Early US Research Articles

Depression and loneliness during April 2020 COVID-19 restrictions in the United States, and their associations with frequency of social and sexual connections.

PurposeTo estimate the prevalence of depression and loneliness during the US COVID-19 response, and examine their associations with frequency of social and sexual connections.MethodsWe conducted an online cross-sectional survey of a nationally representative sample of American adults (n = 1010), aged 18–94, running from April 10–20, 2020. We assessed depressive symptoms (CES-D-10 scale), loneliness (UCLA 3-Item Loneliness scale), and frequency of in-person and remote social connections (4 items, e.g., hugging family member, video chats) and sexual connections (4 items, e.g., partnered sexual activity, dating app use).ResultsOne-third of participants (32%) reported depressive symptoms, and loneliness was high [mean (SD): 4.4 (1.7)]. Those with depressive symptoms were more likely to be women, aged 20–29, unmarried, and low-income. Very frequent in-person connections were generally associated with lower depression and loneliness; frequent remote connections were not.ConclusionsDepression and loneliness were elevated during the early US COVID-19 response. Those who maintained very frequent in-person, but not remote, social and sexual connections had better mental health outcomes. While COVID-19 social restrictions remain necessary, it will be critical to expand mental health services to serve those most at-risk and identify effective ways of maintaining social and sexual connections from a distance.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00127-020-02002-8.

Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States by David J. Dzurec III

Reviewed by: Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States by David J. Dzurec III Sarah Sillin (bio) Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States david j. dzurec iii University of Massachusetts Press, 2019 236 pp. David J. Dzurec III's Our Suffering Brethren traces a history of white American captivity from the American Revolution to the end of the Barbary War. Throughout this era, the British navy and Barbary corsairs repeatedly captured American ships—whether to impress, imprison, ransom, or enslave those aboard—thereby evoking a sense of American vulnerability (7). Dzurec's history demonstrates that captivity profoundly influenced early US politics by eliciting widespread public concern; it thereby became a source of nationalism that served complex, sometimes contradictory interests. Americans' loss of freedom offered a key justification first for the Revolutionaries' cause and then for a stronger federal government. Yet rather than simply unifying the country, captivity became the subject of fierce political debates. Indeed, Dzurec argues that Federalists' and Republicans' responses established a key pattern in US politics: each party asserted its unique ability to provide national security, even as both invoked the same nationalist rhetoric by playing on fear of a foreign threat (194). In examining such rhetoric, Dzurec develops a nuanced reading of how international encounters shaped the government's relation to citizens. Federalists and Republicans alike located political capital in American captives' suffering, as they claimed authority to enter into new wars, negotiate for US captives, or forge treaties. But even as politicians played on voters' anxieties, he suggests, so too did public discourse inform US politics. The apparent arbitrariness of captivity, which elicited concerns that "any American could be taken captive," also thereby fostered a sense that "any American could join the debate about the nature of Independence" (38). Though the nation's early presidents responded to this sentiment with [End Page 300] calls for limiting public involvement—like the private fundraising efforts to redeem Americans captive in Algeria—public opinion and political policies continued to shape one another. To understand the reciprocal influence of public opinion and political rhetoric, Dzurec explores a rich historical archive. His readings of sailors' letters and narratives (with particular attention to Ethan Allen's and John Dodge's memoirs) highlight the influential role of their accounts in circulating news of captivity and shaping Americans' impressions of these events. Moreover, he delves into Americans' responses to such accounts by analyzing the more official discourse of political policies and representatives' correspondence, alongside public commentary in news editorials, plays, and printed accounts of local festivities. Together, these texts allow him to argue that politicians' and private citizens' responses informed one another, while considering how they shifted over time. Captivity became first a touchstone in arguments for American independence and confederation in the late eighteenth century and then a lightning rod in early nineteenth-century political debates as the Federalist and Republican parties both purported to be the party of national security. Dzurec moves chronologically, so that the first half of Our Suffering Brethren identifies how captivity fostered American nationalism, starting with British impressment. Of course, captivity was not a new experience or trope; rather, Dzurec contends, colonial-era captivity narratives provided revolutionaries with "a historical precedent for the type of threat they faced" (37). Moreover, he suggests that stories of captivity became a means for revolutionaries to claim sympathy. Yet rather than halt captivity, the end of the war left Americans unprotected by British treaties with Barbary states. When Algerian corsairs captured American merchant ships in 1785, captivity took on new importance in US politics by fostering interest in a stronger federal government. Even as Americans' captivity strengthened arguments for the federal government, though, it also raised new possibilities for individual Americans to participate in foreign relations. Dzurec explores how such private involvement ebbed and flowed. In the 1780s, Americans began fundraising to help ransom their countrymen, then paused this involvement when the Constitutional Convention afforded the government more power to act on their behalf. Although Washington and the Federalists believed "public sentiment ought not play a role in politics outside of election" (63), the [End Page 301] formation of Democratic...

