Newspaper Interviews Research Articles

The production of a newspaper interview: Following the story at the business desk of a Dutch daily

Based on 4 years of work experience in a newsroom, this article analyses in detail how news interviews are produced at the business desk of a Dutch daily newspaper. It focuses on the power dynamics, multiple social interactions and reciprocal exchanges which govern its production. The main case is an interview conducted with the president of the European Central Bank. Decomposing the production process in three stages (arranging an interview, conducting and publishing it), the article ‘follows the story’ from the beginning to end. In particular, it shows how the power balance between journalist and source shifts during the production process, how the outcome of the interview is governed by a range of relations other than the one between interviewer and interviewee and how conflicts over interview authorization are solved and social ties reproduced through opportunistic reciprocity between the journalist and his source.

Entre la censura y los negocios: notas sobre la industria del corrido de narcotráfico y de la nueva música regional mexicana

This text offers a study about different positions and media reactions around the growing popularity of drug traffic and violence music. The so called narcocorrido, with roots in the musical cultures of the border region between Mexico and the United States, becomes a evidence of the violence associated with criminal activities. But, taking advantage of its contents with lucrative opportunity, get inserted into the transnational record industry regardless of censorship and accusations of conservative moral and other ethical discourses. Findings presented here precedes examination of newspaper articles and interviews with promoters and musicians of regional music bands. Retaking the postulates of Howard S. Becker, the musical production of narcocorrido will be characterized as an Art world, an activity subject to conventions into logical marketing and distribution spaces where its use and enjoyment passes over any prohibition based in social control mechanisms. The authorities however much they try, they face a problem cannot be resolved in any way: narcocorridos are the visible and glamorous part of a more complex political, social and transnational economic dynamics.

Electrifying news! Journalists, audiences, and the culture of timeliness in the United States, 1840--1920

The telegraph literally and figuratively electrified news by transforming reporting into a process that delivered impulses of information whose timeliness often riveted and sometimes excited newspaper audiences. The now-familiar daily news cycle—scheduled reports of recent news punctuated by even more timely breaking news—originated with telegraphic journalism. Daily papers began presenting themselves as the public’s portal to an electrified national and international newsgathering network. Looking beyond the role of telegraph firms and wire services, this study explores how the culture of journalistic timeliness was cultivated in organizational, occupational, and public settings. Organizationally, telegraph-enabled timeliness altered every stage of the news-production process, from reporter-source interactions to the delivery of stories to readers. The press reified timeliness internally through organizational rewards and occupational discourses, and externally by projecting its institutional values through marketing and the metatexts that accompanied stories. For the audience, daily papers conveyed the temporal rhythms of a networked industrial society. Audiences valued some timely news as data inputs that enhanced opportunities to participate in distant affairs or influence outcomes, though for economic intelligence private channels almost always outstripped newspapers’ public delivery of the same information. But even electrified news valued mostly for its storytelling made events common to many people simultaneously in a manner that encouraged the construction of meaning by scattered audiences. In those situations, timeliness often meant that news circulated fast enough for reactions around the nation to become part of the story itself.

Так говорил Айги. Устный дискурс поэта

Gennadii Aigi's spoken discourse differed greatly from his written speech. It possessed such properties as spontaneity, conversational inconsistency, complete absence of any public speaking techniques and rhetorical organisation. Aigi focused on the interlocutor in dialogue, where his individual polysemantic concepts (such as “physiology”, “religious dirt”) originate.The second part of the article contains the author's newspaper interview with Gennadii Aigi, ‘The innovators give way to the nouveaux riches’ (1994).

Miłość do trzech pomarańczy Roberta Stillera: O niedokończonym projekcie translatorskim i fragmencie Sprężynowej pomarańczy (wersji N)

This article aims to revisit the story of Robert Stiller’s triple translation of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange in Polish, a project that this prolific and controversial translator never finished despite an attempt to return to it on the eve of his recent death. Firstly, the article retraces the origins of Stiller’s Russianised Mechaniczna pomarańcza (1989/1999; A Mechanical Orange: version R) and Americanised Nakręcana pomarańcza (1999; A Wind-Up Orange: version A) with respect to a wider corpus of sources (the translator’s 1974 pamphlet, foreword to the 1991 version, newspaper interviews, etc.) and suggests a more literary and in‑depth comparative approach to his elaborate translation project. Secondly, and more importantly, the article also serves as a modest introduction to the henceforth unpublished fragment of Stiller’s third Germanised Sprężynowa pomarańcza (A Spring-Assisted Orange: version N), whose longer fragment will be quoted from Stiller’s manuscript. In retracing the Russianised, Americanised, and Germanised language landscapes and bringing to the fore respective post-dependent interpretations, this text opens up Stiller’s experiment to a critical and polyphonic discussion about the original, its triple rendering, and its politically pluralistic implications for post-1989 Poland.

