Leland Stanford Research Articles

A Good Corporate Citizen: The Southern Pacific Railroad

The historical literature on railroads in America is massive, ranging from individual corporate histories to studies on state and federal regulation. Yet surprisingly, the nation's first big business has not been studied exhaustively. A topic that has been largely overlooked involves the impact of a carrier (or carriers) on a particular region or locality. Fortunately, Richard J. Orsi, professor emeritus of history at California State University, Hayward, has helped to fill this scholarly void, producing this ambitious work on the role played by the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) on the American West, especially California. In the process of examining such matters as land settlement, water, agriculture and conservation, he effectively challenges the age-old notion that the SP was the evil octopus of Frank Norris literary fame, namely that the railroad repeatedly committed acts of corporate arrogance and abuse. Although the company did not always perform in the public interest, the firm was much more a builder than a destroyer of California and the West. The overall philosophy of SP executives was straightforward: management that sought to unlock the region's enormous potential, creating bountiful harvests of agricultural, mineral, and timber products and profits for individuals and society alike. The story of the SP and its relationship to its far-flung service territory is complex. From the 1850s until the 1930s, the company expanded considerably, evolving from several shortline railroads into a mighty system, the result of takeovers (system building) and construction. The SP benefited directly from an amazingly successful initial core of investors-promoters-managers, the long-remembered Big Four: Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis Potter Huntington and Leland Stanford. These California visionaries made possible the Central Pacific, the western link of the nation's first transcontinental railroad, and they also built more trackage, bought additional lines and turned the Central Pacific into a vital part of a much larger concern, the SP.

The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, a California Colossus

Journal Article The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, A California Colossus Get access The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, A California Colossus. Two Volume Set. By Tutorow Norman E.. (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 2004. lviii + 1146 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $125.00.) Michael Magliari Michael Magliari California State University, Chico Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 36, Issue 4, Winter 2005, Pages 538–539, https://doi.org/10.2307/25443273 Published: 01 November 2005

The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, a California Colossus

The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, a California Colossus

Iron Horses: Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Industrialised Eye

Iron Horses: Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Industrialised Eye

Review: THE GOVERNOR: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, A California Colossus, by Norman E. Tutorow

Review: <i>THE GOVERNOR: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, A California Colossus</i>, by Norman E. Tutorow

The Governor: the life and legacy of Leland Stanford, a California colossus

The Governor: the life and legacy of Leland Stanford, a California colossus

Review: The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, by Norman E. Tutorow

Review: <i>The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford</i>, by Norman E. Tutorow

Jack Winsor Hansen: The Sibyl Sanderson Story: Requiem for a Diva

Pompton Plains, N.J.: Amadeus Press, 2005 503 pages, $29.95 Judy Garland. Janis Joplin. Marilyn Monroe. Dylan Thomas. Bobby Fischer. Jim Morrison. Brian Wilson. Robert Downey, Jr. Jimi Hendrix. Michael Rabin. These legendary musicians, actors, writers, and chess champions are enthroned in the sad pantheon of people who achieve great fame and fortune only to crash and burn, sometimes almost overnight, their downward trajectories often made steeper and even fatal by drugs and alcohol. If they haven’t done so already, the cruel gods of burnout and failure need to dust off a chair in that pantheon for Sibyl Sanderson (1864–1903). As told in Jack Winsor Hansen’s “authorized biography,” the colorfully piteous story of the American soprano for whom Jules Massenet wrote Esclarmonde and Thaïs and revised Manon is worthy of Jacqueline Susann, a trashy tabloid, Jerry Springer, or the Hollywood Babylon books. Like the title character in a Greek tragedy, Sanderson fell from a great height. Her father was the chief justice of the California Supreme Court and made a fortune in the railroad business; he stood close to his good friend, the California governor turned transcontinental railroad mogul Leland Stanford, when the famous driving of a golden spike linked America’s east and west at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. A dazzlingly beautiful but wild debutante who was expelled from her boarding school when she was caught jumping over a fence to meet a boy, Sanderson almost married William Randolph Hearst, and their love for each other survived for decades despite his parents’ marriage ban and his subsequent union with a more proper mate.

