Black Stockings Research Articles

Antifascist Narrative and the Politics of Optimism

AbstractThis essay identifies the structure of US antifascist literary narrative, and in so doing, outlines its history and theorizes its democratic intervention. It argues that since the 1930s, antifascist narratives have been fueled by an optimism they maintain in the face of an existential threat to democracy. Spawned at moments of danger, antifascist narratives do not fight fascism simply to restore the status quo of liberalism, but strive to expand democracy through the defeat of fascism, forging a new reality in the fight against monsters. The essay focuses on two largely forgotten works published in the late 1930s, perhaps the darkest era for antifascists: James T. Farrell’s novella, Tommy Gallagher’s Crusade (1939), and William Thomas Smith’s serial novel, The Black Stockings (1937), which appeared in the Baltimore Afro-American. These two works are part of a subgenre of antifascist literature that I call “the blackshirt narrative,” a subgenre particularly worth revisiting for those interested in preserving and expanding democracy in the twenty-first century.Spawned at a moment of danger, [antifascist] optimism does not just fight fascism in order to restore the status quo of liberalism, but . . . strives to expand democracy through the defeat of fascism, forging a new reality in the fight against monsters.

Invisible Bridges: On Ukraine, Russia, and friendships

Invisible BridgesOn Ukraine, Russia, and friendships Marci Shore (bio) in early march, ten days after Vladimir Putin sent his army into Ukraine to begin a mass slaughter, I got a message on an encrypted application from my friend Inessa in Moscow. We had known each other for nearly thirty years. But it had been seven years since we last spoke. By then Inessa and I both knew that Putin's anticipated blitzkrieg had failed: Kyiv had not fallen in three days. But the slaughter continued. It was a rare historical moment in its absence of ambiguity—an unprovoked invasion, for nothing. We were watching it all, live-streamed on the internet. Or rather, I was watching it [End Page 39] all. Information in Russia was censored. Yet it was impossible that Inessa, so well educated, would not—did not—know. "I had thought that the very worst in my life had already happened—I lost my parents," Inessa wrote. "I could not have imagined something like this.…" Then a second message: "I am afraid that in Russia a civil war is about to begin, and then—terror." galina i am not a neutral observer of this war—I have been living it from afar, through my friends who are in it. My attachment to Ukraine has its origins neither in Ukraine nor in Russia, nor in America, but rather in a provincial part of the Czech Republic, where I arrived some twenty-eight years ago, during the last days of summer in 1994, to work as an English teacher. I was the only American in a small town with a market square freshly painted in shades of lime and tangerine, and I wanted to be liked. The people in the town, by and large, did not like me. Other women my age were very much liked. Milena worked at a vaguely Italian café that served pizza and wine. The café was young and bright, like Milena, and other young, bright people gathered there. When the café was not busy, she would open her shopping bag from behind the bar and show her girlfriends her new purchases: black stockings, auburn hair dye, violet nail polish. In sparkling eye shadow, heavy mascara, tight jeans, and the clingy tops of a dancer, Milena always looked beautiful, and at home. She seemed content to mix drinks, happy to be in the world that could be touched like the spoon she twirled between her fingers. I was jealous of Milena and her ability to enjoy the present moment. Men admired her. No one harassed her. Of course, she had a boyfriend to protect her. I was nearly always by myself. My own makeup was not so heavy, my clothes not quite so revealing, my brown hair undyed. Even so, men called to me, taunted me, followed me around the painted square, as if it were understood that this was okay, that the usual rules did not apply to foreigners. [End Page 40] I was unprotected by social conventions. The other women in the town saw everything, but none reached out a hand. Except Galina, a Ukrainian woman about fifteen years older than I was, who taught at the school with me. She did reach out—one of those moments that alters the arc of one's life. She made tea, translated for me, told me who in the town had good will, if misplaced, and who could not be trusted. Today, near thirty years later, as a historian of Eastern Europe, as I find myself unable to turn away from a country turning to embers in a ghastly war, I understand that my connection to Ukraine came into being through this unexpected friendship, against the backdrop of those men and their catcalls. Perhaps it was natural that we, two English teachers, the only two foreigners working at this school, were drawn together, despite our differences. I was an agnostic Jew; Galina was searching for faith in that passionate, desperate way captured in the Russian word bogoiskatel'stvo, "God-seeking." Galina and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Mara, had arrived shortly after Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution of 1989; the Iron Curtain had just fallen; everyone...