“They are Hauling off Bits of Texas”: James E. Pearce and the Effort to Establish a State Museum

“They are Hauling off Bits of Texas”:James E. Pearce and the Effort to Establish a State Museum Lynn Denton (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution James EPearce, the first director of the Texas Memorial Museum. UT Texas Memorial Museum Photograph Collection, di_10413, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin. [End Page 146] An undated newspaper clipping glued in a scrapbook in the files of the Texas Memorial Museum captures the driving purpose and sense of urgency of University of Texas at Austin (UT) faculty member and anthropologist James Edwin Pearce to establish a state museum. For more than seventeen years, between 1919 and 1936, in hundreds of speeches, newspaper interviews, articles, pamphlets, and letters, Pearce advocated the essential instructional and educational function of museums in society. He called on individual citizens, educators, organizations, and elected officials to keep historic, scientific, and private collections within the state. As he observed researchers from “the East and the West” hauling bits of Texas away to universities and museums elsewhere, “Dr. Pearce [thought] something ought to be done.”1 Pearce almost saw success in the 40th and 41st Texas Legislatures, of 1927 and 1929 respectively, but his vision for a UT-based state museum was not realized until 1936 amid the Texas Centennial preparations. The groundbreaking for that institution, the Texas Memorial Museum, occurred on June 11, 1936, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt triggered a remote controlled detonation from his railroad car at East Avenue and Fourth Street in Austin.2 A little more than two years later, and [End Page 147] only two weeks before the public opening, James E. Pearce, the museum’s director, died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack.3 Pearce is now almost completely forgotten. Commemorative newspaper coverage and public remarks for the temporary opening held the November after his death marked the beginning of a shift in public remembrance of the museum’s origins, reporting that: “Mr. Pearce was assisted by the American Legion centennial committee which was a vital force in getting the movement started for the Texas Memorial Museum.”4 This wording echoed Gov. James V. Allred’s museum cornerstone dedication the previous December, when he emphasized and heightened the role of the American Legion. Pearce was not mentioned once in Allred’s speech.5 When the UT Law School outgrew its original law building, it was remodeled and renamed Pearce Hall in 1954, but demolished twenty years later for the construction of the Graduate School of Business. The Texas Memorial Museum’s scientific monograph series that partially carried his name, the Pearce-Sellards Series, ceased publication in the mid-1980s. The junior high school named in his honor, opening to architectural design accolades in 1959, became one of Austin’s most beleaguered schools at the end of the twentieth century and now has a new name as the Young Women’s Leadership Academy. Eighty years after the Texas Centennial, the museum he finally saw completed is struggling to remain open.6 Research, analysis, and discussions of forgotten histories often center on oppression, gender, class and race struggle, and the displaced or dispossessed. That is not James E. Pearce’s story, and yet this particular erasure of history, this forgetting, is a reminder of other histories that are elided in the reshaping of public memory and spaces. The trajectory of his museum project takes place in the early days of the professionalization of the museum field and within the context of the early years of anthropology and history at the University of Texas, among now iconic faculty members and presidents—J. Frank Dobie, Roy Bedichek, H. Y. Benedict, Charles W. Ramsdell, and W. J. Battle. James Edwin Pearce, described as both stoic and extremely sociable, was “as much at home kidding in a cow-lot as he was at ease in the Town and [End Page 148] Gown Club or the university classroom.”7 Born in 1868 in Person County, North Carolina, he was the third son in a farming family that relocated to Hunt County, Texas, in 1871. After completing high school in Campbell (east of Greenville), he remained there as a teacher for...