The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford (review)

Reviewed by: The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford Edward D. Harris Jr. Robert W. P. Cutler . The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. xi + 161 pp. Ill. $29.95 (0-8047-4793-8). What joy it must have been for Bob Cutler, a distinguished professor emeritus of neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine, to unearth the writings of those who lived with Jane Stanford, as well as those who were in contact with her at, and after, her death. This is superb investigative reporting, especially since it was accomplished almost one hundred years after the events. Particularly impressive in this small volume (108 pages of text and 52 more of careful notes and appendices) is the way Cutler describes the characters in this tragedy so well that one senses that he knew them—such as Bertha Berner (Mrs. Stanford's private secretary of twenty-one years) and Dr. F. Howard Humphries (a highly qualified physician who attended Mrs. Stanford in her last moments of life on Oahu). Why was this account not spoken clearly at the time? One very impersonal reason is that communication between Hawaii and Palo Alto in 1905 was much more primitive and slow than that between Mars and Houston is today. Evidence found in Hawaii might become no more than a rumor when weeks needed to pass between its sending and its receipt in San Francisco. After Leland Stanford Jr. had died of typhoid in Europe, Leland Stanford, the bereft father, elected to found a university in his son's memory. Two years after the first class was admitted to Leland Stanford Junior University in 1891, Mr. Stanford died. Jane Stanford became the "sole trustee" until 1903 when she relinquished control, only to be elected president of the Board of Trustees. Just prior to his death, Stanford and his wife had chosen the first president of the new university: David Starr Jordan, then president of the University of Indiana. Until Mrs. Stanford's death fourteen years later, it was observed that she and Jordan disagreed about many issues relevant to the operations of the University. Cutler takes us to their relationship dispassionately and clearly. The overture to Jane Stanford's demise occurred in San Francisco on 14 January 1905, six weeks before she died: that evening, she drank a glass from a bottle of Poland Spring water; it was bitter, and she vomited. The residuum in the bottle was analyzed and found to contain "rodent poison" with strychnine and other impurities. Depressed and horrified that someone had tried to kill her, Jane soon set sail with a retinue to Hawaii. On 28 February, after a picnic not far from the Moana Hotel on Waikiki where the entourage was housed, she felt a need for sodium bicarbonate. She had brought a bottle from San Francisco, and had not previously used it; shortly after taking a spoonful of the bicarbonate, she died in tetanic spasm and hyperextension of the joints and spine, a pathognomonic clinical picture of strychnine poisoning. A Dr. Day described "the position of the feet; the ankle was in extreme extension, that is, the toes thrown down so that the arch of the foot was very much exaggerated and drawn inward toward the middle line" (p. 13). The NaHCO3 was noted to have a bitter taste. At the autopsy, no abnormalities of the internal organs (especially the heart) were found, and the empty cardiac ventricles with cyanotic blood in the atria indicated that the heart [End Page 907] was pumping at the time of respiratory arrest. Sure enough, there was pure strychnine (without impurities) detected amid the bicarbonate of soda. All excellent research raises more questions than the data answer. Such is the case here. Who tried to poison Jane Stanford in San Francisco? Did the same person(s) succeed in Hawaii? Why did David Starr Jordan, after sailing to Hawaii to retrieve her body for the mausoleum in Palo Alto, declare clearly and often that Jane Stanford had died of natural causes (a "ruptured coronary aneurysm?") while disparaging the well-qualified physicians who watched over her death and performed a meticulous autopsy? Bob Cutler has woven the...

New science at the ultrafast frontier

IN 1872 EADWEARD Muybridge used a series of 24 cameras to photograph a racehorse owned by the then governor of California Leland Stanford. Legend has it that Stanford, who stopped at nothing to improve the performance of his horses, wanted to win a bet that all of the horse's feet left the ground during a gallop. As his horse raced past and triggered Muy-bridge's cameras, Stanford was proved right and the forerunner of modern stroboscopes was born.

