American Urban Space Research Articles

French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy ed. by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor

Reviewed by: French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy ed. by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor Justin M. Carroll (bio) Keywords St. Louis, Missouri, Mississippi River, Francophones, Trade, Louisiana Territory French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy. Edited by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. 319. Cloth, $65.00.) French St. Louis: Landscape, Context, and Legacy, edited by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor, evolved from a symposium at the Missouri History Museum to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis in February of 1764. This collected volume features articles from a variety of scholars at different stages of their careers; this creates a unique synthesis of perspectives and concerns. Together, they work toward pushing the study of St. Louis beyond the traditional civic mythologies and boosterism that often define the commemoration of American urban spaces into more critical realms, complicating both past and present in the process. Thematically, these scholars move the historical framework surrounding St. Louis into four new and exciting directions: [End Page 662] 1. The first quarter of the book contextualizes the founding and early years of St. Louis within the processes and structures of empire and frontier. 2. The following section situates St. Louis within the larger regional context of the Francophone world of the Mississippi River and the port city of New Orleans. 3. The next quarter opens new avenues of archival research and historical methods to recover ignored voices or lost landscapes. 4. The final quarter explores the persistence of French communities in St. Louis into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each chapter in this collected volume merits attention and reading by scholars and citizens interested in St. Louis, the larger Mississippi River Valley, Native North America, and the transatlantic French Empire. However, this review will focus on individual chapters from each section to highlight the diversity and depth offered by French St. Louis. For example, Robert Michael Morrissey's chapter, "Empire by Collaboration: St. Louis, the Illinois Country, and the French Colonial Empire," challenges persistent myths of the French Empire in North America and shows how, in places like Kaskaskia, outside of present-day St. Louis, "collaborative, opportunistic, and often quite functional" relationships developed between French settlers, Native Americans, and French officials (29). The inhabitants of the Illinois Country were hardly the submissive or dependent subjects of a distant and absolutist regime in Versailles as stereotyped by the British Empire and later American historians, but rather negotiated and directed the course of empire and day-to-day life in pragmatic and self-interested ways. In the context of regionalism, for example, Lawrence N. Powell's chapter, "You Are Who You Trade With: Why Antebellum St. Louis Industrialized and New Orleans Didn't," offers an excellent exploration of the diverging paths these two French-speaking communities followed in the nineteenth century. Despite similar colonial trajectories and intimate early entanglements, institutional differences connected to the evolution of plantations and enslaved labor in the South and the development of small-scale urbanization and market-oriented farms in the Midwest radically reoriented the trajectories of St. Louis and New Orleans. Economic patterns and antebellum politics disconnected borderland states like Missouri from the lower South during the early nineteenth century. By the end of [End Page 663] the Civil War, Powell shows "how St. Louis became the anchor of an urban region, while New Orleans became the American anomaly: the nation's only city system without an urban region" (133). Beyond the vistas of empire and region, John H. Lawrence's "The View from Upper Louisiana: Pierre-Clément de Laussat's Concerns and Contacts, 1803–1804" demonstrates how archive-building and translation, alongside careful scholarly attention, can profoundly reshape existing narratives. His article centers on the archive of Pierre-Clement de Laussat (1756–1835), a French colonial prefect in New Orleans between 1803 and 1804. Before the U.S. purchase of the Louisiana Territory, Laussat's brief tenure resulted in the creation of 600 manuscripts—reports, letters, proclamations, surveys, and other documents. Now housed at The Historic New Orleans Collection, these sources, most untranslated, reveal "the...

Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror ed. by Stefan Rabitsch et al.

