Bunker Hill Research Articles

Isotope Discrimination of Source Waters, Flowpaths, and Travel Times at an Acid-Generating, Lead–Zinc–Silver Mine, Silver Valley, Idaho, USA

Precipitation infiltrates into the lead–zinc–silver Bunker Hill Mine, oxidizes pyrite, and produces acidic waters that discharge from the mine portal. The metasedimentary geology and alteration from 100+ yr of mining provide a heterogeneous environment for source water infiltration and flow within the mine. A university–industry partnership was developed to trace the mine water sources, flowpaths, and travel times to identify potential areas for infiltration reduction. Snowpack, creek, and mine water samples were collected over a 1-year period for the analysis of δ2H, δ18O, and 3H, along with the in situ measurement of temperature, specific conductance, pH, dissolved oxygen, and flow. The isotope tracers were used to identify the source waters, unmix mine water as it moved deeper in the mine, and examine flowpaths in and near the acid-generating pyritic zone. The results indicate creek water infiltrating relatively quickly through the anthropogenically-modified pathways and causing the largest amount of acidic water in the upper levels of the mine. Slower, natural pathways associated with faults, fractures, and bedding planes produce mostly neutral waters with the source waters typically originating at higher elevations. Travel times ranged from <1 to 22 years with shorter pathways to the upper levels of the mine and increasing contributions deeper in the mine from pathways containing older, higher-elevation snowmelt. These slower and older inflows were identified by depleted δ18O values, smaller 3H concentrations, the dampening of the variability of the isotope signals, and pH increases. Reduction of infiltration zones near the upper workings of the mine likely will decrease the acidic waters in the upper levels of the mine, but the higher elevation infiltration zones will continue to contribute snowmelt-derived waters at all mine levels.

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought by Kristin Waters

Reviewed by: Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought by Kristin Waters Janaka Lewis (bio) Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought. By Kristin Waters. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. 338. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $30.00.) In twenty-five chapters, Kristin Waters chronicles the life of Maria W. Stewart (née Miller). From Stewart’s childhood in Hartford, Connecticut, to the moment when, as “a nearly destitute twenty-nine-year-old widow,” she placed the manuscript of what became her famous collection of meditations into William Lloyd Garrison’s hands, Waters’s biography paints an imaginative portrait of “America’s first black woman political writer” (3). Waters seeks to understand why and how Stewart’s work stands today as “one of the most significant and least well-known foundational voices in African American and Black feminist thought” (4). While tracing Stewart’s early years, Waters includes little-known details of Stewart’s Connecticut-based parents, along with narratives of their possible enslavement during the 1790s. The young Maria Miller herself was indentured to a clergyman when municipalities were still governed by Congregational churches. While painstakingly reconstructing Miller’s decade of servitude in Hartford, Waters contextualizes these experiences within the relationship of the city to regional and national events, such as the War of 1812 and the Hartford Convention. She examines Miller’s Sabbath School education in Hartford, which put her in proximity to other Black individuals, while she planned her escape to Boston. Waters also [End Page 241] uses naval vessel records to document James W. Stewart, Miller’s later husband and a major intellectual influence, as a merchant mariner and then a seaman under David Porter in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812 and the Second Barbary War. By starting with Stewart’s beginnings, Waters reclaims “the lives and thought of Black women as they co-created community as well as social and political theory, contributing original analysis of the gendered dimensions of life, action, and thought” (6). Waters reconstructs the names, families, and occupations of women of the North Slope, who made up fifteen of the twenty-four founders of the First African Church, the “first autonomous Black church in the Northeast,” constituted on August 8, 1805. In so doing, Waters “piece[s] together their lives and contributions as friends, neighbors, co-congregants, co-theorists and sometimes critics of Stewart, whose writing is replete with gender analyses” (6). The author also recreates local African American community life, in which Stewart likely participated, including community festivals and public feast days, such as Boston Bunker Hill Day—an opportunity to honor African American Revolutionary War veterans—and African Day, which celebrated the legal demise of the slave trade and revolution in Haiti. Waters then contextualizes Stewart’s feminist activism, speaking, and writing in ongoing developments in Boston, such as the establishment of the Prince Hall Masons, the inauguration in 1827 of Freedom’s Journal as the first Black newspaper in New York City, the publication of David Walker’s Appeal in 1829, and the publication of the white-owned Liberator in 1831. Waters also details the courtship and brief marriage of the Stewarts, as well as the death of James W. Stewart to heart failure and Maria Stewart’s long battle for her husband’s estate. Based in the field of philosophy, but also using history, fictional narrative, biography, and archival research, Waters puts into conversation Black feminist theorists, such as Patricia Hill Collins and Brittney C. Cooper; historians, such as Christopher Cameron and James and Lois Horton; and political philosophers, such as Charles Mills and Leonard Harris. In so doing, she explores how Stewart had to hold and practice principles of morality, knowledge and power, and multiple consciousnesses (citing W. E. B. DuBois). Waters’s methods are informed by African American and women’s studies movements, as she seeks to rewrite and recenter the roots of Black political theory. She ends her account of the woman she calls “a hero and a warrior” with Stewart securing for herself a pension for widows of War of 1812 veterans and then publishing Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria...