Review Essay: "Something You Don't Expect": The Recordings of Bert Williams

Williams: Middle Years, 1910-1918. Archeophone, 2002. $17.75 CD. Williams: His Final Releases, 1919-1922. Archeophone, 2001. $17.75 CD. Everybody, it seems, has an opinion on Williams. Unfortunately, Williams is known today more by his reputation than his repertoire. Whether praised as a comic genius or vilified as a burnt cork darky stereotype, Williams suffers from a tragic lack of reissue projects has kept his recorded legacy nearly a secret from current generations. reissue of his complete extant works as they are being released on Archeophone label, however, makes Williams' fascinating, highly entertaining, historically important work available for re-evaluation and demonstrates just how talented, important, and influential a figure he was, a figure even Booker T. Washington acknowledged had done more for African Americans than Washington himself had done: has smiled his into people's hearts. I have been obliged to fight my way (Charters 6). We wear mask, Paul Laurence Dunbar began his famous poem of same name, that grins and lies, and in a particularly poignant this was true of one of great comedians of twentieth century, Egbert Austin Bert Williams. Born in 1874, light-skinned Williams, of Danish and West Indian extraction, from a well-to-do background in Antigua, found himself relegated to lower socioeconomic rungs in this country with rest of his darker-skinned brethren when he and his family moved to San Francisco in 1885. When he discovered his talent as a mimic at a young age, he sought work in shows, but ultimately wound up performing on streets and in clubs on Barbary Coast after his graduation from high school and brief attendance at Leland Stanford University. That is, until a felicitous sequence of events paired him with George Walker and set two on a bumpy road toward stardom in touring shows of day. Although two initially scorned grotesque blackface minstrel stereotypes had been in force for half a century, they eventually capitulated to demands for lying, thieving, shiftless, superstitious, gullible, ignorant, lazy, or dandified and comically vain images fed feelings of white superiority as they appeared on stage. While other shows advertised presence of blackface coons, Williams and Walker advertised themselves as The Two Real Coons, doing their best to please predominantly white crowds while lending an air of dignity to figures draped in shameful indignities and shuffling under a shock of artificial kinky hair. They were a huge hit in such shows as Clorindy (where they popularized cakewalk), A Lucky Coon, Bandanna Land, and In Dahomey. Williams later went on to star with Ziegfeld Follies after George Walker fell ill. All while, he lamented his lot as an educated, upper class African American longing for mainstream respectability would not be offered to him. He was quoted as saying in his understated there was nothing disgraceful about being colored, but he often found it inconvenient--in America (Charters 12). James Weldon Johnson would use quote in his passing novel of 1912, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (155). Johnson also commented in chapter seven of novel Here was a man who made people laugh at size of his mouth, while he carried in his heart a burning ambition to be a tragedian; and so after all he did play a part in a tragedy (105-06), particularly since, as Johnson recalled in Along This Way, his actual demeanor was entirely unrecognizable as shambling, shuffling 'darkey' he impersonated on stage (Jasen 48). It was a quote could well be applied to Williams, who was called by fellow Ziegfeld performer W. C. Fields the funniest man I ever saw, and saddest man I ever knew (Debus, His Final Releases). While seen as a natural at what he did, ironically Williams in fact had to learn dialect he mastered for his audience since his own background and diction placed him far from Southern stereotype. …

David Starr Jordan on the Dysgenic Effects of Dysfunctional Culture

David Starr Jordan, Chancellor of Stanford University, typified the positive eugenicists who were writing at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. In the light of modern genetics it is reasonable to say that he accurately identified the importance of reproductive selection in determining the destiny of any breeding population, and drew attention to the fact that while culture came into existence as a factor which helped promote the survival of the population which possessed it, culture can also be dysfunctional and exert dysgenic pressures on those who adhere to value systems which counter to nature's law of survival of the fittest. Key Words: Evolution, culture, selection, dysgenics, intelligence, war, Catholicism, celibacy, primogeniture One of the first to scholars to stress the dysgenic aspects of modern warfare was David Starr Jordan (1851-1931), a biologist who served as President of Indiana University (1875-1892), president of Stanford University (then known as Leland Stanford Jr., University) (1891-1913) and later as Chancellor of the same university (1913-1916). Jordan's approach to eugenics was characteristic of the mainstream position at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. He emphasized positive eugenics, favoring an increase in the fertility rate of the fitter members of society rather than attempts to eliminate inferior genes from the gene pool. His positive eugenics concentrates specifically on nations as breeding units. And he uses the term to refer to both human subspecies and to the human species as a whole. In fact, without prevarication he uses to refer to any phylogenetic continuum. He also saw every generation as a genetic bottleneck in the course of which selection, either eugenic or dysgenic, determines which genes will be passed on to future generations. Thus, in The Blood of the Nation (1903)1, Jordan commences his test with the assertion that: In this paper I shall set forth two propositions: the one selfevident; the other not apparent at first sight, but equally demonstrable. The of a nation determines its history. This is the first proposition. The second is: the history of a nation determines its The present character of a nation is made by its past history. Those who are alive to-day are the resultants of the stream of heredity as modified by the vicissitudes through which the nation has passed. This stream flows in the veins of those who survive. Those who die without descendants can not color the stream of heredity. It must take its traits from the actual parentage. Some of today's readers might quibble at Jordan's use of the term blood to refer to heredity, but it must be understood that this is an ancient symbolism, dating back to classical Greece and Rome, and Jordan takes care to explain that: The word blood in this sense is figurative only, an expression formed to cover the qualities of heredity. Such traits, as the phrase goes, run in the blood. In the earlier philosophy it was held that was the actual physical vehicle of heredity, that the traits bequeathed from sire to son as the characteristics of families or races ran literally in the literal We know now that this is not the case. We know that the actual in the actual veins plays no part in heredity, that the transfusion of means no more than the transposition of food, and that the physical basis of the phenomena of inheritance is found in the structure of the germ cell and its contained germ-plasm. But the old word well serves our purposes. The which is thicker than water is the symbol of unity. In this sense the of the people concerned is at once the cause and the result of the deeds recorded in their history. This last sentence, in which Jordan refers to as the symbol of race unity, is characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon eugenicists of his period who were inspired by a deep-rooted sense of loyalty to their own bloodline, and sought to ensure a better future for their descendants. …