Producer cooperatives influence on competitive dynamics - the Azorean case

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, I aim at understanding how producer cooperatives compete in the factor markets; and second, I analyse how producer cooperatives influence the competitive dynamics of the markets where they compete. With this paper we aim at bringing a strategic perspective of this phenomenon. This paper follows a single case study qualitative analysis. The empirical context is the dairy market of the Azorean island Sao Miguel (in Portugal), more specifically, the milk factor market. This empirical context is adequate for the following reasons: first, because it is possible to isolate the market and its players in a quasi-experimental fashion (because it is a island); second, it presents a stable cooperative tradition; and third, cooperatives compete side-by-side with private firms (the cooperative Union represent 50% of the factor dairy market and the 3 other private firms represent the remaining 50%). The main data sources were local newspaper articles (322 in total) and interviews (31 in total with all market players). The data was coded in different categories, such as players’ characteristics, strategic positioning, strategic moves, and context/external shocks. The results reveal that on the factor market side, as buyer, the cooperative presents a “proudly first” positioning. This buyer positioning reflects the effort of the cooperative to always set the higher price and the best conditions on the factor market. This positioning contrasts with other private players that have adopted “Please stay” and “I don’t care” positioning. The results have also point out that the increase of the cooperative market share in the factor market, is leading to increased market competition. There is evidence that the cooperative is driving up the total number of strategic moves in the market that were predominantly oriented to price increases. On the theoretical part, some interesting inputs emerged on the concept of buyers strategic positioning. The results also challenge competitive dynamics studies, which defend that when the concentration in the market increases, the competitive activity decreases. Surprisingly, I have observed the opposite effect and I argue that is due to the cooperative influence. Additionally, the paper defends that producer cooperatives are able to drive factor market competition in markets where there are severe asymmetries of power. Such studies can increase our knowledge about the local impact of cooperatives and the circumstances under which cooperatives are an efficient alternative to the public and private sectors.

Lost Chords and Christian Soldiers: The Sacred Music of Sir Arthur Sullivan by Ian C. Bradley

Lost Chords and Christian Soldiers: The Sacred Music of Sir Arthur Sullivan by Ian C. Bradley Julian Onderdonk Lost Chords and Christian Soldiers: The Sacred Music of Sir Arthur Sullivan. By Ian C. Bradley. London: SCM Press, 2013. [xii, 239 p. ISBN 9780334044215. £25] Appendices, bibliography, discography, index. Few serious composers have suffered as much as Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) from their association with “light music.” Collaborating with W. S. Gilbert on the celebrated Savoy operas—The Mikado, The [End Page 345] Pirates of Penzance, Trial by Jury, and others—Sullivan achieved enormous fame and earned a reputation as a musician of unsurpassed grace and wit. Such accolades were typically double-edged, however, and were often accompanied by regret that a composer of such promise should waste his talent on mere “fooling.” Sullivan himself felt the truth of the criticism and throughout his career endeavored to silence his detractors with “serious” cantatas and odes, songs, orchestral and chamber music, and even a grand opera. These works were successful to a degree, but their popularity began to wane in the early twentieth century in the wake of a general reaction against all things Victorian. Indeed, the theory grew up in these years that Sullivan had not merely prostituted himself but was, in fact, constitutionally incapable of writing anything but insincere and vulgar music. The lightweight frivolity of the Savoy operas, and the mawkish sentimentality of parlor favorites like “The Lost Chord,” seemed for many to mark his true métier as a composer, with the consequence that his serious music, itself shaped by a similar Victorian aesthetic, was dismissed as a matter of course. These critics reserved special censure for Sullivan’s sacred music: the anthems, hymn tunes, sacred cantatas, oratorios, and songs that likewise partook of this emotional world. Part of their complaint was with the outright sentimentalism of Victorian popular religion itself, the endless procession of guardian angels, heavenly thoughts, and “sacred” hearths and homes that directly inspired Sullivan’s lilting melodies and syrupy harmonies. But the composer’s materialism and worldliness, his notorious womanizing and gambling, played its part too, suggesting an element of false piety in these works and ultimately fueling the charge of artistic insincerity. According to Ian Bradley, however, Sullivan’s religious faith was genuine, the product of a “spiritual quality of innocence” (p. 13) and a principled Broad Church liberalism that stressed a non-dogmatic approach to the gospels. If worldly pleasures prompted him to emphasize the secular in his music, still a strong “spiritual yearning” remained (p. 183). As he put it in an 1885 newspaper interview: “My sacred music is that on which I base my reputation as a composer. These works are the offspring of my liveliest fancy, the children of my greatest strength, the products of my most earnest thought and most incessant toil” (p. 1). Bradley is fighting a series of overlapping prejudices here, and he wisely tackles them one chapter at a time. First is the strong bias against Sullivan’s music, the blame for which he lays squarely at the feet of an elitist British musical establishment long suspicious of popular and material success. (He makes an interesting analogy between Sullivan and another industrious Englishman of the popular theater, Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose music has likewise been reviled by critics.) Second is the sentimentality of Victorian religious culture itself, which he engagingly explains and defends with reference to tumultuous times. Here, the social upheavals of the industrial revolution, the strict antimaterialism of the romantic movement, above all the nineteenth-century crisis of faith (to which an exaggerated religious expression would seem to be a kind of counterintuitive and counterfactual response) are all seen to play their part. A third, biographical chapter tracing the composer’s years as a boy chorister in the Chapel Royal provides an opportunity to explore Sullivan’s staunch royalism and the worldliness that developed partly as a consequence of the aristocratic contacts he made there. But Bradley also makes it clear that the experience introduced him to some of the most important figures in Anglican musical circles—Thomas Helmore, Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley, Joseph Barnby, and John Stainer among them—and asserts...

Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries ed. by Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young (review)

Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young, eds. Suzan-Lori Parks in Person: Interviews and Commentaries. London: Routledge, 2014. Pp. xii + 228. $130.00. Philip C. Kolin and Harvey Young introduce their book of interviews and commentaries on playwright Suzan-Lori Parks with an essay titled Watch Me Work, which takes its name from one of Parks's more recent performance projects in which she sits on an elevated platform in the lobby of a theatre and performs the act of playwriting for anyone to watch. This title also moves to the central objective of Suzan-Lori Parks in Person, which is to provide primary insight into the methods, techniques, and inspirations for Parks's prolific and award-winning body of work. As they set the stage for her thoughts, confessions, and revelations in the collected interviews, Kolin and Young bring focus to Parks's literary influences (which include Baldwin, Kennedy, Joyce, and Faulkner), the stylistic innovations of her new ... stage and her sustained mission to fill the great (w)hole of through radical inclusion across her work from 1985 to 2013(1,5). The book is divided into two sections. Part 1 includes eighteen interviews with Parks and her collaborators, and part 2 consists of commentaries from the directors who have worked most closely with her or critics and scholars who have distinguished themselves through their work on Parks's drama (151). The interviews in part 1 are organized chronologically, from a 1992 piece that considers the groundbreaking linguistic work she creates in The Death of the Last Negro in the Whole Entire World at Yale Repertory Theatre to a 2011 conversation with Parks the director/playwright as she prepares The Book of Grace for the ZACH Theatre premiere. The book also moves beyond newspaper interviews that surround specific productions to include pieces from magazines, collected essays, academic journals, and even a one-on-one piece where Parks interviews Adrienne Kennedy, a playwright who had a profound effect on her own writing. A large portion of the commentaries in part 2 are transcribed from a Hunter College symposium on Parks's work in 2004. One of the panels at the symposium featured critics and scholars including Robert Brustein and Alisa Solomon, and the other panel focused on the directors who have staged the premieres of Parks s major works, including Richard Foreman and Liz Diamond. In total, Suzan-Lori Parks in Person is an engaging work that offers insights into the playwright's mind and work, from her undergraduate thesis to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog and her international project 365 Days/365 Plays. Kolin and Young provide texts that explore not only how she works but also how she develops seeds of ideas into fully realized productions. The one mildly frustrating aspect of the book is that, by the nature of the art of interviewing, the questions and the answers in the eighteen interviews often repeat and overlap. This happens most often when there are multiple interviews from the same period or surrounding the same play, with Parks offering anecdotes about the writing process or illuminating some aspect of history that inspired the work. However, the repetitions that develop throughout Parks's own narrative across the book actually become the threads that weave together the major themes and effects of her writing. In particular, three threads become prominent in the discussion of her writing: her use of language, her stylistic choices, and the way she makes and mines history (9). From the beginning of Parks's interactions with critics, scholars, and audiences, the way she uses language to delineate a character's race, class, and emotional trajectory has been a marker of her innovative genius. Not only does Parks strive to explore African American linguistic sound, rhythm, and pattern, but she imbues the language with specificity, emotion, and meaning, creating poetic dialogue that ranges from heartfelt plaintive yearnings to blistering condemnations (35,69). …

Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen ed. by Vincent Brook, Marat Grinberg (review)

