Great Meadows Research Articles

Ethnographic Observations of the Wartime Everyday Life of the Population of Southern Ukraine: Post-Expedition Reflections

Based on field materials, an attempt has been made to analyze the state of self-awareness among modern residents of the former centre of freedoms of the Zaporizhzhian Army, which included parts of the present-day Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson regions. The transformations taking place in this socio-cultural space and their influence on self-identification processes are traced from an anthropological perspective. Examples of russian imperial attitude towards the cultural landscape of the southern Naddniprianshchyna in different historical periods are provided. Parallels are drawn with the testimonies of the renowned traveller and ethnographer, Alexander Afanasyev-Chuzhbinsky, who, in the mid‑19th century, exploring the region and noted negative trends regarding the economic practices of the new owners of Zaporizhzhia lands. It is argued that a similar destructive impact on nature and culture was the practice of constructing large dams on the Dnipro River during the Soviet period, which generated a distinct conflict between russian imperial and Ukrainian worldviews. Through the prism of the author’s collected testimonies during expeditions to the places of the Cossack Great Meadow visited by A. Afanasyev-Chuzhbinsky, contemporary events during the russian-Ukrainian war are comprehended. The focus is on the issue of the new genocide and ecocide brought by the occupiers to the south of Ukraine as a result of the explosion of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station. The study reveals family strategies for preserving cultural memory concerning the former landscape and the role of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks in modern processes of self-identification, through which not only the indigenous inhabitants but also participants of new waves of migration mentally assimilated the Zaporizhzhia heritage. Consequently, the military component of the cultural landscape of the Southern Naddniprianshchyna under the new conditions of the russian-Ukrainian war is capable of indirectly influencing the Ukrainian society. All of this calls for active protective measures regarding the cultural heritage and further comprehensive organization of scientific research in various fields of natural and socio-humanitarian sciences in order to preserve the values of the region and the development of Ukraine as a whole.

Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, Massachusetts, USA: A Wetland of Distinction

Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Massachusetts has been recognized as a Wetland of Distinction by the Society of Wetland Scientists. It provides essential habitat for migratory birds as well as for resident wildlife including state endangered birds: least bittern (Ixobrychus exilis), pied-billed grebe (Podilymbus podiceps), upland sandpiper (Bartramia longicauda), American bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus), and two state threatened species grasshopper sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum) and king rail (Rallus elegans). Great Meadows also harbors the largest genetically distinct populations of threatened Blanding’s turtle (Emydoidea blandingii) in the Northeast. The refuge also provides outdoor recreation opportunities (hunting, fishing, and nature observation) and a place for environmental education.

Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, Massachusetts, USA: A Wetland of Distinction

Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is an approximately 100-hectare wetland complex located in suburban eastern Massachusetts, about 26 km northwest of Boston (Figure 1). It is comprised of two complexes that fall within the floodplain of the Sudbury and Concord Rivers. It lies within the Southern New England Coastal Plains and Hills Ecoregion, an area comprised of generally flat areas with a few low hills (Griffith et al. 2009).

