Fellow Americans Research Articles

In the Aftermath of Tragedy

In the Aftermath of Tragedy

Our Thoughts and Prayers Are With Our Fellow Americans

Home HealthCare Nurse: The Journal for the Home Care and Hospice Professional: October 2001 - Volume 19 - Issue 10 - p 605

Untested Feasibility: Imagining the Pragmatic Possibility of Paulo Freire

n the first Saturday in May 1997, literacy lost one of its greatest champions, and teachers lost one of their most powerful role models. The death of Paulo Freire, a teacher of rare tenacity, integrity, and belief, seems to make the hope that teachers have taken from him less powerful, even less possible, than before. Freire's work has always been about making the connections, as he put it, between the and the word. Teachers now have only his words-and not the constant example of his action-to find the connections to their own worlds of teaching and learning. As teachers struggle to connect world and word for ourselves, we need to remember and take heart from Freire's warning: is to rewrite, not memorize the content of what is being read (Critical Consciousness 100). Recognizing his popularity among educators in the United States, Freire cautioned: It is impossible to export pedagogical practices without re-inventing them. Please, tell your fellow Americans not to import me. Ask them to recreate and rewrite my ideas (Politics ofEducation xiii-xix). That warning, sounded over and over again by Freire during his many talks to teachers in the United States, should receive special attention now, when we no longer have his continual admonition as a guide. How teachers might re-create, rather than import, Freire into our own North American contexts-and so not lose the power of his ideas-is the subject of this essay. To remake Freire, to exercise our own critical perception in contexts of real work and meaningful action, both in the classroom and in the discipline, teachers need to look at our particular North American contexts and use them in responding to Freire's

September 11: Farewell, My Birthday

How shall I henceforth celebrate my birthday? What shall I wish for when I blow out the candles next year and the year after that? As millions of my fellow New Yorkers and Americans mourn annually the tragedy of September 11, how do I annually celebrate my birthday? I'm certain that, more American flags will be unfurled on my birthday than any other day on the American calendar, more than the Fourth of July. But, as my friend Elena observed, the best thing about all these flags everywhere is that a whole lot of Senegalese street vendors in New York City are making a whole lot of money. No, I'm not a flag-waver. I'm not a pin- or ribbon-wearer either. I'm one of those who, as a matter of principle, roots against the U.S. during the Olympics and World Cup. If that makes me a bad American, so be it.

The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas , and: Cláper (review)

Claper, by Alicia FreilichTo most Americans the republics south of the Rio Grande are the stuff of benign neglect. Only the occasional sweep of illegal aliens, the momentary drug bust, the quick vacation on some tropical beach may briefly lift our eyelids as we tsk-tsk our bemusement at those underdeveloped folk. Generally, we don't really care. The world conducts its serious economic and cultural business in New York, or London, or Tokyo, or Singapore. Who cares about a bunch of vilde chayes on the pampa plains? Where are the pampas, anyway?I use vilde chayes intentionally, since Jews are by and large no better informed than their fellow Americans. The Jewish world runs on a U.S.-Israel axis, with Europe included because it's where our grandparents came from and where the Holocaust occurred. But Latin America? Ah, yes, what about those Nazis in Argentina?Happily, change is in the air. Academe, at least, has discovered not only that there are Jews in Latin America, but that they are vibrant, creative, with something to say to other Jews and culture-makers. In departments of history, sociology, cultural studies, and Latin American and Brazilian literatures a new discipline is emerging: Latin American Jewish Studies. (Jewish Studies has been slow to recognize the newcomer.) A confluence of fortunate -- and less fortunate -- circumstances has put LAJS on the map, with literature often leading the way.Why now? Writers in Latin America are today asserting their Jewishness, however problematically. This wasn't always so. Until recently, Latin American Jewish intellectuals were often immigrants outside the mainstream or native-born Jews whose concerns had little or nothing to do with Judaism. Argentina's Alberto Gerchunoff was an early exception; that is why his book has been reprinted.Harsh dictatorships in the seventies served as a painful impetus for change. Young Latin American Jews identified with progressive and democratic forces found themselves under a double siege -- as Argentines, Chileans, Brazilians, or Uruguayans, and as Jews. Repression and exile led many to reconsider their Jewishness as a paradigm of suffering and resistance and as a source of cultural memory and pride. The result was an outpouring of Latin American Jewish creativity: organizations, journals, conferences, publishing houses, fiction, critical works. Democracy's return intensified the awakening.The Jerusalem-based Association of Jewish Writers in Spanish and Portuguese currently serves as the intellectual address for a network of authors living in Latin America, Spain, France, Israel, and the United States. It publishes Noaj, an important literary journal whose name echoes with biblical intimations of catastrophe, survival, and rebirth. The association has sponsored heady writers' symposia in Buenos Aires, S...o Paulo, Miami, and Jerusalem, and calmer scholarly events with AMILAT, the Israeli Society for Latin American Jewish Studies.In Buenos Aires, Argentine-Jewish intellectuals are spearheading the publication of novels, story collections, and anthologies. They are reediting books by previous generations of Latin-American Jewish authors who wrote in Yiddish, Portuguese, and Spanish, creating their ancestors even as they look to the future. Marcos Aguinis, Ricardo Feierstein, Gererdo Mario Goloboff, Alicia Steimberg, and Elihau Toker are some of those identified with the new activism, which has spilled over into Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela.A corresponding surge of interest has overtaken the North, spurred by the decadeold Latin American Jewish Studies Association. LAJSA members are teaching courses in Latin American Jewish history and literature at major U.S. universities, correcting the prejudiced, homogenizing picture of "Latin Americanness." (Are Freilich, Gerchunoff, or Aizenberg Hispanic names? …

