Lighthouse Keepers Research Articles

THE LIGHTHOUSE MOVIE: DOMINATION, SUBJUGATION, AND EXPLOITATION

Power relations is a compelling and complex social issue that has been present throughout human history. It is just as prominent in today’s day and age as in every period of human life; it is also represented in movies. The Lighthouse movie, written and directed by Robert Eggars (2019), depicts the life of two lighthouse keepers, a supervisor and his assistant. They get stranded on a remote island off the coast of New England in the 1890s when a massive storm hits the island. Left with only alcohol as their emergency food supply, the power balance between supervisor and assistant worsens. This article is a film study; the film was analyzed by examining the narrative and cinematography elements. The discussion consults Michel Foucault’s theory (1982) regarding power relations, how power works, the forms they take, and how it is imposed. The finding shows that the supervisor exercises power through domination, subjugation, and exploitation of the assistant. As the setting of the place, the lighthouse has a symbolic meaning of power; as it navigates the ships on the sea, the lighthouse keeper rules what happens both inside and outside his house.

Merlerium: Mermaids, mythology, desire and madness in Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse (2019)

Robert Eggers’ 2019 film The Lighthouse provides an idiosyncratic representation of the mermaid as a Jungian anima in a film that revolves around the homoerotic tension between two lighthouse keepers on a remote, windswept island. While the mermaid theme is essentially a minor aspect of the film, juxtaposed with other mythological motifs, it is significant for the intensity of passions it catalyses in one of the film’s two male leads. Analysing the film, its script and statements of directorial intent, this article first discusses aspects of the interaction of the masculine characters and their relation to mythic figures, before going on to discuss the role and design of the mermaid, and of the sex scene she appears in. Additional consideration is given to the role of music and sound design in building nuance and thematic intensity within the film.

The Depths by Nicole Lesperance

Reviewed by: The Depths by Nicole Lesperance Wesley Jacques Lesperance, Nicole The Depths. Razorbill, 2022 [368p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593465363 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593465370 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 Seventeen-year-old Addie is forced to come along on her mother's honeymoon to a small Caribbean island where Addie's new stepdad, her mom, and a family of lighthouse keepers are the only other living people around. The setting does little to free Addie from memories of her almost fatal freediving accident, and if anything, the island seems supernaturally reactive to her presence. Billy, the youngest son of the lighthouse keeper, confirms as much; his own near-death experience seems to be at the root of how he and now Addie are able to see the ghosts of the island. Investigating island mysteries by day with fifteen-year-old Billy and by night with someone Addie believes to be Billy's older, more reclusive (read: hotter) brother easily makes for an eerie, if predictable, love triangle. Also foreseeable is the brother's obvious villainy, as he ensures that he and Addie are never seen in the light of day and coerces her into a number of questionable decisions. The island's supernatural threats pale in comparison to the novel's potentially triggering representation of grooming and predation, as readers learn of the bad guy's link to centuries of tragic deaths of young women who, like Addie, were deceived and seduced. With the help of a pair of previously wronged ghost sisters, Addie and Billy are able to foil the villain's plans with minimal fuss, bringing a tidy ending to a serviceably spooky story. [End Page 54] Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island: The Agatha Biddle Band of 1870 by Theresa L. Weller

Reviewed by: The Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island: The Agatha Biddle Band of 1870 by Theresa L. Weller David A. Nichols Theresa L. Weller, The Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island: The Agatha Biddle Band of 1870. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021. xx, 223 pp. $32.95 (paper). The Biddle Band, named for their ogimaa Agatha Biddle, was a majority female group who applied for annuity payments under the Anishinaabe land cession treaties of 1836 and 1855. Their names appear on the annuity roll of 1870, as updated a generation later by Horace Durant. This document became the starting point for Weller's deep dive into the band's genealogical history. While biologically unrelated to one another, members of the Biddle Band shared several features in common. Most were Catholic, or at least married and baptized their children according to the church's rites. (Sometimes, given the irregular availability of priests, the couple's marriage rites and the baptism of their first children took place at the same time.) Many had Francophone names, inherited from French voyageur ancestors or recommended [End Page 119] by French-speaking godparents. Nearly all were women who had married White or Métis husbands, in harmony with Indigenous exogamous marriage rules. And most went on to make the band a superlatively fertile group of ancestors, whose members bore a total of 470 children (seven apiece, on average) over the course of the nineteenth century. In researching the band's genealogy, Weller has recovered hundreds of names and birth and death dates. Often that is all the available records will provide. The Biddle Band's members and early descendants were not wealthy people, and only a minority left a larger record of their lives. These were fascinating lives all the same. Some husbands and brothers had been fur traders. Others worked as lighthouse keepers, town officials, or boat captains. One, Charles Logan, was a basket maker who plied the tourist trade at Saint Ignace. Several served as soldiers in the Civil War and one was old enough to have been a drummer boy in the War of 1812. The Biddle Band's female members were preoccupied, for a good part of their lives, with childbearing and childrearing. A few worked as herbalists and midwives or as teachers—like Martha Tanner, daughter of famed White captive John Tanner—or, in Agatha Biddle's case, as the band's provisioner and civil chief. For genealogists researching family history in the Great Lakes region, Founding Mothers of Mackinac Island will serve as an indispensable reference. For students of Native American history, Weller's capsule biographies of band members will provide starting points for deeper research into the region's ongoing Indigenous history: how women and men held on to traditional roles as healers, fishermen, traders, parents, and chiefs, while pursuing new opportunities and robustly growing their population. Theresa Weller's deeply researched book, and the scholarship one hopes it will inspire, will remind us that long after the supposed end of the "frontier era," the Midwest remained Indian Country. [End Page 120] David A. Nichols Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press