The Poetry of a Prison Uprising

The Poetry of a Prison Uprising Elias Rodriques (bio) When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal ed. by Celes Tisdale Duke University Press, 2022, pp. 152 Click for larger view View full resolution Prisoners in Attica on September 10, 1971 (Bettmann/Getty Images) [End Page 100] The story of Attica could be said to begin in 1929, when uprisings at Dannemora and Auburn prisons captivated New York state. Conditions at the prisons (including overcrowding, low wages, and more), rebellions in response to those conditions, and assaults on prisoners by police and armed citizens occasioned a visit from Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. "The time has come," Roosevelt said after visiting Dannemora and nearby Great Meadow Prison, "when New York can no longer tolerate prisons like Dannemora and Auburn." In the wake of the prisoners taking control of their facilities and of governmental outcry, the state did not demolish either prison (both are still operational today). Instead, it built a new facility: Attica. From its opening in 1931, Attica showed signs of what was to come. Fifteen days after the prison began operations, Jesse Conklin, incarcerated for forgery, became the first person to escape. A year and a half later, in December 1932, the first uprising occurred. According to the warden at the time, it was caused in part by "a strong distaste among certain . . . convicts for pick and shovel work." If there was a "distaste" for labor, the events of the following decades suggest that the prisoners resented their work because of the way the prison denigrated its laborers. During that time, according to the critic Mark Nowak, people incarcerated at Attica participated in strikes and protests (such as the "sour milk sit-down strike"), lawsuits (including more than a hundred complaints filed by Black Muslims demanding religious freedom), and even, in 1962, a sit-in coordinated across four New York prisons. Using political protests and labor actions, people incarcerated at Attica fought for better work conditions, for their rights, and for their liberation. They were not the lazy laborers whom the warden suggested deserved the punishment they received; they were workers and people who could and did resist the institution's dehumanization. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that such a politically active group responded forcefully to the killing of the Black Marxist George Jackson, a prisoner at San Quentin, in August 1971. On September 9, 1,300 prisoners took control of Attica. Governing themselves through representative democracy, they drafted a list of demands, which included minimum-wage payment for their forced labor, an end to the censorship of reading materials, and an expansion of the prison's education system. After four days, armed forces stormed the prison, resulting in the deaths of thirty-two prisoners and eleven hostages. Though the assault by the state brought an end to the prisoners' self-governance, [End Page 101] those who survived did see one of their efforts come to fruition in the form of a poetry workshop that started in 1972, led by Celes Tisdale, a professor at SUNY Buffalo. Tisdale's new book, When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal, collects poems by his students in that workshop and his journal entries from the period. Some of the work was originally published in Tisdale's 1974 book Betcha Ain't, but the new volume also includes never-before-published poems, Tisdale's class handouts, and more. When the Smoke Cleared, accordingly, reveals a great deal about survival in the wake of state violence and about the uses of prison education. ______ On the first day of the course (which was funded in part by a nonprofit and in part by the state), Tisdale was not so much concerned with the curriculum as anxious about what would happen. He wrote in his journal, "Many times have I basked in the glory of applause, adulation, recognition as I interpreted the Black poet masters. But, today, I wait in painful/joyful anticipation of meeting those humanity-scarred men who must express themselves or perish from anonymity." In the hours that followed, he met his workshop participants, some of whom he recognized from the neighborhood where he grew up, in nearby Buffalo...

A partnership-based, whole-watershed approach to climate adaptation in Acadia National Park

Author(s): Miller-Rushing, Abraham J.; Henkel, Brian; Cole-Will, Rebecca | Abstract: Changes in climate and associated changes in seasonality, invasive plants and insects, and visitation are stressing ecosystems and infrastructure in Acadia National Park. Over the past five years, park staff and partners have begun taking an interdisciplinary, partnership-based approach to assessing baseline conditions, identifying stresses, developing climate change scenarios, and restoring the ecological and cultural integrity and resilience of whole watersheds. The approach contrasts with past resource management in which managers frequently tackled problems with minimal coordination between disciplines (e.g., water, wildlife, cultural resources, and maintenance) and locations. The result has been a series of projects that have begun to measurably improve the health of one of the park’s most visited and iconic watersheds: the Cromwell Brook watershed, which includes Sieur de Monts (Acadia began in 1916 as Sieur de Monts National Monument) and the Great Meadow, and whose namesake waterway flows through the gateway town of Bar Harbor. Projects (inside and out of the park) have included rehabilitating a historic spring pool, replacing undersized culverts with open-bottom bridges, removing a poorly sited septic system, removing invasive plants, restoring native wetland, establishing monitoring to assess changes in watershed health, and working with the town and other stakeholders to plan future projects that would further improve the health of Great Meadow and downstream areas in Bar Harbor. The combination of planning; monitoring; restoring healthy, functioning ecological communities; and minimizing stresses from human infrastructure and visitation offer the best chance of main- taining Acadia National Park for the enjoyment of future generations.