An Easy Meal

An Easy Meal Heidi Bell (bio) “The animal envoys of the Unseen Power no longer serve, as in primeval times, to teach and to guide mankind. Bears, lions, elephants, ibexes, and gazelles are in cages in our zoos.” —Joseph Campbell, The Way of the Animal Powers In the beginning—and still—Fox dances in his black stockings, tracing a perfect arc in Bear’s periphery. His nostrils sip the air, his only waking impulse the mouth-watering curiosity pulling him forward to the hindquarters of a deer sunk in a bed of pine needles or to the ripe, delicate layers of rotting fish buried in the bank of red sand. Bear’s secrets give way so sumptuously beneath Fox’s paws. He is exquisitely attuned to Bear, feels the air quiver when Bear turns again toward one of his caches, and Fox slinks off, just out of reach. When the berries dry up and the snow sifts down through the trees, Bear disappears, and it’s a matter of principle for Fox to follow the thread of a scent on the cold air, to steal into Bear’s den. The redness of him, his intricate musk trickles into Bear’s dreams, and Bear moans as nimble black lips grasp and sharp white incisors drag a rabbit carcass from a cocoon of dried grass out into the snow. Fox and Bear dream through the long winter nights, while the Storyteller describes them in stories made while watching from the patient underbrush, while praying for god to appear as a fat buck. Stories of Fox pilfering Bear’s honey, Bear’s fish; Fox tricking Bear into ice fishing with his tail, formerly bushy; Bear insisting, in tale after tale, that might is superior to wile—and proven wrong again and again. II Spring is when it rains and rains, and—like the stream that thaws and swells and overflows, moving everything in its grasp onward through space and time—the Storyteller, alienated now from the forces that made him, reaches in and makes a mess of things. Fox reaches for an easy fish but is caught in the roiling water and buffeted by the churning debris of Nature and Civilization—gravel, shards of clay pots, broken branches, the twisted frame of a loom, clots of winter leaves, a cracked coat of arms, a sodden map of the British Empire. The Storyteller deposits Fox, weak and battered, far downstream. The unfamiliar [End Page 163] forest reeks of Bear. The smell is coming from a heap of rocks, a castle, toward which Fox creeps until the door bangs open, and three male Bears emerge on hind legs, dressed in cloak, in tunic, in doublet and pantaloons. As they step onto the path, the Bears’ front paws dangle idiotically. Fox is pulled after them as if attached by a string, unsteady and disoriented, for he, too, is walking on hind legs, his nose exceedingly far from the ground, his luxurious tail wagging with unease. The Bears notice him there and approach, and Fox cowers inside the sensory overload of them, three boars together. He bows low, drawing his foot back along the ground in keeping with a custom that has nothing to do with him but has somehow taken over his body, and the Bears grunt with laughter and call him “Scrapefoot” before going on their way. Where has it gone—Fox’s supple ability to evade capture? In this unholy place, any of the Bears could have torn him to pieces while he bowed and scraped. For the first time, he wants to be free of Bear, and he wrests himself out of the invisible grip of the Storyteller, who has decided all animals must walk upright. Fox hunches now on all fours and feels more himself. And as the scent of the Bears fades, he is compelled to fumble with the door latch and slip inside the castle, for where Bear is, there is an easy meal. He ransacks the place, searching for the caches, but the Storyteller—unfathomably—has stashed nothing in the cushions lining the three thrones of rock, nothing in the wardrobe but costumes for dancing—red wool jackets...

The Effect of Nanosilver on Postharvest Longevity of Thalictrum aquilegifolium L. Foliage

<em>Thalictrum aquilegifolium </em>L. ‘Black Stockings,’ with its interesting foliage, is used as a cut greenery. We tested the postharvest longevity of the foliage after different 24-hr conditioning treatments with nanosilver (0, 5, 10, 15, 20 mg dm<sup>−3</sup>) and 20 g dm<sup>−3</sup> sucrose and compared the results with those obtained using the standard preservative (200 mg dm<sup>−3</sup> 8-hydroxyquinoline citrate + 20 g dm<sup>−3</sup> sucrose) and Floralife 200 Clear. The longevity of the foliage and the content of assimilative pigments were evaluated and the functioning of the photosynthetic apparatus (F<sub>0</sub>, Fm, Fv/Fm) was analyzed. We found that leaf senescence, as determined by chlorophyll <em>a </em>and carotenoid content after 14 days of holding, was most effectively inhibited by the solution containing 5 mg dm<sup>−3</sup> nanosilver and sucrose. This solution increased the maximal quantum efficiency of photosystem II (Fv/Fm) in the leaves.

O’Herlihy (Née Noonan)

