Frigid Winter Research Articles

Cereal Rye Among the Best Cover Crops at Weed Suppression

AbstractCereal rye, as a fall‐planted and winter‐grown cover crop, offers many benefits. It tolerates both frigid winter temperatures and warm springs. It also tolerates both the wet conditions and drought. It reduces soil erosion, enhances soil organic matter, improves soil water retention, and reduces nutrient leaching. But, it’s not a panacea, of course. This article will discuss some of the benefits, challenges, and considerations of using cereal rye as a cover crop. Earn 0.5 CEUs in Integrated Pest Management by reading this article and taking the quiz at https://web.sciencesocieties.org/Learning‐Center/Courses.

Lack of oxygen curtails vision in red-eared sliders

For many animals, winter is a time to go into hibernation and sleep until the weather gets warmer and food is more plentiful. But for some animals, hibernation requires a lot more than just sleeping through the frigid winter months. Some turtles, such as the red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta elegans), are condemned to overwinter in ponds that freeze over, meaning that they can't surface for air for weeks or months in temperatures hovering around 3°C. Even worse, the water these turtles settle down in often has very little oxygen. Because oxygen is usually required by animals to make energy, these turtles slow down their metabolism by 90 to 95%, saving the energy they do make to keep the systems going that are absolutely necessary. But even these systems aren't functioning as normal. The turtles slow their heart rates to 1 or 2 beats every 10 min, stop moving around and even turn off parts of their brain to save energy. But what happens to their senses? Are they still able to hear and see while in this state of suspended animation? These are the questions that Michael Ariel, Shivika Ahuja and Daniel Warren of Saint Louis University, USA are attempting to answer.Ariel and colleagues first tested whether the turtles’ hearing was affected when they didn't have any oxygen. They vibrated a rod near the turtle's eardrum and measured the response from where hearing is processed the brainstem. The shelled reptiles’ hearing was no different whether they had normal amounts of oxygen or very little. This suggested that the turtles can still hear during their hibernation because hearing isn't as reliant on the amount of oxygen they have available. But what about their vision? Do the turtles even need to see in the murky waters of their winter homes?This time, the team shined flashes of light on the sliders’ eyes and measured responses of one area of the brainstem that processes vision. Although very short 0.05 ms flashes of LED light showed no differences in the response, the responses of the brainstem decreased by 50% when the turtles didn't have much oxygen if the light flashes were longer than 0.2 ms. This wasn't surprising to Ariel and colleagues as the visual system is takes a lot of energy to run. ‘The retina in general, and the light sensing cells in particular, use the highest amount of metabolic energy of all vertebrate sensory systems’, states Ariel.With that in mind, the researchers measured the response of the same flashes of LEDs directly from the retina. When oxygen levels were very low, the response to the lights by the retina was lower, but not as low as the response by the brainstem. So, the turtles are shutting off their energetically expensive visual system all the way from the eyes back to the brain, where their vision is processed. Also, it took the turtles’ brainstems longer than normal to respond to flashes of light, whereas the brainstems responded normally to vibrations near the eardrum, suggesting that the cascade of events that follow sensing a flash of light is slower when very little oxygen is present. So, much like high-altitude mountain climbers who report problems such as hallucinations and dimming of their vision, in these turtles, it seems like eyesight is the first thing to go when the oxygen levels drop.

Aquarian Dawn by Ebele Chizea

Reviewed by: Aquarian Dawn by Ebele Chizea Wesley Jacques Chizea, Ebele Aquarian Dawn. Three Rooms Press, 2022 [224p] Paper ed. ISBN 9781953103253 $15.00 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12 When a teenaged Ada Ekene and her mother arrive in Greensberg, PA, in January 1966, their newly independent Afrikan homeland Nabuka is on the verge of civil war. Conflict between mother and daughter tends to run just as deep and cold in the frigid winter, even as the two women work on building a new life in smalltown U.S. Ada’s stepdad Ben is recently divorced from her mother but still plays a key role in Ada’s life, maintaining her connection to post-colonial Nabuka and her Afa ethnic heritage. Ada’s mother is distant, stern, and has high expectations for her secretly chainsmoking daughter, who has only excelled in school because it’s easier than having actual conversations with her mother. The tragic toll of the war back home and its immediate impacts on Ada’s family add geo-political underpinnings to this truly unique coming-of-age story, where small-town high school anxieties of the ’60s develop into wide-scale young adult uneasiness in the ’70s. The loosely concealed real-world countries, towns, and institutions keep this world fictionalized but familiar and underscores how personal the political can be. Chizea offers YA fiction a provocative maturity and thoughtful nuance that reads like Zadie Smith or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie but nonetheless provides an undoubted and necessary perspective specifically for young audiences. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Hybrid Optimization Algorithm for Water Volume Adjustment Problem in District Heating Systems