John McGahern and the Big House Trope in the 1980s

John McGahern and the Big House Trope in the 1980s Yen-Chi Wu (bio) In a memorable scene in John McGahern’s screenplay The Rockingham Shoot, we see the nationalist teacher Reilly beating up his students with terrifying ferocity. On the surface, he punishes the kids for skipping class, but what really incurs his fury is that some students went to help at the annual shooting held in the Anglo-Irish Rockingham Estate. Dismissing the students for willingly skivvying and acting like peasants in the service of “our overloads,” Reilly hits the kids so hard that the cane he uses for beating gets shredded.1 By the end of the corporal punishment, Reilly—a fervent Irish nationalist and ambitious local politician—is “dishevelled, out of breath and sexually aroused.”2 Linking post-independence nationalism with unwarranted violence and perverted sexual desire is a hallmark in McGahern’s early fictions. Reilly’s abusive behavior is reminiscent of the veteran-patriarch figures in McGahern’s previous novels, such as the fiery-tempered sergeant Reegan in The Barracks (1963) and the domineering father Mahoney in The Dark (1965). But McGahern’s employment of the Big House trope in The Rockingham Shoot separates it from his earlier work. In fact, the Anglo-Irish Big House is a prominent trope in McGahern’s mid-career works, often revealing his sympathy toward the Big House residents and their marginalized status in the nationalist climate. To that end, the screenplay is indicative of McGahern’s creative outputs in the 1980s when he discovered a well-suited marriage between his social critique of conservative nationalism and the revisionist reiteration of the Big House trope. However, McGahern’s turn to revisionism and the Anglo-Irish tradition in the politically turbulent 1980s also raises questions concerning the intersections between historical debates, sectarian politics, and literary production. In the 1980s, except for the second edition of The Leavetaking, McGahern did not publish a new novel. Instead, he wrote The Rockingham Shoot, which was first broadcast on BBC Two Northern Ireland in 1987. His third short [End Page 27] story collection, High Ground, came out in 1985. The 1980s was also when he prepared Amongst Women, which was published in 1990. A noticeable thread running through his works of this period is McGahern’s interest in the Big House trope. In addition to The Rockingham Shoot, three stories in High Ground—“Oldfashioned,” “Eddie Mac,” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood”—feature Anglo-Irish Big Houses.3 Amongst Women could be read as a Catholic version of the Big House, where the rural homestead Great Meadow is an isolated estate and the Morans its aristocratic residents. While Amongst Women adopts the Anglo-Irish literary tradition elusively, McGahern’s early Big House stories often contain historical allusions and draw inspiration from his childhood memory. Some critics thus rely on biographical materials and McGahern’s admiration for Anglo-Irish writers to account for his preoccupation with the Anglo-Irish literary tradition.4 Others attend to the historical and political significance embodied in the Anglo-Irish Big House to complicate the biographical reading.5 While these discussions are admirable pursuits that shed new light on McGahern’s oeuvre, they tend to treat his Big House stories as unproblematic revisionist critique of conservative nationalism. This treatment misses the subtle differences among the stories. It also downplays the significance of the 1980s, when revisionism was under revision itself and a strand of historical revisionism that colluded with modernization ideology suffered from increasing scrutiny. While some of McGahern’s Big House stories are aligned with revisionism, others—especially Amongst Women— employ the traditionally Anglo-Irish literary tradition more creatively. The ways in which McGahern modified his use of the Big House trope deserve more attention in order to fully understand how he responded to contemporary debates on revisionism. McGahern’s Kirkwood stories—“Eddie Mac” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood”—share revisionist ideologies, and they are open to the criticism [End Page 28] voiced by postcolonial scholars. But in “Oldfashioned” and Amongst Women, McGahern is able to render the Big House trope more creatively to interrogate the throes of Ireland’s socioeconomic modernization, instigated by Seán Lemass’s...

