Battle Cry Research Articles

Down with Cautis Was Our Battle Cry!

Down with Cautis Was Our Battle Cry!

Hepatic Artery Infusion: Still an Option?

Time and science have been kind to patients with colorectal cancer metastatic to the liver. The combination of a decrease in surgical mortality, increased operative tools, increase in the number of active chemotherapeutic drugs— both general and targeted—accompanied by an acceptance of multimodality therapies have improved patient outcomes. A few tools have maintained a quiet hum in the treatment cacophony. The focus of the paper by Ammori et al. is one of those tools: the continuous hepatic artery infusion (CHAI) pump. Emerging in the 1980s as an effective method of delivering floxuridine to the liver via the hepatic artery, its success was consistent but simultaneously limited to a few centers and physicians (medical oncologists and surgeons) who had adequate and specific skill in using this treatment modality. There were many challenges to the use of continuous infusion hepatic artery delivery of floxuridine. They included the complexities of managing the idiopathic liver transaminitis with appropriate dose reductions, surgically placing the pump and working through the vagaries of the hepatic arterial anatomy, dealing with the mechanical challenges of accessing the chambers for filling, and removing the drug and replacing with heparinized saline, and a continued surveillance for late biliary sclerosis. Clearly, using the technology in the ‘‘adjuvant setting,’’ i.e., following hepatic resection for colorectal metastases, was most problematic. The saving grace in this setting was that the patient did not require an additional surgery for the pump placement; however, concerns of functional liver reserve and recovery created an enhanced anxiety. Despite all the challenges, the committed group of oncologists (medical and surgical) consistently demonstrated in pilot and phase 2 studies, a series of outcomes that exceeded those generated with only the systemic chemotherapy available during the same time period. When the limited choice for chemotherapy morphed from 5-fluoruracil and leucovorin—excellent agents with known toxicity and carefully studied therapeutic regimens— to oxaliplatin, irinotecan, capecitabine, and subsequently the targeted agents led initially by bevacizumab and cetuximab, that’s when things changed. An enthusiasm for the new agents with potential for sequential use and improved response rates emerged. The CHAI with the reasonably toxic floxuridine fell from favor and nearly all medical oncologists began to transition their clinical practice to the new systemic agents. A few strongholds of CHAI remained active but the incorporation of pump based chemotherapy rapidly lost ground. The clinical trials that had been developed during the height of interest in pump therapy suffered poor accrual and failed to definitively answer the question of superiority or even equivalence (noninferiority). During this same timeframe came the battle cry for more aggressive surgical approaches following successful ‘‘neoadjuvant’’ conversion chemotherapy. The selection of neoadjuvant treatments were focused on efficacy measured as response and safety as measured by the morbidity and mortality of the subsequent operations. Those practitioners with experience in CHAI accepted and worked around the hepatocyte damage as measured in the hepatic transaminitis and the measurable and presumed intraand extrahepatic biliary injury that resulted from the chemotherapy-infused blood bathing the biliary structures. Thoughtful attempts to reduce the injury with dexamethasone were admirable but not adequate to consistently reduce hepatic injury. The ‘‘soft’’ hepatic damage of oxaliplatin (sinusoidal injury), fluoropyrimidine and irinotecan (steatosis), and bevacizumab pales compared with a liver arterially infused 2 weeks on and 2 weeks off with floxuridine. It is almost ironic to consider the current restrictions on timing of hepatic surgery after systemic chemotherapy compared with the post-CHAI liver. So where does this leave us when faced with colorectal cancer metastatic to the liver? Metastatic disease that is resectable at presentation may or may not be treated with Society of Surgical Oncology 2013

THE IMPORTANCE OF ADVERTISING SLOGANS AND THEIR PROPER DESIGNING IN BRAND EQUITY

The term slogan derives from Slough-ghairm, pronounced as Slogorm from Scottish Gaelic which means battle cry. Slogan is usually an unforgettable phrase that is frequently used to express an idea or purpose. Slogans have been employed in religious and political areas since long time ago, but today they are mostly used in business and trading. They vary from other ordinary text and images, and often because of their simple structure cannot convey a lot of concepts and details. Hereupon, slogans instead of drawing specific audience, address general audience to convey their particular meanings. Brand owners pay lots of money to advertising agencies to come up with snappy advertising slogans. Advertising slogans often claim to have knowledge of something and attempt to show it. Slogans usually serve a substantial role in calling audience’s attention to one or more aspects of a product or service. Normally slogans claim that the advertised product or service is of the highest quality, or is the most delicious, the most inexpensive, or nutritious… one. The slogans should point out, at least, the most important advantage of a product, or respond to the audience’s needs, or offer more benefits for their future/probable customers.