Reviewed by: Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen ed. by Vincent Brook, Marat Grinberg Judah M. Cohen (bio) Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen. By Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg, eds. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014. xxxiii + 275 pp. Woody on Rye, when viewed from outside of the circle of scholars interested in Jewishness and Woody Allen’s movies, seems like an insider conversation content to remain that way. The volume brings together a series of respected scholars to explore ideas and themes in Allen’s movies from c. 1992 onward—films, Brook and Grinberg claim, largely overlooked in scholarship due to the “the major fissure in Allen’s career caused by the Mia Farrow/Soon-Yi Previn scandal” (ix). Unfortunately, the addition of a lens of “Jewishness” appears to hamstring the contributors—and their volume’s contribution—more than it helps. Grinberg, in his own essay, provides a justification: “Woody Allen ought to be viewed as a serious Jewish artist and philosopher, whose Jewish or indeed Judaic thinking shines through even or especially in the absence of apparent Jewish markers, thematics, or identity” (38). Yet while this pairing seems natural on the surface (and may appeal theoretically to Jewish studies), these dual foci too often turn the volume into an exercise in scholarly self-affirmation. Despite Woody Allen’s complex, and often dismissive, relationship to Judaism in his own accounts, his voice is drowned out here by scholarly fiat. Scholarship that explores a celebrity’s or artist’s “Jewishness” has become its own cottage industry, achieving varying degrees of success. Often such studies involve combing a subject’s works for indicators of Judaism, whether obvious or coded; triangulating these observations with other mediated accounts of the artist, such as newspaper interviews or profiles; and anchoring the discussion to more general thematic ideas in the work of prominent scholars. While at times illuminating, these kinds of studies have been critiqued as more interested in arranging [End Page 271] data to achieve a preconceived end than in letting the evidence speak for itself. An entire volume predicated on such a preconceived end, moreover—here, Allen’s Jewishness—has the trap already set. Attractive writing and humorous turns of phrase, as well as a whimsical design that replaces colons in chapter titles with a broken pair of glasses, cannot save many of the essays from suffering as a result. Historians might find particularly annoying the lack of primary materials engaged beyond Allen’s films, leading, among other things, to long plot narrations/readings (especially Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Deconstructing Harry, and Scoop) that can repeat across several essays. Without other historical benchmarks, moreover, the films double as their own insular history, leading to a false impression of hermeticism. I also had difficulty with the frequency by which authors asserted signs of “Jewishness” through acknowledged stereotype: how discussions of a nose, or hypersexuality, or shortness of stature, unproblematically become paradigms of Judaism in order to establish a dialectic with Christianity or to address gender relations. A three essay “Schlemiel Studies” section proves emblematic of this approach, proclaiming the Schlemiel as a distinctive Jewish character and then labeling Allen’s characters as Schlemiels-by-presumption. A three essay section on Allen’s female characters includes a number of interesting ideas about the portrayals of Jewish women but works with such a limited amount of material that by the end arguments seem repetitious. And assertive speculation about Allen’s creative choices, given that none of the authors appeared to make any efforts to contact him, seem to emphasize the artifice of scholarly convention and its questionability here. Among many examples: “what is especially striking about Cassandra’s Dream is that Allen brings God back with a vengeance” (51). I came to wonder, as I arrived at the end of the book, if releasing the authors from the “Jewishness” target might have led to a more diverse—and, frankly, better, collection. In contrast, James Fisher’s essay on Allen’s Broadway plays offers a glimpse of what this volume could have become. A refreshing detour from the film analyses, Fisher’s more...

Ideology, race and place in historical constructions of belonging: the case of Zimbabwe

This article explores the ways in which constructions of identities of place are embedded in the ideology of race and social orientation in Zimbabwe. Using newspaper reports, memoirs, speeches, advertisements, fiction, interviews and ephemera produced around key discursive thresholds, it examines the production of multiple meanings of key terms within competing discourses to generate co-existing parallel lexicons. Crucially, labels like ‘settler’, ‘African’ and ‘Zimbabwean’, labels that are inextricably linked to access to and association with the land in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, shift their reference and connotations for different speakers in different settings and periods. For example, the term ‘settler’, used to refer to white colonists of British origin who occupied vast agricultural lands in colonial Zimbabwe, is appropriated in post-independent Zimbabwe to designate blacks settled on the land in the Fast Track Land Reform Programme. The analysis of semantic pragmatic change in relation to key discursive thresholds yields a complex story of changing identities conditioned by different experiences of a raced national biography.