Textual Portraits

Textual Portraits Leslie Nichols (bio) In the series Textual Portraits, I am interested in visualizing the historical context of women’s lives and conveying a sense of social heritage. This work starts with an image of a contemporary woman, often a scholar, artist, or student, who has made an impression on me. I select a classic social text that has relevance for the woman’s life. With image and text prepared, I begin typing on a manual typewriter. I have a small collection of typewriters, but my studio workhorse is an Underwood with an extended carriage, named Gwen after the British painter Gwen John. The titles of these works reference my source materials. For example, Lois (Woolf 1929) is a portrait of artist Lois Dodd created with Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own. I met Lois during a studio visit at Vermont Studio Center. I chose this text to create her image because, in 1952, she was a founding member of one the first artist-run cooperative galleries in New York. She created a public space for artists to share their work. A Room of One’s Own was written only two years after Lois’s birth, and therefore partially describes the time period in which she was born. By interlocking the historic words and the contemporary image, I hope to convey the context of time and place. I create portraits with text to emphasize the weight of words and to allude to the idea that our lives are the creations of our minds and social constructs. Click for larger view View full resolution Leslie Nichols’s Underwood typewriter with Pia (Butler 1988) in progress [End Page 114] Click for larger view View full resolution JESSICA (IRIGARAY 1977) Excerpts from Luce Irigaray’s essay “The Sex Which Is Not One” are layered to create a portrait of Jessica Kreutter, a contemporary ceramic artist based in Houston. 9.5″ × 9.5″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 115] Click for larger view View full resolution JENNIFER (MAATHAI N. D.) This image portrays Jennifer Sheffield, an educator and educational consultant passionate about fostering creativity and innovation in students. The image is typed with the story of the hummingbird often told by the environmental political activist and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. 12″ × 12″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 116] Click for larger view View full resolution EBONY (WELLS-BARNETT 1900) Portrait of artist and educator Ebony Marshmann, typed with words from Ida B. Wells’s speech “Lynch Law in America,” delivered in 1900. 12″ × 12″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 117] Click for larger view View full resolution LOIS (WOOLF 1929) Portrait of New York artist Lois Dodd typed with words from Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own. 12″ × 12″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 118] Click for larger view View full resolution SIOBHAN (GRIMKÉ 1837) Phrases such as “My Dear Sister” from Sarah Grimké’s “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes” make the background for this portrait of New York-based artist Siobhan Liddell. 9.5″ × 9.5″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 119] Click for larger view View full resolution TIFFANY (TRUTH 1851) Words delivered by abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth in her 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” are legible in the background of this image depicting art student Tiffany Jackson. 9.5″ × 9.5″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 120] Leslie Nichols leslie nichols uses found and original text to create visual imagery. A recent NEA Studio Residency Grant from Women’s Studio Workshop supported experiments in letterpress printing. Her work has been recognized with additional grants from the Elizabeth Green-shields Foundation, AAUW, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Great Meadows Foundation. Her studio is in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Copyright © 2017 University of North Carolina Wilmington

Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Modernist

MATTHEW NICKEL Misericordia University Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Modernist THE PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY IS TO REASSESS THE WORK OF ELIZABETH Madox Roberts and to identify her unique place as a specifically modernist writer. Critics and scholars of American literature have often been preoccupied with how Roberts fits under the rubrics of southern literature, southern women’s literature, and agrarian/regional literature. While these categories have helped to align Roberts within the wide spectrum of American literature, they have prevented scholarly scrutiny of her work by those outside the purview of southern literary studies. By reevaluating Roberts within the context of modernism, specifically through her unique style that encompasses both voice and landscape, and in particular with the same structural device of the classic epic central to James Joyce and Ezra Pound, my aim is to illuminate the manifestation of modernist techniques in her writing and to broaden our understanding of Roberts’s place in the American literary canon. Elizabeth Madox Roberts was born in 1881 in Perryville, Kentucky, attended the University of Chicago from 1917 to 1921, lived her life primarily in Springfield, Kentucky, and wrote seven novels, two books of short stories, and three volumes of poetry. She died in 1941. In the mid-twentiethcentury,threecriticalvolumesanalyzedRoberts’slifeand writing, and after several decades, a resurgence of Roberts scholarship emerged in conjunction with the founding of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society.1 Though she was a lifelong poet, she is primarily known now for her novels, specifically The Time of Man (1926), My Heart and My Flesh (1927), and The Great Meadow (1930). Critical reception of her work in Roberts’s own time was overwhelmingly positive. The Time 1 The first three volumes dedicated to Roberts are Harry Modean Campbell and Ruel E. Foster, Elizabeth Madox Roberts: American Novelist (1956); Earl H. Rovit, Herald to Chaos (1960); and Frederick P. W. McDowell, Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1963). The Roberts hiatus lasted then roughly from the late 1960s until the late 1990s. Numerous scholars have continued to make new discoveries and connections. Of note: William H. Slavick, who has worked diligently to promote Roberts, her poetry and unpublished material; H. R. Stoneback, who first wrote about Roberts in his dissertation at Vanderbilt in the 1960s and who has been the force behind the Roberts renascence for more than two decades in dozens of essays, keynotes, lectures, and in his role as Honorary President of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society; and Jane Eblen Keller, at work on the official Roberts biography, forthcoming (2019) from the University Press of Kentucky. 414 Matthew Nickel of Man in 1926 was a Book-of-the-Month Club novel, a position that Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises did not earn in that same year. Sherwood Anderson found The Time of Man “Very clear, fine and altogether charming.” “I am humble before it,” he added to his blurb printed on the dust jacket of the second edition of the novel. Robert Penn Warren claimed that “By 1930 . . . it was impossible to discuss American fiction without reference to Elizabeth Madox Roberts” (xxi). Her international status was supported early on by Ford Madox Ford, who saw Roberts as one of the greatest writers of the 1920s generation. He often cited her, along with Ernest Hemingway, as a true modernist and ranked her with James Joyce, declaring that “for me Miss Roberts stands almost supremely alone” (286).2 In his critical essay on Roberts, Ford claims that between The Time of Man and My Heart and My Flesh, a whole quality had been added to literature itself—as if literature itself had a new purpose given to it, as if what literature could do had been extended in its scope, as if the number of emotions that literature could convey had been added to, and as if the permanent change that every book must work upon you had been given a new region in which to exercise itself. (“Elizabeth Madox Roberts” 285) ReadersunfamiliarwithRobertsmightquestionFord’sstatementsand his critical positioning of her as a modernist. The most natural place to consider the validity of his claims is with The Time of Man, a coming-of-age story about Ellen Chesser, whose life is defined and...