Viable Second Trimester Cervical Ectopic Pregnancy Managed Successfully with Uterine Preservation: Case Report

Cervical pregnancy is a rare clinical entity that accounts for less than 1% of all ectopic pregnancies. It results from implantation of the blastocyst in the cervical canal below the level of the internal os. Although non-tubal ectopic pregnancies account for only 5% of ectopics, they contribute to a significant morbidity. The cornerstone in the management of cervical ectopic is early diagnosis by high index of suspension and a qualified sonographer. Management options for cervical ectopic pregnancies range from conservative drug treatment to radical hysterectomy. Over the last few years, the mortality and morbidity rates of ectopic pregnancies have been reduced. This is mainly due to the early recognition of the condition and the wide availability of minimally invasive surgical procedures. We present a case of a 33-year-old woman that was 16 weeks pregnant. She presented initially with recurrent vaginal bleeding followed by minimal lower abdominal pain. Her early US scans were misleading. Several weeks later, a follow up MRI scan suggested cervical ectopic. She was managed surgically with uterine preservation.

Ocean, Continent, and Competency: The Material Origins of Early US Federalism

Ocean, Continent, and Competency: The Material Origins of Early US Federalism

Characteristics of Clinical Trials Launched Early in the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US and in France.

Based on hierarchical classification and logistic regression of early US and French COVID-19 clinical trials we show that despite the registration of a large number of trials, only a minority had characteristics usually associated with providing robust and relevant evidence.

Rethinking the Role of the Speaker: Power, Institutional Development, and the Myth of the “Impartial Moderator” in the Early US House of Representatives

AbstractThe early Speakers of the US House of Representatives, most historians and political scientists have agreed, aspired only to facilitate legislative business; the office served as an “impartial moderator,” its functions were “largely ceremonial,” and its occupants of no more consequence than a mere “traffic cop.” This article challenges that conclusion by presenting episodes from the tenures of four early Speakers—Jonathan Dayton, Theodore Sedgwick, Nathaniel Macon, and Joseph B. Varnum—to illustrate their contributions to debates that still occupy us today: the relationship between Congress and president; the scope of federal power; the extent of constitutional freedoms; and the functions and limitations of party government. At a moment when scholars are showing renewed interest in the historical mechanics of lawmaking, this article argues for reinserting the Speakership back into the heart of that process, where it has always belonged.

Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas

In this devastating and important account, Jeffrey Ostler brings to light the broad sweep of early US genocidal policies implemented before the more familiar period of the so-called Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century. By highlighting the preremoval period and more closely examining postremoval Native America through the Civil War, Ostler challenges us to broaden the spectrum of genocidal policy and military actions, as well as settler practices, to include dispossession and its entangled relationship with disease, demography, interethnic warfare, and cultural disintegration. As he eloquently observes, “For Native people in real historical time . . . this was the challenge before them: to avoid what they perceived as the very real possibility that their communities, their people, their nations would be totally annihilated” (7).This book is part of a larger two-volume project seeking to recalibrate Native American history between the American Revolution and Wounded Knee. Treading into recent debates and new historiographical territory around the historical reality of and accountability for “American genocide” (as Benjamin Madley has aptly phrased it), Ostler takes a nuanced approach by seeking the Indigenous voices who practiced “survivance” in the face of a rapidly expanding settler-colonial machine. While many historians have ably located Indigenous power and agency in early encounters and resistance movements, it is also critical, Ostler argues, to look again at “times and places where the balance of power did not favor Indigenous people . . . where Indians were subject to a raging sea” (8).In addition to its bold conceptual scope, Surviving Genocide is also geographically sweeping, focusing region by region on the Indigenous nations and confederacies of the present-day American South, Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, Mississippi Valley, Great Lakes, and Eastern Plains. Before tightly focusing on the period between the American Revolution and Bleeding Kansas, he offers a fascinating reassessment of earlier encounters between the Native confederacies of all of these regions, identifying the nexus of disease, starvation, and endemic warfare that proved a deadly disruption of delicate Indigenous alliances. Yet, as he argues, these alliances remained regional in scope until the 1760s. “None spread throughout the entirety of eastern North America . . . [but] the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s War set in motion events that would lead to the American Revolution” (29). This is a crucial point overlooked by historians until very recently. The power and might of an Indigenous “backcountry” exercised the enmity of the fledgling colonists while simultaneously enflaming their desire for independence. Ostler, then, directly ties American independence with genocidal dispossession right at the nation’s founding.The remainder of the book takes on the difficult task of placing the more well-known resistance movements of Pontiac, Little Turtle, and Tecumseh, among others, within the larger framework of the Removal Period. These are typically seen as parts of distinct, separated historical periods, but Ostler threads these nations and regions into one story about a clear, consistent, and merciless government policy of genocide implemented in varying degrees but always with the same outcome: Indigenous disappearance from the new Anglo-American landscape.Ostler’s neat prose powerfully conveys the clear implications of this: “By 1860, many nations—impoverished, starving, and afflicted by multiple diseases—were on a trajectory toward complete and total extinction” (244). Despite the relentless war of extermination, though, the descendants of Tecumseh and others survived. This occurred, Ostler concludes, not due to a change of heart by Americans (who continued to pursue Indian elimination into the twentieth century) but simply because of the defiant resilience of Native America.

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson by Marianne Noble

Reviewed by: Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson by Marianne Noble Maria A. Windell Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson. By Marianne Noble. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. vii + 294 pp. $99.99 cloth/$80.00 e-book. “Sympathy is more complex than the first few pages of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the last few pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” writes Marianne Noble early in Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson (4). The remark is spot-on. Studies of early American sympathy—or sentimentalism or sensibility—almost inevitably refer to Adam Smith’s prisoner upon the rack or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s instruction that one “see to it that they feel right.” These models have, in many ways, underwritten the recovery of early US sentimentalism as a field of serious inquiry. They have also been criticized for privileging the spectator/reader, as they depend upon the presumption that one knows what another is feeling—a presumption that essentializes the other and erases his or her subjectivity. Noble argues that the critique errs, however, in assuming that nineteenth-century US authors celebrated sentimentalism’s universalizing tendencies. Failing to look beyond Smith and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she asserts, has limited our understanding of how writers questioned and refined their own ideas about sympathy as a means of human contact. Looking at later works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson, Noble shows how these authors “surprisingly yet decisively anticipate our own emphases on difference, embodied subjectivity, and anti-essentialism” (4). Noble takes care to differentiate sympathy from sentimentalism. The distinction grounds her argument that scholars criticize sentimentalism for flattening difference but overlook how nineteenth-century authors also leveled this criticism. More importantly, she argues that they responded by developing sympathy as an alternative to sentimentalism specifically because they understood it as a model of “feeling . . . care that unites people not by erasing differences but by imagining an attitude that invites intimacies while also protecting differences” (35). Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and Dickinson, she writes, relied more on J. G. Herder’s revisions of Adam Smith than on Smith, and they refused the idea that a person’s true self resides behind a social mask. Instead, they valued the other’s infinite complexity and unknowability without seeking to transcend individual particularities (as did transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, argues Noble in her first chapter). Even in the nineteenth century, she writes, Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and Dickinson were [End Page 170] “[k]eenly attuned to” and sought to alleviate “the normative judgments invisibly folded into acts of sympathy” (31). Each of the book’s chapters meticulously contrasts an author’s earlier writings with his or her later works to illustrate how authors rethought and revised their approaches to sympathy as a means of processing individual, racial, class, and gendered difference. The Douglass chapter, for instance, powerfully juxtaposes a number of passages from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with their revised counterparts in My Bondage and My Freedom. Noble argues that My Bondage revises the very logic undergirding Narrative’s call for abolition: whereas the earlier autobiography highlights enslaved African Americans’ suffering and capacity for feeling, the latter centers the recognition of African American individuality. That is, My Bondage asks readers not to feel for the enslaved but to respect African Americans’ “plenipotentiary capacity for self-cultivation” (129). Noble’s compelling reading of Douglass also encompasses The Heroic Slave and “Letter to His Old Master,” but it does not extend to Douglass’s writings on Haiti, Ireland, or other places beyond the United States. It would be interesting to see how Douglass’s revised thinking on sympathy worked in relation to national differences. Regardless, Noble convincingly demonstrates how Hawthorne, Stowe, and Dickinson also rethought their own investments in sympathy, including her argument that Stowe came to reject as essentialist and appropriative the model of sympathy she had elaborated in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The nineteenth century, Noble insists, had already responded to our critiques of sympathy as a basis for...