O’Herlihy (Née Noonan) Andrew Peters (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Stewart Black On the second of April 1923 she was born in the main bedroom of the family home, in Drumcondra. Her colour was deep blue. The thundery richness of this blue, almost purple, with the yellow marbling of the afterbirth strung tight across it, caused the midwife to fear cyanosis. The midwife said nothing but took strong measures. She smacked the baby’s blood into motion with the flat of her [End Page 11] hand, made loud entreaties. “Come along, come along, comealongcomealong,” she said. Mary’s reluctance to commence life, to acquiesce to the torment of existence, earned her the reputation of a slow starter, which she was to retain into old age. When at last she cried out from the midwife’s blows, she did so quietly, as if apologising for making her small dent in the surface of things. The next day’s Irish Times carried the following announcement: noonan—April 2nd, at 2 Glendalough Road, Drumcondra, the wife of P. J. Noonan, of a daughter. The redbrick house had a shiny blue door and a brass knocker too high to reach. Beside the front door, the narrow beds of flowers (snow-drops, snowdrops, snowdrops) were guarded by hooped railings. Newly painted, they left a sticky horseshoe of white gloss on the back of that dress of giant cornflowers. Daddy gripped her under her arms and swung her away from them, up and away. Always in a suit, Daddy, and smelling of his pipe. Bristled smoke-smelling cheek laid against her own. In the mornings he closed the shiny front door behind him with one hand on his hat, his head slightly bowed. The door banged shut and you saw his hat and the white of his face momently in the wrinkles of the glass, flashing. And then it was gone. That dress was ruined. Years later Mother still complained, that dress of blue cornflowers which you spoiled with your leaning! Always resting, leaning, the slow starter, the blood sluggish in her veins. God bless that midwife. ________ On the third of September 1929 her mother removed her banana toast before she had finished it and took her hand and led her to the bus stop under the wall of the Archbishop’s Palace. They travelled on the lower deck as far as Eccles Street, where her mother handed her to Sister Dymphna of the Dominican College. In later years she travelled to school unaccompanied, walked to the stop and waited for the swaying bus to come down the Drumcondra Road. On winter mornings the leaves on the footpath were crisp with frost; they arched their backs with cold. She wore a navy blue serge dress and white collar, detachable. Long black stockings, also. The boys going to St. Patrick’s wore their cowboy uniforms: miniature ten-gallon hats, tasselled chaps, waistcoats of denim, and pearl-handled revolvers bouncing at their hips. [End Page 12] Sister Madeline checked your hat and gloves before you went home in the afternoon. The uniforms came from Clery’s, the school section, with its racks of blazers and high shelves of rolled scarves. Sister Madeline’s big teeth pressed her bottom lip when she smiled and said good afternoon to you. Her teeth hanging unevenly like badly pegged washing, Sister Madeline told the children in her funny old way that she anticipated with great pleasure greeting them again on the morrow. On the second of June 1939 she received a prize for her essay “Dominic of Caleruega and the Albigensians,” written in her even, sloping hand on four sides of foolscap. The pages of the foolscap crisp with age. She accepted her prize on the stage of the school concert hall before her fellow prizewinners. The audience included parents of prizewinners and assorted members of the community, such as active sisters, affiliated Dominicans, and, occupying the rearward rows, more brightly coloured lay staff. For her prize book she chose The Concise Oxford Dictionary, on the flyleaf of which was pasted a prize certificate signed by Father T. P. Molloy, O.P. Over...

New England Nun

New England Nun RC de Winter (bio) I move through the fair quietly,unobtrusive except for my height,robed in the black of a nun.Never speaking unless spoken to,I make my purchases efficiently,buying only what I needbut also only the best.I turn no heads, charming no one.There is no reason to mark meexcept perhaps for my attire.Finished with my errands,I smile to myself as I turn to go,knowing that underneath my robesthe silk of black stockings awaitshe who says his prayers at night. [End Page 21] RC de Winter RC deWinter’s poetry is anthologized in New York City Haiku (NY Times), Uno: A Poetry Anthology (Verian Thomas), Cowboys & Cocktails: Poetry from the True Grit Saloon (Brick Street Poetry) and elsewhere and appears in print and online in numerous literary journals. Copyright © 2019 University of Nebraska Press

Does uniform color affect offside in association football?

AbstractPast research has documented an impact of sportswear color on performance and referees' judgments in combat and team sports. Amongst other things, it was argued that these effects may arise from differences in visibility. In this regard, the current study was aimed at questioning the impact of uniform color on offside judgments in association football. We analyzed the number of offside judgments for 1530 matches from the first and second division of the football league in Germany and recorded the color of shirts, shorts and stockings for both teams. Data analyses revealed that attacking teams wearing black shirts and black stockings were accompanied by fewer offside decisions. In contrast, defending teams wearing black or green kits were accompanied by increased offside judgments against the opposing teams. Thus, it seems that black and green kits yielded favourable offside judgments. Regarding the low color contrast with green uniforms on a green lawn and the lower detection rate of dark colors the results suggest that green and black kits are less visible, which may impede players' visual detection. The results emphasise the importance of analyzing the role of uniform color in the context of offside decisions to ensure fair play and equal opportunities of winning.