Introduction: Social Minds in Factual and Fictional Narration

Introduction:Social Minds in Factual and Fictional Narration Maximilian Alders (bio) Maggie flew over from London on the morning of the Day. Mona and Sheila met her at Dublin Airport and the three sisters drove to Great Meadow in Mona’s car. They did not hurry. With the years they had drawn closer. Apart, they could be breathtakingly sharp on the others’ shortcomings but together their individual selves gathered into something very close to a single presence. (McGahern 2) Narratives detail the multifarious fortunes of individuals entangled in social scenarios. The emphasis in scholarly expeditions has overwhelmingly been on the first part of this equation, single protagonists. The end of the passage above, however, highlights the formation of a social mind: “ . . . together their individual selves gathered into something very close to a single presence.” Such collective experience, as represented in textual narrative, is the overarching object of study for this special issue. My co-editor, Eva von Contzen, and I start from the premise that the techniques for representing the agents of shared experience—social minds, meaning groups of various sizes, shapes, and modalities—constitute intra-narrative phenomena which, despite [End Page 113] their ubiquity in factual and fictional narratives, and despite some notable attention from narrative theorists, still remain underexplored. We believe that the essays in this issue help to remedy that situation, even as they highlight the need for further investigations of the representation of collective experience. Our project has been inspired by Alan Palmer’s recent study, Social Minds in the Novel, which figures as an important dialogue partner in most of the essays assembled here. Elaborating the main claim of his book, Palmer posits the vital importance of social minds: An important part of the social mind is our capacity for intermental thought. Such thinking is joint, group, shared, or collective, as opposed to intramental, or individual or private thought. It is also known as socially distributed, situated, or extended cognition, and also as intersubjectivity. Intermental thought is a crucially important component of fictional narrative because, just as in real life, where much of our thinking is done in groups, much of the mental functioning that occurs in novels is done by large organizations, small groups, work colleagues, friends, families, couples, and other intermental units. (41; emphasis original) Palmer’s stress in this section is on forms of intermental thought. His previous work, the 2004 Fictional Minds, makes it clear, however, that for him “externalist” manifestations, such as physical action and body language, equally count as expressions— and revelations—of consciousness. Palmer endorses a “thought-action-continuum” which emphasizes the ties and transitions between “internalist” cognition and “externalist” action. In Social Minds in the Novel he homes in on the consequences of recognizing that cognition and action can be (portrayed as) “joint, group, shared, or collective . . .” (41). Unsurprisingly, social minds occur in variegated formations. In order to capture this diversity, Palmer furthermore establishes a tentative spectrum to differentiate numerous kinds and agents of intermental thought as represented in novels: intermental encounters; small intermental units; medium-sized intermental units; large intermental units; intermental minds (46–48). He notes, however, that “the simplicity of this typology hardly begins to do justice to the complexity and range of the intermental units to be found in novels” (48). The full phenomenal range spanned by the term social minds can be further elucidated by summoning the crucial binary dynamics between agency and reception. Social minds actively carry out experiences, but they also passively undergo them. Palmer comprehends social minds as full-fledged experiential agents, meaning collective characters in a literal rather than a merely metaphorical sense (“Intermental Thought” 427). Two characters making love passionately and persistently, for instance, or a conference crowd sharing a basic understanding of their subject and gathering for scholarly exchange—these are cases of social minds in action. Both cases likewise involve the respective unit’s collective perception. The term “social mind” refers to the entity capable of collective experience in the first place, whether agential or receptive. Palmer’s work on social minds has triggered diverse reactions from narrative scholars, with the best collection of responses in Style 45.2 (2011). Palmer himself [End Page 114...