Introduction, or The Things We Did Not Lose in the Fire

Introduction, or The Things We Did Not Lose in the Fire Diana W. Anselmo (bio) I am touching a strip of film from the 1910s. Composed of sixteen frames, it depicts a man on horseback, galloping down a woodsy trail. In all likelihood, the motion picture these frames belonged to does not exist anymore; it is estimated that only 14 percent of US silent features survived time, neglect, floods, and fire.1 And yet this piece of sepia nitrate rests in my hands, available despite early cinema’s rampant ephemerality. Its survival is due to one movie-loving girl, Eleanor G. Fulton, who decided to assemble a hundred-page scrapbook honoring Jack W. Kerrigan, one of the first screen heart-throbs. Between 1913 and 1917, the twenty-something fan had access to Hollywood’s sprawling lots, so it is possible she gathered the discarded filmstrip herself, on one of her trips to the new Universal studio; there Fulton met her idol at least twice. In addition to the filmstrip, the personal scrapbook includes a snapshot of Kerrigan awkwardly standing by a trailer, the girl fan’s shadow cast by his feet. A proud declaration of authorship is penned under the vernacular reproduction: “Warren Kerrigan posed for this picture at Universal City, October 12 1915. I took it with my Kodak,” Fulton notes, signing off “EGF.”2 An autographed headshot is also preserved among hundreds of Kerrigan-related newspaper clippings and memorabilia. The blue ink scrawled across the star’s face is glossy, as if perpetually wet (Figure 1). Access and ephemerality are the key terms framing this dossier on “Alternative Archives.” I have access to Kerrigan’s snapshot and handwriting—to [End Page 160] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jack W. Kerrigan’s autographed headshot in Eleanor G. Fulton’s annotated movie scrap-book (1913–1917). Photo by author. [End Page 161] a material piece of his largely lost filmography—because of a female fan’s archival labor and the knowledge exchange abetted by the World Wide Web. Fulton’s movie scrapbook found me in 2014 through an auction advertised on the online marketplace eBay. Without the portal of mass communication and commerce that is the internet, this peephole into early film reception and celebrity would have remained unavailable to me, and by extension to academic scrutiny. Trafficking in transience, fan artifacts from the silent era have a low survival rate. Most material sources conferred institutional protection and discursive currency have originated from within capitalistic enterprises, functioning to legitimize the systems of power that afforded their production; scrapbooks crafted by no-name screen-struck girls rarely qualify. Pushing against the erasure of female labor in early Hollywood, Janet Staiger, Shelley Stamp, Karen Ward Mahar, Amelie Hastie, Mark Garrett Cooper, Hilary Hallett, and Richard Abel, among many others, have shed light on how women helped implement a lucrative star system as directors, producers, screenwriters, columnists, patrons, and players.3 However, with their credits systemically unpreserved, female legacies of film authorship and agency continue to flirt with oblivion. Silence constitutes an invisible form of violence since it is difficult to mount a historical argument in the void of material evidence. Digital preservation has greatly contributed to the expedient diversification and accessibility of media history. Projects such as the Media History Digital Library, Lantern, Women Film Pioneers Project, and Early African American Film are research-based, non-profit databases that offer open access to (mostly English-language) productions, periodicals, and biographies of workers from the silent and sound eras, spotlighting women and people of color who have not received sufficient attention in scholarly and popular debate.4 Leveraging archival data to increase public awareness of diverse media histories, these databases are extraordinarily useful, particularly to instructors and students. Nonetheless, knowledge of early female moviegoing remains circumscribed to secondhand reports found in the periodical press and the memoirs [End Page 162] of film personalities, resources framed by commercial intent. That intent drives content, which drives exclusion through copyediting bias, market research, and consumer expectations. Black and queer people, for example, are seldom identified in these industry-sanctioned sources. Though undoubtedly part of the heterogeneous connective tissue comprising early US audiences...