Nowadays, the winter is getting harsher and harsher in Northern China. Thus, the centralized heating systems (CHSs) are playing even more irreplaceable, essential and critical roles in ensuring general public’s livelihood than never ever before. CHSs are normally composed of one or several combined heat and power (CHP) plants (units) and an extensive vein like district heating networks (DHNs) connecting with chemical plants, paper mills, food processing factories, hospitals, hotels, universities, prisons and residential complexes. A CHP plant in Northern China usually consumes coal to heat the cold water into steam to drive high-pressure turbines and low pressure turbines to generate electricity. Then the low-temperature steam is used to heat up the cold water in a main pipe into hot water travelling through the DHNs to provide heat to each end nodes. The returned water will be heated again for reuse and the surplus steam will be released into air through cooling towers. In 2020, China promised to the world that carbon dioxide will peak in 2030 and net-zero emission will happen in 2060. On the one hand, CHP plants need to guarantee enough hot water flowing within each household’s heating radiator. On the other hand, they should cut down on the consumption on non-renewable resources. Lowering water temperature, adjusting water volume and reducing water pressure will all contribute to energy-saving purpose. Lowering water temperature and reducing water pressure may cause too much heat losses during long-distance transmission in frigid winter. Therefore, a reasonable water volume adjustment becomes an advisable action comparatively. Here, we transfer the hot water supply volume optimization problem (HWSVOP) into a heat exchange station (HES) valve angle adjustment problem (SHWESVAAP). Then, a multi-objective mathematical model is established considering balancing the satisfactory degree of each household in residential quarters and the hot water volume (HWV) in the main pipe. And a hybrid polar bear optimization algorithm integrated with chemical reaction optimization (HA-PBO-CRO) is designed to optimize the valve angle (VA) in each HES. The comparative results between HA-PBO-CRO and non-dominant sorting genetic algorithm (NSGAII) demonstrate HA-PBO-CRO is superior to NSGAII with better Pareto frontiers on one hand and provide a critical reference supporting the management in a CHP plant to make a right decision on what to do to cut energy consumption while satisfying customers’ needs.

Solar Deicing Nanocoatings Adaptive to Overhead Power Lines

AbstractIn frigid winter, the ice and snow built‐up on high‐voltage overhead power lines may seriously risk the reliability of electric power transmission and telecommunication systems. Green technologies for power line deicing that can effectively remove the accumulated ice or snow on the cables in a gentle way are highly desired but technically challenging due to the complex cable surfaces. Herein, this work reports a scalable solar‐thermal icephobic nanocoating compatible with both flat and complex curved surfaces. The spray‐coated nanocoating comprises a titanium nitride nanoparticle layer as a low‐emissivity photo‐thermal medium and dual‐scale silica particles as a water‐repellent layer even at low temperatures. Enabled by the collective effects of high‐efficiency solar‐thermal conversion and temperature‐insensitive superhydrophobicity, the nanocoating realizes effective deicing/defrosting on power lines at frigid temperatures down to −15 °C. The versatility of this coating and its compatibility with mass‐production processes render passive solar‐driven deicing technologies promising for practical applications on most outdoor exposed surfaces.

Synergy of multiple drivers leading to severe winter haze pollution in a megacity in Northeast China

Severe haze repeatedly shrouded Harbin during the winter of 2019–2020, making it one of the 10 most polluted cities in China for January of 2020. Here we explored the major drivers for the extreme atmospheric pollution events. Enhanced formation of secondary organic and inorganic aerosols was evident at higher pollution levels, accompanied with a sharp growth of aerosol water content (AWC) and a persistent increase of aerosol pH. Non-biomass burning (non-BB) combustion sources were inferred to be relatively stable during the measurement period. The elemental carbon mass apportioned to the non-BB sources exhibited an apparent increasing trend as aerosol concentrations became higher, pointing to the influence of unfavorable dispersion conditions. In addition, biomass burning (BB) emissions were found to be strengthened at higher aerosol concentrations. This trend was associated with a large drop of temperature, presumably indicating that the strengthened BB emissions were due to more intensive use of biomass for heating. In brief, the winter haze events in Harbin were caused by a synergy of three factors, i.e., enhanced secondary aerosol formation, unfavorable dispersion conditions and strengthened BB emissions. A semi-quantitative approach was developed to further estimate the relative importance of these drivers. Strengthened BB emissions were always less responsible for haze events compared to other factors, whereas the less severe and heavily polluted haze events were caused mainly by unfavorable dispersion conditions and enhanced secondary aerosol formation, respectively. This study provides observational evidences for efficient production of secondary species in aerosol water despite the frigid winter in Harbin, and thus highlights the need for effective control of gaseous precursors, both organic and inorganic.