Four Novels of 1939: Ambition and Redemption; Ethnicity and Race

Four Novels of 1939: Ambition and Redemption; Ethnicity and Race

Historical Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States

Historical Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States

Review: Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States

Review: <i>Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States</i>

Resist &amp; Rise: The One Love Method and Human Rights Performance

Resist & Rise:The One Love Method and Human Rights Performance Ayshia Mackiestephenson (bio) In Spring 2021, Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) students presented the performance Resist & Rise: Our Fight for Freedom at the Spring Arts Festival. In this performance, Black and Brown community college students created original works based upon the human rights concerns within their communities. I directed Resist & Rise1 as the professor for the learning community course "Introduction to Communication." There were performances on ending police brutality, criminal justice reform in the United States, and resisting white supremacy in pop culture. Students presented poetry, images, passionate speeches, archival Black history footage, and their own original films on these topics. The overall themes for the performance were to advocate for BIPOC human rights and to resist and rise above white supremacy. I used the One Love Method (One Love), a curriculum I designed to resist white supremacy in performance-based education and beyond to teach this course and direct the performance. The public performance was grounded in One Love as a means to empower Black and Brown students, encourage antiracist allyship, and serve our college community with inspiration, participation, and action. One Love is a tool to center Indigenous African epistemology and human rights activism in the performance studies and theatre classrooms, and the Resist & Rise performance is an example of its effectiveness. Analysis and Pedagogy "Love is necessary work and it is in love that we learn to resist, thrive, and lead under any circumstances." —bell hooks It is through human rights advocacy that this love can be expressed and realized. One Love is a performance studies pedagogy that recognizes all human beings as one, with one common African ancestry, and uses Yoruba rhetoric and philosophy as a way to dismantle racism in teaching and learning. It is a performance studies pedagogy, because performance is the study of how humans present their identity in culture and on the stage. The use of a Black framework is critical to Black and other BIPOC students presenting an identity that resists white supremacy and centers the subaltern's epistemology. The use of a Black and precolonial framework is in itself an act of social change and works to transform the performance space. Students used Yoruba philosophy as the foundation to their human rights project. One Love is also based upon the premise that using African Indigenous philosophy makes sense, because all human beings share African ancestry. It is based upon Black African (specifically Yoruba and Zulu) rhetoric and philosophy. At BHCC, I was inspired to design this method while teaching communication, performance studies, and theatre in 2019. One day, I was teaching a dualenrollment performance studies course and a Black high school student said that she hated having [End Page 139] no history and nothing that was hers alone and that she didn't have to take from white people. This statement from such a young woman really broke my heart and was the inspiration for this method. I knew that resisting white supremacy in education would take more than teaching Black history rooted in the US oppression and discrimination of Black people. Performance needs a means to move away from the centralization of white paradigms, of white ways of knowing and being and producing. I already knew that the field of performance studies and theatre in particular predominantly uses frameworks by white American and European artists (Viewpoints, Stanislavski, Meisner, and so on). Performance studies is highly influenced by Black scholars who have framed the field (D. Soyini Madison, Bryant Keith Alexander, Mary Weems, and so on), but there is little linkage to African epistemology or BIPOC human rights or the centering of African epistemology as a human right. I decided that my students needed a method of teaching performance-based work that centers African influence on performance and recognizes the human rights of Black and Brown people in our artistic practices. The young woman's cry for help coincided with my humanities division looking for faculty to train other faculty in innovative curriculum for Professional Development Day. I volunteered to design and lead the workshop "The One Love Method: An Antiracist Pedagogy." I continued to develop One Love over...