Poetry, the Sleeping King, and Creative Doubt

Poetry, the Sleeping King, and Creative Doubt Jeff Gundy “Great doubt: great awakening. Little doubt: little awakening. No doubt: no awakening.” ‐Zen Buddhist saying “Doubt… gets a lot done.” ‐Jennifer Hecht, Doubt: A History The (Possibly) Sleeping King As the old tales have it, a mighty king sleeps somewhere beneath the Untersberg, the massive mountain whose northern peak looms over Salzburg and whose long ridge runs south into Germany. The Grimm brothers report that Emperor Karl der Grosse—Charlemagne, in the history books I read in school—sits in a trance somewhere within that massive mountain, whose northern peak looms over Salzburg and whose long ridge trails many miles south into Germany. The great king bears a “keen and profound look,” “friendly and sociable toward all of his subjects who walk back and forth with him across a beautiful meadow. No one knows why he is there and what he intends to do. These remain mysteries of God” (Aschliman). But perhaps, they say, it is not Karl der Grosse at all, but the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa, who drowned crossing a river in his armor in 1190 during his third crusade. His ravens circle the mountain and his beard has grown into the table, or until his ravens wake him, and when he awakens he will not wander peaceably in the meadow but bring the apocalypse. He did have an appetite for shedding blood in the name of God, after all. Who is under the mountain? Is he dwelling easily there, with no need to return, or gathering strength for a savage awakening? Could he really bring a kingdom of justice and equality, or would his emergence just lead to more misery and destruction? Should we go looking for him? Would the pleasure of knowing be worth the chance that we might find only horror under the mountain? What things are best not known? And what happens if we add “about God” to that question? Like most good stories, this one seizes us with drama, teases us with hope, and ends in mystery. Doubt is built into it, inseparable—if we knew it were true, our lives would have to change. But while it is possible, however unlikely, we can allow ourselves the pleasure and promise that lie in its being merely potential. Freed by our doubts about its “reality,” we can read it as metaphor, as allegory, as pageant, as whatever we will. Think about the origin of the story. How did it come about? Someone, or ones, thinking about how dim and awful their days were, no doubt, dreaming of how they might be otherwise. Someone asking for a story—a child perhaps, or one of those gathered at the hearth, or in the tavern. Doubting the official story that all is well and will be well, if only we trust and obey. What if the great king were still alive? What if he waits under the mountain? What does he do there? Will he return? Once the first question is asked, that great meadow under the mountain opens out, filled with possibility. Of course that potential remains only as long as it remains imagined rather than actual. I propose to examine and even to celebrate doubt—not as a failing or a weakness but as a creative, positive, and hopeful practice, one born out of the obvious gaps and lapses of our knowledge and wisdom, the everyday imperfections of our lives, and a necessary belief that revelation is not yet complete. Yet I hasten to add that all doubt is not created equal. Enervating cynicism, mere disbelief, easy scorn, mindless relativism; all these are of no use. No, the doubt I have in mind is more closely allied to a flexible skepticism (sometimes cheerful, sometimes desperate), to brisk refusal of horned dilemmas and totalitarian claims, and to a humility both modest and bold. To question, often if not always, is the first step toward making something new. This seems strange, wrong, incomplete… what if, instead or also… ? The lesser sorts of doubt are big, these days, with conservatives doubting science and (it seems) any information that threatens their dogmas, with reports of declining church attendance in...