Defining frigid winter illuminates its loss across seasonally snow-covered areas of eastern North America

Winter is often understudied in ecosystem sciences and viewed as a burden for human systems and infrastructure. However, the importance of winter in regulating ecological processes and shaping human communities has emerged as a topic of great interest, particularly in areas that experience seasonal snow cover. Traditional seasonal definitions may not fully represent below freezing winters and snow accumulation that have historically characterized these areas. Here we: (1) propose the concept of ‘frigid winter’ to address longstanding problems with traditional delineations of winter; and (2) define frigid winter as a period of sustained temperatures below freezing and snow accumulation that together regulate ecological processes and their services. We explore this definition and the changes occurring within it using 100 years of meteorological data from northeastern North America. Trend analysis demonstrates that frigid winters have shortened by ∼3 weeks over the last century, that cold, snowy conditions have become more intermittent, and that the choice of winter delineation (astronomical, meteorological, hibernal, or frigid) influences the apparent rate at which winter conditions disappear.

Coming from Nowhere

Coming from Nowhere Robert Lopez (bio) The first time someone called me a spic was during recess or after school in the playground or in the park across the street from my house. I was in shirtsleeves and it was hot or I had on a heavy winter coat with a ski hat and gloves and boots because it had snowed overnight and we could see our breath in the frigid winter cold. I like the thought of the word spic hanging frozen in the air, the vapors of which are exhaled and linger for an unnatural period of time, like in a Saturday morning cartoon, until they disappear. That’s how I’ve experienced most of what’s happened to me, from childhood on, as a series of vapors, exhalations, and disappearances. Back when children wore snowsuits in such weather, the ones that had the mittens tied into the sleeves, the winters were majestic all over New York. There were blizzards every other weekend and the drifts would bury the cars parked in the streets and the trees lining the sidewalks. It seemed as if we would never see the cars again and if school ever did reopen we’d have to use wooden tennis rackets as makeshift snowshoes to get there. We took photographs and when I say we I mean my mother and father took photographs of the cars, of my sister and me, all buried and content and whited out on our lawn outside of our Levitt house in the middle of a particularly conservative and culturally bankrupt part of the country known as Long Island. One wouldn’t think of this as a realistic setting where one person calls another a spic for the first time. One imagines a brilliant sun and blaring heat, people sweating and wearing mirrored sunglasses and sandals instead of ski hats and waterproof boots. My sister and I would go out to the backyard and build snow forts. We did this in matching snowsuits, designed to keep us safe and dry and warm, which were bulky and ridiculous and didn’t allow for any sort of athletic maneuver. You couldn’t fight in them, for instance, but you could build a fort and after the fort was built you could build another fort right next to it. I have no memory of what, if anything, we did inside the forts. [End Page 87] The first time someone called me a spic I was six or nine or eleven years old. The last time someone called me a spic was probably in high school and most likely a term of endearment. I don’t think my sister was ever called a spic, regardless of the weather. I’m sure she was called other things, but none of them ethnically motivated. I remember her friends used to call her Coco for Coco Lopez, which is a Puerto Rican coconut product used in many popular drinks. I don’t think girls were called spics in the 1980s. Maybe they never were. Now when it snows I stay inside. Maybe I look out the window, but I wait for the city to plow the streets and for the superintendents to shovel the sidewalks before I venture out into the world unless it is absolutely necessary, unless I have no choice and it’s about food or the possibility of tennis or sex. I never play in the snow, stopped all that around the age of eight. I hear stories of grown people sledding in the park or cross-country skiing after a blizzard, building snow structures and the like. I remember once a woman I dated expressed consternation when I didn’t throw a snowball at her after she pelted me with one while we were out walking one winter’s day. She accused me of having no fun. Now I like it best when I go on the Pratt or New School or Columbia website and they say that all classes are canceled. I don’t do anything special or especially productive with this unexpected day off and it isn’t as if I don’t like my job, but it still...