The Weathersfield Affair

The Weathersfield Affair

Evaluation of the integrated exposure uptake biokinetic (IEUBK) model for lead in children.

The Integrated Exposure Uptake Biokinetic Model for Lead in Children (IEUBK model) was developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to support assessments of health risks to children from exposures to lead (Pb). This study evaluated performance of IEUBK model (v2.0) as it would be typically applied at Superfund sites to predict blood Pb levels (BLLs) in populations of children. The model was evaluated by comparing model predictions of BLLs to 1144 observed BLLs in a population of children at the Bunker Hill Superfund Site for which there were paired estimates of environmental Pb concentrations. Predicted population geometric mean (GM) BLLs (GM: 3.4 µg/dL, 95% CI: 3.3, 3.5) were within 0.3 µg/dL of observed (GM: 3.6 µg/dL, 95% CI: 3.5, 3.8). The model predicted the observed age trend in GM BLLs and explained ~90% of the variance in the observed age-stratified GM BLLs. The mean predicted probability of exceeding 5 µg/dL (P5) was 27% (95% CI: 24, 29) and observed P5 was 32% (95% CI: 29, 35), a difference of 5%. Differences between geographic area stratified mean P5 (predicted minus observed) ranged from -11 to 14% (mean difference: 2.3%). Although the more general applicability of these findings to other populations remains to be determined in future studies, our results support applications of the IEUBK model (v2.0) for informing risk-based decisions regarding remediation of soils and mitigation of exposures at Superfund sites where the majority of the exposure unit GM BLLs are expected to be ≤5 µg/dL and where it is desired to limit the predicted probability of exceeding 5 µg/dL to <5%.

Margaret Sanger, “The Unrecorded Battle” (1912)

Margaret Sanger, “The Unrecorded Battle” (1912)

Review: Battle Green Vietnam: The 1971 March on Concord, Lexington, and Boston, by Elise Lemire

Review: <i>Battle Green Vietnam: The 1971 March on Concord, Lexington, and Boston</i>, by Elise Lemire

Reducing Urban Heat Island Effects While Providing Affordable Housing in Bunker Hill

The Bunker Hill Public Housing development is a historic public housing building, home to a large population of racial and ethnic minorities, that requires major redevelopment and repair to enhance the safety of its residents. The Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) recently approved a $1.46 billion redevelopment for the property, a part of which is allocated to remove and replace ~250 mature trees around the public housing units. Removal of these trees would affect an already vulnerable population significantly more exposed to the effects of heat events, including heat-related stress, morbidity, and mortality, which will worsen with climate change in the coming years. While the BPDA proposal seeks to address the issue that the area already experiences 20% less cooling due to a lack of vegetation by replanting more trees, their estimated timescale of more than a decade for the canopy to just return to its current size is concerning. In order to mitigate the added heat stress caused by the tree removal, we propose the supplementary action of installing green roofs on buildings throughout the development. These green roofs would continue to provide cooling and beneficial community services even once the tree canopy has returned. These measures will serve as an appropriate stopgap measure until the canopy can return to size and expand as well as providing the community with the same co-benefits, such as air quality improvement, noise pollution reduction, community spaces, and locally grown food from community gardens, that more affluent parts of the city already experience. The installation of green roofs and supplemental vegetation will take only 0.25% of the entire redevelopment project budget and will have a large return in community wellness.

The Potential of Smartphone Apps in Informing Protobacco and Antitobacco Messaging Efforts Among Underserved Communities: Longitudinal Observational Study.