To the lighthouse

Mr Grinling is probably one of the most famous lighthouse keepers in the world, brought to life by Ronda Armitage in her series of classic children's books. There are lots of ways to use them to explore peoples' occupations and life-styles.

Was Ida Lewis a Womanly, or a Manly, Woman? The Ambivalence of a Woman Lighthouse Keeper’s Gender Identity Between Masculinity and Femininity

It is obvious that Darling could be mentioned as a most brave woman in doing the heavy labor involved in a lighthouse keeping and even saving shipwrecked people, but it is more particularly worth noting that Ida Lewis’s efforts saved the lives of at least eighteen people over a period of twenty-five years. This paper focuses on Ida Lewis, the most famous woman lighthouse keeper in the United States, and analyzes the gender identity of women lighthouse keepers. most studies that discuss women lighthouse keepers point out that, behind women’s being appointed as official lighthouse keepers in the nineteenth-century United States, the labor of lighthouse keepers could essentially share common features with the form of femininity that was emphasized in the Victorian era. However, when analyzing from the viewpoint of gender ideology, I cannot help raising questions regarding women lighthouse keepers as examples of mere femininity simply because the labor forms were analogous with household labor. When the labors of lighthouse keeping would be actually recognized as a manly role, can we make a judgement that women lighthouse keepers all endowed feminine traits even when performing the heavy tasks of lighthouse keeping? Moreover, lifesaving, being separable from lighthouse keeping, has been traditionally considered to be “masculine behavior.” The aim of this paper is to point out that “femininity” and “masculinity” have been artificially generated, and, as such, are entirely unrelated to an individual’s characteristics and abilities. In that light, to deconstruct ideologies of “femininity” and “masculinity,” I have chosen to focus on women who have committed to continuing to perform their duties by analyzing the life of Ida Lewis as the most famous woman lighthouse keeper. This has been accomplished by referring to the United States Department of the Interior National Park Service: National Register of Historic Places Inventory for 1897 and some articles about Ida Lewis from 1869 to 1911 as primary sources. Ida Lewis applies simultaneously as among those women who, under the patriarchy, should be confined to the “women’s sphere.” Furthermore, according to social gender ideology, the life of Ms. Lewis does not necessarily correspond to an individual’s abilities and character, as she was able to display the same ability as a man and perform “men’s work” in the women’s sphere.