Decreased Temperature Associated with Increased ED Visits By Patients with Sickle Cell Disease

Introduction: Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a genetic disorder diagnosed at birth, characterized by repeated acute complications leading to significant morbidity and mortality. Patients subjectively state extreme temperatures trigger sickle cell complications such as vaso-occlusive crisis (VOC) and acute chest syndrome (ACS), leading previous studies to examine the relationship between environmental factors and rates of acute SCD complications with mixed results. Dessap et al. found a correlation between SCD admissions and daily temperature change but not mean daily temperature, whereas Nolan et al. found only windspeed to have a significant correlation. We hypothesized an association exists between temperature, windspeed, and humidity and ED visits for VOC and ACS.Methods: We designed a retrospective observational study utilizing the Chicago Sickle Cell Disease Research Group clinical registry of patients with SCD (HbSC, HbSB0, HbSB+, or HbSS) seen in the emergency department (ED) from May 1, 2014 to May 31, 2016 at two pediatric hospitals in Chicago, Illinois. Encounters were included if a final diagnosis of VOC or ACS was recorded based on ICD-9 or ICD-10 codes. Weather data were obtained through the University of Chicago's Center for Data Intensive Science using data from the Environmental Data Commons, collected at Midway Airport. We used Spearman's rank correlation coefficient with n-2 degrees of freedom for correlations between frequency of ED encounters and daily weather conditions including mean temperature, relative humidity, and maximum windspeed. Encounter rates by weather marker were calculated using the number of encounters by unique individuals divided by the total number of days. Our analysis included encounters by unique individuals as multiple encounters from the same subject within a defined weather marker are likely to be correlated and can introduce bias.Results: During the 2 year study period there were 139 unique individuals, ranging in age from 10 months to 23 years, with SCD (72.7% Hgb SS, 16.5% Hgb SC, and 10.8% Hgb Sβ+/0). There were a total of 618 ED encounters with a qualifying final diagnosis. Mean daily temperature ranged from 0.4 - 84.8 degrees Fahrenheit, maximum daily windspeed ranged from 6.9 - 42.5 miles per hour, and daily relative humidity ranged from 17.1% - 90.2%. In our analysis, there was a correlation between lower mean daily temperature and increased number of ED encounters for VOC (ρ= -0.791, p<0.001) and for total ED encounters, which included both VOC and ACS (ρ= -0.757, p<0.001). A similar correlation was not seen in the analysis for relative humidity (ρ= 0.252, p=0.43) or for maximum windspeed (ρ= 0.318, p=0.23).Conclusion: Our study demonstrates a correlation between lower mean daily temperature and increased number of ED visits for SCD complications when examining encounters by unique individuals. There was no significant correlation found for daily windspeed or daily humidity. Prior studies of temperature effects on SCD in France, Brazil and various sites in the United States have shown mixed results, with several showing no correlation. Our findings of low temperatures correlating with increased ED visits could be due to our location having a wider range of temperatures when compared with prior studies. This finding could significantly impact the advice given to patients in areas with periods of prolonged low temperatures as this could increase the rate of ED visits. In Chicago, our study conclusions could be utilized to make policy recommendations on school attendance and accommodations when the temperatures decrease during the frigid winter months, allowing for improved access to homebound instruction for patients with SCD.Future directions include evaluating pertinent clinical markers such as hemoglobin change from baseline, hydroxyurea use at presentation, and ED disposition, which may show that weather change affects some children with SCD more severely than others. We believe continued investigation is warranted to attempt to more accurately characterize the effects of weather change on clinical outcomes of the pediatric sickle cell population. DisclosuresNo relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) and wastewater ponds, Part II: Developmental, physiological, morphological and behavioural effects of ingestion of secondary clarified effluent water