Arthur Pendragon, Eco-Warrior

Arthur Pendragon, Eco-Warrior Laurie A. Finke (bio) and Martin B. Shichtman (bio) This essay explores the environmental agendas and ambitions that motivate John Timothy Rothwell, ‘a mad biker chieftain wielding an axe,’ who, claiming to be a ‘post-Thatcher’ King Arthur, changes his name and links his political struggles against the state to myths that mourn the lost original purity of ancient Britain. This article looks backward to authoritarian values his ecocriticism should interrogate. (LAF and MBS) What ‘patient labor of mourning’ divides English Heritage’s fantasy of Britain’s medieval origins from the acts of political legitimation of one Arthur Uther Pendragon (born John Timothy Rothwell), a ‘British soldier, the son of a soldier, brought up in army camps and council estates, a truant, a persistent offender, a jack-of-all-trades, a traveler, a mad biker chieftain wielding an axe, who, in a moment of revelation, in a twentieth-century squat,’ claims to be a ‘post-Thatcher’ King Arthur, who changes his name to reflect (create) that reality, and who links his political struggles against the state to myths that mourn the always already lost original purity of ancient Britain, invoking ‘a time, long before history, when the people knew their place in the Universe, not as the centre, but as parts of a greater whole’?1 This is the characterization of Arthur Pendragon offered up in The Trials of Arthur: The Life and Times of a Modern-Day King, the (auto)biography written by Pendragon and Christopher J. Stone. King Arthur (and when we refer to King Arthur in this essay, we are referring to this late twentieth-century return), wearing Druid robes, a crown, and wielding Excalibur, has since the late 1990s been involved in ecological conflicts with such keepers and maintainers of the mythologies of the British past—and British monuments—as English Heritage, Parliament, and even the Monarchy, in his desire to reclaim the sacrality of the land. Ronald Hutton, the University of Bristol historian of neo-paganism, describes Arthur Pendragon as ‘a major figure in modern Druidry’ and deserving of ‘an equally important place in the history of groups concerned with environmental issues and civil rights.’2 Taking as his battle cry John Boorman’s mantra—through Jessie Weston—that ‘the king and the land are one,’3 Arthur Pendragon has set out to reclaim sites like Stonehenge, providing a contesting myth of origin to that supplied by the current trustees, who have fenced off the stones, making what ‘the king’ claims was a place of worship, where men and women communed with the earth, into little more [End Page 5] than a museum space catering to the ‘tourist gaze.’4 This essay explores the environmental agendas and ambitions that motivate Pendragon’s engagement with both the Arthurian past and the environment, exploring the imbrications of ecology and cultural heritage, nature and the antique past, in forms of nostalgia that become a means to forge political communities of all kinds, but most particularly, the community of the nation. While we do not claim to be experts on ecocriticism or green cultural studies, we hope to bring our expertise in medievalism to bear on the trope Timothy Morton has called ecomimesis—the techniques through which nature writers speak for and represent nature—to investigate its investments in nostalgia as an expression of ecological nationalism.5 Ecomimesis is an authenticating device, but it is also ‘a pressure point, crystallizing a vast and complex ideological network of beliefs, practices, and processes in and around the idea of the natural world.’6 The ‘patient labor of mourning’ with which we opened is the phrase Bernard Cerquiglini uses to describe the nostalgia of the medieval philologist’s ‘quest for an anterior perfection that is always bygone.’7 This desire for the ‘authentic, first, and original version’ also describes the passion that fuels King Arthur’s self-described ‘mad fantasy.’8 In both his protests and his memoir, King Arthur conjures up an ecomimesis that knits together nature, medievalism, romance, and nostalgia for a lost organic society. It is too easy, however, simply to dismiss King Arthur’s performance as so much nostalgic kitsch. In a 2011 review...

A Battle Cry of Freedom—But for Whom?

A Battle Cry of Freedom—But for Whom? Mark Grimsley (bio) Gary W. Gallagher . The Union War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. 215 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.95. Chandra Manning . What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. 350 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $26.95. The two works under review are creatively at odds with one another. Chandra Manning argues that when Civil War soldiers thought about the issue at the core of the conflict, they thought about slavery: not states' rights and the defense of home, as one might expect from those who wore gray; or the preservation of the Union, as one might expect from those who wore blue. Gary W. Gallagher is, to say the least, impatient with the latter part of the argument. He seeks to reaffirm that Union soldiers fought primarily for, well, the Union. Gallagher's view was once quite literally engraved in stone. In 1911, art critic Royal Cortissoz was asked by Henry Bacon, architect of the Lincoln Memorial, to compose a suitable inscription for the edifice. Cortissoz offered: "In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever." The memorial committee embraced this magisterial declaration, a declaration further underscored by the thirty-six Doric columns that grace the edifice: one for each American state in 1865, including the eleven that tried to leave the Union. And yet beneath this affirmation lay another that comes much closer to Manning's viewpoint, one that Cortissoz considered and rejected. The inscription might instead have highlighted Lincoln's status as "the Great Emancipator" and, in the process, implicitly shifted the meaning of the conflict. But as Cortissoz explained to Bacon, "By emphasizing his saving the union you appeal to both [North and South]. By saying nothing about slavery you avoid the rubbing of old sores."1 The eventual forty-one-page congressional report of the memorial commission further underscored the emphasis on Union as a way to hide the politically problematic issue of emancipation. Twenty times it extolled Lincoln as "the man who saved the Union." Lincoln as "emancipator" appeared just once—in a passage dealing with rejected designs. [End Page 77] The historiography of the early twentieth century also placed the salvation of the Union at center stage, treating the destruction of slavery as a happy but incidental side effect. But just as in succeeding decades civil rights activists persistently nudged the meaning of the Lincoln Memorial in the direction of black freedom, so too did academic historians eventually move emancipation to a place of central significance in the Civil War era. Even so, historians continued to assume that Northern soldiers fought to preserve the Union and that they viewed the destruction of slavery as, at best, a necessary means to achieve that end. Historians also assumed that while the preservation of slavery may have been a significant factor in the decision to secede, it was not a significant motivation for Confederate soldiers, who instead were thought to have fought for states' rights or for home and hearth. In the 1990s, James M. McPherson argued persuasively that the preservation of slavery was in fact a significant motivator of Confederate troops, but that they viewed slavery as a bulwark of political liberty, as Southerners understood the concept, rather than an object of protection in its own right. Still, his findings confirmed the central place of Union in the minds of Northern soldiers and their gradual acceptance of the idea that the preservation of " the best government on God's footstool" required the elimination of slavery.2 In What This Cruel War Was Over, Chandra Manning challenges this interpretation, albeit in a slightly oblique way. She doesn't reject the idea that Union and Confederate soldiers were motivated by factors other than the destruction or preservation of slavery. But she argues that, whatever their motivation to enlist and fight, soldiers on both sides regarded the peculiar institution as the central issue at stake in the contest—whether they liked it or not. "The problem, as both sides saw it...