Comparative Sociology of 11 to 18 Examinations in Thailand, England, and Japan

This study compares 11 to 18 examinations and the changes they have undergone in Thailand, England, and Japan. Using socio-cultural network analysis supported by the interpretive understanding of local newspaper articles and interview transcripts, this study will reveal a process that has not been detected by previous single-case studies. First, there are three compounds across time periods and countries. Second, the analyses of local newspapers show that there is a tendency toward interconnection among the three compounds. Third, the analyses of interview transcripts that are selected as interconnected show that this type can be found in various kinds of people, especially among education administrators and business persons. These results enable us to predict the future of examinations in these areas.

The Prince of Jockeys: The Life of Isaac Burns Murphy by Pellom McDaniels III (review)

Reviewed by: The Prince of Jockeys: The Life of Isaac Burns Murphy by Pellom McDaniels III Robert P. Murray (bio) The Prince of Jockeys: The Life of Isaac Burns Murphy. By Pellom McDaniels III. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp. 506. $39.95 cloth; $39.95 ebook) Considered by many to be the greatest jockey of all time, Isaac Burns Murphy set numerous racing records throughout his illustrious [End Page 93] career in the late nineteenth century. He also happened to be an African American rider. While African Americans had dominated at least the piloting of fast thoroughbreds around racetracks during most of the nineteenth century, they were increasingly being pushed out of the industry by the turn of the twentieth century. Murphy, who passed away after an illness in 1896, rode at the nadir of African American participation in what was then one of the most popular spectator sports in the country. A figure whose historical stature far surpasses his physical stature, Murphy sat at the crossroads of evolving American race relations and the professionalization of American sports. Yet, Pellom McDaniels’s biography of Murphy is proof positive that great historical significance does not necessarily lead to a large archival presence. Although the subject of numerous newspaper interviews and journalistic exposés, the literate Murphy did not leave a cache of documents to gage his inner thoughts and most newspaper accounts focused on his racing career. Simply, we know more of what the man thought about the conditions of the dirt racetrack at Churchill Downs than we do of what he thought of the colored rail-car he was forced to use following the implementation of Kentucky’s separate coach bill in 1892. To his great credit, McDaniels creatively tackles this challenge by constructing a tapestry of social, political, and economic relations surrounding Murphy’s life. The contextualization McDaniels provides is deep and expansive; it is not until page 175 when a thirteen-year-old Murphy climbs into the saddle for the first time. If a reviewer is allowed to propose a modest change to a published work’s title, I would suggest a more accurate subtitle to the book would be “The Life and Times of Isaac Burns Murphy.” McDaniels is at his best when working Murphy into the broader history of sports and American race relations. Throughout the book, he makes fruitful comparisons between the careers of Murphy and other black athletes, especially boxers and baseball players, struggling to adapt to shrinking career opportunities in Jim Crow America. In conducting himself professionally with great integrity, Murphy provided [End Page 94] a challenge to white stereotypes of black masculinity while his astounding success on the track guaranteed an ever-growing salary. However, it was that growing salary and Murphy’s fame that fostered white jealousies. By constructing a positive image of successful black masculinity and actively working to propel his occupation into the ranks of well-paid professionals, Murphy sparked an aggressive white backlash against African American participation in horse racing. Here, McDaniels makes important contributions to our understanding of black masculinity, white supremacy, and the professionalization of sports at the turn of the twentieth century. With a book that casts such a large net, scholars and specialists will find many of McDaniels’s arguments and claims suspect. Historians will undoubtedly challenge McDaniels’s assertion that, “By the mid-1830s, the [domestic slave trade] was more widespread than historians are willing to admit,” given the scholarship of Walter Johnson, Steven Deyle, Edward E. Baptist, and Robert H. Gudmestad (p. 39). Genealogists will find some of the guesses regarding Murphy’s family history perplexing. Based upon a pension application from Murphy’s mother, McDaniels points to an enslaved man named Jerry Skillman as Murphy’s father. During the Civil War, Skillman had enlisted with the United States Colored Troops at Camp Nelson, Kentucky, and McDaniels dedicates much of his third chapter to the possible relocation of the entire Murphy clan to Camp Nelson and Skillman’s military service in the war before dying of disease in Camp Nelson’s hospital in July 1865. Although one document in Skillman’s service records lists an 1865 death date, a quick...