Rather than migrating, mallard ducks may choose to overwinter in northern cities on open-water thermal refuges, such as municipal wastewater treatment ponds, which in Edmonton, Canada, stay ≥10°C during frigid winter months. Refuging mallards spend appreciable time daily on these ponds and hydrate using secondary clarified municipal wastewater (SCEW). We aimed to determine if SCEW ingestion affected mallard health. To this end, we gavaged newly hatched mallards (domesticated Pekin strain) over their first month with SCEW, as well as water representing negative and positive controls (municipal tap water, and the primary active ingredient from birth control pills, 17α-ethinyl estradiol (EE2), respectively). The gavage of SCEW did not affect mass of the body, liver, spleen or heart, but was associated with small increases in beak and wing chord length. In the positive control, EE2 gavage caused similar responses, but also increased tarsus and phallus length. The increases likely owed to the stimulatory effects of estrogenic substances on bone and phallus development. For the biotransformation enzyme CYP2H1, gene expression was numerically increased by both SCEW and EE2. In terms of behavior, SCEW and EE2 gavage reduced two infrequently detected behaviours, pecking and resting alone. Our results suggest that SCEW ingestion would be unlikely to cause any overt health effects in adults, but may evoke subtle, covert effects nevertheless.

Reduced snow cover alters root-microbe interactions and decreases nitrification rates in a northern hardwood forest.

Snow cover is projected to decline during the next century in many ecosystems that currently experience a seasonal snowpack. Because snow insulates soils from frigid winter air temperatures, soils are expected to become colder and experience more winter soil freeze-thaw cycles as snow cover continues to decline. Tree roots are adversely affected by snowpack reduction, but whether loss of snow will affect root-microbe interactions remains largely unknown. The objective of this study was to distinguish and attribute direct (e.g., winter snow- and/or soil frost-mediated) vs. indirect (e.g., root-mediated) effects of winter climate change on microbial biomass, the potential activity of microbial exoenzymes, and net N mineralization and nitrification rates. Soil cores were incubated in situ in nylon mesh that either allowed roots to grow into the soil core (2mm pore size) or excluded root ingrowth (50μm pore size) for up to 29months along a natural winter climate gradient at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, NH (USA). Microbial biomass did not differ among ingrowth or exclusion cores. Across sampling dates, the potential activities of cellobiohydrolase, phenol oxidase, and peroxidase, and net N mineralization rates were more strongly related to soil volumetric water content (P<0.05; R2 =0.25-0.46) than to root biomass, snow or soil frost, or winter soil temperature (R2 <0.10). Root ingrowth was positively related to soil frost (P<0.01; R2 =0.28), suggesting that trees compensate for overwinter root mortality caused by soil freezing by re-allocating resources towards root production. At the sites with the deepest snow cover, root ingrowth reduced nitrification rates by 30% (P<0.01), showing that tree roots exert significant influence over nitrification, which declines with reduced snow cover. If soil freezing intensifies over time, then greater compensatory root growth may reduce nitrification rates directly via plant-microbe N competition and indirectly through a negative feedback on soil moisture, resulting in lower N availability to trees in northern hardwood forests.

Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century

In the frigid winter of 1875, federal agents tracked Charles L. Lawrence, an intimate of Boss Tweed and the most promiscuous smuggler in American history. Leading a network spanning four continents and lasting half a decade, Charley smuggled silk worth $60 million into the United States. Since the American Revolution, smuggling had tested the patriotism of the American people. Distrusting foreign goods, Congress instituted high tariffs making the custom house the nation's protector. It waged a war on smuggling, inspecting every traveller for illicitly imported silk, opium, tobacco, sugar, diamonds and art. The Civil War's blockade of the Confederacy heightened the obsession with contraband but smuggling entered its prime during the Gilded Age and only as the United States became a global power did smuggling lose its scurvy romance.

Eyed Bone Needles from a Younger Dryas Paleoindian Component at Tule Lake Rock Shelter, Northern California

AbstractThe geographic and chronological distribution of eyed bone needles in North American Paleoindian sites led Osborn (2014) to propose that these distinctive artifacts date primarily to the Terminal Pleistocene Younger Dryas Cold Event and were essential to making close-fitting clothes needed to survive frigid winter conditions. Our study of a museum collection from Tule Lake Rock Shelter (CA-SIS-218A) in the high Klamath Basin area supports Osborn’s argument. We present nine high-precision accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon assays from a 2.5 m deep cultural sequence, demonstrating that Paleoindians occupied the site primarily during the Younger Dryas. Although only about .5 m3of the Paleoindian deposits at CA-SIS-218A were excavated, fragments of four small bone needles were recovered, three of which contain whole or partial eyes. Two fragments of large mammal cortical bone from the same levels contain remnants of “groove and snap” fractures that may be related to the production of needle blanks. The bone needles from Tule Lake Rock Shelter extend the geographic range of these distinctive Paleoindian artifacts into the high desert region of Northern California.

