Cohen's Study Research Articles

The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America

The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America

Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature by J. Laurence Cohen

Reviewed by: Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature by J. Laurence Cohen Brian Britt J. Laurence Cohen, Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2021) Excavating Exodus presents close readings of African American primary sources, including pamphlets, poetry, and fiction, as expressions of distinct positions on racial identity. With a focus on uses of Exodus and the Moses story from the nineteenth century to the present, Excavating Exodus represents a major contribution to scholarship on African American reception of the Bible. The study moves from a discussion of Mosaic subjectivity in David Walker's pamphlet, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), Martin R. Delaney's Blake: or; The Huts of America (1859–1862), and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's writings to the twentieth-century works of Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), and William Melvin Kelly's A Different Drummer (1962). Contemporary readings of Exodus include works by Beyoncé and Eve Ewing's poetic rendering of Exodus in terms of Chicago politics, featuring Mayor Richard J. Daley as Pharaoh (158–161). Cohen's study articulates a set of arguments about what these sources say and how they use Exodus and Moses to say it. In dialogue with Albert Raboteau, Eddie Glaude, Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Tommie Shelby, Sharon A. Stanley, and others, Cohen advocates a view of African American solidarity that is more pragmatic than essentialist, yet "affective and political" at the same time (25). In [End Page 103] building this account, Cohen displays an impressive range of engagements with the Exodus story, across many genres and perspectives, with particular emphasis on historical and political context. One of the most valuable contributions of Cohen's study is his use of "signifying" as a mode of intertextual engagement. Like biblical reception in general, signifying applies to a wide range of interpretive practices. For instance, Cohen argues that Martin R. Delany's Blake not only represents its main character as a Moses figure, but also signifies Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) (56). Cohen similarly suggests that Frances Harper responded to David Walker's 1829 use of Moses in her 1859 essay, "Our Greatest Want." This "unmotivated signification," a concept borrowed from Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey, produces intertextual dialogue and development across the authors and texts. Yet it is not always clear how to distinguish an author's act of signification from Cohen's comparison, such as when he suggests that the character Tom Anderson in Iola Leroy (1892) signifies Stowe and Frederick Douglass alike (75–77). Cohen's sources engage multiple forms of biblical reception, ranging from direct citation of Moses and Exodus to generally Mosaic figures who bear only distant allusions and echoes of the Bible. Cohen skillfully surveys these diverse interpretive approaches, suggesting the categories of "typological rigidity" and "typological plasticity" to account for different interpretive approaches to Exodus (48). Unlike the moralistic rigidity that simply contrasted good Mosaic abolitionists against evil Pharaonic slaveholders, Cohen finds more flexible interpretive possibilities within the abolitionism of Martin R. Delaney and others who imagine a new kind of religious reality beyond slavery (60–62). But the real story of Excavating Exodus is not the how but the what of biblical exegesis. Insofar as Cohen frames Exodus interpretations "as a microcosm of the debates at the heart of the Civil Rights movement," his study contributes more to civil rights history than biblical reception history, leading to this four-part classification: "pro-Exodus desegregationism (King), anti-Exodus democratic pluralism (Ellison), pro-Exodus racial separatism (Malcolm X), and anti-Exodus radical individualism (Kelley)" (149, 153). Excavating Exodus culminates in this useful taxonomy, and it would be interesting to see even more about how these political categories relate to the rhetorical and hermeneutical strategies that produced them. Excavating Exodus bears the traces of the doctoral dissertation from which it draws, but the book's clarity and originality make an important contribution to scholarship on African American racial identity and biblical reception. For the study of American religion more generally, the book is a reminder...

Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency

Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

Do the Invariant Findings of Land, McCall, and Cohen Generalize to Cross-National Studies of Social Structure and Homicide?

The Land, McCall, and Cohen study is one of the most highly cited articles in the social structure and homicide literature. In it, the authors found that three structural covariates—resource deprivation, population size and density, and divorce—were consistently associated with U.S. homicide rates over several decades, even when employing different units of analysis. In this article, we review 65 studies to determine whether Land, McCall, and Cohen’s invariant findings for these three structural covariates generalize to the cross-national empirical literature on social structure and homicide. We conclude that the findings for population structure and divorce are inconsistent in this literature but that there is relatively consistent evidence for an association between homicide and some form of resource deprivation cross-nationally. Based on our review, we also discuss two current directions of this literature and critically assess—much like Land, McCall, and Cohen did for the U.S. literature at the time—the current state of the scientific record on the topic of social structure and homicide at the cross-national level.