I Am a Translator, a Transmitter of Culture

I Am a Translator, a Transmitter of Culture Anna Becchi (bio) Some time ago, an article in an Italian newspaper dealing with translation started affirming that "in the rank of solitary professions … translators share the first place with lighthouse keepers." It is true. Someone who translates stays for hours in front of a PC, writing and thinking in apparent loneliness; however, while lighthouse keepers have only the wide blue sea in front of their eyes, translators have plenty of characters that fill their rooms and drag them into a myriad of different situations and countries. Up until now, my characters have taken me to New York, North Carolina, Poland, Austria, and Germany; to the Dutch dunes; to Limburg; and even onto the moon! I wound up in a boxer-ring, on top of a diving board, in the middle of a football field, and on a sailing ship, and I discovered a lot of places and customs that I did not know earlier. In conclusion, every book I translated until now has made me travel and learn something new. And in my opinion, the readers, too, should get this opportunity. But too often publishers and translators of children's books prefer to domesticate the stories written by foreign authors. "The tailoring of source texts to the perceived experience and requirements of the child reader in the target culture is a constant factor across the history of translation for children," Gillian Lathey points out (196). And, in fact, one of the main problems that translators of children's literature have to face is to decide between domestication and foreignization. In the existing theoretical studies, there are in this respect two radically different approaches: one theory propagates a maximal approximation of the target text to the source text, so that the translation has to be faithful, and the other suggests to take the target audience into consideration and adapt the text to the new context giving more liberty to the translator. I am convinced of the fact that translators have a crucial role as cultural mediators. They are the ones who can preserve the local peculiarities that characterize the foreign books and show them to the readers, enriching their lives. But I also think that sometimes a compromise has to be achieved. Of course, we can agree with Maria Nikolajeva when she writes that "a decision on an appropriate translation strategy must naturally be taken in each individual case" (287), but in my opinion, we should avoid to apply the so called ethnocentric model with increasing frequency. It is up to the translators to keep the cultural markers of the original texts in the translation, and it is up to the educators to encourage the young readers to familiarize with foreign cultures suggesting—for example, that they should find information about what they read in other books or on the Internet. Today you can really travel all over the world through google-maps and YouTube while staying behind your desk. And then, perhaps, one day the readers will feel the desire of packing their bags to go on a real journey to the places that have already become familiar to them through literature. In a nutshell, the essential aspect in deciding if a text should be domesticated or not is, for me, the age of the target group. If the text is written for first-grade readers and its characters have funny names with particular meanings as well as relating puns, then even a localization of the text—which means a changing of the setting to a more familiar one—may be the most appropriate choice. It is quite evident for me that if you have to translate the names of the [End Page 62] characters, the setting of the book cannot remain in the foreign country because there would be a lack of authenticity that even a young audience would notice. Otherwise, someone could feel the same astonishment as Umberto Eco when he was a young boy in the 1950s and watched synchronized Hollywood films set in America in which, curiously, all the characters had Italian names (177). In any case, if you localize a novel, you have to pay great...

Precursors of Women Seafarers in the Western Maritime History: Seafaring Heroines as Navigators and Lighthouse Keepers

Precursors of Women Seafarers in the Western Maritime History: Seafaring Heroines as Navigators and Lighthouse Keepers

Rising: Perspectives of Change on the North Carolina Coast

RisingPerspectives of Change on the North Carolina Coast Baxter Miller (bio), Ryan Stancil (bio), and Barbara Garrity-Blake (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Five Little Birds, Hatteras Inlet, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Dare County. A shoal off the southernmost point of Hatteras Island. Just as quickly as a sandbar emerges, it can recede, grow, or disappear. Subject to the forces of wind, salt, and sun, the birds are a reminder of the isolation and dynamism of North Carolina's barrier island system and the generations of adaptive and resilient "bankers" who have lived, worked, worshiped, played, grieved, and celebrated on this ribbon of sand they call home. [End Page 101] Over sixty years ago, my grandfather was offered a sizable piece of waterfront property at the northern entrance of Buxton Village on Hatteras Island for $3,000 by his aunt, the famed village postmistress, Maude White. At the time, the parcel—no more than a half-mile wide from sound to sea—was like other parts of what is now the wild and natural National Park. Today, travelers are welcomed to the village, which is home to the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, on either side by several locally owned beach motels and businesses. Now assessed at over a million dollars, the land, like so many other parts of the island, is where tourists jockey for the biggest rental homes closest to the beach, where developers scalp for empty parcels on the edge of the sea, where hundreds of thousands flock to recreate on the very sand in question, and where fishermen maneuver for the best spot to soak their bait. But in the 1950s, as family lore goes, my grandfather gave the land offer no more than a few seconds' thought, making known his sensible wish to stay high and dry in Buxton Woods. Uttering, "No fool would ever build on the beach," he deemed it a poor investment. Last fall, after Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm, battered the Gulf, and with Hurricane Maria, the strongest one on record, barreling toward the United States, I stood on that section of beach, where a handful of shrimp boats often trawl in the distance. In the last year, those boats have been joined by a lonely dredge and hundreds of yards of rusty pipe tasked with channeling millions of cubic yards of sand to the shore—a re-nourishment effort to widen the beach and, in turn, hopefully save the adjacent road, motels, and homes from being washed into the sea. I wondered what my grandfather would have thought. A proud descendant of Hatteras lifesaving surfmen, lighthouse keepers, and commercial fishermen, I've clung tightly to stories of my heritage, passed down to me by my father. Although I wasn't technically raised on Hatteras, these are the stories that help make sense of who I am—my relationship with the environment and my sense of place. ________ Advances in technology, engineering, and construction, along with commercial and economic realizations, have shifted our adaptive ideology on our barrier islands and across coastal North Carolina. Today, we build higher dunes and more jetties. We harden our shorelines with seawalls. We dredge our inlets and re-nourish [End Page 102] Click for larger view View full resolution Impressions of Re-nourishment, Buxton, Dare County. Before 2018, high tide would regularly bring the sea up to the base of the motels at the northern entrance to Buxton Village. Storm events would usher water underneath the structures and across the road. In the summer of 2017, beach nourishment began on a 2.9-mile section of shoreline that, once complete, will stretch from the old lighthouse site to north of the village. At an estimated cost of $22.1 million, the project will relocate approximately 2.6 million cubic yards of sand to the shore. [End Page 103] our eroded beaches. We build our houses higher off the ground and ever closer to the water. We pave over the land underneath us and employ dikes to drain agricultural fields and protect them from saltwater. We attempt to regulate our fisheries in the face of warming water and changing migration patterns that extend...