George C. White in Brazil:

Abstract In 1988, under the auspices of the United States Information Services, George C. White toured major cities in Brazil to talk about the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theater Center. In São Paulo he was interviewed by Leo Gilson Ribeiro for the Jornal da Tarde. This newspaper interview appeared on October 1, 1988. It is reprinted here, for the first time in an English translation.

George C. White in Brazil:

Abstract In 1988, under the auspices of the United States Information Services, George C. White toured major cities in Brazil to talk about the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theater Center. In São Paulo he was interviewed by Leo Gilson Ribeiro for the Jornal da Tarde. This newspaper interview appeared on October 1, 1988. It is reprinted here, for the first time in an English translation.

Hong Kong After the Umbrella Movement

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)An uncertain future for One Country Two SystemsBefore police riot gear fired rounds of tear gas at unarmed protesters on September 28, few could have expected that the siege of the government headquarters would turn the scripted Occupy Central (zhanling zhonghuan...) into Hong Kong's biggest and most unprecedented pro-democracy movement amidst its electoral reforms.(1) In the next twoand-a-half months, protesters of what became the Umbrella Movement (yusan yundong????)(2)would occupy major roads the city's busiest districts, set up tents, stock up supplies, and protect their territories with makeshift barricades, sometimes with human chains, to stop police incursion and opposing groups. Across the encampments, they would press on for a focused goal - genuine universal (zhen puxuan???) for election of their Chief Executive, the city's top leader - until police officers cleared the last occupied site on December 15. This article assesses the implications of the Umbrella Movement as it drew to a close. It explains how the movement morphed from the Occupy Central movement, and reviews the controversy raised over the city's rule of law and constitutional relations with mainland China. Despite having amplified democracy supporters' yearnings for universal suffrage, the movement, which no compromise was offered by Beijing and the Hong government, will likely deepen social cleavages and send the city toward an uncertain future.From Occupy Central to the Umbrella MovementThe Umbrella Movement was set against a protracted debate over the electoral reform of the city's Chief Executive election. According to the National People's Congress ruling 2007, Hong may finally introduce universal suffrage for the election of the fifth Chief Executive 2017 - after it was twice denied by Beijing for its 2007 and 2012 elections.(3) If universal suffrage is implemented 2017, Chief Executive candidates would be elected by a popular vote instead of being selected by an election committee - but they must be selected by a nominating committee to ensure that the elected leader would not oppose the central government and that he/she would the country and love Hong Kong (aiguo aigang ????), a requirement set out by numerous Chinese officials. In addition, Hong Kong's Basic Law requires this nominating committee to be broadly representative and to operate in accordance with democratic procedures, but it does not clearly outline the composition of the committee or the nomination procedure.(4)The nomination process soon became the focal point of contention. Across the pro-democracy camp, there were widespread concerns that the nomination process will act as a safety valve to screen out candidates regarded unfavourably by Beijing. Fearing that the election might turn out to be fake universal (jia puxuan???), democracy supporters argued that they have not only the right to be elected but also the right to be nominated, and thus they deserve a more democratic and inclusive nomination process. (5) Many insisted on the introduction of civic nomination (gongmin timing ????), a mechanism that would allow the public to bypass the nominating committee and directly nominate Chief Executive candidates, but which has been rejected by the government as a contravention of the Basic Law. (6) Some would accept a more democraticallyformed nominating committee, as long as there was reform on its composition and/or a reasonably lower nomination threshold.The idea of Occupy Central was floated amidst the debate. In early 2013, law professor Benny TaiYiu-ting sketched the early vision of Occupy Central a series of newspaper articles and interviews.(7)Tai proposed a large-scale civil disobedience (gongmin kangming????) movement which participants would block traffic to petition for universal suffrage the CE election that would comply with international standards. …

Almada Negreiros and the geometric canon

This paper presents a mathematical analysis of a series of geometrical abstract artworks by the Portuguese author Almada Negreiros (1893–1970), understood in the context of the author's search for a canon. After a brief description of Almada's work in the frame of twentieth-century visual arts, we examine the mathematical elements in three of his works: illustrations for a newspaper interview, two drawings from a collection called Language of the Square and his last visual work, the mural Começar. The analysis revealed that some of the author's geometrical constructions were mathematically exact whereas others were approximations. We used computer-based drawings, along with mathematical deductions to examine the constructions presented in the aforementioned works, which we believe to be the representative of Almada's geometric statements. Our findings show that, though limited by the self-taught nature of his endeavour, the mathematical content of these artworks is surprisingly rich. The paper is meant to be an introduction to Almada's work from a mathematical point of view, showing the importance of a comprehensive study of the mathematical elements in the author's body of work.