Staging Tahrir: Laila Soliman’s Revolutionary Theatre

If one day, a people desire to live, Then fate will answer their call And their night will then begin to fade, And their chains break and fall.“Will to Live” Abī al-Qāsim al-ShābīOne of the most inspiring aspects of the Egyptian revolution was the outpouring of creative expression that accompanied the uprising’s social and political movements in the form of protest songs, poetry, slogans, chants, graffiti and installation art, street theatre, cartoons, among other forms of artistic inventiveness. Creative dissidence has always been an integral part of protest movements, as argued by Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (2011): Poetry, novels and popular culture have chronicled and encapsulated the struggle of peoples against colonial rule and later, against postcolonial monarchies and dictatorships, so the poems, vignettes, and quotes from novels were all there in the collective unconscious.... The revolution introduced new songs, chants and tropes, but it refocused attention on an already existing, rich and living archive.... Contrary to all the brouhaha about Twitter and Facebook, what energized people in Tunisia and Egypt and elsewhere, aside from sociopolitical grievances and an accumulation of pain and anger, was a famous line of poetry by a Tunisian poet, al-Shabbi.Antoon evokes Abū al-Qāsim al-Shābī, whose poem “The Will to Live,” referenced in the epigraph, symbolized the battle cry of Tunisians in the anti-colonial struggles of the early 1900s. Refrains from the poem echoed in both Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab spring uprisings over one century later, thereby highlighting the intimate synergies between the creative imaginary and revolutionary action.

Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War

Music in nineteenth-century America was social and ephemeral. As a result, its power and popularity remained largely situational. Such a musical climate is the setting for Christian McWhirter's Battle Hymns—an extensive, descriptive account of music during the American Civil War. The author's approach is that of a Civil War historian more than a cultural or music scholar. In thematic chapters, written in clear prose drawn from detailed archival research, the author handles such topics as the Northern and Southern quests for national anthems, popular music on the home front, music in the armies, music of and about freedpeople, and the politicization of music. Although the book does not follow a chronology, it still describes how and why popular music transformed over the course of the war as peoples' experiences with and attitudes toward the war changed. Stories on the creation of “John Brown's Body,” “Battle Cry of Freedom,” and “Dixie” revisit common subjects in American music history. McWhirter's chapter on how whites musically expressed their changing opinions of blacks and how they musically conveyed their newfound status as freedpeople situates Civil War music within its racial context. His description of how veterans used Civil War–era music to promote their legacy begins an interesting chapter that progresses through later attempts to bolster the Lost Cause using Civil War music and ends in 2009 with the University of Mississippi football controversy over using “Dixie” as the team's unofficial fight song—nicely emphasizing this history's relevance to the present.

The Nation’s Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America (review)