Two Poems

46 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 On Vision Wally Neuzil to Schiele Vision is God’s gift but to me it seems it was not given. All I see is you. This must be the devil’s last offering to me. Yesterday I managed to get into your house as far as the marble staircase but they dragged me out: Fräulein, where are you going? Do leave at once! A man stuck out his head at the racket, it’s you I hoped you’d rush to gather me up but it was someone else. Love is compulsive instinct, you used to say. I would have recognized your brown eyes, their green. Do you remember our Neulengbach landlord? Guess, he kicked me out, told me to find another painter. Do you remember the draught from the windows and how cold I used to get in my black stockings? Our polka-dotted cup, the bread crumbs slowly drowning in the hot bread soup? I imagine you embrace me, your other hand pushes the paint tubes on the floor. The girl-child with the big mane, your model was one half-crown dearer to you than a prostitute. The other day you set an anthill on fire in the park to show me the burning of Troy so they banished us from all public gardens. I thought the ban touched us both but it seems I’m wrong again. This one’s a sure suicide, the man in dungarees walking by me told his mate when I strolled into Praterstrasse. Trust me, I live by the river, I have an eye for ’em. Then the winter boughs lassoed back and held me in my place. You are walking with your wife in Paradise where I cannot follow. Still, for one last time I will sit for you. Wally in wet clothes sticking to her bare skin will be your most scandalous work yet. Of all the cover feature bodies in literature Two Poems by Zsuzsa Takács Masters Whose Doorsteps Masters whose doorsteps I approached in rapture and awe before ringing the doorbell that gave a ululant screech like a siren. A seedy woman let me in the ballroom flooded in chandelier light: the landlady, just reading the gas meter, writing in her chequered notebook, she kindly showed me the way strewn with roses. I knocked; something stirred inside. At the fatigued Come in!, I pushed the copper doorknob but a protruding nail ripped the skin on my hand. I was given coffee, hot and undrinkably strong. In a soiled mug by the cup there was sugar turned to stone; they insisted I take some, but no spoon was in sight. Stranded, I dug my fingers into the fossil: they watched me, mortified. That instant I saw the aluminum teaspoon halfhidden under the lace coverlet. I made to apologize: “I thought it was part of the pattern.” I stirred the dark potion for a while, but at the first sip I dropped the red-hot alt-wien cup back into its cracked alt-wien saucer. They slurped the flame-hot beverage with closed eyes. The muse was chain-smoking, her teeth spotted and yellowish like the fusiliers’ torch-lit cloak on Rembrandt’s Night Watch. The host’s dark eyes scanned me from head to toe, halting on my bleeding hand. His lips curled into a smile. I stood (sat) his gaze like one struck by lightning. I noticed he was wearing white summer gloves and knew at once it was for poetry’s stigmata. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 47 Editorial note: From Tiltott nyelv (Forbidden tongue), 2013. Zsuzsa Takács (b. 1938) is the doyenne of contemporary Hungarian poetry. She started publishing in the early 1970s. Her volumes address both private and historical traumas, the impotence of empathy and language when faced with the suffering of the creature—of a beloved person, or one’s own. She lives in Budapest. Erika Mihálycsa is a lecturer in twentieth-century British literature at Babes-Bolyai University Cluj, Romania, a prolific translator from English, and editor of Hyperion magazine, issued by Contra Mundum Press. Viennese girls I will be as you always wanted me to...

Mother’s Day, 2003, Flying Westward, and: Jeanne d’Arc, Imprisoned, and: The Changeling

Mother’s Day, 2003, Flying Westward, and: Jeanne d’Arc, Imprisoned, and: The Changeling Sarah Kennedy (bio) Mother’s Day, 2003, Flying Westward An hour out of Gatwick, we’re cruising at however many feet—I can’t remember numbers—but, outside, clouds colonize the air, one dissident [End Page 101] shredded by our wing. The war is “won,” the casualties, well, they’re justified, our president’s convinced. I could read about postmodern fashion in this magazine, but it’s too hip. If I wanted deconstruction, I’d listen to the news. Today, they interviewed the parents of some soldiers stationed overseas, proud Americans, still sure we’re enlightening the Middle East. My daughters, to my shame, support the occupation, too. Dawn disappears behind the plane. I see nothing out there now but the jet-trail of other travelers vandalizing the sky. I’d like to turn, go back, fly again into Rome where pace flags brighten windowsills. But it’s too late. I’ve had my holiday, the family expects its mother home, not running around in European churches, praying God protect the world from us. It’s not evening yet, though we have lost the day, but our approach, descending through rain, looks dim, the West already settling, anticipating night. [End Page 102] Jeanne d’Arc, Imprisoned And they call me possessed—royals, clergy leaders of state circling and chanting die, my comrades, sisters and brothers, stunned dumb to imagine me lashed to a pole. Do they hope I will sprout horns or fly away? I have renounced the voices of the saints and for that lie—a moment’s fear—do I suffer what they call reprieve. Now English, now Latin, the message is always death when an earthly empire speaks. But I am baffled, fatigued. Have I mistranslated? St Catherine still whispers war in my ear, perhaps it is parable. Metaphor. Single girl in a world of politic kings. It’s slippery in here, which label must I wear today? Heretic, herald of wisdom, witch, woman who dares to wear men’s garments. Guards toss me dresses, then they threaten rape. Who wouldn’t choose breeches, I am skirted with evil, I am under surveillance, occupied. They’re at my door, hoping to catch a snatch of treasonous [End Page 103] speech, though the official word is that I only talk to myself. I will say no more than a prayer when they conjure up their terror, set a torch to my skin and press in for a better view of the fire. I see the godly ones stirring my ashes, measuring bone, adding a pinch of lime. And they call me touched, traitor to the Right. With my halo of pain, my sanctified mind, I am the holiest thing they know. The Changeling Testimony of Johanna Kennedy Burke at the trial of Michael Cleary for the murder of his wife, Bridget Boland Cleary, 1895 Are you a witch, are you a fairy, / Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary? –Schoolyard rhyme, County Tipperary Picture her now, no sheehoguey thing spirited from the mountain by fairies to cough and curse down her husband’s house. But neither my cousin Bridget. One gold earring still in place, black stockings on her charred legs, the rest a burned sack of meat and bones. I never liked her, I admit. Dress-proud. She made herself the word on every gossip’s tongue but [End Page 104] even I could see that a chest cold does not mark a woman for murder unless that drunk Jack Dunne is called in, and what did Michael expect from him, a fairy doctor, but “That is not Bridget Boland”? I think of her now, the fevered face, her fear when she pulled me down to the pillow to whisper, “He’s making a changeling of me.” I saw only tuberculosis, blood on her mouth, and if her husband was brutal, well, I saw only the bed she had made and would have to lie in. Forgive me, I was asleep when he doused her with the paraffin, I should have seen it would come to that, the fire was in his...