The butchers, the baker: the World War II memoir of a United States Army Air Corps soldier captured by the Japanese in the Philippines

Imprisoned aboard an unmarked ship that was torpedoed by an American submarine, the wounded author struggled to survive. Mapes' memoir chronicles a gruelling three-year ordeal that was punctuated by strange, and often amusing encounters with fellow Americans, Japanese, Filipinos, and the fierce Moros of Mindanao Island.

Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Twenty-five years ago, after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Gerald Ford promised a return to normalcy. My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over, President Ford declared. But it was not. The Watergate scandal, and the remedies against future abuses of power, would have an enduring impact on presidents and the country. In Shadow, Bob Woodward takes us deep into the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton to describe how each discovered that the presidency was forever altered. With special emphasis on the human toll, Woodward shows the consequences of the new ethics laws, and the emboldened Congress and media. Powerful investigations increasingly stripped away the privacy and protections once expected by the nation's chief executive. Shadow is an authoritative, unsettling narrative of the modern, beleaguered presidency.

Contemporary Evangelicals: Born-Again and World Affirming

Because conservative Protestant activism in the 1970s and 1980s was motivated by moral concerns—a reaction to the further disestablishment of so-called traditional Christian values in American society—and because explanations of church growth have also centered on values and boundary maintenance—the strictchurches-grow thesis—resurgent evangelicalism has come to be understood as a reactionary social movement, that is, as though most evangelicals are fundamentalists. Serious students of religion know this is not the case, but it is easy to confound explanations of the popularity of born-again Christianity and the cultural politics of the new Christian Right. In this article, three features of contemporary American evangelicalism are examined that suggest born-again Christians are becoming more like their fellow Americans in their comfort with popular culture, which is to say they are less culturally conservative. Whether contemporary evangelicalism is understood to be sectarian or world affirming is consequential for explaining the prosperity of born-again Christianity and for discerning its future role in public life.