Reviewed by: The Nation’s Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America Martin Brückner (bio) Keywords Continent, Geography, North America The Nation’s Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America. By James D. Drake. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. 416. Cloth, $45.00.) This book offers the perhaps most exhaustive study to date of the continental imagination in the eighteenth century, with special emphasis on the Anglophone world and British–American culture. While the book addresses a familiar topic, its wide-ranging survey expertly captures the way in which British colonists used the term “continent” in the decades [End Page 503] leading up to the American Revolution and shortly after. We are familiar with labels such as the “Continental Congress,” the “Continental Army,” or the “Continental Dollar.” We know that European and American artists relied on stereotypical iconography to represent continents. And we most certainly remember Thomas Paine’s battle cry raised in Common Sense that “nothing but Continental authority can regulate Continental matters.” But by directly engaging with continental labels and prefixes, The Nation’s Nature illustrates layers of meaning unfamiliar to many. Synthesizing scholarship from various disciplines and mining an array of documents that include newspapers, diaries, pamphlets, prints, and maps, The Nation’s Nature provides a historical survey of how the concept of the continent entered public discourse and became a popular platform for American geopolitical imaginings. In a move appealing to audiences across the disciplines, the book reminds us to always historicize the very terms we find are peppering headlines of tracts, essays, and other archival materials. Here, it foregrounds the study The Myth of Continents (1997) by historical geographers Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen to remind us that speaking of continents has a unique history in Anglo–American thought. The meta-geographical unit of the “continent” was a spatial construct new to eighteenth-century epistemology, offering a taxonomic principle much welcomed by the collectors and interpreters of New World information. The book also reminds us how being called by continental names, such as by the shorthand name “American,” was anything but an objective locative phrase but rather a highly charged rhetorical conceit reflective of changing perceptions and values. The Nation’s Nature traces the continental terminology and its cultural implications for North American subjects in seven chapters. By emphasizing scientific discourse of the period (unfortunately this happens at the expense of literary discourse), the first chapter documents the shift in continental definitions marked by geography textbooks, maps, and travel narratives. While it was common practice during the late seventeenth century to lump together geopolitical units like France, Germany, or Spain with the tectonic spaces of continents, the territorial conflicts of the early eighteenth century changed the continental conception into a more meta-geographical definition. As shown by many studies on the history of geographical thought in Europe and America, geography books, travelogues, and in particular school geographies facilitated meta-narratives of generalization. At the same time, maps and their decorative [End Page 504] iconography propagated a new understanding of continental identity that was predicated on cartographic outlines and the corporeal figurations of America as the racially determined Native American Other. Chapters 2 and 3 track continental references made in public discourse during an era marked by territorial conflict. Early eighteenth-century conceptions of the American continent were made widely visible in the wake of a French and British map war in which both sides sought to portray their colonial possessions in cartographic views that favored transregional representations. British–American mapmakers, such as William Douglass, Lewis Evans, and John Mitchell, participated in the British effort of laying claim to the North American continent, which by 1755 was regularly depicted as a “sea-to-sea empire” (89) stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Pole. But it was the period following the Seven Years’ War that the ensuing political debates over colonial autonomy became increasingly couched in “continental” terms. Sermons and political speeches by authors such as Jonathan Mayhew, James Otis, and Christopher Gadsden introduced the rhetoric of “continentality” to illustrate colonial concerns and to make political claims of cultural difference...

Acoustic Signals in Domestic Chicken (<i>Gallus gallus</i>): A Tool for Teaching Veterinary Ethology and Implication for language learning

In this study chicken were able to express about 30 sounds (Words/syllables) of which 19 were distinctly identified as: warning, alarm, contact, territorial, laying, nesting, mating, threat, submissive, distress, fear , contentment, food, dust bathing, perching, battle cries, privacy, dominance and time calls. And short sentences (A combination of two and three syllables/ cackle). There were also some sounds that were not deciphered. Local chicken have had a good sense of hearing to these sounds as observed from postural, visual and auditory displays. It was found that baby chicks from broody and non broody breeds responded to the acoustic stimulus. While the adults of the commercial breed, did not respond to the acoustic stimulus, showed less motor reactions, postural and vocal displays. Also they produced less syllables. It was concluded that they do not know the language. The songram indicate that chicken produced sound frequency ranging from 50Hz to 10 kHz, this hearing range is within the hearing realm of humans which is 20-20,000Hz. Thus, Birdsong can be used as a biological model of human language, and acoustic communication in chicken can be demonstrated to students without the requirement of special apparatus. The results showed the usefulness of the chicken model in teaching acoustic communication, animal behavior and the importance of imprinting in language learning.

Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War Douglas Shadle (bio) Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War. By Christian McWhirter. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. vii, 321. $39.95 cloth) Christian McWhirter's Battle Hymns paints a richly textured portrait of musical life during the Civil War. McWhirter has adopted the methodology of reception history, an approach that explores the shifting meanings listeners ascribe to specific musical works—here, vernacular songs—in their changing cultural and historical contexts. This focus on meaning, as opposed to the music itself, sets Battle Hymns apart from other standard books on the subject such as Music of the Civil War Era (2004) by Steven Cornelius and The Singing Sixties (1960) by Willard A. and Porter W. Heaps. The main chapters of the book detail the important roles music played as patriotic expression for both the Union and the Confederacy, political propaganda on the home front, a source of energy and entertainment for soldiers, a site of identity formation for African Americans, an emotional release at war's end, and a tool for reimagining history. Since topics such as nationalism, slavery, hardship, and death reappear in each chapter, this thematic organizational structure allows the reader to view the same phenomena from several different perspectives and to develop a sense of the intriguing and clever intertexuality found in many songs from the period. McWhirter deliberately focuses on widely popular and still-familiar tunes, such as "John Brown's Body," "Dixie," "The Battle Cry of Freedom," and others that inspired multiple retextings (i.e., new words set to the same tune) or direct musical responses (parodies, "answer songs," or sequels). His refreshingly accessible prose likewise never approaches esotericism. The vast array of primary-source material that McWhirter has [End Page 602] carefully amassed is another of the chief strengths of the book. The scope of his sources speaks directly to his thesis that music was a powerful medium of political and emotional expression during the war. Its ubiquity in common discourse strongly suggests that it was an equally important feature of everyday life for soldiers, current and former slaves, and families on the home front, all of whom left documentation revealing their feelings about and experiences with music. McWhirter skillfully weaves their voices into his narrative. At times, however, the diffuseness of the sources may leave the reader wondering how representative a particular experience or opinion might have been. McWhirter's claims about the uniqueness of his topic are overstated and reveal his inexperience with areas outside of the scope of the book. Music was no less important during the Revolutionary War or the two world wars, for example. Composers, performers, and listeners alike confronted the particular cultural challenges posed by each. McWhirter also largely ignores the thriving musical cultures that were less directly affected by the war itself—music at theaters, beer gardens, or concert halls—thus potentially leaving the reader with the impression that the war was a singular musical obsession; it was not. Lastly, McWhirter's focus on meaning leaves questions about precisely what sounds elicited such strong responses. Perhaps he will consider creating a companion website that includes streaming musical examples. These weaknesses notwithstanding, Battle Hymns convincingly combines historical and musicological perspectives by illustrating the mutual enrichment of music and extramusical culture. A song written and printed first in Chicago, for example, could be sung at a political rally there, purchased at a music store by a rally attendee, mailed to her brother on the front lines, arranged by the regimental bandmaster for use at an evening performance, and finally retexted by drunken soldiers before bed. Such rapid movement and adaptation of music was made possible by the increased nationalization of the economy, transportation networks, and the musical marketplace, all [End Page 603] of which enter McWhirter's analyses. Battle Hymns is filled with many more stories like this (and much more compelling) and thus deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the Civil War. Douglas Shadle Douglas Shadle is a visiting assistant professor of music history at the University of Louisville. He is...