Sociology and Medicine Interactions and Emerging Disciplines

This brief essay places the work of Professor Siri Hettige in the context of understanding of social origins of health and disease. The origin of the term ‘social medicine’ dates to the French Revolution in 1848, which called for the medical profession to integrate knowledge in medical issues, population health, social factors and public policies. During this period, similar views were expressed elsewhere e.g. in Germany by Virchow’s famous statement that “medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a grand scale”. In the early 20th century, another wave of social medicine originated in South America, a key figure being Salvador Allende. As the Minister of Health, he introduced these concepts to model the health services in Chile and later elected as the President. He was assassinated in a CIA sponsored military coup in 1973. In contrast, the early British and US traditions focused on a model where priority was on applying sociology in relation to individual behaviors. It was later that social structural determinants of health and diseases were addressed e.g. the Black Report of 1980. The US followed different trends, attempting to integrate concepts of the two disciplines (i.e. sociology in medicine) and studying the sociology of medicine (e.g. explaining health-seeking behaviors) and more recently, social epidemiology and politics of health. Professor Hettige’s extensive work covers almost all the above topics, trends and developments. His research publications and writings in the lay press have stimulated much discussion and contributed to sociopolitical changes in Sri Lanka. His name will be remembered as a pioneer in the field where sociology intersects with health in Sri Lanka and even in Asia.

Recent collapse of crop belts and declining diversity of US agriculture since 1840.

Over the last century, US agriculture greatly intensified and became industrialized, increasing in inputs and yields while decreasing in total cropland area. In the industrial sector, spatial agglomeration effects are typical, but such changes in the patterns of crop types and diversity would have major implications for the resilience of food systems to global change. Here, we investigate the extent to which agricultural industrialization in the United States was accompanied by agglomeration of crop types, not just overall cropland area, as well as declines in crop diversity. Based on county-level analyses of individual crop land cover area in the conterminous United States from 1840 to 2017, we found a strong and abrupt spatial concentration of most crop types in very recent years. For 13 of the 18 major crops, the widespread belts that characterized early 20th century US agriculture have collapsed, with spatial concentration increasing 15-fold after 2002. The number of counties producing each crop declined from 1940 to 2017 by up to 97%, and their total area declined by up to 98%, despite increasing total production. Concomitantly, the diversity of crop types within counties plummeted: in 1940, 88% of counties grew >10 crops, but only 2% did so in 2017, and combinations of crop types that once characterized entire agricultural regions are lost. Importantly, declining crop diversity with increasing cropland area is a recent phenomenon, suggesting that corresponding environmental effects in agriculturally dominated counties have fundamentally changed. For example, the spatial concentration of agriculture has important consequences for the spread of crop pests, agrochemical use, and climate change. Ultimately, the recent collapse of most agricultural belts and the loss of crop diversity suggest greater vulnerability of US food systems to environmental and economic change, but the spatial concentration of agriculture may also offer environmental benefits in areas that are no longer farmed.