Лускокрилі (Lepidoptera), які охороняються в Національному природному парку «Великий Луг»

Досліджено лускокрилих фауни національного природного парку «Великий Луг». Серед комплексу Lepidoptera 27 видів занесено до охоронних списків різного рівня: 11 видів – до списку МСОП, 17 – до Червоної книги України, 8 – до Європейського Червоного списку тварин і рослин, що перебувають під загрозою зникнення у світовому масштабі, 6 – до Червоної книги «Європейських денних метеликів». У комплексі видів, що охороняються на території НПП, представлені види із 5 надродин, 11 родин. Територія НПП «Великий Луг» повністю розташована в долині р. Дніпро, що дає змогу запровадити охоронний режим у широкому спектрі екосистем (степові, лучні, лісові, болотяні, острівні тощо). Саме строкатість умов існування дозволила тут сформуватись цікавому зоогеографічному комплексу, представленому 5 основними групами (палеарктична – 26%, понтоказахська – 26%, середземноморська – 22%, євросибірська – 15%, європейська – 11%). Цікавою виявилась екологічна структура: ксеротермофіли-1 – 46%, мезофіли-1 – 18%, ксеротермофіли-2 – 15%, мезофіли-2 – 11%, гігрофіли – 4%, убіквісти – 4%. Аналіз сучасних загроз існуванню лускокрилих у межах НПП показав наявність таких найважливіших факторів: абразія берегів Каховського водосховища, перевипас свійської худоби, рекреаційне навантаження та штучне лісорозведення.

Locating the Pre-Clearance Forest Border at Fort Necessity, Great Meadows, Pennsylvania, Using Pollen Analysis

The forest border position was critical in the brief 1754 siege of George Washington’s Fort Necessity at Great Meadows, Pennsylvania. Pollen analysis of core transects across the meadow and up the adjacent hillsides provided evidence of the location of the pre-clearance forest border to within a 20 ft. interval on seven of eight core transects and within 40 ft. on the eighth. This could not have been accomplished with the lake and bog palynology characteristic of palaeoecological palynology. Reconstruction of the historical period vegetation of specific plots requires investigation of the soil-pollen spectra of the target location itself. Pollen percolates downward in soil profiles, allowing the analyst to recognize the pollen spectra of the target time period, and published empirical studies of horizontal predeposition pollen transport assist the investigator in defining vegetation changes across space.

A Potpourri of Praise

A Potpourri of Praise Earl Rovit (bio) Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Essays of Reassessment and Reclamation edited by H. R. Stoneback and Steven Florczyk (Wind Publications, 2008. 348 pages. $20 pb) Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Essays of Discovery and Recovery edited by H. R. Stoneback, Nicole Camastra, and Steven Florczyk (Quincy & Harrod Press & The Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society, 2008. 184 pages. $20 pb) These two collections consist of a scattering of letters, notes, and unpublished fiction culled from the Elizabeth Roberts papers; articles of biographical and historical information; essays of exegesis; and other miscellaneous items honoring Eliza-beth Madox Roberts (1881–1941). Both books are largely the product of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society—a group which under the enthusiasm of Harry Stoneback and William Slavick has been nurturing the ember of Roberts’s reputation and striving mightily to fan it into a larger flame. Categorized by conventional literary history as a minor Kentucky regionalist, Roberts is remembered, if at all, for two of her seven novels—The Time of Man (1926) and The Great Meadow (1929), a handful of poems which are often categorized as “children’s poetry,” and several short stories. A literary late bloomer, Roberts entered the University of Chicago in 1917 at the age of thirty-six, joining a kind of aesthetic Bruderschaft that hovered on the fringes of Harriet [End Page lxii] Monroe’s Poetry and that included Glenway Wescott, Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, and Monroe Wheeler. The Time of Man, published in the same year as The Sun Also Rises, was a Literary Guild selection, and The Great Meadow was made into a reasonably successful movie. In the thirties Roberts’s health—seemingly always fragile—deteriorated, as did her reputation. Several of the essays argue that Roberts was an exemplary modernist (à la Pound); some try to include her as a member of the southern Agrarians; some argue for her influence on Robert Penn Warren and Wendell Berry; one writer finds her work paralleling Milton’s Paradise Lost; and several provide close readings of some of her short stories. Curiously enough there is almost no attention focused on what was her most ambitious, albeit seriously flawed, novel, He Sent Forth a Raven (1935). Essentially the two collections present a potpourri of praise with a tincture of resentment at the failure to recognize the value of Roberts’s contribution to American letters. Literary reputation—the formation and ongoing rearrangement of the canon—is ultimately something of a mystery. While we are likely to assert and perhaps believe that aesthetic excellence—like truth—will eventually “out” and prevail, the grounds for such belief are shaky. Survivability and prominence in the literary marketplace are determined by so many variable factors—institutional reading lists, vacillating ideological concerns, topical relevance, what we might call the “authority of influence,” seismic shifts in taste, cultural whimsy—that it is inevitable for some worthy writers to be overlooked. I have wondered, for example, why a feminist movement that has embraced Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton should have bypassed Roberts and Ellen Glasgow. In the end readers harbor their own subjective preferences and passions, but persuading others to join them tends to be a futile pursuit. Or, to put it another way, it’s impossible to legislate or coerce genuine love. Earl Rovit Earl Rovit, a novelist, critic, and scholar, has published essays (especially reminiscences) and reviews in the SR for many years. He lives in Manhattan. Copyright © 2009 University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, 37383

