures of a criminal nature of legal entities&rdquo; of the General Part of the Criminal Code of Ukraine does not address the issue of encouraging positive postcriminal behavior of legal entities. Only Art. 96-5 &ldquo;Grounds for exemption of a legal entity from the application of measures of a criminal nature&rdquo; of the mentioned section addresses such grounds for exemption as the expiration of the statute of limitations for the application of measures of a criminal nature to a legal entity. At the same time, it is difficult to call this norm perfect because of its individual shortcomings and a certain &ldquo;isolation&rdquo; of legislative regulation. During the draft law work on the formal and substantive improvement of Section XIV-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, certain elements of American practice should be more carefully elaborated and used in terms of the application of alternative mechanisms to criminal prosecution of organizations

Clinical and Angiographic Profile of Young Patients Presenting with Spontaneous Electrocardiogram Resolution of ST-Segment Elevation (Spontaneous Aborted) Myocardial Infarction: A Substudy of the Premature Coronary Artery Disease Registry (Registered Under [CTRI/2018/03/012544

Background: There are very few data regarding clinically defined spontaneous resolution (SR) in ST-segment elevation (STE) acute coronary syndrome (ACS) patients. Most recent European and American practice guidelines fail to give specific recommendations for these patients. Specifically, the timing of intervention in patients with SR remains unclear. Aim and Study: The aim of the study was to study the clinical, social, biochemical, and angiographic profile of Indian youth presenting with spontaneous resolution (SR) of ST-segment elevation (STE). Subjects and Methods: The premature coronary artery disease (PCAD) registry is a prospective, descriptive, observational study of Indians aged below 40 years with coronary artery disease (CAD) conducted between April 2017 and April 2020. Of 3450 patients registered in PCAD registry, a total of 41 (1.2%) out of these 3450 patients presented with STE myocardial infarction (MI), which resolved spontaneously, and hence these patients satisfied entry criteria. Entire clinical and angiographic profile of these patients was documented. Conventional lipids were estimated using commercially available kits. The data were analyzed by statistical software R version 3.5.0 (R Core Team (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria). Results: The mean age of all patients under PCAD registry was 30.49 years. A majority of 38 (92.68%) of the patients were males, 30 (73.17%) were smokers. Of total, four patients (9.75%) were diabetic. Twenty-five out of 41 patients (60.97%) were coming under the below poverty line category. Five patients (12.19%) were Muslims by religion, whereas the remaining were Hindus. The majority (38 patients, 92.68%) were nonvegetarians. The most common index presentation of the transient STE was with anterior wall MI (27 patients, 65.85%). The mean total cholesterol of the entire study population was 172.947 ± 47.11. Thirty-nine out of 41 patients (95.12%) underwent diagnostic coronary angiogram. Ultimately, 32 out of 41 patients (78.05%) were discharged and continued on optimal medical therapy and follow-up and nine patients (21.95%) underwent percutaneous coronary revascularization. Conclusions: Patients with ACS and SR of ST-elevation on electrocardiogram (ECG) exhibit a characteristic profile that differentiates them from the rest of patients with STEMI: younger age, a greater prevalence of males and smokers, and a lesser elevation of the necrosis markers, a greater ejection fraction, and a higher prevalence of single-vessel disease. Contrary to popular belief, coronary angiogram showed a significant proportion of them to be having underlying organic CAD. Our study highlights the need for early intervention in such patients.

L 'État et l 'économie en post pandemie. Nouveaux et vieux défis théoriques et pratiques