Study for a Flat Earth

Study for a Flat Earth Charlie Bondhus (bio) The Alien Cathouse is a Nevada brothelwhere the girls dress in glowing latex, big black contactlenses, pulling sad-eyed men with jawslike donkeys. One grumbled lines from Hart Crane—"A jest fallsfrom the speechless caravan"—and I thought about the planet and my needto invent proverbs—"Blessed are the lighthouse keepers, for theirs is the beam that cutsthe flat earth," or "you would hate it in the desert where the saguaro's yellowflowers bloom only at night." Nevada makes me think of streptomycin,and when I left Brooklyn all I remembered was a bookon a shelf and orange tabbies on a fire escape.The title was Study for a Flat Earth and I wanted very much to take itwith me but the voice of God—common to deserts—spoke of "the nightsky's indigenous smell" and how virtue in its highest form resembles "lightscircling a UFO's perimeter." Later, [End Page 46] when she removed her maskI saw she was neither beautiful nor plain:the kind of lady who, if pressed, I would have to describe as"A most handsome woman." [End Page 47] Charlie Bondhus Charlie Bondhus's second poetry book, All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), won the 2014 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Missouri Review, Columbia Journal, and The Bellevue Literary Review. He's the poetry editor at The Good Men Project (goodmenproject.com). Copyright © 2017 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

BLACK MIRROR: DESTROYING THE IDYLL OF HAPPY CHILDHOOD, OR THE SOCIUM TODAY IN THE MILLENIALS’ POETRY

This essay is a look into the black mirror of lost - or inversed - myths. It’s about the society of disconnected people; about new generation of creative persons - the Millenials - who are trying to find their own place in the world by different ways, and the major of them is Poetry.Stefania Danilova is the youngest member of Writers’ Union of Russia. She is polylingual and polycultural poet, one of the “Lighthouse keepers” of modern literature as the heroes of her essay - millenials, children with “older hearts”.

Wolontariat w Polsce. Przykład projektu Polska Cyfrowa Równych Szans

Artykuł jest raportem z badania prowadzonego wśród Latarników – wolontariuszy projektu Polska Cyfrowa Równych Szans, osób odpowiedzialnych za wprowadzenie osób w wieku 50+ w cyfrowy świat. Wyniki badań pokazują ogólny rys cech społeczno-demograficznych Latarników, ich wcześniejsze doświadczenia z wolontariatem, specyfikę pracy w projekcie PCRS oraz odbiór społeczny wolontariuszy. Poszczególne dane prezentowane są na tle wyników badań ogólnopolskich, a także europejskiego i polskiego kontekstu funkcjonowania wolontariatu. Wyniki pokazują dość duże zróżnicowanie definiowania samego wolontariatu, a co za tym idzie ‒ różne motywacje włączania się w tego typu działania, a także różne poziomy satysfakcji z bycia wolontariuszem. Porównanie odpowiedzi Latarników z wynikami ogólnopolskich badań wolontariuszy wskazuje na możliwe podobieństwa i różnice między nimi, a zaprezentowane typologie wskazują kluczowe punkty podziału tej heterogenicznej grupy, jaką są wolontariusze.