Property price effects of a national wildlife refuge: Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Massachusetts

The amenity value of proximity to a National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in central Middlesex County, Massachusetts is estimated and compared to the values of proximity to five other open space types, including agricultural land, cemeteries, conservation land, golf courses, and sport/recreation parks. A hedonic model is used to explore the relationships among residential property values and proximity to these distinct types of open space. Open space characteristics in the empirical model include measures of continuous distance from each property to the nearest open space of each type and an index describing the diversity of open space types within neighborhoods of 100 and 1000 meters around a home. Results reveal that a property located 100 meters closer to the NWR than a neighboring property has a price premium of $984. Further, proximity to the NWR is valued more than proximity to agricultural land, cemeteries, and conservation land. No significant differences are found among the values of proximity to the NWR, golf courses, and sport/recreation parks.

The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord

Book Review| January 01 2007 The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. Brian Donahue. Joseph Cullon Joseph Cullon Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Agricultural History (2007) 81 (1): 133–135. https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-81.1.133 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Joseph Cullon; The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. Agricultural History 1 January 2007; 81 (1): 133–135. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-81.1.133 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAgricultural History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2007 Agricultural History Society2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord

The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord

The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord

The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord

The Great Meadow: Sustainable Husbandry in Colonial Concord

The Great Meadow: Sustainable Husbandry in Colonial Concord

The Great Meadow: farmers and the land in Colonial Concord

The farmers of colonial New England have been widely accused of farming extensively, neglecting manure, wearing out their land, and moving on. But did they? And if so, when and why? Brian Donahue offers an innovative, accessible, and authoritative history of the early farming practices of Concord, Massachusetts, and challenges the long-standing notion that colonial husbandry degraded the land. In fact, he argues, the Concord community of farmers achieved a remarkably successful and sustainable system of local production. Donahue describes in precise detail - using among other tools an innovative historical geographical information system (GIS) method - how land was settled and how mixed husbandry was developed in Concord. By reconstructing several farm neighbourhoods and following them through many generations, he reveals the care with which farmers managed the land, soil, and water. He concludes that ecological degradation came to Concord only later, when nineteenth-century economic and social forces undercut the environmental balance that earlier colonial farmers had nurtured.

What There Is

from the foliage, spangling my bare arms and overalls. In Great Meadows once, I was encased at dusk in mayflies. Tiny life, wings perfectly diaphanous, alive merely a day and a night. It seemed a tease, much like you, this blueprint without mouth parts, digestive tract, a fillip of what I've known of pleasure, and proof enough of neither justice nor mercy nor any other mythy thing I've ever wanted proof of. Even something loathsome as pity. As though I'd learned an intimate and terrible fact about a dear friend, life