Catalyzing Scientific Progress

Catalyzing Scientific Progress

Prodigal's Progress: Jay Wright's Focal Center

Jay Wright concludes his poem Beginning Again, the last in his first volume titled The Homecoming Singer, with the following lines: And now my ancient rhythm calls me, out of ashes and fraternal death, you, mother Idoto, naked I stand a prodigal lost in your legend ... An aching prodigal, who would make miracles to understand the simple given. The lines cited within the above passage were actually taken from the opening lines of the late Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo's sequence Heavensgate in his first collected volume, Labyrinths. The first poem of that sequence represents an initiate's act of submission as he begins his ritual cleansing and self-dedication to the guiding spirits of his clan. I quote the entire poem: BEFORE YOU, mother Idoto, naked I stand; before your watery presence, a prodigal leaning on an oilbean, lost in your legend. Under your power wait I on barefoot, watchman for the watchword at Heavensgate; out of the depths my cry: give ear and hearken (19) I think that Wright's citation of Okigbo's lines is significant in a number of respects, some of which have to do with the contexts within which he defined his creative agenda. Born in Albuquerque, he grew up there and in San Pedro, California, achieving full maturity in California in the sixties when many African Americans were raising intense questions about who they were and where they fitted within the larger American society. Many of the artists found their answers in the cultural lines of communication that had opened up between African Americans and Africans in the years of the Black Renaissance. Langston Hughes aided the process by editing two anthologies of African writing in the early sixties, thus introducing his fellow Americans to the urgent voices, new and not so new, that were then drawing the attention of the world to the unfamiliar outlooks--and the often fierce sentiments--of peoples gradually shedding the yoke of European colonialism. Christopher Okigbo had published most of his poetry by the mid-sixties. In a style that may have suited the temperament of Jay Wright, he addressed himself in his poems to rather intense questions about the relationship of traditional African culture to ideas and outlooks that colonialism had introduced into his society. Much of his earlier poetry was therefore set within the structure of a ritual experience in which these various influences were brought into a mantic confrontation with one another. At the end of this long, searing mystical experience, in the final movement of the sequence Distances (69-76), the poet re-emerges to declare that, although he cannot pretend to have solved the conundrums raised by the clash of images in his personality, he remains beholden to the protective forces of his community from which he would seemed to have strayed.(1) Wright published The Homecoming Singer in 1971, four years after Okigbo's death while fighting in the Nigerian civil war. No doubt he had encountered Okigbo's poetry well before this publication date, and recognized a certain affinity in both men's sentiments and visions. In appropriating Okigbo's lines into his own inaugural volume, the African American poet would seem to have gained some inspiration from his African counterpart as he sought to articulate his own creative mission. Before Singer, Wright had published a short pamphlet of poems titled Death as History. Roughly half the poems in this collection eventually found their way--with minor revisions--into Singer, among them the piece entitled Destination: Accomplished, the final poem in the former volume. In this poem, we get a sense of the poet's persona reaching a point of determination in which he resolves to get Back to these history books, to my stroking of these beautiful, discarded masks I keep. …

The Protestant Personality and Higher Education: American Philanthropy Beyond the "Progressive Era"

Andrew Carnegie wrote, in his best known essay titled "The Gospel of Wealth" (1889), that "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship." He then instructed wealthy fellow Americans how to spend their wealth conscientiously: "First to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer."1 The concerns that Carnegie expressed in his essay reveal one of the fundamental challenges that most wealthy Americans had confronted at the turn of the century. He was not alone in reflecting upon these concerns during this period. John D. Rocke feller, a contemporary of Carnegie, appeared equally disturbed by the same questions. In Random Reminiscences, Rockefeller wrote: "As I study wealthy men, I can see but one way in which they can secure a real equivalent for money spent, and that is to cultivate a taste for giving where the money may produce an effect which will be a lasting gratification .... It would be the narrowest sort of view to take, and I think the meanest, to consider that good works consist chiefly in the outright giving of money."2 These words summed up some of the most dominant values of American society. Long before Carnegie and Rockefeller, early social reformers such as Cotton Mather (1663-1728) and Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), addressed these same issues in their well-attended sermons and numerous social commentaries.3 In 1698, in one of his famous sermons, Mather, a co-founder of Yale University, told the people of Boston: "Instead of exhorting you to augment your charity, I will rather utter an exhortation . . .that you may not abuse your charity by misapplying it."4 He

Patients' Lack of Literacy May Contribute to Billions of Dollars in Higher Hospital Costs

PHYSICIANS, nurses, hospitals, pharmacists and other providers of medical care are not the only controllers of health care costs. The US educational system plays a substantial role and, according to a recent estimate, it is in such a parlous state that its results—or lack of results—contribute to an estimated $15 billion a year in excess hospital costs alone. Some 40 million to 44 million Americans are functionally illiterate, the National Adult Literacy Survey has estimated. They are unable to read and comprehend adequately to function in society. Apart from other social disadvantages, this means they cannot understand a physician's prescription or health care instructions, and, perhaps even more important, they are unable to navigate through the complex health care system. The result is that not only are they in poorer health, with higher health care costs and more frequent hospitalizations than their literate fellow Americans, but they are unable

The Presidency of Andrew Jackson.