The Gordon Base Ball Club of Chicago and the Black Sporting Fraternity, 1884–1886

On March 5, 1884, Sporting Life published this item: Gordon Base Ball Club of Chicago, one of the best organizations, proposes to capture the championship of the United States. W. C. Sutliffe is the manager. The players in this club receive from $35 to $50 per week. (1) The Gordon Base Ball Club, or of St. Louis, as sportswriters called them, offer another remarkable chapter to nineteenth-century baseball. The Gordons (1884-86) comprised talented ball tossers from independent professional aggregations: the Unknowns and the Garden Citys, both of Chicago, and the Black Stockings of St. Louis. The Gordons' professional tours followed a regional circuit previously traveled by the Black Stockings in 1883, and it is not improbable that former Black Stockings' players scheduled their new club's road itinerary. Like the Black Stockings, the Gordon Base Ball Club crossed bats with black and white clubs, professionals, semi-professionals and so-called amateurs. Leslie A. Heaphy's Black Baseball and Chicago correctly observes that little is known about late nineteenth-century teams or individual players in the Garden City--another name for Chicago--because sports coverage of nines tended to be sporadic. Heaphy explains: Most of these early teams had to rely on word of mouth advertising and the like since newspapers came and went rather quickly. There were twenty-six African American newspapers established in Chicago between 1878 and 1920 but few lasted. (2) When referring to the Gordon Base Ball Club of 1884, for example, Heaphy's assessment of local newspapers, both white (The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Daily News, and Daily Inter-Ocean) and (The Conservator), appears correct. However, I will suggest here that evidence not be restricted to the Chicago press, and, as the evidence does illustrate, and white newspapers throughout the Midwest and South covered the Gordon Base Ball Club's exploits. What makes the Gordons special? Given the limited number of years the club existed, one might answer nothing at all. Regarding the Gordons, historians have not written much. Conversely, they have rediscovered the Cuban Giants, arguably one of baseball's most successful late nineteenth-century clubs. By comparison, time and neglect shrouds the Gordons' history. Research on baseball, in its infancy, is rather uneven. Late nineteenth-century editors and sportswriters found the Gordons wanting as well. Given the social status of the Chicago White Stockings of the National League, the Chicago Unions of the Union Association, the Chicago Amateur Base Ball Association, and independents, the Gordons competed for highly sought-after column space, but they received scant attention in the local sports pages. The club's unstable position seemed easy to ignore and its pretensions easy to rebuff. Simply claiming themselves colored champions of the United meant little, if anything, to Chicago baseball's elite. This nine deserves better. Historian Neil Harris is correct when he writes that it is so easy to get the postbellum Gilded Age (1873-1901) wrong, because getting it right requires so much research and concentration. (3) It's no one's fault, really. The Gordons weren't or aren't anyone's favorite team. That is, until now. I find the Gordon Base Ball Club's history rather complex and illuminating. It reads like a mystery novel, enigmatically woven into the sociocultural fabric of late nineteenth-century Chicago. The Gordons emerged in the postbellum Gilded Age, the period of economic ascendancy in the United States following the Civil War. While local sports coverage may have ignored their exploits, sportswriters across the country considered the nine good copy; they embodied Chicago's thriving sporting culture. The Gordons were contemporaries of other professional nines, including the St. Louis Black Stockings, Louisville Fall Citys, New Orleans Pickwicks, New Orleans Unions, and Chicago Unknowns. …