Intramedullary Fixation of Calcaneal Fractures: Early US Experience

Category:Hindfoot; TraumaIntroduction/Purpose:The fixation of displaced intraarticular fractures of the calcaneus have posed many challenges for the surgeon, including an anatomic reduction, fracture stabilization, and soft tissue concerns. The extensible lateral and sinus tarsi approaches must be delayed until soft tissues concerns resolve and despite this are susceptible to wound necrosis and skin infections. Intramedullary fixation allows immediate fixation without soft tissue compromise.Methods:The retrospective case series is comprised of 23 patients; 19 intramedullary fixation of the calcaneus and 4 primary arthrodesis with the FH Orthopedics CalcaNail. Fracture classification, timing to surgery, accuracy of reduction, complications, and outcome were recorded.Results:There were zero wound complications. Bohler’s angle was restored as well as articular surface. One patient required implant removal after healing seconding to prominent hardware. One patient required conversion to a subtalar arthrodesis. There were no implant mechanical failures.Conclusion:The intramedullary fixation of calcaneus fractures has been performed extensively outside the US with documented success. This series of early US experience exhibits similar utility. The ability to reduce the fracture intrafocally and stabilize with a minimally invasive approach have proven useful with no incidence of wound complications. Not to mention no delay from time of injury to surgery is needed.

A multinational listeriosis outbreak and the importance of sharing genomic data

A multinational listeriosis outbreak and the importance of sharing genomic data

Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o NovelHispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National IdentityWhere the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales

Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o NovelHispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National IdentityWhere the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales

The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis by Melissa J. Homestead

Reviewed by: The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis by Melissa J. Homestead Kelsey Squire The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. By Melissa J. Homestead. Oxford UP, 2021. 408 pp. Biographical approaches to literature rely so often on facts drawn from archival materials—letters, photographs, birth certificates, ticket stubs—that it can be easy to overlook the role that interpretation plays in biographical studies of authors and their works. Which facts are valued? What evidence is dismissed as unimportant? In The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, author Melissa J. Homestead addresses one of the largest interpretive gaps in Willa Cather studies: Cather's relationship with longtime partner, Edith Lewis. The Only Wonderful Things provides admirers of Cather's fiction with a deeper, more nuanced understanding of Cather's life and work. More broadly, The Only Wonderful Things will be useful to scholars whose work intersects with the fields of biography, authorship, LBGTQ studies, and early twentieth-century US literature and culture. In her personal and compelling introduction, Homestead outlines how the role of Edith Lewis came to be minimized—and in some cases, erased—in the study of Cather's work. As Homestead explains, "[t]he image of Willa Cather as an autonomous artist, detached from the market and from the contemporary [End Page 131] social world, has made it difficult for Cather biographers and critics to see Edith Lewis"; and Homestead admits that she herself as a younger scholar "fell into the trap of not seeing [Lewis] or of misperceiving what I saw" (3). Questions like "was Cather really a lesbian?" and "were Cather and Lewis friends, coworkers, or lovers?" have haunted biographical studies of Cather's life and work. Homestead summarizes how scholars like Phyllis Robinson and Sharon O'Brien first began to identify Cather as a lesbian in the 1980s. Homestead goes on to discuss how critics misinterpreted evidence at the Cather-Lewis gravesite in Jaffrey, New Hampshire—including rumors that Lewis was buried at Cather's feet—and how these errors minimized Lewis's role in Cather's life. Homestead also draws on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Christopher Nealon, and Heather Love to explore claims that Cather and Lewis were closeted and that they kept their relationship a secret. Is it appropriate to label Cather and Lewis's relationship as lesbian, then? Homestead argues, convincingly, for this label. Drawing on the scholarship of historian Lillian Faderman, Homestead encourages readers to distinguish "lesbian" as an adjective from lesbian as a noun, arguing that this manner of speaking best describes Cather and Lewis's relationship (7). Homestead provides a persuasive model for how to think through historical changes of language that defined same-sex relationships from those of the late nineteenth century to our contemporary moment. While the "Cather as lesbian" question may have dominated popular public narratives of Cather, Homestead's other label for the Cather-Lewis relationship—"creative partnership"—is equally important. While The Only Wonderful Things draws on biographical approaches to literature, it is not, as Homestead clarifies, a full biography of either Willa Cather or Edith Lewis. Homestead explains her organization thusly: "I present a series of scenes from their partnership in chapters organized both chronologically and thematically" (2). This thematic organization runs the risk of being confusing to readers (jumps in the timeline need to be tracked carefully), but through Homestead's deft handling, the thematic organization allows her more expansive leeway in providing cohesive portraits of Cather and Lewis's lives across time. Chapter 1 provides essential details about Edith Lewis's life and family history, starting with her birth in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1881. By [End Page 132] describing the lives of Lewis's parents, Henry and Lillie Lewis, Homestead provides a nuanced portrait of middle-class life in the late nineteenth-century Midwest. In particular, Homestead traces how Henry and Lillie Lewis "recreated or created New England-based social networks in the West" through their professional and personal lives (19). Homestead also presents a detailed discussion of Edith Lewis's writerly inclinations by discussing the stories and sketches...