A Century of Ocean Warming on Florida Keys Coral Reefs: Historic In Situ Observations

There is strong evidence that global climate change over the last several decades has caused shifts in species distributions, species extinctions, and alterations in the functioning of ecosystems. However, because of high variability on short (i.e., diurnal, seasonal, and annual) timescales as well as the recency of a comprehensive instrumental record, it is difficult to detect or provide evidence for long-term, site-specific trends in ocean temperature. Here we analyze five in situ datasets from Florida Keys coral reef habitats, including historic measurements taken by lighthouse keepers, to provide three independent lines of evidence supporting approximately 0.8 °C of warming in sea surface temperature (SST) over the last century. Results indicate that the warming observed in the records between 1878 and 2012 can be fully accounted for by the warming observed in recent decades (from 1975 to 2007), documented using in situ thermographs on a mid-shore patch reef. The magnitude of warming revealed here is similar to that found in other SST datasets from the region and to that observed in global mean surface temperature. The geologic context and significance of recent ocean warming to coral growth and population dynamics are discussed, as is the future prognosis for the Florida reef tract.

Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives by Natalie A. Naylor

Book Reviews 125 and direct action tactics from Italy to the United States, to their children, who would embrace labor reformism. The Red Scare profoundly changed the Italian American experience as many learned to cling to white racial privilege and the entitlement it carried as a means to gain economic stability and legitimacy as Americans. This evolution is a particularly interesting narrative in understanding the rise of American conservatism and raises a couple of compelling questions: Where did this radical spirit go with the rise of the Cold War? Did the grandchildren of these immigrants join the New Left later in the century? But these are not questions Guglielmo attempts to address rather she highlights the role Italian women had in American radical labor activism. She argues that the value of this history comes not only from understanding immigrant women’s radicalism but that cross-racial, class, and ethnic organizing was once a virtue among American workers and the recent abandonment of it has doomed the entire American working class. Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives. By Natalie A. Naylor. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2012, 192 pages, $19.99 Paper. Reviewed by Christine Neejer, Michigan State University Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives could have easily been a dry account of elite women’s activities. Natalie A. Naylor avoids such a pitfall and instead assembles an engaging collection of biographies that encourage us to rethink Long Island women’s connections to local and national historical narratives. Naylor positions women at the center of her local framework, allowing readers to see significant historical events, such as the American War for Independence and the fight for women’s suffrage, through the perspective of Long Island women. Naylor also uses her work to challenge male-normative practices of local history. She argues that historians of Long Island have downplayed or ignored women, assuming men’s experiences alone tell the region’s story. Naylor does not aim to discount the significance of men’s experiences, but 126 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY rather encourage readers to rethink what counts as significant and to recognize the value in studying the ordinary. Naylor uses a variety of sources, including newspapers and local histories , to engage in two projects. First, she brings the stories of famous women into the history of Long Island. She devotes chapters on the First Ladies, wealthy philanthropists, and business innovators who had ties to the area or used their influence to improve it. Naylor pays particular attention to the arts, highlighting women novelists, painters, and architects who were influenced by and worked on Long Island. Secondly, she unearths the lives of women who never achieved fame or significant attention from historians. Naylor’s work shines in this respect. She uses the lives of everyday women to illustrate how Long Island women were not resigned to the domestic sphere but actively engaged in community life throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. They established schools, administered medical care, coordinated women’s clubs and activist campaigns, and hosted meaningful community events among many other activities. The book makes a particularly striking historiographical addition to the study of women in science and technology. Naylor discusses lesser known women such as Elizabeth Shoemaker, the first in a line of Long Island women who served as lighthouse keepers starting in the 1820s, and Joan Druett, one of many nineteenth-century ‘sister sailors’ who assisted in navigation and medical care on whaling and merchant ships. One of the most striking historiographical additions of the book is Naylor’s discussion of Long Island women’s role in the history of flight. With few mountains or trees, the Hempstead Plains were an ideal training ground for this new technology. Naylor explores the history of Long Island women pilots in depth, including Harriet Quimby, who in 1911 became the first woman to earn a pilot’s license and Amelia Earhart’s famous Ninety-Nines organization . Naylor expands this analysis to World War II with her engaging discussion of women such as Jackie Cochran, one of 1,100 women who served as test pilots. Naylor represents a...