Henry Bridgewater's Black Stockings of St. Louis, 1881-1889

Henry Bridgewater's Black Stockings team of St. Louis provides another foundational story in history of colored baseball.1 remarkable thing about this story is not so much its retrieval from baseball's past as its buried treasure, its titillating fragments and artifacts. It argues that something special occurred in 1880s, something that needs to be unearthed and reexamined-if not examined for first time. Henry Bridgewater's colored nine, Black Stockings of St. Louis, provide a parallel vision of larger forces of modernization reshaping American life, alternately resisting and adapting to these forces. Mass-circulation newspapers and sporting journals represent some of novel constraints and opportunities with which this colored club had to contend. While story of Black Stockings may be tracked from start to finish in print media, its meaning remains to be fully explored by historians. And as this essay makes clear, colored baseball teams rarely present a single story, or a single meaning.2Scant attention has been devoted to Black Stockings. While primary references to Bridgewater's club have been incorporated into baseball histories-most recently in works by Harold Seymour, Robert Peterson, Jerry Malloy, and Michael E. Lomax-no significant scholarship, to my knowledge, has been devoted to subject.3 I present this work, then, as a bare-bones historical outline. Historians fascinated with postbellum Gilded Age, period of economic ascendancy in United States following Civil War, may give priority to other colored nines if subject were to enter their accounts. For present purposes, I think it makes sense to concentrate on this buried treasure and leave other cultural artifacts of 19th-century colored baseball to be exhumed later.4Pre-1883 sports columns tended to limit their coverage of Black Stockings. Bridgewater changed all that. He fits among most famous unknown baseball men of period-unknown, that is, to modern investigators-a man whose presence, at time, was immediately recognizable. Bridgewater was not only a baseball man; black sporting community considered him an expert billiardist and a principal exponent of western sporting fraternity.5 Traveling throughout United States and Upper Canada in 1883, Bridgewater's professional nine anticipated Cuban Giants, both in national prestige and as a viable economic entity.1882: The Colored Lads Play Surprisingly WellBetween 1881 and 1882, St. Louis newspapers offered sparse coverage of city's colored clubs, but when they did, Lindells, Aetnas, Waverlys, Hartfords, West Ends, Blue Stockings, Yellow Stockings, and Black Stockings figured prominently.6 papers promoted weekend games and provided score results that appeared on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, or Mondays. On June 17, 1881, for example, Evening Chronicle reported that Black and Yellow Stockings would play at Red Stocking Park.7 Local papers failed, however, to carry game's score.Why poor coverage? One answer was column space. Critics complained that editors gave baseball too much column space. And press doted on white professional club, Brown Stockings, which it viewed as a lucrative, civic-minded enterprise. On other hand, Black Stockings colored nine hardly qualified as city's iconic sports symbol. In 1880s, professional baseball intensified its demands, weeding out those ill-suited by age, class, ethnicity, race, and gender.8 Labor historian Robert E. Burk explains, [T]he established lines of ethnic and racial acceptance and prohibition changed little. owners' recalcitrance illustrated other half of player value equation-the need for player force to present an appealing visual product to a 'respectable' white spectatorship.9 For Burk, white ownership's preoccupation with controlling ballplayer's image and enhancing spectators' response to product- namely a high-skill, labor-intensive entertainment industry-defined the ethnocultural composition of player force. …

Caring for Fatima

When I first began to practice and to teach oncology 30 years ago, I realized that knowing something of the disease itself was not enough. Of equal importance was the ability to develop rapport with my patients. A good rapport leads to trust and a trusting relationship encourages compliance with sometimes difficult treatments. It became clear to me that patients needed to know that their oncologist cares about them and that they are important. This relationship that I achieved with my patients has also provided me the satisfaction necessary to carry on working in this area of medicine. I learned that there were many ways to establish rapport and to gain trust, and I understood that the ability to achieve these goals was integral to a successful career. There are ways to convey these thoughts and feelings and, unconsciously, good physicians begin to develop these tools as time goes by. This is not to say that caring about your patients is not genuine—it must be. The skill used in conveying feelings and developing the right working relationship with the patient is learned and requires time and experience. What are the techniques used to develop such a relationship? In Western culture, where I previously worked, care is expressed by a firm handshake, eye contact, a smile, a reassuring touch, or perhaps a prolonged private visit in the office with a lengthy and personal discussion of the problem. To determine whether I was succeeding, I read body language and facial expressions and listened for nuances in our conversations. Then I moved to the United Arab Emirates and began to look after a population of Muslim patients. This change in my life has given me occasion to think long and hard about all of the techniques I had used in building rapport, and to re-examine them in the light of a different culture. I had worked previously in a multicultural environment but had never been so wholly immersed in a culture as distinct and different from my own. Fatima was one of my first patients. She was 30, a mother of six, and had breast cancer. She arrived in my office with three sisters and her older brother. On my side I had a translator and a nurse. So, the eight of us sat down to talk. “Which of you is Fatima?” I asked. As is the custom for some Muslim women, each was completely covered in a black abaya, a head covering called a shaila, and a black facial covering called a burka. In addition, each sister wore black gloves and long black stockings. The temperature outside on this bright August morning hovered at 48°C (118.4°F) and the humidity was a touch higher than 90%. The brother answered. As the oldest male he is the most important decision maker in the family and is responsible to the family for all that happens. They hold him responsible and he holds me responsible. “This is Fatima,” he said in Arabic to the translator and then to me, in perfect English, “She does not know that she has cancer and you must not tell her. We have told her that she has an ‘inflammation.’ This is what you must tell her.” Now I was expected to participate in this deception. I held out my hand to Fatima and she drew her hands away quickly. In this part of the world women do not shake hands. I would learn this lesson repeatedly, and then be much surprised when a woman would eagerly hold out a hand to be shaken. I was now starting to wonder if I was in over my depth with Fatima. There was not one square inch of this patient that I was able to see. I could not even distinguish her from her sisters. Under her voluminous abaya it was very difficult to read her body language and I was unable to see her face or her eyes to understand the effect of anything that I said. I also knew that direct eye contact here was regarded as being suggestive or forward and I must avoid giving offense. If I touched her hand as a simple reassuring gesture, this also may be misinterpreted. Negotiations began with the eldest brother. He is a powerful family figure. In some situations he may take precedence over the husband in the decision-making process. Fatima’s husband did not come to this visit. He has another wife and he had become more distant. I sense that she was not able to look to him for support. This unfortunate circumstance is not always the case, but I see it from time to time in my practice here. From the Division of Medical Oncology, Sheikh Khalifa Medical City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Portraits of an Artist