A Call to “Image Gently”

In August 2011, The Joint Commission (2011) issued a sentinel event alert discussing how high-radiation dosages delivered at any one timemay cause a risk and long-term injury to patients. This has been a particular concern for pediatric patients for many years. In a study by Brenner, Elliston, Hall, and Berdon (2001) in the American Journal of Roentgenology, concern was raised about the possible induction of added cancers because of the ionizing radiation of children undergoing computed tomography (CT). More recently, Brenner and Hall (2007) published that up to 2% of all cancers in theUnited States could be because ofCT radiation exposure. Although many experts disagree on the extent of cancers that may occur from diagnostic imaging, we, as pediatric nurses, should be aware of the possible risk to our patients and the need to provide education to their caregivers. Radiation is found all around us, and we have been exposed to radiation since we were born. Radiation occurs naturally; we are laid bare to these background sources daily as we breathe air (radon gas), ingest food that has absorbed trace radioisotopes, such as potassium, and absorb particles through means of cosmic bombardment. Artificial sources of radiation can either be from nonionizing radiation, such as the type that is used in cell phones or microwaves, or from ionizing radiation used in medical imaging (International Atomic Energy Agency, 2011). Since the creation of CT scans in the early 1970s, the number of ionizing studies have risen from 2 million studies per year to more than 72 million completed in the United States during 2007 (National Council on Radiation Protection, 2009). CT scans are essential for the diagnosis of certain conditions in children such as appendicitis, head injuries, multiple trauma, and congenital heart defects (Frosh, 2011). However, it is the call of the medical community to determine whether a CT scan is necessary. If the medical

Remember the Raisin!

Remember the Raisin! Geoffrey Plank (bio) Jon Latimer . 1812: War with America. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. xv + 637 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth); $20.00 (paper). Alan Taylor . The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies. New York: Knopf, 2010. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. On August 5, 1812, the famous Indian leader Tecumseh, with a large body of warriors, ambushed an American force that was marching toward the Raisin River in the Michigan Territory. The river was the site of an old French settlement, and it was still sparsely populated by French-speakers. The Americans were traveling through the area with the aim of protecting a supply train with provisions for their garrison at Detroit. Tecumseh and his fellow warriors killed seventeen soldiers; and while that may seem like a small number, their action helped precipitate a dramatic American withdrawal from the upper Midwest. Shortly thereafter, the Americans decided to consolidate their supply lines in southern Michigan, and so they abandoned Fort Dearborn, the site of present-day Chicago. They wanted to hold Detroit, but quickly discovered they could not. A few days after the August 5th skirmish, the British seized the town. In January 1813, with the British still in possession of Detroit, American soldiers returned to the Raisin River in an effort to protect the French habitants and secure their continuing loyalty to the United States. They made themselves vulnerable by going there, and, on January 22, they were defeated by a force of over 1,000 Native American, British, and Canadian fighters. In the aftermath of the battle, eighty wounded American prisoners were taken to a habitant settlement called Frenchtown, where, in the night, Indians killed dozens of them. Some of the prisoners were scalped, and some were fed to pigs. These events inspired American calls for revenge. On several subsequent occasions during the War of 1812, American soldiers charged into battle crying "Remember the Raisin!" Indeed, they shouted those words at the engagement later that year when they killed Tecumseh. [End Page 62] Similar battle cries have echoed more loudly through our American history books. We are more familiar with "Remember the Alamo," "Remember Fort Sumter," "Remember the Maine," and "Remember Pearl Harbor." Until recently at least, Americans have not devoted much attention to the War of 1812. This situation, however, is changing. John Latimer's 1812: War with America and Alan Taylor's The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies are early contributions to an imminent outpouring of books, scholarly articles, conferences, and other commemorative events marking the conflict. Much of this work has been timed to coincide with the 2012 bicentennial anniversary, when, it is widely assumed, the war will resonate more powerfully in public memory. I suspect, however, that most amateur history buffs in Britain and the U.S. would be astonished by the attention the War of 1812 is receiving in academic circles. It is attracting more scholarship than the War of the American Revolution. Under these circumstances, the time will soon come when historians will no longer be able to justify their works on the war by asserting that it is understudied. Latimer makes an essential, almost foundational, contribution to the growing literature on the war, but his book already seems to belong to an earlier era. As a pioneer of sorts, he has had to work to recover and reconstruct a lost narrative and draw attention to a conflict that, he suggests, had been too easily forgotten, especially by the British public. The British, he explains, had cared deeply about the war while it was happening, but the conflict faded into relative insignificance for them following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Latimer offers a sweeping chronological account of the war "from the British perspective" (p. vii). He starts each of his chapters with a discussion of British politics, citing broadsides and songs as well as state papers, in order to illuminate what the British thought was at stake in their conflict with the United States. He makes a convincing case that the...