Harnessing heredity in Gilded Age America: middle class mores and industrial breeding in a cultural context.

By investigating the practices and beliefs of Gilded Age trotting horse breeders, this article demonstrates the relationship between industrial economic development and the growth of genetic reasoning in the United States. As most historians of biology already know, E. H. Harriman, Leland Stanford, and John D. Rockefeller not only transformed American business practice, they donated heavily to institutions that promoted eugenic research programs. What is not widely known, however, is that these same industrialists were accomplished trotting horse breeders with well-developed theories of inheritance. The article that follows uses these theories to place the rise of eugenic and genetic research into the context of the rapid development of industry in post Civil War America. Specifically, the study identifies how functional utility as defined through the narrow concerns of industrial practices were privileged over form and pedigree in American horse breeding. Even more importantly, this article suggests that the continuity established between the practices of the industrial philanthropists and the scientific research institutions that they established occurred at two levels: through the values privileged by the development of the dynamics of a mass society and through the tools used to process the large amounts of information necessary to understand breeding patterns in slow breeding organisms.

The Millionaire's Palace: Leland Stanford's Commission for Pottier &amp; Stymus in San Francisco

During 1875 and 1876, Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Railroad, built in San Francisco one of the country's largest mansions. It was the first West Coast commission, and one of the most ambitious projects, for New York decorating firm Pottier & Stymus. The extent of the firm's contribution, however, has largely gone unrecognized. In Pottier & Stymus's hands, the mansion became a pioneering achievement in the artistic decoration of houses. Configured to recall a seventeenth-century palace, the rooms of the house presented a comprehensive iconographic scheme in which furnishings and decorations combined with the architecture itself, presenting visitors with a message about Stanford's business accomplishments and reinforcing the practical fact that the mansion served more as a public space than a private home.

Algebraic Semantics in Language and Philosophy, Godehard Link, 1997, Standford, CSLI Publications, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Leland Stanford Junior University, 432 p.

Algebraic Semantics in Language and Philosophy, Godehard Link, 1997, Standford, CSLI Publications, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Leland Stanford Junior University, 432 p.. Un article de la revue Revue québécoise de linguistique (Volume 27, numéro 1, 1999, p. 15-125) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Reflections on Informed Consent: 40 Years After its Birth

Dr. Jay Katz a physician and law professor at Yale University invites fellow physicians to set aside their dislike of informed consent and consider both its origins and possible future in the field of medicine. He notes that informed consent with its initial pronouncements on patient roles in medical decision- making surfaced in 1957 in US Supreme Court case entitled Salgo vs. Leland Stanford Jr. University Board of Trustees. The notion was expanded by Natanson vs. Kline in 1960 and by Cantenbury vs. Spence in 1972. Informed consent was not designed to serve as a medical blueprint for interactions between physicians and patients says Katz but rather to push physicians to articulate medical standards of disclosure that would better conform to basic legal principles. However the medical profession did not do this and the task of fashioning a doctrine responsive to both the realities of medical practice and the requirements of law remains to be done. Thus Katz advocates a reexamination of the unitary scope of the informed-consent doctrine in light of the diversity of medical practices. He argues that: disclosures may have to be limited to the most essential parts; that the fullest disclosures should be enforced and shared decision making should be an absolute requirement for acute disorders; that the pace of disclosure may have to be slower for conditions in which the prognosis is dire and a fatal outcome is likely; and informed consent could be dispensed with if the patient agrees for relatively minor time-limited disorders.

Informing for consent: Concepts and methods.