Click for larger view Figure 1 Self-Portrait with Spread Fingers. Oil on Wood. 1911. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY, except where noted Wien Museum Karlsplatz, Vienna, Austria [End Page 97] In 1910, one of Austria's greatest architects, Otto Wagner, known for his art nouveau buildings, wanted to be painted by an up-and-coming artist. He planned for his portrait to be the first in a series of others of prominent Viennese artists and intellectuals, including Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Mahler. He thought he had found an artist to patronize in Egon Schiele. Coincidentally, the twenty-year-old painter was working to master a style of portraiture in which the sitter's personality was fully expressed. But after sitting for lengthy periods, the architect saw in Schiele's developing portrait the theatrical pose and bizarre gestures characteristic of the young artist's emerging style and canceled the entire project. Click for larger view Figure 2 Outstretched Nude with Green Stockings. 1914. Photo Credit: Visual Arts Library/Art Resource, NY Private Collection That year Egon painted eleven portraits. In them he rendered tortured, emotional states against isolated, blank backgrounds. All of his stylized portraits reflected his own inner world. In fact, Egon Schiele's art was a means to learn about his life, his loves, his sexuality. He turned his attention inward, attempting to understand the world through knowledge of the self. He was his own greatest subject. His self-studies are revealing portrayals of a young man moving from precocious child and defiant student to respected artistic success by his midtwenties. [End Page 98] Click for larger view Figure 3 Portrait Friederick Maria Beer. 1914. Private Collection [End Page 99] Click for larger view Figure 4 Nude on Her Stomach. Gouache and black crayon. 1917. Click for larger view Figure 5 Reclining Woman with Black Stockings. Gouache and black crayon. 1917. Private Collection [End Page 100] Click for larger view Figure 6 Standing Nude, Facing Front (Self-Portrait). Watercolor. 1910. Photo Credit: Art Resource, NY Graphische Sammlung Albertine, Vienna, Austria [End Page 101] Click for larger view Figure 7 Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait with Bent Head. Oil on Wood. 1912. Museum Leopold, Vienna, Austria [End Page 102] Click for larger view Figure 8 The Green Stocking. Gouache and black crayon. 1914. Private Collection [End Page 103] Click for larger view Figure 9 Three Girls. Watercolor and pencil. 1911. Private Collection [End Page 104] In pursuit of self-identity, we all try on different faces and attitudes. Schiele did this on canvas. His poses, many of them nude, are sometimes monstrous and grotesque. To deflect charges of self-infatuation and exhibitionism, he exaggerated his physical slimness and paleness, gave himself impossibly long, disjointed limbs and a shock of electrified hair. He also took on grim or bizarre facial expressions. By mocking himself, he could more freely examine his body, moods and psyche. His images of an emaciated, disturbed young man convey the fear and disillusionment of youth and a sense of the tenuousness of the dividing line between sanity and madness. Like a Hamlet or a Holden Caulfield, Schiele displayed himself in exaggerated, sometimes abnormal postures, suggesting a man alienated from himself and from the world. Painting some hundred self-portraits, Schiele engaged in a literal and manic expression of personal identity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Vienna cafés and salons overflowed with philosophers, writers and artists. More celebrated than Vienna's artists, though, were its scientists and psychoanalysts, an intimate group who learned from each other's disciplines and cross-pollinated one another's ideas. Schiele's preoccupation paralleled the primary concern of the Viennese psychoanalytic movement. Like Freud, he advocated stripping away ego, pretense and delusion in search of a truer self. What lies behind and within human beings, he realized, is more important than the well-constructed façade. Egon was born in 1890 in Tulln, a small town on the Danube in lower Austria. He was the third child of...

A Return to Jacmel

Doctor Herve Braget arrived in Jacmel one Saturday afternoon on a big red motorcycle with sparkling metal and making the noise of an assault tank. He took a turn around the little southwestern Haitian city before stopping at the Place d'Armes in front of the villa that his father had just turned into a clinic for him. Dr. Braget was the first Haitian from Jacmel to bring back from the University of Paris the title of hospital intern. His arrival at the handlebar of a Harley Davidson was seen as scandalous. People had been expecting to see him return home in his father's Buick. At the very least, they would have accepted seeing him come back in a taptap. They would have understood it if a young doctor wanted to mingle with the common people, chickens, and other animals using that means of transport. The young cyclist's costume was another reason for indignation: the son of Timoleon Braget, the honored coffee exporter, was wearing golf pants, a salmoncolored shirt with a polka-dot bow tie, black stockings, dark aviator's glasses, and leather gloves. In that attire, nobody could recognize the studious young man, the athlete of serious elegance that they had seen leave ten years earlier. In Jacmel that night, Mistress Scandal did not sleep on an empty stomach. On the benches of the Place d'Armes as in living rooms, she drank as much as she fed. No doctor who has interned in the hospitals of Paris can travel on a motorcycle in such an outlandish costume, with stockings matching his dark glasses. Herve Braget must have picked up such habits in the gutters of Barbes-Rochechouart. His apparel confirmed the rumors that had circulated from time to time about the student's

Trust says no to black stockings for nurses

Trust says no to black stockings for nurses

Just the Sort of Day Jack Had Always Loved

Just the Sort of Day Jack Had Always Loved

The Evolution of Desire in Advertising

The Evolution of Desire in Advertising

Black Stockings and Pot Pourri: Gender Issues in Design and Technology

Product designers are an integral part of bringing technology to life and it is predominantly males as designers who ‘clothe’ technology in the designs which utilise it. Consequently products used by and identified with women are in fact designed by men. One of the guiding precepts of design as it is taught and practised, is that people buy particular artefacts in order to express and/or confirm their identity. It has been argued that the success of gendered designs in the late nineteenth century reflected the social construct of gender difference. I argue that this has remained unchallenged to date and that the gender stereotyping of products further stereotypes technology. The theoretical debates about gender and technology are rarely introduced to product design students because the predominantly male lecturers are reluctant to deal with the issues themselves.