Black Friday: Crowdsourcing Communities of Risk

Just before dawn on Friday, November 28, 2008, Jdimytai Damour, a thirty-four-year- old Wal-Mart employee, was killed in a futile attempt to prevent a crowd of approximately two thousand shoppers from streaming through the main entrance to the Wal-Mart at the Green Acres Shopping Plaza in Valley Stream, New York. Just minutes before it was scheduled to open at 5:00 a.m., Damour was overpowered, trampled, and asphyxiated by the crush of bodies flowing through a bottleneck at the door. He was pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m. at nearby Franklyn Hospital after failed attempts to revive him with CPR. The store closed for two hours later that morning in memoriam. Damour s death notwithstanding, the scene outside the Green Acres Wal-Mart was typical across the nation that November day in observance of an annual ritual popularly known as Black Friday. The rite is now all too familiar. Each following Thanksgiving, millions of consumers assemble outside retail outlets, malls, and box stores, often camping out all night with friends and family and enduring inclement weather until national chains fling their doors open at daybreak to begin the highestvolume shopping day of the year. The sale day that informally marks the commencement of the holiday shopping season has become a sensational media event. Obligatory human interest stories feature images of impetuous shoppers dashing frantically into aisles stacked impossibly high with discounted retail goods and feverishly foraging through stuffed racks and bargain bins, while the more staid coverage by the financial press tracks sales numbers minute by minute as a weathervane of consumer confidence. Yet both the popular and journalistic conversations about rarely deviate from a spendthrift battle cry or scratch beneath the superficial caricature of consumer bliss to question directly the systemic linkages between social, cultural, and economic factors that make the phenomenon of possible, factors that, if followed, run deep into the fissures, contradictions, and dangers inherent in a global postindustrial capitalism increasingly dependent on and threatened by deepening systemic risk. The name Black Friday may be vaingloriously derived from the color of ink left in corporate ledger books at the day's profit-taking close, yet if one shifts from the sanguine perspective of those on high to that of others witnessing events from within the panicked crowd, Black Friday connotes an ominous pall and refers to a very different kind of bottom line: a bottom hit by those who are left behind to pay the price for windfalls gained and gamed by a system of speculative finance, unsustainable consumer debt, declining wages, and precarious labor. The shoppers and employees who frequent the Green Acres Wal-Mart are representative of communities feeling the less auspicious effects of the sacrosanct shopping day. The vast majority are black, most commuting to just outside New York City limits to the predominantly white, middleand upper-middle-class suburban community of Valley Stream, the westernmost suburb of Long Island, bordering Queens, from comparatively lower- income, predominantly African American urban neighborhoods like Rosedale, Brookville, and Laurelton because of easy mass transit access, cheaper prices, and a lack of investment by national retail chains in their own Queens neighborhoods. As for the majority-black employees at the Wal-Mart, many are earning wages regarded as at or below subsistence level, near the minimum in the growing sector of low-paying service sector jobs outsourced to third-party temporary agencies. Damour, a Haitian immigrant, didn't technically work for Wal-Mart; rather he was an employee of the temp agency Labor Now, one of many firms, such as Staffmark and SelectRemedy, that crowdsource an exploitable, often immigrant workforce and feeds Wal-Mart cheap, flexible, minimally trained, minimum-wage laborers, making the firm's employment completely scalable to the contingencies and uncertainties of consumer demand and freeing the retail giant from responsibility for benefits, health care, and workers' compensation (Bonachich and Wilson 2008; Laird 2009). …

In Arabic

In Arabic Shara Lessley (bio) There’s no to be, no passivity, is is always implied. Nor does Miss exist in the local dialect, only the half block between her father’s house and husband’s. A boy takes as his battle cry his sister’s name or his camel’s; his gun’s imagined refrain mabrook—congratulations. There’s a word for the little pieces of candy wrapped not in plastic, but dried lilac; a phrase for the static of snow-crust forming white camellias of ice. In class I scribble translation’s phonetic equivalent; how to ask what place is this? which street? In English tourist sounds like terrorist, terrorist tourist; in Arabic there are ninety-nine ways to say God. Friday’s aljoum’a stems from “to gather,” as in to-gather-for-noon’s-holy-prayer. What hour is this?—my teacher asks— to which I insist, At the market I drankfresh juice. What day is this? Let’s take our son to the pool. She answers questions with questions: You’re from where, exactly? Why are you here? Study the sounds, she proposes, the characters’ [End Page 197] valley’s and peaks: : what do you see? A corkscrew of scrolls unrolled across the dead at Mujab Wadi. [End Page 198] Shara Lessley Shara Lessley is a former Stegner Fellow and the author of Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2012). Her awards include an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, the Tickner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize. She currently lives in the Middle East. Copyright © 2012 Middlebury College Publications