Reviewed by: Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror ed. by Stefan Rabitsch et al. Jeremy Withers (bio) Cities of Hope and Cities of Despair. Stefan Rabitsch, Michael Fuchs, and Stefan L. Brandt, eds. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. UP of Mississippi, 2022. x+ 311 pp. $99 hc, $30 pbk. This volume brings together an impressive collection of essays to argue that "American cities appear to be everywhere" (10) in the global cultural landscape. In their introduction to the collection, Stefan Rabitsch and Michael Fuchs go on to assert: "Indeed, rather than through firsthand experience, we primarily encounter the American city on the movie screen, at the end of the TV remote, or while operating a game controller" (9). As their collection aims to prove, that statement is no less true when applied to works that fall under the label of the fantastic: works of sf, fantasy, and horror. Also in their introduction, Rabitsch and Fuchs declare that the American city is one defined by "overlapping dualities" (4) such as rich vs. poor, high vs. low, dark vs. light, and so forth. To help bolster this claim, the editors sketch out some of the vacillating historical perceptions of American cities, ranging from the Puritans' redemptive "city upon a hill" to Thomas Jefferson's anti-urban agrarianism to the utopianism of writers such as Edward Bellamy. The second half of the introduction consists of Rabitsch and Fuchs's discussion of what they see as nine essential characteristics of "the Fantastic City": such a city is representational, relies on scripts, is modular (i.e. assemblage-like), transnational, horizontal, erodes the separation between urban space and its surroundings, is vertical, interlinked with mobility, and is a palimpsest. Within the collection proper, the essays favor an examination of cities in works of popular culture such as big-budget Hollywood films and video games, with some essays focusing instead on works more associated with high culture, such as the literary fiction of Colson Whitehead and Samuel R. Delany. [End Page 582] Fans and scholars of sf will be pleased to find that this genre receives the most attention. With regards to essays focusing (primarily) on science-fictional film, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper's chapter examines The Phantom Empire (1935), a "musical-science fiction-western hybrid" (54) starring Gene Autry, to argue that this Depression-era serial film frets about the sterility of urban environments and modern technology while celebrating the values of the American frontier and heartland. Robert Yeates contributes a timely study of race and racism in three post-apocalyptic works: W.E.B. Du Bois's story "The Comet" (1920) and the films The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959) and Z for Zachariah (2015). Yeates's essay poignantly concludes with the observation that "the fact that these three texts tell such remarkably similar stories highlights how uncomfortably similar the problems faced by African Americans are in 2015 to those perceived by Du Bois in 1920" (132). Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns's chapter analyzes two dystopian films starring action icon Sylvester Stallone and reveals how they "both tap into preoccupations about city violence and urban decay in the 1980s and 1990s" (167). Michael Fuchs and Sarah Lahm shift the focus to virtual realities as represented in the video game Assassin's Creed III (2012) and the films The Thirteenth Floor (1999) and TRON: Legacy (2010) to explore how virtual environments offer up promises of freedom but inevitably reveal themselves to be places of constraint and limitation. Usefully pivoting away from the Anglo-American focus of much sf scholarship, J. Jesse Ramírez discusses Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (2008), a film whose setting of Tijuana, Mexico, marginalizes the "cities … usually represented as epicenters of futurity" (211), such as Los Angeles or London. Further, the film's depictions of technological disembodiment explore how such technology is steeped in the utopian potential to forge connections across borders at the same time as it might be a dystopian tool for neocolonial exploitation. With regard to essays focusing on sf literature, Carl Abbott's comes first in the collection and is, unfortunately...

Mapping the city from below: Approaches in charting out Latinx historical and quotidian presence in metropolitan Los Angeles: 1990–2020

How do marginalized ethnic communities assert their presence in the American urban space? This article examines maps and location descriptions found in ‘Rock Angelino’ concert flyers, lyrics of songs, and spoken word multimedia pieces as examples of ‘mapping from below’ practices from the 1990s to the near present, which Latinxs have used to place themselves in the historical geography and cultural imaginary of Los Angeles. While people of Latin American descent have been part of Los Angeles since its founding, their presence has often been neglected and diminished in the maps created by government agencies, and in more recent times, by gentrifying real estate enterprises that inaccurately portray the past and present of Los Angeles as a White space with few selective geographical locations of communities of colour. By employing critical geography and cultural history methodologies, this piece demonstrates how Latinxs have been cartographers of their own communities. Most significantly how Latinxs employed their words and sounds as mapping tools with which to chart, examine, narrate and make visible the rich layered histories of Latinxs and communities of colour in Southern California.