Mineralogy of saline perennial cold springs on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut, Canada and implications for spring deposits on Mars

In recent years evidence for spring deposits on Mars has been mounting. It seems increasingly likely that groundwater upwelling and surfacing as springs may be responsible for some mineral deposits on Mars’ surface. In order to more easily detect and better understand potential spring deposits on Mars, it is pertinent that we gain a better understanding of the distribution of minerals at cold spring systems on Earth. Here, we report on the detailed mineralogy and distribution of precipitates in crusts and sediments of three non-volcanic perennial saline cold spring systems associated with gypsum/anhydrite diapirs on Axel Heiberg Island, Canada: Wolf spring (WS; also known as Lost Hammer), Colour Peak springs (CP), and Gypsum Hill springs (GH). At these sites permafrost, frigid winter temperatures, and arid atmospheric conditions approximate conditions of present-day, as well as past, Mars. Mineralogy of the three springs is dominated by halite (NaCl), calcite (CaCO3), gypsum (CaSO4·2H2O), thenardite (Na2SO4), mirabilite (Na2SO4·10H2O), and elemental sulfur (S°). Minerals at WS are more sodium-rich than at the other two sites, and water salinity is much higher, suggesting water flows through halite in the subsurface. Mirabilite is likely deposit at WS during winter months and dehydrates to thenardite during summer months. Elemental sulfur is typically associated with gypsum, and may be related to microbial metabolism. Spring sediments are home to thriving microbial communities in winter and summer months, and presumably year round. If spring systems did exist on the surface of Mars, they may represent environments capable of supporting microbial life. It is not known to what extent mineral crusts in cold saline spring systems on Earth preserve evidence of microbial life, or if they ever did on Mars. Therefore, studying terrestrial saline spring mineral deposits such as those on Axel Heiberg Island may help us to better understand cold spring precipitation on Mars and guide us in the search for minerals that may have been precipitated in spring systems and that may contain evidence of life. Additionally, spectral data from Europa indicates the presence of mirabilite. While the depositional environment on Europa differs from Axel Heiberg Island, the springs may still be a good mineralogical analogue, given the precipitation of mirabilite by the upwelling of cold, salty subsurface water, in a cold, semi-arid desert environment.

Forging an English Bohemia

Forging an English Bohemia Tracy C. Davis (bio) The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870. By Jacky Bratton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; pp. 230. 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in late Victorian Britain. By Nicholas Freeman. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011; pp. 248. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter. By Marty Gould. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies. London: Routledge, 2011; pp. 262. Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. By Sadiah Qureshi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011; pp. 392. Misapprehensions that the Victorian period was quaint may arise through erroneous contrasts with our own time. We think of the twenty-first century as an age of rapid global communication, yet in the 1890s a telegraph could travel from Manchester in the north of England to the west coast of Canada then back to Manchester in ninety seconds (Freeman 77–78). That may be quicker than e-mails can travel on a dial-up connection or just as speedy as a text message can be sent and returned, even when cell-phone towers are well-placed. The rapid circulation of same-day news brought an unprecedented level of cohesion within the empire by the mid-Victorian period. In 1854, the transmission of William Russell’s Crimean dispatches to the London Times transformed Britons from patriotic nationalists into anxious war skeptics, demoralized by news of battles commanded by aging, out-of-touch generals, hospitals clogged with diseased (not merely wounded) soldiers, [End Page 287] and near-starvation conditions suffered during an unanticipated frigid winter campaign. When the debacle was brought home by telegraph, the world seemed to shrink. Even Tennyson’s galloping lines “Into the valley of the shadow of death / Rode the six hundred,” published in The Examiner six weeks after the charge of the Light Brigade, memorialized the seeming immediacy of the events and ubiquity of their impact: “When can their glory fade? / O the wild charge they made! / All the world wondered.” Flows of information as well as peoples contributed to a growing sense of access, immediacy, and contact. Entertainment was integral to this effect. Whether through the visits of cricketers, the exhibition of natives from Cape province, or melodramas depicting the Victoria gold rush, the imperial periphery was brought to London, making it the quintessential contact zone. Imperialism was both economic and governmental, but it was also reinforced through the cheap daily press, genteel exhibition halls, and thriving theatres of the West End. Jacky Bratton calls the West End “a portal on to a world of pleasure” (5), replete with the finest in shopping, especially for those in search of the luxury trades, and retreats for the most debauched sensualists and inveterate gamblers, as well as performance venues for the newly emergent middle classes. Others have chronicled the process of making the West End1—building infrastructure, developing the interdependent service industries, and gradually sharpening incipient boundaries around St. James’s plush townhouses in the west, the shopping paradise of Oxford Street in the north, journalists’ offices and law courts in the east, and the traffic-clogged Strand along the southern periphery—but Bratton takes it up anew as a topic in theatre history. The consolidation of the West End between 1840 and 1870 was commensurate with the expansion of telegraphic networks, the building and buttressing of national and metropolitan rail networks, and the emergence of a professional class of artists and managers who kept the pump primed with entertainments. This, she argues, in tandem with the serialization of realist novels, shaped Victorian expectations of the scope of British dominion over self and other, gentility and baser instincts, masculinity and femininity. For Nicholas Freeman, the West End is where Oscar Wilde’s dramas—and trials—played out. Whereas Bratton geographically maps London, first from the perspective of a pleasure-seeking woman then as a journalist, Freeman affectively maps social preoccupations from September 1894 to December 1895, contrasting the excruciating privations of those suffering from a severe winter, influenza, and diphtheria outbreaks with the exhilarating self-destructive spree that marked Wilde’s last months...