Sun protection provided by ladies stockings

Bowen's disease, squamous and basal cell carcinoma, and malignant melanoma occur more frequently on the lower leg of women compared with men, presumably because of increased solar ultraviolet radiation (UVR) exposure as a consequence of dress. While it is apparent from simple observation that stockings are transparent to light, systematic data on UV transmission through stockings are lacking. The purpose of this study was to measure the spectral transmission of UVR through a range of thickness and colours of plain-knit ladies stockings, and to use these data to calculate the sun protection factor (SPF). We found that SPFs increased from about 1.5 to 3.0 for black stockings ranging from 10 to 40 denier; there were statistically significant differences in SPFs with colour (higher for darker colours) and site (higher at the distal calf than at the proximal calf); and for every colour and denier of stocking tested, UVA and UVB were absorbed equally. We conclude that the most popular type of stocking (15 denier) provides an SPF of less than 2, and that women who require photoprotection to the legs be advised to wear trousers or at least a 40 denier stocking.

Ten Ways of Disappearing

I. Manners In 1326: Cambridge scholars were forbidden to frequent taverns, introduce dogs within college precincts, wear short swords with peaked shoes, play flutes, or use catapults. --The Story of Cambridge, Dr. Charles Stubbs, Dean of Ely, 1905 I'm going running again, even though I despise the awkward gym-class feel of sweaty clothes and ragged breaths. In my college room, sturdy wood beams arc through the afternoon glow of my attic window; bars of light and shadow cage me as I dress in a gray jogging outfit, bright new shoes, and a rain slicker. Downstairs, I burst into the musty air at a trot that carries me past lawns that each day a troupe of funereal gardeners comb into squares, like checkerboards. Occasionally another runner, usually a rower or rugby player, passes me with a furtive nod to indicate that we both belong to a secret society here: The Club of People Who Sweat. It's March in Cambridgeshire, and I'm running exactly at sea level. I should be sinking, mired in spongy earth and inland fjords. This ear-shaped bit of England, long famous for flooding and eels, protrudes into the Atlantic due northeast from London. Once part of the Kingdom of East Anglia, into the Middle Ages it afford[ed] only deep mud, with sedge and reeds, and possessed of birds, yea, much more by devils. But a series of conquerors, starting with the Romans, dredged and drained these fenlands long ago. Reeds, sedges, devils--all have vanished. Now the land grows aubergines, tulips, culture, onions, and scholars. It also breeds a certain madness, a polite malaria: sherry at five; at eight, port darker than blood drained into crystal; brandy before bed; Paternoster to the sound of a dinner gong as we undergraduates stand stiff-necked over stewed prunes, waiting for the old dons at high table to settle onto ornate chairs long on intimate terms with the backsides of lords. I arrived here in September from America very sincere, very scholarly, armed with certain beliefs. I knew that the rich noblewoman Elizabeth de Clare established Clare College in 1338 to replace the number of [educated] men having been taken away by the fangs of pestilence--the bubonic plague. And I believed I would join a hallowed group of scholars who read by lamplight in stone garrets. Now, seven months later, I imagine myself as Alice, long since passed through the silver membrane of looking glass, cataloging the rules of this odd world: Don't set one foot upon the grass. Drop the eyes when speaking. Dress by day in the colors of weathered stones. Never admit ignorance. Only prostitutes wear beads, and black stockings are questionable. Don't cook garlic, nor eat it, nor--especially--breathe it upon others. Mention weather. Don't mention family. Never say suspenders in mixed company, although swat is perfectly all right. Never discuss love except as a literary construct. Apologize a great deal very insincerely for tiny infractions. Ignore the big crimes. Never lay a hand on a friend's shoulder. Don't, for God's sake, cry. Don't don't never never: When the refrain grows too loud I put on my gray sweat-quit and pound the ground with the balls of my feet. In the pasture to my left, the Kings College cows low softly while men in blue caps buff them to a perfect black-and-white gloss. This path runs nearly as straight as a survey line along the channeled stream of the Cam, three miles to the little village of Grantchester. I struggle along, my lungs a slow burn, watching the unswollen river. Among the stately trees along its banks, the leaves have started; my favorite copper beech will soon drop red tendrils into the water, and the willows will weep and weep. Before long I arrive, soaked, at the end of the line--the lone Grantchester pub with its white chickens pecking at the ground and its bitter beer and meat pasties under glass cases. A woman, fortyish, dressed in a charcoal wool sweater, tends bar. …