Negative heritage: the material-cultural politics of the American haunted history tour

ABSTRACTThis article assesses the defining features and cultural significance of the haunted history tour as it has come to be practiced in American urban spaces. A distinctive cultural form that has risen to prominence in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and other places, haunted history taps into public fascinations with “dark” history and ghosts, but does so to engage unresolved and troubling elements of local history and memory. Practitioners engage creatively with problematic histories that otherwise might be forgotten or suppressed, attending especially to their material-folkloric traces. Drawing on participatory and analytical research in several U.S. cities, in particular St. Louis, New York, and Savannah, the article moves from a characterization of the defining modes and interpretative conventions of haunted history, which are drawn from mainstream tourism and others from more-activist public history, to an analysis of its preoccupation with haunting “remainders” of the past, which, I contend, form an unacknowledged narrative and epistemological core of an experimental memory project whose primary quarry is the domain of “negative heritage”.

City Limits

This essay explores the idea of city limits, real and metaphorical walls, and boundaries raised within and around the urban environment. The focus is on American urban epicentres, and by analysing two literary works, John Fante’s Los Angeles novel Ask the Dust and Lorraine Hansberry’s Chicago play A Raisin in the Sun, it interrogates what form the walls within those spaces might take, why they are raised, and what effects they have on the city’s inhabitants – especially the marginalised groups who tend to be either excluded, restricted or enclosed by them. In this essay, I suggest that boundaries are created or enforced as a result of a fear of loss of space and power within the urban environment which leads to the consistent marginalisation of the Other as exhibited in both texts. In other words, the essay will demonstrate that the physical and fiscal boundaries represented in the novel and play are masking a more complex set of boundaries of racial exclusion and hierarchies in place within the American urban space.

Valoración visual de la calidad ambiental del área urbana de Querétaro, México: la compleja sencillez de valorar el entorno urbano

In several Latin American urban spaces, assessing environmental quality is costly and the results are unclear to most people. Given this, we performed an analysis of the environmental quality of the urban area of Queretaro, Mexico (UAMQ or in spanish AUMQ). To this end, we developed an urban environmental quality index (UEQI or in spanish ICAU) that is based on a visual assessment, along census tracts, of the following environmental variables: water, air and soil. We investigated the presence of spatial clusters that accentuate the deterioration of urban environmental quality (UEQ or CAU in Spanish). Our results showed that the UEQ decreased in clusters as you move away from the urban center, while the priority areas are associated with the variables soil and air. We also present 27 unreleased environmental variables for AUMQ, whose results and methodology could be replicated for other urban spaces.

Ecologies of Socialism: Soviet Gradostroitel'stvo and Late Soviet Socialism

The most lasting legacy of the Soviet experience, more so than institutions that persist in the Russian Federation today or the mentalities of citizens of post-Soviet states, was its transformation of Eurasia from a rural continent into an urban one. Particularly after the Great Patriotic War, the landscape of Soviet urban spaces changed as countless rows of low-quality apartment housing sprung up and a uniform socialist urban culture appeared to be forming. However, how and why this urban revolution happened, and what effect it had on the psychological makeup of Soviet citizens, remains lesser known. Meanwhile, while scholars of urban history such as Jane Jacobs, Reyner Banham, Lewis Mumford, and Mike Davis have produced fascinating tracts and monographs on the “ecologies” of American urban spaces – how, in other words, human beings in various political systems have interacted with the built urban landscape around them – limited work has been done on similar processes and histories in the Soviet world beyond the technical literature of the Cold War era. In this paper, I attempt to provide the outlines of such a history with such an approach by analyzing how changes in the Soviet urban fabric from approximately 1932 to 1980s affected social life in Soviet cities and among Soviet families. Basing my argument on close readings of Soviet books on gradostroitel'stvo (urban construction, urban studies) as well as literature, and guided by the insights of the above-listed urbanist thinkers, I argue that changes in urban planning so altered the relationship between citizens, the Party, and History that the Soviet system lost key strengths that had emboldened it during the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, while new Soviet housing projects obviously raised the standard of living of a great portion of the population, in resolving the housing problem, they also dismantled the “stranger's gaze” – the everyday urban clashes that, enabled by denunciations and an efficient and brutal NKVD – that had dominated Soviet housing until then. Focusing on Magnitogorsk in the 1930s and a variety of new Soviet cities (Navoi, Dneprodzherzhinsk, etc.) to make this point, I argue that the Soviet system, in effect, built itself out of existence by building so much into existence. I also point to the possibility of rich transnational comparisons in this field in the future.