Professional Politicians as the Subjects of Moral Panic

The media, the public and politicians themselves often express a fear that Australian political life is increasingly dominated by ‘professional politicians’, who are seen as careerist, lacking in commitment and disconnected from the reality of ordinary lives. The article analyses the meanings given to the term ‘professional politicians’ and their relationship to other definitions and characteristics of professionalism. It also uses the concept of moral panic to analyse the concerns expressed about ‘professional politicians’. This concept, first formulated in 1972 in Cohen's study of alleged youth violence in a small town in the United Kingdom, is most often associated with studies of social deviance. This article demonstrates how, in a later period, it can be extended to apply to politicians, a group traditionally more often identified as a perpetrator of moral panics than the subject of them.

Seprafilm Review and Meta‐analysis

As a surgeon with a long-time interest in the clinical and research aspects of adhesions, I looked forward to reading the review and meta-analysis by Drs. Zeng, Yu, You, and Zhang [1]. Unfortunately, the factual and methodologic errors contained in the article diminished my experience and inadequately supported the author’s conclusions. For a meta-analysis to be valid the analyzed studies need to have similar populations and endpoints. The authors admit this limitation in their discussion but fail to discuss its significance. Of the seven trials included, one used only cancer patients [2], three excluded cancer patients [3–5], one used only pediatric patients [6], and the other six used adults. The type of surgery performed has been shown to affect adhesions. The operations performed in the studies were different: Restorative proctocolectomy in some [3–5], sigmoid colectomy and Hartman’s in others [7], and mostly small-bowel procedures in another [6]. The method of application and number of sheets of Seprafilm used also varied significantly from just under the wound in some studies to application to adhesiogenic areas and wraping the ileostomies [8] or wrapping the anastomosis. Finally, one of the studies [5] did not even use Seprafilm but a different product (glycerol/sodium hyaluronate/carboxymethylcellulose-based bioresorbable membrane) which is chemically different and has different clinical properties. This product is different enough that the United States Federal Drug Administration required separate studies to test its effectiveness and safety. The glycerol component appears to support bacterial growth and after this finding the product was voluntarily removed from the market. In doing data abstraction, the authors failed to include the lack of abscesses in the treatment and control groups in the Inoue article [6]. Removing abscess data from the Cohen study [5] and adding the data from the Inoue article, the new analysis (according to my statistician) confirms that there is insufficient support for a statistical difference in abscess formation when Seprafilm is used. A similar result occurs when the Cohen study is removed from the analysis. Another of my concerns is the evaluation of secondary endpoints or findings that were not prospectively identified in the original study. Events such as bowel obstructions and abscesses have a number of clinical (nausea, vomiting, abdominal distension, lack of flatus), radiologic (distended loops of bowel, air-fluid levels, luminal transition on CT scans), and operative findings as well as different etiologies (technical, luminal, adhesive). In the absence of prospectively defined criteria, interand intraobserver biases are rampant. In addition, most of the studies were not powered adequately to determine secondary endpoints. A minor point, and most likely an editing error, is that Gore-Tex surgical membrane is manufactured by Gore not Genzyme. While I agree with the authors that the data support Seprafilm reducing adhesions, evaluation of appropriate studies fails to provide convincing evidence of an increase in abscesses or fistulas. I was disappointed that this article did not clarify any issues and added little novel information to the literature. Dr. Beck was an investigator in several of the studies reviewed and has been a consultant to Genzyme Corporation.