BackgroundPeople from underserved communities such as those from lower socioeconomic positions or racial and ethnic minority groups are often disproportionately targeted by the tobacco industry, through the relatively high levels of tobacco retail outlets (TROs) located in their neighborhood or protobacco marketing and promotional strategies. It is difficult to capture the smoking behaviors of individuals in actual locations as well as the extent of exposure to tobacco promotional efforts. With the high ownership of smartphones in the United States—when used alongside data sources on TRO locations—apps could potentially improve tobacco control efforts. Health apps could be used to assess individual-level exposure to tobacco marketing, particularly in relation to the locations of TROs as well as locations where they were most likely to smoke. To date, it remains unclear how health apps could be used practically by health promotion organizations to better reach underserved communities in their tobacco control efforts.ObjectiveThis study aimed to demonstrate how smartphone apps could augment existing data on locations of TROs within underserved communities in Massachusetts and Texas to help inform tobacco control efforts.MethodsData for this study were collected from 2 sources: (1) geolocations of TROs from the North American Industry Classification System 2016 and (2) 95 participants (aged 18 to 34 years) from underserved communities who resided in Massachusetts and Texas and took part in an 8-week study using location tracking on their smartphones. We analyzed the data using spatial autocorrelation, optimized hot spot analysis, and fitted power-law distribution to identify the TROs that attracted the most human traffic using mobility data.ResultsParticipants reported encountering protobacco messages mostly from store signs and displays and antitobacco messages predominantly through television. In Massachusetts, clusters of TROs (Dorchester Center and Jamaica Plain) and reported smoking behaviors (Dorchester Center, Roxbury Crossing, Lawrence) were found in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Despite the widespread distribution of TROs throughout the communities, participants overwhelmingly visited a relatively small number of TROs in Roxbury and Methuen. In Texas, clusters of TROs (Spring, Jersey Village, Bunker Hill Village, Sugar Land, and Missouri City) were found primarily in Houston, whereas clusters of reported smoking behaviors were concentrated in West University Place, Aldine, Jersey Village, Spring, and Baytown.ConclusionsSmartphone apps could be used to pair geolocation data with self-reported smoking behavior in order to gain a better understanding of how tobacco product marketing and promotion influence smoking behavior within vulnerable communities. Public health officials could take advantage of smartphone data collection capabilities to implement targeted tobacco control efforts in these strategic locations to reach underserved communities in their built environment.

OCR finds college wasn't required to provide retroactive adjustments

Case name: Letter to: Bunker Hill Community College, No. 01‐16‐2060 (OCR 01/03/redacted).

DVD Chronicle

DVD Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) DVD Chronicle: Los Angeles Plays Itself, directed by Thom Andersen (Cinema Guild, 2014) Gone in 60 Seconds, directed by H. B. Halicki (Mill Creek Entertainment, 2017) Falling Down, directed by Joel Schumacher (Warner Brothers, 2010); Once upon a Time … in Hollywood, directed by Quentin Tarantino (Sony Pictures, 2019) Swingers, directed by Doug Liman (Miramax Lionsgate, 2011) Killer of Sheep, directed by Charles Burnett (The Charles Burnett Collection, New Yorker Video and Milestone Cinematheque, 2007) Devil in a Blue Dress, directed by Carl Franklin (Leading Men, Sony Pictures, 2013) Bosch, seasons 1–6, directed by Jim McKay and others (Amazon Prime streaming). NB: all these films except Killer of Sheep are available for streaming from Amazon Prime Bosch is available only via streaming. What are the films that best show Los Angeles? Show the city in all its guises, old and new, fabulated and actual, unimaginably rich and desperately poor, alternately sun-stunned and (as Raymond Chandler wrote in The Big Sleep) having "the look of hard wet rain in the foothills"? During a recent stay of a few months in Los Angeles these seemed apt questions to ponder, especially when the Chandlerian rain persisted through much of a wet spring. On drizzly days I stayed inside our Koreatown apartment to watch Los Angeles films—the movie-viewing analogue, I suppose, to the locavore dining fashionable among hip Angelenos—mostly via DVDs borrowed from the media collection at the Los Angeles Central Public Library. I remark in passing that this building is certainly the most handsome in Southern California, and one of the most handsome public buildings anywhere. I do not know of any documentary film addressing the architecture of the Central Library or its complicated history (it suffered a disastrous arson fire in 1986). There should be such a film, something to match in interest and intelligence of approach Susan Orlean's recent volume The Library Book, which reports on the fire and much else besides. There is an excellent documentary—more accurately, a film essay—about Los Angeles architecture, especially domestic architecture: Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). A useful starting point for anyone interested in cinematic depictions of the city's buildings and locales, it gathers clips from a wide variety of movies, then links the clips together with smart, information-filled, and opinionated commentary from Andersen, who knows what he likes (screen work observing the city in all its multifariousness) and what he does not like (Los Angeles reduced to its [End Page 449] wealthiest neighborhoods in the hills or at the beach, with the hundreds of square miles of the city down in the flats completely left out of the picture). As a native Angeleno, Andersen also notices and deplores a lot of locational inaccuracies, streets placed in the wrong neighborhoods and the like. "Silly geography makes for silly movies," he says, persuasively enough. Less persuasively, Andersen argues that Hollywood has regularly communicated its disdain for Modernist architecture in Los Angeles by installing drug lords or other villains in showplace avant-garde homes—for example, the white-walled Lovell house designed in the late 1920s by Richard Neutra and nestled into a superb hillside site in Los Feliz. In Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential this becomes the swank lair of the society pimp Pierce Patchett, and according to Andersen it is thereby devalued. The guilt-by-criminality argument, repeated often in Los Angeles Plays Itself, especially in the documentary's last hour or so, does not become more convincing on repetition. Andersen in general is not very attuned to irony or nuance in the cinema. With regard to Annie Hall, he takes Alvy Singer's diatribe against Los Angeles in that film seriously, as an earnest critique of the city from Woody Allen, rather than as a comic riff from a character we recognize as a New York City obsessive. Andersen is on surer ground when he simply shows and comments affectionately on the great icons of cinematographic presentation in Los Angeles—Bunker Hill and its obliquely climbing Angels Flight funicular; the late-19th-century Bradbury Building's filigree ironwork stairs and handsome atrium, the setting for...