In 1829 Andrew Jackson arrived in Washington in a carriage. Eight years and two turbulent presidential terms later, he left on a train. Those years, among the most prosperous in American history, saw America transformed not only by growth in transportation but by the expansion of the market economy and the formation of the mass political party. Jackson's ambivalence - and that of his followers - toward the new politics and the new economy is the story of this book. Historians have often depicted the Old Hero (or Old Hickory) as bigger than life - so prominent that his name was wed to an era. Donald Cole presents a different Jackson, one not always sure of himself and more controlled by, than in control of, the political and economic forces of his age. He portrays Jackson as a leader who yearned for the agrarian past but was also entranced by the future of a growing market economy. The dominant theme of Jackson's presidency, Cole argues, was his inconsistent and unsuccessful battle to resist the market revolution. Elected by a broad coalition of interest groups, Jackson battled constantly not only with his opponents but also his supporters. He spent most of his time rearranging his administration and contending with Congress. His accomplishments were mostly negative - relocating Indians, vetoing road bills and the Bank bill, and opposing nullification. The greatest achievement of his administration, the rise of the mass political party, was more the work of advisers than of Jackson himself. He did, however, make a lasting imprint, Cole contends. Through his strength, passions, and especially his anxiety, Jackson symbolised the ambivalence of his fellow Americans at a decisive moment - a time when the country was struggling with the conflict between the ideals of the Revolution and the realities of 19th century capitalism.

"The Other America" in Historical Perspective

In The Dispossessed Jacqueline Jones seeks to demonstrate two deceptively simple truths: that Poverty abides no line drawn by color or culture and that Poverty has a (pp. 1-2). With these two generalizations foremost in her mind, she proceeds to offer an account of poverty in the United States in the 130 years between the outbreak of the Civil War and the present. Her ultimate goal is to integrate poverty and the poor into American life-to demonstrate that poverty is a structural phenomenon generated by the normal operations of the economy, the state, and the larger society, and to show that the poor share many values with their fellow Americans. Jones begins her study in the rural South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. She examines the origins of the postslavery labor system in southern agriculture, exploring the distinct solutions arrived upon for black and white labor. White planters continued to insist upon restrictions in the movement of black field laborers, while a shared commitment to white supremacy obscured the opposing economic interests of white planters and white field laborers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers. Jones's interest in exploring the place of race in the history of the poor continues in three central chapters focusing on southern economic development between 1870 and 1930. She examines, in turn, the agricultural economy, plantation turnover, and the emergence of a southern rural nonagricultural labor force. In a particularly interesting chapter, Jones turns on its head the lament of contemporary landowners over the restlessness of their sharecroppers and tenants by demonstrating that it was the more successful and ambitious (rather than the defeated and downtrodden) among southerners, white and black alike, who were constantly on the move in efforts to improve their lot. Hence, controlling for status, whites generally displayed greater mobility than did blacks, reflecting the greater variety of opportunities open to them across the South in these decades. After outlining the experiences of poor whites and blacks in the rural South

Letter from America via Paris

Americans in Paris Often Feel Neither American Nor French — which sometimes allows them to see both countries more clearly. I have just completed a year living in the Fifth Arondissement while occupying the French American Foundation's Chair of American Civilization at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales. If my sojourn does not licence me to play Tocqueville to the Americans, it does let me watch my fellow Americans from a distance and the culturally distant French from close up.

The Shaker experience in America: a history of the United Society of Believers

The Shakers, once a radical religious sect whose members were despised and harassed by their fellow Americans, have in recent years become celebrated--and sentimentalized--for their communal way of life, the simplicity of their worship, their belief in celibacy, pacifism, and equality of the sexes, and not least their superb furniture and handicrafts. This monumental book is the first general history of the Shakers from their origins in eighteenth-century England to the present day. Drawing on written and oral testimony by Shakers over the past two centuries, Stephen J. Stein offers a full and often revisionist account of the movement: their charismatic leaders, the early years in revolutionary New York and New England, the expansion into the West, the maturation and growth of the sect before the Civil War, the decline in their fortunes after the war, the painful adjustments to society Shakers had to make during the first half of the twentieth century, the renaissance of interest after 1950, and the forbidden topic within contemporary Shakerism--the conflict between the two remaining villages at Canterbury, New Hampshire, and Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Stein provides many new interpretations of the Shaker experience. He reassesses the role of founder Ann Lee, emphasizes the impact of the western Shaker settlements on the course of the society's history, and describes the variety of cultural enterprises that have obscured the religious and historical dimensions of the Shakers. Throughout Stein places the Shaker experience within the wider context of American life and shows how the movement has evolved to deal with changing times. Shattering the romantic myth that has been perpetuatedabout the quaint and peaceful Shakers, Stein portrays a group that is factious, practical, and fully human.