Constructing African American Urban Space in Atlanta, Georgia*

Recognizing the connections between the construction of urban space and racial identity, this article explores an urban redevelopment scheme launched in 2004 by Big Bethel ame Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Known as the “Renaissance Walk,” Big Bethel's project is a $45 million dollar redevelopment plan to turn an adjacent city block into a mixed‐use development. By looking at the racialization of place from the perspective of those who live, work, and organize along Auburn Avenue, one of the most historically significant African American business corridors in the United States, I contend that Big Bethel's redevelopment project is emblematic of contemporary black counterpublic spaces and links the redevelopment project undertaken by Big Bethel with African American identity positions.

The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (review)

Reviewed by: The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public Jean Franzino (bio) The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. By Susan M. Schweik. (New York: New York University Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 431. $45.00 cloth; $24.00 paper) In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a rash of municipal governments across the United States passed so-called "unsightly beggar ordinances," laws that prohibited "diseased, maimed, and deformed" persons from exposing themselves to public view. Though seldom and unevenly enforced, the appearance of these [End Page 428] remarkable laws indexed a range of contemporary concerns in a historical moment of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Susan M. Schweik's fascinating account of the cultural context and import of the laws will prove useful not only to those interested in the laws per se, but to anyone with an investment in disability history, labor history, and conditions in post–Civil War American urban spaces. The Ugly Laws traces the ordinances from their earliest appearance in San Francisco in 1867 through their heyday in Midwestern cities in the 1880s and 1890s. While municipal governments seem to have ceased enacting the laws by World War I, a policeman in Omaha, Nebraska, made an arrest under one such statue as recently as 1974, highlighting Schweik's assertion that we must look to the past not only for the disjunctions but also for the continuities with the present. In the opening sections of the book, Schweik examines two key factors that contributed to the emergence of the ordinances—the growth of the organized charity movement and the fears about labor unrest that coalesced around the figure of the disabled beggar—before opening onto a dazzling array of other important contributors: Foucauldian biopower and the rise of state institutions, the City Beautiful movement, and the development of tort law. In part 2, Schweik provides a corrective to cultural memory of the law that has rendered the "unsightly beggar" in abstract terms, examining the discourses of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race that surrounded the ordinances. Drawing on the felicitous connection between intersectional models of identity and the city intersections policed by the laws, Schweik analyzes, for example, their relation to measures banning cross-dressing, prostitution, and other sex and gender transgressions. Pointing out that the peak years of the enactment of such laws coincided with the height of Jim Crow and with massive immigration restrictions, Schweik also reads the unsightly beggar ordinances as imbricated with other spatial regulations, such as segregation and the quarantine. Part 3 traces opposition to the laws both at the moment of their decline and in the contemporary era, when disability activists and scholars have begun to more systematically [End Page 429] dismantle their legacy. Schweik is clearly at ease in the archive, and the wide range of sources she addresses—from police orders to medical treatises to case law—sheds new light on the category of disability. She productively uses archival idiosyncrasies, such as the ambiguity in the Chicago records surrounding who was arrested merely for begging and who for begging-while-disabled, to argue that "panhandling provoked crises of interpretation" that illuminate "the performativity of disability as a visual practice" (pp. 36-37). Her considerable theoretical sophistication is complemented by an adventurous spirit of inquiry which insists, for example, on taking the possibility of the sham disabled beggar seriously and assessing the implications for such fundamental topics as the social construction of disability. One of the most important contributions of Schweik's analysis is her attention to the role of the unsightly-beggar ordinances in disability historiography. The disability movement, she contends, has tended to evacuate the beggar from the scene, focusing instead on the anachronistic descriptor of ugliness first used by legal scholars in the 1970s. "The point here," Schweik argues, "is not to allow 'labor' or 'poverty' or 'economic justice' issues to overtake or obscure 'disability' issues. The point is to recognize that it is precisely at this arresting intersection that the subject of the ugly law stands" (p. 61). Indeed, the range of concerns illuminated by Schweik's materialist and historicist focus on the ordinances proves that The Ugly Laws has succeeded, as the book's poignant last words put...