“There Is NoNewBlack Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

“There Is No<i>New</i>Black Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

OCR finds college wasn't required to provide retroactive adjustments

Case name: Letter to: Bunker Hill Community College, No. 01‐16‐2060 (OCR 01/03/redacted).

Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution by Judith L. Van Buskirk

Reviewed by: Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution by Judith L. Van Buskirk Dinah Mayo-Bobee (bio) judith l. van buskirk Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution Norman University of Oklahoma Press 2017 312 pp. Although it has taken some time for a vigorously researched study of African American participation in the fight for American independence to appear, Standing in Their Own Light satisfies every anticipation. What we learn about black Americans who supported the Patriot cause is that these men and women have a unique story to tell. Theirs should be considered apart from the history of those who understandably took advantage of Lord Dunmore's 1775 proclamation inviting slaves to fight for the British in return for freedom. Dunmore presented a crucial opportunity for the enslaved to escape bondage, but hundreds of free and enslaved black Americans chose differently. Yet because Dunmore's efforts are considered a blow against slavery, the African Americans who fought for independence and the creation of a new republic shared a more obscure history (35). Even though some of these men and women are mentioned in scholarly works now and then, their appearances are anecdotal and largely detached from major events of the American Revolution (5, 6). Judith L. Van Buskirk reverses this trend. Along with demonstrating that Revolutionary rhetoric transformed the debate over slavery throughout the thirteen colonies, Van Buskirk introduces readers to hundreds of African Americans who fought for and in many cases died for America's [End Page 262] independence. By bringing their service to light the author enables each one to "stand in their own light and shine for everyone to see" (xiv). Van Buskirk's research demonstrates through these Patriots' own words and actions that liberation from colonial rule and the creation of a new nation were important to black men and women who saw their participation in the Revolutionary War as part of their larger, personal fight against racial injustice and slavery. From the beginning to the end of a well-written and coherently arranged book, Van Buskirk surpasses her goal. Utilizing scores of manuscript collections located in repositories across the country, the book relies on period newspapers, military records, pension applications, government documents, letters, wills, and other primary sources. With the use of these sources, Standing in Their Own Light recreates the world of inequality and systemic racism that necessitated African Americans' fight for equality. The book then places their perspectives in the forefront, including disappointment over the nation's failure to end racial discrimination and slavery (73). One of the study's most important contributions is Van Buskirk's detailed record of the part African Americans played in key events that occurred before, during, and after the Revolution. This includes firsthand accounts of their participation in the Boston Massacre (1770), the Boston Tea Party (1773), and the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (1775). In addition, the book provides a comprehensive geographic assessment of the laws and public sentiments that African Americans circumnavigated in order to join militias and the Continental Army or to participate in noncombat roles (18). After spending a great deal of time researching and becoming familiar with these men and their families the author admittedly formed an emotional attachment to many (xiii). Nonetheless, nowhere in the book does the scholarship sacrifice objectivity for sentimentality. Indeed, where a record exists it is pursued, but where there is none or a lead is truncated, the author acknowledges the dead end and moves along. Nor does the book lionize any of the black protagonists or their white supporters beyond the accolades bestowed by contemporaries who fought alongside or witnessed their achievements on or off of the battlefield (5, 11). An objective approach along with a meticulous process of verification and elimination increases the value of Van Buskirk's scholarship and enables us to comb through the lives and service of African Americans in George Washington's military with confidence. [End Page 263] Revolutionary rhetoric had clearly begun to transform African Americans' outlook about their prospects in a new nation long before Washington welcomed them into his fighting forces. After initially issuing...

Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 by Joshua Glick (review)

Reviewed by: Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 by Joshua Glick Jerald Podair Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977. Joshua Glick. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 277 pp. $34.95. Los Angeles, California, home to Hollywood, would at first glance seem a most unlikely place for a robust alternative documentary film culture. It is almost as if the city has no corporeal existence apart from the world of magic and mirrors created by the Hollywood cinematic dream machine. But “L.A.” is a real place, and in this volume, Joshua Glick shows how during a roughly twenty-year period between the late Fifties and Seventies, a group of loosely affiliated contrarians working in the shadow of the major studios and production companies documented the lives and struggles of the everyday people of Los Angeles that go largely unnoticed by moviegoers and tourists. Poorly capitalized, under-publicized, and inadequately distributed, these young documentarians worked the city’s off-ramps: Bunker Hill, the downtown noir of run-down rooming houses and derelict bars and pawn shops that Raymond Chandler called “old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town.” East L.A., home to the city’s neglected and shunned Latino population. Watts, a culde-sac of African American poverty and isolation. Los Angeles’s alternative chroniclers offered a powerful rejoinder to the celebratory portrayals of the city emanating from mainstream Hollywood. Their body of work includes some of the most important films ever made about this most misunderstood and underappreciated city. Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961), among the two or three [End Page 57] greatest films of any kind produced about Los Angeles, depicts Native Americans struggling for their bearings in an alien and alienating Bunker Hill neighborhood, which itself is doomed to fall before the redeveloper’s wrecking ball. Chicano activist Jesus Salvador Trevino’s 1971 America Tropical uses the story of a Great Depression muralist commissioned to paint a stereotypical tropical scene but who instead produced a critique of Anglo-American racism and imperialism to offer a commentary on contemporary issues of ethnic identity and power. Killer of Sheep (1977), from Charles Burnett, a leader of a group of African American filmmakers known as the “L.A. Rebellion,” is a study of quotidian ambivalence over the course of three days in the life of a South Los Angeles slaughterhouse worker. Glick juxtaposes these and other critical explorations of the city’s social and racial structures with the work of David Wolper, whose Wolper Productions, headquartered in Los Angeles, was for many years the nation’s leading producer of documentaries and docudramas. Glick astutely describes Wolper as the quintessential Cold War liberal filmmaker, whose programming touched on issues relating to politics, foreign policy, and civil rights with an emphasis on consensus and progress and a faith in the ameliorative powers of the American democratic system. To his credit, Glick does not caricature Wolper Productions as a propagandist or apologist. The company was responsible for Wattstax (1973), a groundbreaking documentary on a Watts Summer Festival concert that was widely praised for its honesty and authenticity, and 1977’s Roots, which exposed a huge white viewing audience to the violence and inhumanity of slavery. Wolper dared not go where Mackenzie, Trevino, and Burnett did, however, and by 1984 and the Age of Reagan he was producing the triumphalist opening ceremonies for the Olympics in a neoliberalized Los Angeles that had reinvented itself as a “World City” entrepot for global finance and capital. Does this mean, however, that Wolper’s filmic vision had won out over its alternatives? Perhaps not. As he brings his story to a close in Reagan’s Eighties, Glick appears to search for a conclusion, like a Hollywood screenwriter unsure of how to wind things up. Glick implies that the decade marked a dead end for activist filmmakers in Los Angeles and elsewhere, as their genre fell before the imperatives of mainstream and profit-generating cinema, television, and new media. But there is still room in our cultural landscape for the kind of transgressive work represented by the likes of The Exiles, Killer of Sheep, or even Wattstax...

Help students complete credentials with effective scheduling

DALLAS — If your institution's goal is to improve the completion rate, the course schedule could be an effective tool for achieving success. Changing how your institution creates the course schedule involves both cultural and technological change. A panel at the American Association of Community Colleges annual convention explained how several colleges have achieved success with schedule changes. Speakers were Janice Taylor Heard, dean of academic affairs at Cuyahoga Community College; Michael Voss, dean of instruction, career and technical programs at Mesa Community College; Matilda Chavez, interim vice president of learning at South Mountain Community College; and James Canniff, provost and vice president of academic and student affairs at Bunker Hill Community College.