Où ira le monde, quels rôles et quelles relations seront formés entre l ' État et l ' économie face à la mondialisation redéfinie, à l ' internet global, à la croissance des risques et des incertitudes et aux turbulences économiques, écologiques et épidémiques périodiques ? Est-ce que seule une version modifiée du mécanisme de marché existant émergera sur la base d ' un ancien paradigme : « plus, plus vite, mieux » ? Ou les changements seront si profonds que le monde social et économique suivra un nouveau paradigme ? Les réponses à ces questions sont des problèmes de plus grand défi intellectuel dans cet article. Pour trouver la réponse : « quel État dans quelle économie ? » trois problèmes ultérieurs sont considérés : -- l ' identification des principales conclusions de la pensée économique sur le rôle de l ' État et de l ' économie au cours des 2500 dernières années, -- la capacité des doctrines socio-économiques de premier plan fonctionnant dans la pratique européenne et américaine à faire face efficacement aux défis à venir en particulier les attentes sociales, -- les nouveaux défis auxquels sont confrontés les États, les économies et les sociétés du point de vue du développement économique mondial futur (le cas polonais est inclus). Du point de vue méthodologique, les postulats et les conclusions de l ' article reposent sur une approche holistique fusionnant les principaux courants de la théorie de l ' économie avec l ' institutionnalisme, la théorie de l ' organisation et de la gestion, la sociologie et la science politique. Sur la base des recherches effectuées, la conclusion générale a été tirée que la révision de la philosophie économique, du rôle et des relations entre l ' État et l ' économie est nécessaire. L ' économie basée sur le paradigme existant est dominée par la primauté des objectifs économiques et quantitatifs tandis que les objectifs sociaux et qualitatifs sont sous-évalués. Ces objectifs doivent être équivalents, interdépendants, co-significatifs et contribuer au bien-être et à la qualité de vie attendus. De plus, l ' équilibre, l ' harmonie et l ' adéquation du capital économique, social et institutionnel sont nécessaires. Outre la stimulation d ' une croissance économique, c ' est une tâche principale de l ' État. Il est également nécessaire d ' avoir une économie fondée sur la liberté, l ' égalité et la concurrence et ces valeurs doivent être protégées par l ' État. à son tour, il faut que l ' État soit au-dessus du marché en cas d ' échec et lorsqu ' il réalise d ' importants objectifs sociaux visant à améliorer la qualité de vie. L ' État qui est hors de l ' organisation de classe avec une philosophie de vie neutre et à la fois une organisation de la coercition sociale consentie seulement dans une mesure où il a suffisamment de capacité pour atteindre des objectifs nationaux, sociaux et économiques.

Slavery in Alabama: A Call to Action

Slavery in Alabama: A Call to Action Kelly Kennington (bio) For the entirety of its 200-year history, Alabama has been plagued by racial inequality and injustice. The state gets considerable attention from historians and the general public for its Civil Rights-era history of activism, bravery, and violence. But after two centuries of fighting for equity, Alabama continues to lead the nation in some of its bleakest statistics, including the size and treatment of the prison population, poverty rates, and racial health disparities.1 Few scholars would argue with the contention that one of the significant roots of these problems is the state’s history of slavery. On the eve of the American Civil War, Alabama had the nation’s fourth largest enslaved population in terms of overall numbers and the percentage of enslaved people in the population. The 1860 census lists 435,080 people living in slavery in Alabama, constituting a staggering forty-five percent of the state’s population.2 The enslaved men, women, and children who built the state’s grandiose antebellum mansions [End Page 3] and government buildings, cleared the fields, and toiled to produce the wealth of the early state’s leaders have too often faded to the background of Alabama’s history as it is discussed in schools, in popular culture, and even in historical scholarship. Of course, there are numerous exceptions to this statement, but this potential overgeneralization is necessary, if only to emphasize and encourage our historians, teachers, and leaders to work harder to foreground this inescapable and essential history. Alabama must grapple with its full history to trace the origins of modern problems and seek a way forward. The history of slavery in Alabama is a story worth telling, and much of this rich history is still waiting to be unearthed and elaborated on by the next generation of scholars and students. This essay provides a brief overview of slavery in Alabama by discussing the existing historical scholarship; more importantly, it hopes to encourage future research on the subject. Alabama’s history of slavery has gotten more attention in the past year because of the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’s new Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, in Montgomery in April 2018.3 Thousands of visitors have toured the new museum’s exhibits detailing the slave trade and slavery in the state’s capital city. This renewed interest and attention provides an opportunity for further research into the many subjects connected to the institution of slavery in Alabama which, to this point, have been woefully understudied. Although scholarly histories of slavery have included Alabama in some of their broad discussions, the last statewide study specifically devoted to slavery in Alabama is almost seventy-five years old.4 In addition, much of the scholarship touching on slavery in Alabama that has appeared in more recent popular and scholarly articles, books, and textbooks relies too heavily on this 1950 account or takes problematic sources, like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Slave Narratives, at face value.5 It is time for an updated survey of the [End Page 4] state’s history of slavery or, at least, new scholarship focusing on more specific topics on the history of slavery in Alabama. While this brief article cannot accomplish either of these feats, it will lay out some potential topics relating to slavery in the state and suggest possible directions that are worthy of new scholarly treatments and popular interest. ________ Any history of slavery in Alabama must begin with Native American practices because the bulk of the modern state’s territory spent centuries in the hands of Creek and other Indian nations. This article will primarily discuss Creek practices of captivity and slavery, but it also draws on the broader scholarship on Native American slavery.6 In Creek and other Native American societies, slavery was one piece of a collection of captivity practices that originated with taking prisoners after battles fought against neighboring tribes. After capture, the captives could then be symbolically tortured and killed, adopted into Creek families, or enslaved. Some of these captives were used to replace fallen warriors or other members of the town.7 For...