Claiming Citizenship: Mexican Americans in Victoria, Texas

Anthony Quiroz's book is a milestone in Mexican American historiography. He situates Mexican American history within both American consensus and conflict historiography by using the central trope of “citizen.” His basic argument is that the acquisition of full citizenship is the fundamental pursuit of the Mexican American population. By “claiming” their full rights of citizenship, the Mexican Americans of his case study in Victoria, Texas, and throughout the Southwest are simultaneously struggling against the limitation of their rights. It is a “quest for legitimation.” This quest… [is] undertaken within the framework of a bicultural identity that is adaptable to the private Mexican world of home, church, neighborhood, and family as well as the public world of school, work, and politics. Coexistence with Anglo-American society and partaking of the American dream… [is] the desired ideal. (p. xii) Quiroz's text rests on the historian Lizabeth Cohen's study of industrialized workers in Chicago, in which she suggests that workers are united in the public sphere for collective action, while retaining their individualism in the private sphere (Making a New Deal, 1990). For Cohen, as for Quiroz, people struggle harmoniously for a broad notion of citizenship rights against their (narrow) rights, which have been limited by societal-ideological discourses. Quiroz identifies the beginning of this political consciousness to claim citizenship in the 1920s with returning World War I veterans seeking democracy in their communities and with the rise of the middle class, urging Americanism via their two major organizations: the 1929 League of United Latin American Citizens (lulac) and the 1947 American G.I. Forum, which have remained active in Victoria and the Southwest.

Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (review)

Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, by Richard I. CohenPaganism sees its god, Judaism hears Him (p. 6). As Richard I. Cohen stresses in the introduction to Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, the one hundred and fifty years since Heinrich Graetz made that comment have seen not only the expansion of history beyond the boundaries of (male) Christian Europe, but also the growing recognition that images have played an important role in many of the Jewish communities of the last two millennia.Through his analysis of a series of images almost as unfamiliar to historians of the Jewish experience as to historians of art, Cohen seeks a new approach, an alternative entree into the social landscape of Jewish society between the medieval era and World War I (p. 9). Although earlier versions of four of the essays have already appeared in print, readers will find much here that is new, much to challenge and stimulate further research.Students of (or, better, European Christian) art are familiar with one sort of Jewish -- the stereotypical depicted as surrounding Jesus in scenes of trial and crucifixion. Much of Cohen's study concerns efforts (of sympathetic Christians as well as Jews) to redraw this icon, to display and thus demystify the ceremonies and family life of Jews to their Christian neighbors. That this is one of the important roles played by images is undeniable and undeniably poignant; nevertheless, as Cohen reminds us in his epilogue, the story he tells is more complex than this, involving as it does the role of images as signifiers in communities poised on the knife's edge between persecution and acculturation, the challenges of modernity, and the movement from displays of Judaica to displays of art by Jewish artists.Whether couched as attempts to erase the medieval icon of the Jew as Christkiller or as attempts to preserve a Jewishness threatened by the acculturation that accompanied emancipation, the common thread in Cohen's account remains his reading of images of Jews as signifiers of Jewishness. Cohen's readings see images primarily as responses to pressures external to the Jewish communities for which the images were produced. Inherent in this focus is the blurring of the differences among the communities that produced the images; seen solely through this lens, the paintings of Oppenheim and Kaufmann at the end of the nineteenth century differ surprisingly little from the depictions of Jewish ceremony and custom (usually drawn and published by sympathetic Christians) from almost three centuries before.Ironically, in this reading, the most evident difference between the images of the seventeenth century and those of the nineteenth is the medium. The oil paintings by Jewish artists of the nineteenth century contrast with the prints of Jewish ceremonies executed by Christian artists in the seventeenth century. The nineteenth-century paintings were unique, displayed in museums and special exhibits that were the hallmark of their era. The older images were mechanical reproductions, a category of objects whose implications have been analyzed by Walter Benjamin in a still more widely disseminated essay. The irony of Cohen's book title was surely intentional; the irony here is surely not. …

Sex Scandal, the Private Parts of Victorian Fiction

Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages - and never his its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment. Whether discussing George Eliot's lesbian readers, Anthony Trollope's whorish heroines, or Charles Dickens's masturbating characters, William A. Cohen's study explodes the decorum of mainstream nineteenth-century fiction. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness. Scandal, then as now, makes public the secret indiscretions of prominent people, engrossing its audience in salacious details that violate the very code of propriety it aims to enforce. In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870-71, from Eliot's and Trollope's novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde's writing and his trials for homosexuality, Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasise its unspeakable nature. Written with an eye toward the sex scandals that still whet the appetites of consumers of news and novels, this work is suggestive about our own modes of imagining sexuality today and how we arrived at them. Sex Scandal will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in Victorian literature, the history of sexuality, gender studies, nineteenth-century Britain, and gay, lesbian, and queer studies.