Strategic Polling Limits the External Validity of Early Election Polling

Using responses from a series of general election polls conducted between February and March of 2020, we found that a non-negligible share of participants withheld information about their true voter intention by responding strategically to hypothetical questions about potential future vote choice, thus introducing a source of total survey error. Although we propose a combination of ex-ante considerations in survey design and ex-post statistical fixes that can be used to reduce total survey error and infer true voter intention, the lack of repeated outcomes limits our ability to precisely calibrate our models. Our findings call into question the external validity of conclusions based on conditional forecasts using hypothetical polling results and are especially pertinent to early US general election forecasting, where potentially meaningless differences of a few percentage points can be misinterpreted as proof of differences in relative electability of potential party nominees during the Primary election season. We suggest that results from hypothetical election polls should instead be viewed as sources of partial information on future behavior, and interpreted based on contextual variables such as the moment in time relative to the predicted event.

Invocations of Indigeneity in the Colonial Red/White/Black Triad

Abstract This essay takes as its assumptive backdrop the “Red/White/Black demographic triad” in the sense of Stam and Shohat that resulted from the European colonial conquest and settlement of, and the transatlantic enslavement of Africans in, the Americas. It homes in on the ambivalent functions and effects of different evocations of Indigeneity in early abolitionist discourse, considering this very discourse as a specific strand of settler colonial knowledge production during the era of the Enlightenment. While Euro-American abolitionists around 1800 centrally and critically focused on relations between the positions marked by “Black” and “White,” they also made recourse to the position of “Red.” Paradigmatic readings highlight that abolitionists mobilized Red as a trope in contradictory ways according to their argumentative needs, substantiating the hegemonic character of White self-referential knowledge practices in the early US republic and abetting the justification of settler colonialism.

Early US Marine Operations in Vietnam

The author served as sole language interpreter for the first US Marine helicopter squadron to operate in Vietnam. During 1962–1964, marines had their first limited exposure to what would become a massive combat trial. Marr describes daily base operations, combat support missions, and interactions with diverse people. He subsequently participated in Vietnam intelligence activities at Camp Smith in Hawai‘i, where young officers debated the efficacy of counterinsurgency efforts.

Edwin Borchard’s Innocence Project

The article recognizes the life and work of Edwin Montefiore Borchard, the founder of US innocence scholarship, as fitting for the Wrongful Conviction Law Review’s inaugural issue. The sources of his scholarship are located in his life and times in the early twentieth century US Progressive movement. The links between Borchard's other legal scholarship and his wrongful conviction writings are explained. Borchard's writings and advocacy leading to his main work, Convicting the Innocent, and passage of the federal exoneree compensation law are described. The article concludes that Borchard's lasting legacy is to refute innocence denial, a deeply help belief that wrongful convictions never occur or are vanishingly rare.

Testing an ‘ungrading’ approach

As the threat of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, became apparent in early March, US universities and colleges rushed to implement contingency plans that protected their stude...