“What We Need Right Now Is to Imagine the Real”: Grace Paley Writing against War

Hanover, New Hampshire. Another frigid winter day. I am walking to lunch. The dartmouth college green is covered in snow, and temperatures are dropping. It is January 1991, the day after Operation Desert Storm was launched in the Persian Gulf. “stop the war!!” A few people carrying large and small signs stand on the corner closest to Main Street; you can see their breath as they chant. “US out of Kuwait!” The war is so new that no lectures or teach-ins have been scheduled on campus yet, and I see that the protesters are neither students nor faculty members: they are people, many of them older, from surrounding New Hampshire and Vermont towns. Ahead of the academics, once again, I'm thinking. As on other such occasions, Grace Paley is here, wearing her blue parka, purple wool hat, snow boots, and mittens, holding her sign. The protests will continue every Friday at noon, in snow and ice, until the United States starts moving troops out of the Gulf in early March; I join when I can, but I often have conflicts on campus. Paley drives in from her home in nearby Thetford, Vermont, every time, without fail.

The View from the Slave Quarters

After a speaking engagement at Mount Vernon, George Washington's Virginia estate, in 2007, prominent historian and Washington biographer, John Ferling, was invited to take a candlelight tour of the mansion. He had made many trips to this site in the past, but this time he viewed the house and grounds from a somewhat different perspective. About this cold snowy evening, he recalls, the long walk over from the auditorium to the mansion, we went through the area that had been the slave quarters. I don't mean to suggest that it was an epiphany, but it had a powerful impact on me. While viewing the mansion from a vantage point once held by Washington's long-deceased slaves, Ferling could not help wondering about what it must have been like to have had to live in those squalid quarters in such weather, and to have no hope of ever achieving anything better. He remembers, As we completed our walk through the quarters and rounded a bend, there in the snow, with candles burning in each window, was Washington's huge mansion, looking warm and secure, and inviting.1 In many ways, Scott Casper's Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine is an attempt to flesh out this view from the slave quarters, an imaginary glimpse of which temporarily startled Ferling on that frigid winter night. The main characters in Casper's tale are the African Americans who worked on the estate both as slaves and later as freedpeople for more than a century after Washington's death. The title is an obvious play on Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell's 1998 book, George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America. The Dalzells endeavored to decode the property looking for its essential set of clues, which could enable Washington admirers to discover the real man behind the public figure.2 Casper's quietly subversive allusion to the Dalzell book is an effort to depose Washington of his role as the estate's sole and perpetual proprietor and to remind present-day visitors and interpreters to seek the alternative histories and counter-narratives furtively embedded in America's founding.