AbstractConsent doctrine seeks to protect individual autonomy and self-determination of potential subjects or patients. It was created and mandated in reaction to perceived abuses in patient/subject and healthcare professional relationships. In part because of the speed in which these occurred, the doctrine was created as an imperative in the absence of solid theoretical and empirical bases on how people acquire and use information. The Informing for Consent framework is presented so that the mandates of can be more fully examined. The implications of this framework and the need for empirical study are discussed with reference to the following areas: when children become competent to self-consent and for which areas in decision making; when competence to self-consent changes during poor physical or mental health; when people become unable to consent; and when protections such as surrogate decision makers should be instituted or removed. The implications to individual professionals and to regulatory bodies are also discussed.Historical Overview of ConsentThe doctrine of seeks to protect the individual autonomy and self-determination of potential subjects or patients (President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1981). While informed consent grew out of an early legal opinion (Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hosp. 211 N.Y. 125, 129 105 N.E. 92, 1914), the modern concept originated with the Nuremberg Code following the atrocities of World War II and became part of the Helsinki agreement of 1964 (see Beecher, 1970; Dalglish, 1976; Levine, 1981; the actual phrase informed consent was first coined in 1957 with Salgo v. Leland Stanford Jr. Univ. Bd. of Trustees, 154 Cal App. 2d 560, 317 P.2d 170, 1957). The intent of the doctrine is to provide a format and a process for communication with people who will be undergoing medical treatment or participating in research. The necessity for formalizing this type of communication grew out of historical abuses of the doctor-patient/researcher-subject relationships both in medicine (see Beecher, 1970) and psychology (e.g., Milgram, 1974; Holroyd & Brodsky, 1977), including the arbitrary and nonconsensual sterilization of persons with mental retardation (Hayman, 1990), infection of persons with mental retardation with hepatitis at Willowbrook (Ervin, 1974), withholding of treatment for syphilis at Tuskegee (Brandt, 1978), nonconsensual observation of people in the Tearoom Trade study (Humphreys, 1970), and deception in the Milgram study (Dalglish, 1976; Milgram, 1974; Levine, 1981). Without such formalization, the type and amount of information and the manner of its presentation varied greatly (Beecher, 1966; Cooke, Tannenbaum & Gray, 1978; Otto, Ogloff & Small, 1991; President's Commission, 1982b). Incomplete or deceptive information has been disclosed to patients and subjects. In other cases no efforts were made to obtain (Barber, 1979; Cooke, Tannenbaum & Gray, 1978; Dalglish, 1976; Ogloff & Otto, 1991; President's Commission, 1981; 1982; Tymchuk & Thompson, 1986). Some practitioners and researchers continue to see as an infringement upon their freedom to practice or to perform research (Dalglish, 1976; President's Commission, 1981; Tymchuk & Thompson, 1986). Others believe that subjects or patients do not wish to know more or will become overwhelmed by the information they receive as part of the process (Dalglish, 1976). However, these perceptions are inaccurate for many groups such as elderly people (e.g., Dalglish, 1976; Lankton, Batchelder & Ominsky, 1977; Ouslander, Tymchuk & Krynski, 1993; Strull, Lo & Charles, 1986; Tymchuk, Ouslander & Rader, 1986).In psychology, the concept of is the same for both research and treatment participation in Canada and the U.S. (Meisel & Roth, 1983; Rozovsky & Rozovsky, 1990; Sinclair, 1993). …

5607842 Use of trna genes to stabilize the inheritance of unstable plasmids in populations of growing cells : Cohen Stanley N; Vuml ogtli Martin Portola Valley, CA, United States Assigned to The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

5607842 Use of trna genes to stabilize the inheritance of unstable plasmids in populations of growing cells : Cohen Stanley N; Vuml ogtli Martin Portola Valley, CA, United States Assigned to The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

5563035 Estrogen receptor regulation and its uses : Weigel Ronald J Woodside, CA, United States Assigned to The Board of Trustees of The Leland Stanford Junior University

5563035 Estrogen receptor regulation and its uses : Weigel Ronald J Woodside, CA, United States Assigned to The Board of Trustees of The Leland Stanford Junior University

5593676 Method of killing B cells using antibodies which bind CDIM : Bhat Neelima M; Bieber Marcia M; Teng Nelson N H Cupertino, CA, United States Assigned to The Leland Stanford Junior University

5593676 Method of killing B cells using antibodies which bind CDIM : Bhat Neelima M; Bieber Marcia M; Teng Nelson N H Cupertino, CA, United States Assigned to The Leland Stanford Junior University