International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) 29th Triennial Conference, Durban, South Africa, 19–23 June 2011

South Africa (SOMSA) are to be co event. With no organisational office This is the first time that the ICM Triennial Conference has been held in Africa and the hosts, the Society of Midwives of ngratulated on this excellent they produced a conference for 3,500 participants from 109 countries. The scientific programme was well planned and ran smoothly. The social events were inspiring and everyone was so welcoming. The events actually began on the 18 June when 1,000 midwives marched along the beach front of Durban, demonstrating to South Africa, Africa and the World the visibility of midwives. The conference theme was ‘Midwives tackling the ‘Big 5’ globally’. In Africa the phrase ‘Big 5’ usually refers to their animals—African Elephant, Cape Buffalo, Leopard, Lion and Rhinocerous. This was a clever link to the ‘Big 5’ for midwives – haemorrhage, obstructed labour, hypertensive diseases, including pre eclampsia and eclampsia, sepsis, and abortion—the major causes of maternal mortality. Because of the number of presentations – plenary papers, symposia, concurrent sessions, workshops, partner panels and not forgetting the 80þ posters – it is impossible to give a comprehensive report on all that occurred. What follows is a personal report, because the attended sessions were chosen for personal reasons. There was a Plenary session each day and Bridget Lynch, President of ICM, got the programme off to an excellent start with a battle cry to midwives – we must be autonomous; we must stop hiding behind the term ‘skilled birth attendants’; we must represent and educate midwives ourselves – not leave it to others; we must define the scope of practice of midwifery ourselves – not leave it to others; and we must regulate midwifery ourselves – not leave it to others. In discussing these points she pointed participants to the ICM web site (www.internationalmidwives.org) where the ICM Global Standards for Midwifery Education, Global Standards for Midwifery Regulation, Global Standards for Basic Midwifery Competence are among the tools that are published. The Standards for Education, Competence and Regulation have been accepted by WHO so countries will be required to adhere to them. Continuing, Bridget stated that clean water and food are basic human rights that women should have, and as a basic

Battle cry in the intensive care unit: Are we listening?*

Battle cry in the intensive care unit: Are we listening?*

Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller (review)

Reviewed by: Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller Jack Fischel, Emeritus Professor of History, Visiting Professor of the Humanities Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, by Ira B. Nadel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. 352 pp. $27.95. Before his death in 2003, Leon Uris authored 13 novels, three Hollywood movie scripts (Battle Cry, 1954, The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 1957, and The Angry Hills, 1959), and a photographic history, accompanied with historical essays on Israel and Ireland. He will be best remembered, however, for his best-selling historical works of fiction, Battle Cry (1953), Exodus (1958), and Trinity (1976). An indefatigable researcher, Uris prided himself on his extensive research and interviews, which laid the groundwork for recreating, among other historical events the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (Mila 18), the founding of Israel (Exodus), and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish history (Trinity). Although not recognized among the top tier of American-Jewish writers, such as Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, and Bernard Malamud, Uris nevertheless has attained his place, along with Herman Wouk and Chaim Potok, amid the nation's best-selling novelists. Uris' most important work, Exodus, was not only among the most popular novels of its time, but it did more to instill a positive image of Israel in the mind of the American public than any work of history or fiction to this date. When Doubleday published Exodus, the former prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, noted its propaganda value as the most significant thing ever written about Israel. Aside from Kathleen Shine Cain's Leon Uris: A Critical Companion (1998), however, there has not until now been a full-length critical study of Uris's life and work. This omission has been rectified with the publication of [End Page 153] Ira Nadel's biography (which oddly omits Cain's work in its bibliography) of one of the last century's most important writers of popular fiction. Both the strength and weakness of Nadel's biography, however, lies with his access to the Leon Uris archive, housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and much information about his early life gleaned from his interviews with Uris's family. Although Nadel has made an important contribution to our understanding of his subject, he writes as if he were determined to provide the reader with every detail unearthed from his research, whether relevant or not. Nadel, for example, notes that an intruder was found dressed in Uris's bathrobe in his Colorado home (p. 236), but neglects to inform us of the relevance of this incident. This criticism aside, there is much to praise in Nadel's biography and he certainly succeeds in providing us with a great many insights about a writer whose novels challenged the stereotype of the effete Jew and promoted the image of the "tough Jew." Leon Marcus Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Wolf William Uris, a shopkeeper, and Anna Blumberg. Both parents were Jews of Russian Polish origin. His father, an immigrant from Poland, spent a year in Palestine after World War I and derived his surname from Yerushalmi, meaning "man of Jerusalem." Uris, growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, was undersized as well as asthmatic and once said that "I used to think of myself as a sad little Jewish boy." Leon was brought up without any religious training, and because his father was a Communist, he forbade his son any preparation for becoming a Jew, including training for a bar-mitzvah (both his son and daughter through his third wife, Jill Peabody, received a bar and bat-mitzvah). Later in life, Uris, because of the Holocaust, embraced a part of Judaism because he wanted it as his moral standard for living. Until his service in the U.S. Marines (the inspiration for his first best-seller, Battle Cry) Uris never strongly identified with Judaism or religion. As Nadel writes, The history of the Jews meant something to him culturally, but not spiritually and certainly not personally. But the image of the "soft" Jew angered him and he was determined to replace it with one of strength. He undertook...