Amanda Holmes. City Fictions, Language, Body, and Spanish American Urban Space

Amanda Holmes. <i>City Fictions, Language, Body, and Spanish American Urban Space</i>

A Crippling Deceit: Mendicancy and the Performance of Disability in Progressive America

Disabled by the effects of war, illness, poverty, or workplace accidents, the “cripple” was a familiar figure in American urban spaces during the first decade of the 20th century. Despite reformers’ concerted efforts to implement new welfare policies and advocate for working men's insurance, many disabled individuals turned to mendicancy. As the number of beggars increased in American cities, it became apparent that many merely feigned impairment, essentially performing disability, in order to garner public sympathy. This essay explores the relationship between performance, disability, and mendicancy in Progressive America. I re-contextualize the mendicant problem in relation to the burgeoning popularity of cinema and film representations of beggars circulated within the first decade of the 20th century. Cinematic depictions of disabled mendicants not only generated beliefs about the disabled community, they also impacted how citizens conceptualized their role in one of America's fundamental personal and civic practices: charity.

City fictions: language, body, and Spanish American urban space

City fictions: language, body, and Spanish American urban space

Espace urbain et gentrification aux États-Unis, évolution des interprétations

Since the 1980’s, North American urban space has changed radically. Industrial neighborhoods that turned into slums then ghettos with the changing of the American economy and the post Second World War urban sprawl are today encountering "revitalization," "urban renewal" and "gentrification."These different phenomena have been studied through the concept of Frontier—converting urban decay and violence into new chic—and the process of capital mobility, itself attracting new social classes from a new economy based in the inner city (Neil Smith). Other studies show that post-industrial urban space is very similar to pre-industrial urban space, such as that of the Renaissance cities. (Kotkin) But Gentrification could be much more than this, a part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late 20th and early 21st century.This paper focuses on the various theories linked to the radical reapropriation of many central and inner cities in North America in the past three decades.

Mapping constructions of Islamic space in North America: A frame-work for further inquiry

This study seeks to begin the process of articulating a new understanding of conceptualizing Islam in North America. Unlike previous studies that examine North American Islam from the perspectives of sociology or history, what follows attempts to use certain questions formulated by the anthropology of religion. This calls for examining the complexity and messiness of Islams, especially as they relate to equally unstable factors such as culture and society. From there, this study focusses on the relationship of various Islams to multivalent North American urban spaces, showing how such spaces affect Muslim understandings of gender, sexuality and religion.

Which Way to the Promised Land?: Spike Lee's Clockers and the Legacy of the African American City

Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.... Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings. (Lynch 1) In the closing scene of Spike Lee's Clockers (1995), Strike Dunham--the film's young, ulcer-prone protagonist--escapes from the life-threatening dangers of urban life. In the film's final frames we witness both an emigration and a migration as Strike concurrently leaves behind his past and heads toward a more promising future. This in and of itself is neither new nor innovative. We are familiar with Hollywood's happy endings, provided so that audiences can walk out of the theater with a feeling of satisfaction, having experienced narrative closure. The way the scene is shot adds to its redemptive qualities: Infused with a golden light, Strike heads into the sunset before the screen fades to black. Even before Clockers' release, Lee announced his intentions for the film. In a variety of press releases and published interviews, he stated that he wanted Clockers to be more than just another film--what he referred to as the black gangster, hip-hop shoot-'em-up ... drug genre (qtd. in Schaefer 47). One of Lee's primary concerns was to differentiate Clockers from hood films such as John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood (1991) and the Hughes Brothers' Menace II Society (1993). As Lee stated after the film's release, was always our intention that if we succeeded with this film, that this might be the final nail in the coffin and African-American filmmakers would try telling new stories (qtd. in Bernstein 202). While Clockers is wholly conscious of and reliant upon the films immediately preceding it, the film occupies a different position from those with which it is most closely aligned. For instance, its self-conscious appropriation and revision of many of the conventions of the film proble matize a clear-cut alignment of it with earlier examples of the genre. Indeed, its use of conventions is too consciously self-referential, a fact apparent in the film's narrative, style, and shifting character identification. Menace II Society is also a self-referential text, especially in its conscious appropriation of many of the narrative elements of Boyz N the Hood, yet whereas Menace's self-consciousness accepts conventions while expanding upon them, Clockers deconstructs and problematizes them. It may be, in fact, just this process of revision that transforms the film into something else entirely. It is not my intention to examine all of the ways in which Clockers either succeeds or fails to fulfill generic requirements. Instead, I want to start from the understanding that Clockers utilizes iconography similar to that in a number of other films set in African American urban spaces in the nineties, but I want to expand upon this observation by suggesting that Lee broadens this urban sign system in discrete ways. In fact, Lee's film fuses the with the traces of another time and space by linking contemporary Brooklyn to an African American past through specific changes to Richard Price's novel, on which the film is based. This essay focuses on the ways in which Clockers reconsiders and revises the film, in particular, and cinematic representations of the African American city as a whole. [1] In the process, I examine how the film's spatio-temporal parameters dialogue with the traces of another time and space through the motif of the train. My argument is that the presence of the train in Clocke rs inserts the tropes of migration, mobility, and settlement into the narrative in order to place history, especially African American history, back into a dialogue with contemporary African American filmmaking. The difference between Lee's film and more identifiably historical films like Mario Van Peebles' Posse (1993) and Bill Duke's Hoodlum (1997) is that Clockers is set in a contemporary location and uses the conventions of a contemporary genre. …

Sedimentation Rate in Pulmonary Tuberculosis

The most lasting legacy of the Soviet experience, more so than institutions that persist in the Russian Federation today or the mentalities of citizens of post-Soviet states, was its transformation of Eurasia from a rural continent into an urban one. Particularly after the Great Patriotic War, the landscape of Soviet urban spaces changed as countless rows of low-quality apartment housing sprung up and a uniform socialist urban culture appeared to be forming. However, how and why this urban revolution happened, and what effect it had on the psychological makeup of Soviet citizens, remains lesser known. Meanwhile, while scholars of urban history such as Jane Jacobs, Reyner Banham, Lewis Mumford, and Mike Davis have produced fascinating tracts and monographs on the “ecologies” of American urban spaces – how, in other words, human beings in various political systems have interacted with the built urban landscape around them – limited work has been done on similar processes and histories in the Soviet world beyond the technical literature of the Cold War era. In this paper, I attempt to provide the outlines of such a history with such an approach by analyzing how changes in the Soviet urban fabric from approximately 1932 to 1980s affected social life in Soviet cities and among Soviet families. Basing my argument on close readings of Soviet books on gradostroitel'stvo (urban construction, urban studies) as well as literature, and guided by the insights of the above-listed urbanist thinkers, I argue that changes in urban planning so altered the relationship between citizens, the Party, and History that the Soviet system lost key strengths that had emboldened it during the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, while new Soviet housing projects obviously raised the standard of living of a great portion of the population, in resolving the housing problem, they also dismantled the “stranger's gaze” – the everyday urban clashes that, enabled by denunciations and an efficient and brutal NKVD – that had dominated Soviet housing until then. Focusing on Magnitogorsk in the 1930s and a variety of new Soviet cities (Navoi, Dneprodzherzhinsk, etc.) to make this point, I argue that the Soviet system, in effect, built itself out of existence by building so much into existence. I also point to the possibility of rich transnational comparisons in this field in the future.