"American Dreams" of Early Soviet Ethnography: Some Reflections on Bogoras's Legacy

Dmitry Arzyutov discusses a phenomenon that he defines as "American dreams" of Russian ethnography in the early twentieth century based on the example of Waldemar Bogoras, one of the founders of early Soviet ethnography. The essay highlights three specific cases that frame the development of this discipline not through the familiar narrative of gradual isolation but as a story of sometimes problematic contacts and exchanges with American anthropologists. The contacts that were established during the joint Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902) led by Franz Boas continued into the 1920s. Arzyutov shows that the main concepts of Soviet ethnography, such as "ethnogenesis" and "ethnic history," were products of the debates about the origin of the peoples of Arctica and Siberia between Franz Boas and the Russian expedition participants, Bogoras and, to a lesser degree, Lev Shternberg. The second case addresses Bogoras's unrealized project of establishing nature reserves-cum-reservations for the native peoples of Siberia. These were to combine the prerevolutionary idea of nature reserves (popular among Bogoras's geographer colleagues) with the North American practice of Indian reservations. Finally, the third case compares trajectories of the two students of Bogoras and Boas, Julia Averkieva and Archie Phinney. Their stories show how Marxism might have been differently understood and deployed in the transnational context, and how this difference could have generated intellectual and personal disagreements and conflicting versions of identity politics. The three cases taken together testify to the importance of shifting the optics of the history of anthropology from reconstructing national traditions and local genealogies toward tracing dialogue and mutual borrowings.

“Loud, proud, and love a crowd:” African American girls and school discipline practices

Historically, middle grade schools doled out the harshest and most exclusionary discipline to adolescent African American males. African American males were routed along school to prison pathways at rates higher than African American females and their peers from other racial backgrounds. National conversations about exclusionary discipline practices and the school-to-prison pipeline have focused primarily on African American males. More recently, however, African American girls experience exclusionary discipline practices and school-to-prison pathways at rates that, in some cases, exceed African American males. Consequently, national conversations can no longer be single-gendered. African American girls must also be central to dialogues on school discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline. This paper shines klieg lights on middle grade African American girls’ subjection to exclusionary school discipline, school-to-prison pipelines, and negative and stereotypical perceptions. Lastly, this author draws from the literature and her experiences working with middle grade African American girls with multiple school suspensions. She concludes the discussion with culturally responsive recommendations for equitable school discipline practices.

Towards a pedagogy of deviance

Abstract This article engages the narratives of three Toronto hip-hop artists to explore the pedagogical possibilities revealed through the processes of performance identity construction. By immersing themselves in hip-hop communities, artists learn ways of knowing and negotiating their place at the interstices of the normative frameworks that underlie their unique combinations of cultural contexts. Artists’ stories reveal how they bring themselves into being through movement and sound. These narrations of identity become indicative of an artist’s style through performative iterations embedded with the opportunity for enacting difference. For hip-hop artists, deviating from performative expectations is not a mere possibility, but formative intention in the tradition of the African American practice of Signifyin(g), as delineated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Conversations with hip-hop artists invite reflection on what we could accomplish through a music education pedagogy that cultivates creative deviancy that reveals, breaks open and overturns limiting conventions.