From battlefields rising: how the Civil War transformed American literature

Introduction: Emerson's Dream Chapter 1. Beat! Beat! Drums Chapter 2. Concord Chapter 3. Shiloh Chapter 4. Telling it Slant Chapter 5. Port Royal Chapter 6. Fathers and Sons Chapter 7. Phantom Limbs Chapter 8. The Man without a Country Chapter 9. In a Gloomy Wood Epilogue. Heaven End Notes When the volcano of Civil War erupted in 1861, American literature had already achieved maturity in the writings of Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, and others. All of them, plus new voices like Emily Dickinson, tried to understand and express the profound meaning of the war in their writings, which Randll Fuller skillfully dissects in this original and incisive volume.-James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom This is a beautiful, powerful book, uniting the pivotal event of American history with the defining literature of the nation. Fuller's account is filled with humanity, eloquence, and surprise. Anyone who reads this book will see both the Civil War and America's iconic authors with new eyes.-Edward Ayers, author of In The Presence of Mine Enemies

Media, militarism and mythologies of the state: The Latino soldier in World War II films

This essay examines the representation of Latino soldiers in World War II films and the social and political consequences of making these soldiers invisible or visible on screen. The Latino soldier's in/visibility has often been contingent upon state directives, genre conventions and prevailing war discourses. Films such as A Medal for Benny (1945), Battle Cry (1955) and Hell to Eternity (1960) were linked to discourses of national defense and, in later years, Cold War rhetoric. By focusing on these films, the essay calls for heightened vigilance about military and state influence in cinematic representations of Latino/a soldiers.

Rizal, Renaissance and Reform: Reflections on Ophthalmology and Otorhinolaryngology in the Philippine General Hospital

The nineteenth of June 2011 marks a century and fifty years since the birth of José Protasio Rizal in 1861.1 The ninth of November 2011 also marks the Golden Jubilee of the foundation of the Departments of Ophthalmology and Otorhinolaryngology of the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) in 1961, dividing the original Department of Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat that was established a century ago in May 1911. The national hero of the Philippines and Pride of the Malay Race2 is immortalized in countless ways, reflecting his multiple accomplishments that mark a true renaissance individual. The two departments of the national University of the Philippines (UP) have likewise made their mark in pace with the many achievements of their alumni. Rizal was a polyglot and polymath poet, painter, sculptor, sportsman, scientist and patriot, whose writings led to his execution and sparked the Philippine Revolution of 1898.1,3 He was also a physician and an ophthalmologist who insightfully dissected the ills of his patients and society.4 What have the departments and their hospital contributed to health and to humankind?
 
 If precedence were the measure of significance, the pioneering “firsts” would have to include the first laryngo-fissure operation by founding department head Dr. Reinhard Rembe in 1913, the first intracapsular cataract lens extraction in the country using a suction erisophake after the technique of Barraquer by the next chair (and nephew of the national hero) Dr. Aristeo Rizal Ubaldo in 1920, the first laryngectomy by Drs. Ubaldo and founding president of the Philippine Academy of Ophthalmology Antonio S. Fernando in 1923 and the first labyrinthectomy by Drs. Ubaldo and Vicencio C. Alcantara in 1927.5 There was a time when the chairs and senior consultants of most departments of otorhinolaryngology - head and neck surgery in the Philippines were alumni of the UP-PGH, as was the leadership of the Philippine Society of Otolaryngology and Bronchoesophagology (later Philippine Society of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery) which separated from the Philippine Ophthalmological and Otolaryngological Society (subsequently Philippine Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology) in 1956. But those are bygone days, and the folly of resting on one’s laurels becomes all too apparent, as these are quickly eclipsed by the capabilities of newer, better-equipped health care facilities that are manned by experts trained in their respective institutions. Thus the race to super-specialize and sub-specialize, perhaps to regain lost ground and primacy at the expense of tertiary general health care has become the battle cry for some, led by the present administration of the PGH.
 
 And yet, the majority of Filipinos still do not have access to primary health care.6 They who do not even have the services of a basic physician much less can avail of special care of their sight, hearing and balance, smell and taste, breathing, swallowing or speaking, nor of the face with which they face the world. Witness the number of adults with unrepaired cleft lips and untreated head and neck tumors roaming the streets of the city.
 
 The UP College of Medicine (UPCM) founded in 1905 aims “towards leadership and excellence in community-oriented medical education, research and service directed particularly to the underserved.”5 As the teaching hospital of the UPCM, with whom it shares such academic and clinical departments as Ophthalmology and Otorhinolaryngology, the hundred-year-old Philippine General Hospital and its leadership cannot and must not turn a blind eye or deaf ear to the underserved it is mandated to serve. Its true strength lies in relevance, which is quickly lost if it succumbs to the delusionary glitter of super specialization beyond the reach of most people. Of what benefit is it to be the “first,” if it does not redound to the good of the “many?”
 Of Rizal, it has been said “to his patients he gave sight; and to his country he gave vision.”7 As the Departments of Ophthalmology and Otorhinolaryngology pursue the arts and sciences of vision, hearing and balance, olfaction and gustation, respiration and deglutition, phonation and facial expression, may they sharpen the sensitivity of health providers in PGH and other loco-regional general hospitals to the real issues of health and humankind in the developing world and embolden us to overcome the apathy to “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.”