A Meeting with Aimé Césaire

A Meeting with Aimé Césaire Phyllisa A. Smith (bio) On January 9, 2008, I had the honor of meeting one of the founding fathers of Negritude, Aimé Césaire. With their joint participation as students of the journal L’Étudiant noir in 1935 and Césaire's publication of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in 1939, Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas launched this pan-African cultural movement. As I walked the hot, downtown streets of Fort-De-France, Martinique in search of the old city hall building, I took a moment to consciously inhale the fresh Caribbean air. It was warm, humid, and flavored with pleasant scents that can only be found a world away from the frigid winter winds of State College, PA. When I found myself standing in front of Martinique’s Hôtel de Ville, I proceeded beyond the newer building to the rear. There, covered in chipped-white paint and free of any air-conditioners, stood the older structure where Aimé Césaire maintained his office—a stance against relocating to the modern city hall building. These feelings reminded me of lines from Césaire’s “Pour saluer le Tiers-Monde” (“Greetings to the Third World”): Ecoutez: Listen: de mon ile lointaine from my distant island de mon ile veilleuse from my watchful island je vous dis Hoo! I call out to you: Ho! At 9:50 am, ten minutes early, I proceeded inside and walked up the winding staircase to the second floor. Césaire’s office was covered with magnificent artwork, including wooden crafts and oil paintings. I was able to tell the receptionist, in halting, heavily accented French that I was there for a ten o’clock meeting. I wrote my full name, occupation, and reason for the visit on a notepad which the receptionist took to a back room. Upon her return, she asked my Martinican fiancé, Thierry, and me to follow her to the back room. My amazing encounter with Aimé Césaire began when the door opened. I saw the small, bright-eyed, handsomely dark Césaire sitting behind a huge oak desk. He greeted us with a friendly smile while his personal assistant asked us to sit next to him. I was amazed! In my mind, I asked her if she was serious, and if she really meant that I could sit beside Césaire. However, I said nothing and excitedly took my place next to him. In the forty-five minutes I spent in the chair beside Aimé Césaire, I never stopped smiling. After learning that I, too, was a poet, he asked me to recite a poem for him. With Thierry translating, Césaire listened attentively to my poem and then we all began conversing. [End Page 987] During the almost hour long meeting, Césaire learned that college students, like myself, could publicly study African American literature, African American history, and black diasporic studies in the classroom. He asked more than once, “Who pays for that?” finding it hard to believe that the predominately white country of America would support (on any level) the study of black literatures. Equally surprising to him was the knowledge that his work is still widely read in academic institutions, forums, and conferences. Upon hearing this, he turned and looked into my eyes. I nodded “Yes,” relying heavily on my non-verbal skills to assert my sincerity. And to my amazement, he said, in English, “You need to learn French.” Laughter saturated the room. There I was pulling together all the coherent French I had, which was not much, and he not only understood English, but spoke it as well. I guess the joke was on me. He proceeded to speak in English, telling me that he learned English as a young boy in school. Césaire said that it was very unfortunate that Americans did not learn other languages and advised me to become fluent in both French and Spanish. That triangle of languages, he explained, would allow me to speak to the majority of the blacks throughout the world. With pleasure, Césaire agreed to autograph my copy...

Using spatial models to establish climatic limiters of plant species’ distributions

Plant species’ climatic range limiters provide clues to reconstruct past climates, restore ecosystems, and manage agricultural systems. However, precise climatic limiters are unknown for many important species, and determining them typically involves long-term autecological studies. A new method presented here automatically and quantitatively infers limiters for a plant species using its documented, digitized distribution. The method uses available and accessible elevation and climate datasets from the US Geological Survey (USGS) and NOAA, along with common off-the-shelf (COTS) geographic information software technology (GIS) to determine which variables in the plant distribution climate space are actually limiting the range by restricting its movement into surrounding territory. The method utilizes precision climate interpolation allowing for independent variables in addition to latitude and longitude, via a software package developed at Australian National University (ANUSPLIN). For this first run, elevation and slope were included as independent variables for interpolating precipitation and temperature surfaces. The model defined limits for five Sonoran Desert plant species: Carnegiea gigantea, Cercidium microphyllum, Encelia farinosa, Ferocactus acanthodes, and Larrea tridentata. Results were tested against environmental factors outlined in autecological studies. Important model-derived climatic constraints to the distribution of C. gigantea include insufficient monsoon precipitation, low winter and monsoon temperatures, and excessive monsoon and fall precipitation. The distribution of C. microphyllum is constrained by cold winter and fall temperatures, excessive spring and summer precipitation and insufficient fall precipitation. E. farinosa is restricted by frigid winter temperatures and too much summer rainfall. Key factors limiting F. acanthodes are cold winter temperatures and inadequate fall and monsoon precipitation. An inordinate amount of precipitation during the summer, monsoon, and fall constrict the range of L. tridentata, along with an abnormally cool summer or monsoon. Results indicate that the method adequately resolves plant range limiters consistent with the autecological record. Future changes to the model are offered to improve results.