My fellow Americans: presidential addresses that shaped history

Foreword by Senator Sam Nunn Preface The Farewell Address: Washington's Declaration of Independence in Foreign Policy Jefferson's First Inaugural: The Revolutionary as Reconciler The Monroe Doctrine: The Whispered Warning The Jackson Bank Veto: The First War against the Eastern Establishment Polk's Inaugural: Action as Eloquence The Gettysburg Address: The Great American Poem The Cleveland Tariff Message: The Battle Against Big Business The Big Stick: Monroe Doctrine a la Theodore Roosevelt Wilson's Declaration of War: A Latter-Day Paul on Mars Hill The Sesquicentennial Address: The Sermon at the Shrine Franklin Roosevelt's First Inaugural: The Rhetoric of Recovery Harry Truman's Acceptance: The Turnip Day Talk Eisenhower's Farewell Address: An Old Soldier's Warning The Kennedy Inaugural: A Young Warrior's Call to Arms President Nixon's Toast to Chairman Mao: The Beijing Breakthrough The Reagan Address at the Palace of Westminster: A Prophecy for a Free World Bibliography Index

Sacajawea & Co.: the twentieth-century fictional American Indian woman and fellow characters: a study of gender and race

Sacajawea & Co.: the twentieth-century fictional American Indian woman and fellow characters: a study of gender and race

The invention of George Washington

George was the central actor in the great American drama of revolution and nation-founding. His image was an essential aspect of the role he played, but scholars have usually examined the life and the legend apart from one another. Paul Longmore here illuminates the relationship between the man, the myth, and the American people. In addition to a comprehensive look at Washington's career, we are shown how he embodied the ideals of his age and made an effort to shape contemporary perceptions of him. The Invention of George Washington traces the relationship between Washington's career and image from his service in the Seven Years' War through the Declaration of Independence. It shows the linkage between that image and the cultural and political values of his generation. It demonstrates that from the very beginning of the Revolution, his fellow Americans, influenced by contemporary political thought and the needs of a historically transforming moment, substituted him for King George III. Although biographers have commonly presented as a reluctant leader who preferred private life to the swirl of public affairs, he was, in fact, an eager, active, and astute politician. Longmore's study recounts not only his growth as an American nationalist and republican revolutionary, but also his development as a skillful political leader and actor who fashioned his public self to match the expectations and ideals of his fellow citizens. Shrewd, ambitious, and talented, he collaborated with his generation to make himself the embodiment of the revolutionary cause and the new nation.

Brain tumour mortality in immigrants.

All Canadian deaths due to malignant brain tumour for the years 1970-73 were identified and analysed for country of birth. The years 1970-73 were chosen since in later years country of birth was no longer available for each death. The brain tumour population consisted of 1551 male and 1058 female deaths and matched controls were chosen from deaths due to other causes. Americans who died of brain tumour in Canada had a standardized mortality ratio (SMR) of 1.0 compared to their fellow Americans in the USA. Italian, German, Dutch and British immigrants had SMR between 1.5 and 2.6 compared to rates in their home countries and between 1.24 and 2.09 when compared to Canadian rates. A series of graphs shows the increased risk for male immigrants quite dramatically, and indicates that for females the increases were less pronounced. Further analysis showed that the excess risk is confined to those who were born in Western Europe while their Canadian-born children experienced the same rates as all Canadians. Based on the limited information available, occupation could not be shown to play a role in establishing risk. An attempt was made to pinpoint the years of immigration which showed the greatest risk. It is concluded that the determination of risk of brain tumour has a strong environmental component. The possibilities for identification of this component are discussed.