From Lambeth to Niagara: Imitation and Innovation among Female Natationists

The development of English swimming throughout the nineteenth century relied heavily on the activities of swimming professors and their families who promoted the sport through challenges and competitions and established classes for the teaching of swimming and lifesaving. Like many of their contemporaries, the leading swimming family of the period, the Beckwiths, expanded these activities beyond their Lambeth base to include summer seasons at seaside resorts as well as appearances in crystal tanks on the stages of variety theatres and music halls. Female members of the family proved particularly popular and Agnes Beckwith became the most recognized and acclaimed natationist of the period, particularly after her visits to America in 1883 and 1887. A year later it was being reported that a Clara Beckwith was due to appear in a tank scene at the Providence Museum and advertisements began appearing in 1893 for a Cora Beckwith, ‘Champion Lady swimmer of the World’ and demonstrator of the ‘famous Beckwith Backward Sweep’. This paper explores the lives of these two natationists who appeared regularly on stage and in travelling fairs in America over the decades following Agnes's visits. In newspaper advertisements and interviews, both women emphasized their British roots and their connections to the Beckwith dynasty as well as claiming credit for outstanding swimming feats. In announcing her intention to swim Niagara Falls in 1901 Cora, born Cora MacFarland in Maine in 1870, asserted that she had previously swum the English Channel alongside Matthew Webb. Clara, born Clara Sabean in Nova Scotia in 1870, was even more forthcoming about her entitlement to the Beckwith name by stating in her 1893 autobiography that she had been born in Lambeth in 1867, and identifying her father as William Manning Beckwith, Champion Swimmer of England. Both women not only appropriated the Beckwith name but they also annexed the Beckwith routines, including endurance floating and ornamental swimming, and this paper highlights these similarities before reflecting on some generic commonalities in these natational careers.

Hearing the inaudible experimental subject: Echoes of Inaudi, Binet's calculating prodigy.

Historians of psychology have traditionally focused on ideas (intellectual history), the "great men" who produced them (an older style of biography sometimes called "hagiography"), or-more recently-the influence of the contexts that shaped them (social and cultural history). A still more recent approach is to bring in those invisible subjects whose experiences have previously been ignored, most often through histories focusing on the discipline's forgotten women or minority contributors: "history from below" (subaltern history). A variation on this was popularized in the history of psychiatry (viz., "patient voices") and has since been carried into the history of psychology (e.g., "feminist voices"). The latest innovation is to focus on what Jill Morawski has referred to as "the discipline's experimental subjects." (These are the collective done-to, rather than the doers, of psychological research.) This history is one of those: an attempt to look behind Alfred Binet to find an influence that shaped his work. The purpose is thus to "give voice" to this unheard-from subject-the until-now inaudible Jacques Inaudi (including excerpts from newspaper interviews and translations from his recently discovered autobiography)-and at the same time advance Morawski's historiographical project. We then get a glimpse of what it was like to be a child prodigy in France in the 1880s, as well as what securing scientific patrons could do for one's prospects. By focusing specifically on Binet's unheard-from experimental subject, we are also afforded new perspectives of the history of late-19th century French psychology (reflecting another emerging interest, "international history"), and we gain new insights into the prehistory of contemporary Binet-style intelligence testing.

Dialect and stance-taking by non-Egyptian celebrities in Egypt

AbstractThis article explores the stance of non-Egyptian celebrities performing in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) and/or living in Egypt. These celebrities are forced by the Egyptian media to take a stance towards ECA and Egypt, and engage in the ongoing dialogue concerning Egypt’s cultural role. Meta-linguistic, as well as linguistic, resources become the focal point of a struggle for dominance. Over the last five years, there have been intense debates regarding the role of Egypt as a cultural hub in relation to the Egyptian media. This is due to the increasing threat from other emerging cultural hubs – such as Dubai and Lebanon – both of which have greater financial resources and allow the use of other Arabic dialects. The data utilised for this research includes television and newspaper interviews, articles, as well as performances by non-Egyptians. One particularly relevant example is that of Russian/Armenian belly dancer Ṣāfināz who currently resides in Egypt.