“Virtue (almost) triumphant” revisited: Of Sylphs andSilfidi

Swooning heroines, trembling villains bent on revenge, dramatic confrontations in which the forces of evil threaten the innocent and the virtuous-these are some of the elements common to the nineteenthcentury Italian ballets described in Selma Jeanne Cohen's 1964 article Virtue (almost) Triumphant, a survey of nearly 300 ballet libretti housed in the Music Division of The New York Public Library.' Cohen's study of these primary sources provides illuminating glimpses into a repertoire largely unfamiliar to today's balletgoing audience. Her article stresses the heavy preponderance of melodramas in a repertoire also sprinkled with tragedies, pastoral divertissements, and a few comedies. Plot summaries of works such as Sara, o sia II Bardo del Torrente and Colombo, ossia La Scoperta del Nuovo Mondo illustrate the conventions of the Italian melodrama: evening-length productions, often stretching to five acts; narratives set in exotic locations or the distant past with a multitude of costumed extras on stage to provide local color; the alternation of dancing and pantomime passages (much like aria and recitative in opera); an emphasis on elaborate staging and the popularity of spectacular scenic effects (floods, fires, even volcanic eruptions); and plots brimming with reversals of for

Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America

Far from simply vanishing in the face of modernity, Orthodox Jews in the United States today are surviving and flourishing. Samuel C. Heilman and Steven M. Cohen, both distinguished scholars of Jewish studies, have joined forces in this pathbreaking book to articulate this vibrancy and to characterize the many faces of Orthodox Jewry in contemporary America. Who are these Orthodox Jews? How have they survived, what do they believe and practice and how do they accommodate the tension between traditional Jewish and modern American values? Drawing on a survey of more than one thousand participants, the authors address these questions and many more. Heilman and Cohen reveal that American Jewish Orthodoxy is not a monolith by distinguishing its three broad varieties: the traditionalists, the centrists, and the nominally orthodox. To illuminate this full spectrum of orthodoxy the authors focus on the centrists, taking us through the dimensions of their ritual observances, religious beliefs, community life, and their social, political, and sexual attitudes. Both parochial and cosmopolitan, orthodox and liberal, these Jews are characterized by their dualism, by their successful involvement in both the modern Western world and in traditional Jewish culture. In painting this provocative and fascinating portrait of what Jewish Orthodoxy has become in America today, Heilman and Cohen's study also sheds light on the larger picture of the persistence of religion in the modern world.

Galilee-Jerusalem Relations According to Josephus'Life

Josephus'Liferaises many important literary and historical questions that are not easily resolved. This may explain why, for the most part, it has been ignored by New Testament scholars, despite the fact that it is the only extant writing from the first century that bears directly on Galilean life and culture and was written by somebody with immediate experience of that location. Its tendentious character has been ably exposed by Shaye Cohen's study,Josephus in Galilee and Rome. His Vita and Development as an Historian, Leiden, Brill, 1979. Yet it can still yield invaluable information on social relations within the province, provided we approach it in the proper critical fashion, framing our questions carefully and being attentive to the presuppositions of the author.

Acute adverse reactions to LSD in clinical and experimental use in the United Kingdom.

It is well recognized that LSD (lysergide) can give serious adverse reactions, including suicide and prolonged psychosis; Smart and Bateman (1967) have reviewed the subject thoroughly. However, examples reported refer largely to cases where the LSD was self-administered. Medical case reports usually cover small case numbers, and publication may be determined by high adverse reaction rates. There has been no methodical survey of the pooled experience of psychiatrists since Cohen's study in 1960. This reported 44 replies sent out to 62 American investigators who had published papers or whose work was known to the author. Replies covered 5,000 subjects with 25,000 LSD or mescaline sessions. In this series, there were only two suicides that Cohen regarded as directly related to the LSD, and there were psychotic reactions (lasting more than 48 hours) at a rate of 0·8 per 1,000 experimental subjects and 1·8 per 1000 patients. It is unfortunate that one-third of the investigators failed to reply to Cohen's questionnaire.

Anticipation of relevant stimuli and evoked potentials: a reply to Naatanen.

Naatanen's comments on Donchin and Cohen's study of selective attention seem to derive from a failure to appreciate the relationship between the negative shifts in cortical potentials reported by Naatanen, and Grey Walter's CNV. Naatanen's assertion that slow negative cortical shifts reflect generalized cortical activation is discussed.