Book Review: Women Lighthouse Keepers of Lake Michigan: Heroic Tales of Courage and Resourcefulness

Book Review: Women Lighthouse Keepers of Lake Michigan: Heroic Tales of Courage and Resourcefulness

Erie Land Lighthouse: A Microcosm of Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes Maritime History

The Erie Land Lighthouse was a visible link in the early eighteenth century western frontier trade network. Lighting the harbor entrance to Erie, Pennsylvania, from 1818 until the close of the century, the Erie Land Lighthouse contributed to the emergence of Erie as a vital shipping port connecting the Great Lakes to expanding inland markets. Constructed in 1818, the Erie Land Lighthouse (formerly, Presque Isle Lighthouse) was the first of a series of lighthouses built by the United States to aid navigation and promote shipping on the Great Lakes. As with its contemporaries, the original 1818 structure was replaced in 1858 by a taller lighthouse and a more elaborate keeper's residence. Structural flaws required the 1858 lighthouse to be replaced in 1867 by a third, which still stands today. The record of the Erie Land Lighthouse mirrors the history of similar facilities and processes across the Great Lakes. Unlike other locations, however, the Erie, Pennsylvania, site is archaeologically unique due to the presence of remnants of all phases of its construction and use history. Archaeological investigation of the first two sequent lighthouse structures on the site recovered a range of artifacts reflecting the government ownership of the lighthouse property, the site's advantageous location in a commercial hub, the effects of local and regional competition, and the day-to-day life of the lighthouse keepers. Details of the archaeological excavations at the Erie Land Lighthouse are provided and the site is placed in the larger context of lighthouse construction and use on the Great Lakes.

Cancer of the gastrointestinal tract and exposure to asbestos in drinking water among lighthouse keepers (Norway)

Previous studies of predominantly ecological design have indicated a possible elevation of gastrointestinal cancer risk in population groups exposed to drinking water contaminated with asbestos from natural sources or asbestos-cement containing water pipes. In the present study the possible effect of ingested asbestos fibers on gastrointestinal cancer risk was investigated in an occupational group where a proportion of the employees was exposed to asbestos in their drinking water. A cohort of 726 lighthouse keepers first employed between 1917 and 1967 were followed up for cancer incidence from 1960 to 2002. The standardized incidence ratio (SIR) was calculated as the number of new cancer cases divided by the expected number based on five-year age and sex specific incidence rates in the general rural population of Norway. A 95% confidence interval (CI) was calculated for all SIR values assuming a Poisson distribution of the cancer cases. Risk of stomach cancer was elevated in the whole cohort (SIR: 1.6, CI: 1.0-2.3), in the subgroup with definite asbestos exposure (SIR: 2.5, CI: 0.9-5.5), and when the group was followed for 20 years and more after first possible exposure (SIR: 1.7, CI: 1.1-2.7). Less consistent results were found for colon cancer; SIR was 1.5 (CI: 0.9-2.2) overall, 0.8 (CI: 0.1-2.9) among the exposed, and 1.6 (CI: 1.0-2.5) twenty years and more after first possible exposure. The results support the hypothesis of an association between ingested asbestos and gastrointestinal cancer risk in general and stomach cancer risk specifically.

The Value of Technical Documentation as an Aid in Training

This article examines the value added to the United States Lighthouse Service by the operator's manuals, which were issued to the lighthouse keepers by the Light-House Board in 1852. Subsequent reports of the board to Congress conclusively show that the manuals resulted in a significant savings in the operating costs of the service. In addition, annual reports of district superintendents show that the instructional information improved the appearance and reliability of the lights. Furthermore, the manuals helped to reduce significantly the number of marine disasters along America's shores in the years following the board's decision.

Women Who Kept the Lights: An Illustrated History of Female Lighthouse Keepers

Women Who Kept the Lights: An Illustrated History of Female Lighthouse Keepers

Incidence of cancer among lighthouse keepers exposed to asbestos in drinking water.

The study population comprises 690 Norwegian male lighthouse keepers whose water supply came from cisterns that received rain water off asbestos-cement-tiled roofs. The asbestos-cement tiles were installed in the late 1950s, and two decades later the fiber content in the tap water was analyzed. The fiber content ranged from 1,760 to 71,350 million fibers per liter, which is significantly higher than measured in any other Norwegian public water supply. During the follow-up period, 1960-1991, no statistically significant excess risk was found for any type of cancer in the group with a latency period of 20 years or more, except for stomach cancer (11 observed cases vs. 4.57 expected, standardized incidence ratio = 241, 95% confidence interval 120-431). No cases of malignant mesothelioma were found. The study is limited by lack of knowledge as to when the tiles began to deteriorate and, thus, the magnitude of total exposure as well as by the inability to control for such potential confounding factors as diet.