Whiteness, Artist Identities, and Artworld Spaces

This paper considers a research study into the artist identity formation in young people engaged in a teen arts internship program at a contemporary arts center in post-Katrina New Orleans using the construct of whiteness to examine access to artist identities and artworld spaces. Art has always been embedded into the cultural and spiritual practices of people’s everyday lives. Yet, modern and contemporary artworld identities and spaces have been shaped by exclusionary and oppressive practices. In the city of New Orleans, there is a persistent presence of African American art and cultural practices that thrive outside of artworld institutions. And yet, as this study demonstrates, artworld identities and spaces within the city of New Orleans and beyond, even when they espouse social justice orientations, often remain within the milieu of whiteness and related power structures.

North American Practice Patterns for PET-2 Positive Hodgkin Lymphoma

North American Practice Patterns for PET-2 Positive Hodgkin Lymphoma

The Uncommons (Danez Smith)

This article examines the poetry of Danez Smith as a practice of commoning. It introduces the concept of the uncommons as a way of thinking about how African American literature, culture, and political practice develop egalitarian forms of life in the face of white supremacism. It considers the ways in which the violences of white supremacism uncommon black life—that is, bar blackness from belonging—as well as the ways in which poetry and politics become avenues through which black life invents alternative socialities. From this perspective, the lyric qualities of Smith’s verse are social not because they prescribe a proper collective identity but because they invent modes of relation that transform social death into the possibility of another way of living. This is the uncommons: a reckoning with the racialized political economy of death that constructs commonality through dissonance, disruption, passion, and power.

Multicenter Study of the Treatment of Appendicitis in America: Acute, Perforated, and Gangrenous (MUSTANG), an EAST Multicenter Study.

We sought to describe contemporary presentation, treatment, and outcomes of patients presenting with acute (A), perforated (P), and gangrenous (G) appendicitis in the United States. Recent European trials have reported that medical (antibiotics only) treatment of acute appendicitis is an acceptable alternative to surgical appendectomy. However, the type of operation (open appendectomy) and average duration of stay are not consistent with current American practice and therefore their conclusions do not apply to modern American surgeons. This multicenter prospective observational study enrolled adults with appendicitis from January 2017 to June 2018. Descriptive statistics were performed. P and G were combined into a "complicated" outcome variable and risk factors were assessed using multivariable logistic regression. A total 3597 subjects were enrolled across 28 sites: median age was 37 (27-52) years, 1918 (53%) were male, 90% underwent computed tomography (CT) imaging, 91% were initially treated by appendectomy (98% laparoscopic), and median hospital stay was 1 (1-2) day. The 30-day rates of Emergency Department (ED) visit and readmission were 10% and 6%. Of 219 initially treated with antibiotics, 35 (16%) required appendectomy during index hospitalization and 12 (5%) underwent appendectomy within 30 days, for a cumulative failure rate of 21%. Overall, 2403 (77%) patients had A, whereas 487 (16%) and 218 (7%) patients had P and G, respectively. On regression analysis, age, symptoms >48 hours, temperature, WBC, Alvarado score, and appendicolith were predictive of "complicated" appendicitis, whereas co-morbidities, smoking, and ED triage to appendectomy >6 hours or >12 hours were not. In the United States, the majority of patients presenting with appendicitis receive CT imaging, undergo laparoscopic appendectomy, and stay in the hospital for 1 day. One in five patients selected for initial non-operative management required appendectomy within 30 days. In-hospital delay to appendectomy is not a risk factor for "complicated" appendicitis.

Designing Presidential Impeachment

Impeachment is again a central preoccupation of United States constitutional law and politics. This article casts new light on this debate by examining the law and practice of presidential impeachment globally. It draws first on case studies from countries such as South Korea, Paraguay, Brazil, and South Africa, and then large-n empirical analysis of constitutional texts. Contrary to current American practice, it shows, impeachment is not primarily about removing criminals or similar “bad actors” from the presidency. Instead, it is a tool to exit deep political crises. At its best, impeachment enables a ‘hard reset’ of the political system by triggering new elections. This systemic, rather than individualistic, conceptualization of impeachment is normatively desirable. It ameliorates the rigidity that sometimes characterizes presidential systems, and as we show has no negative impact on the quality of democracy. This comparative analysis has significant implications for the design and practice of impeachment, especially in the United States. In particular, it supports a broader, more political gloss on the famously cryptic phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It also implies that impeachment standards should vary for different kinds of actors such as presidents, judges, and cabinet members, rather than being uniform. Finally it shows how impeachment’s integrity, contra current case-law, can be materially aided by judicial involvement.