Northeastern University Press Research Articles

Colloquy: Shadow Culture Narratives: Race, Gender, and American Music Historiography

Colloquy: Shadow Culture Narratives: Race, Gender, and American Music Historiography

Philosophical Heritage of bell hooks’ Radical Feminism and Cultural Criticism

In Feminist theory: from margin to center, bell hooks puts into question the works by reformist feminists who happens to be mostly white, privileged women. She insists that these reformists do not address the plight of other oppressed women who were subjugated not only by their sex alone but by other factors such as race and class. Consequently, she proposes a cultural criticism that investigates the systems of domination in place through a disruption and deconstruction of cultural productions. This paper aims to critically evaluate hooks’ radical feminism and cultural criticism, and show its philosophical heritage through an engagement with the key ideas of critical theory and postmodernism.
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George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The Messenger Years, 1923-1924

George S. Schuyler's “Shafts and Darts”: The <i>Messenger</i> Years, 1923-1924

Supervisors’ Value Orientations and Ethics: A Cross-National Analysis

In this study, we used the framework of institutional anomie theory (Messner and Rosenfeld in Crime and the American dream, Wadsworth, Delmont, CA, 2001; Rosenfeld and Messner in: Passas and Agnew (eds) The future of anomie theory, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1997) to examine the relationship between supervisors’ ethics and their personal value orientation, including achievement and pecuniary materialism. We further investigated whether these individual-level associations were moderated by societal factors consisting of income inequality, government efficiency, foreign competition, and technological advancement. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze data of 16,464 supervisors from 42 nations obtained from the 2010–2014 wave of the World Values Survey. Results showed that strong achievement value orientation was positively related to willingness to justify ethically suspect behaviors; government efficiency and technological advancement, respectively, had negative and positive moderating effects on this relationship. On the other hand, foreign competition had a positive moderating effect on the association between pecuniary materialism and ethicality.

The Basic Models of Criminal Liability of AI Systems and Outer Circles

The way humans cope with breaches of legal order is through criminal law operated by the criminal justice system. Accordingly, human societies define criminal offenses and operate social mechanisms to apply them. This is how criminal law works. Originally, this way has been designed by humans and for humans. However, as technology has developed, criminal offenses are committed not only by humans. The major development in this issue has occurred in the 17th century. In the 21st century criminal law is required to supply adequate solutions for commission of criminal offenses through artificial intelligent (AI) systems. Basically, there are three basic models to cope with this phenomenon within the current definitions of criminal law. These models are: (1) The Perpetration-by-Another Liability Model; (2) The Natural Probable Consequence Liability Model; and- (3) The Direct Liability Model. The Models are based on previous researches published around the world, including some of the author's books [e.g., GABRIEL HALLEVY, WHEN ROBOTS KILL – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE UNDER CRIMINAL LAW, Northeastern University Press, University Press of New England (2013)]. Some of the articles have been translated world-widely into various languages, including Chinese and Turkish. These models together with the coordination of them are presented within this paper.

Review: It's Been Beautiful: “Soul!” and Black Power Television, by Gayle Wald

Book Review| December 01 2017 Review: It's Been Beautiful: “Soul!” and Black Power Television, by Gayle Wald It's Been Beautiful: “Soul!” and Black Power Television, by Gayle Wald. Photographs by Chester Higgins. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. x, 278 pp. Tammy L. Kernodle Tammy L. Kernodle TAMMY L. KERNODLE is Professor of Musicology at Miami University. Her research focuses on African American music and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the author of Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Northeastern University Press, 2004) and served as associate editor of the Encyclopedia of African American Music (ABC-Clio, 2011) and as a senior editor for the revised Grove Dictionary of American Music (Oxford University Press, 2013). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2017) 70 (3): 873–877. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.3.873 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Tammy L. Kernodle; Review: It's Been Beautiful: “Soul!” and Black Power Television, by Gayle Wald. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2017; 70 (3): 873–877. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.3.873 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Disconcerting, peculiar, provocative, and transformational are words that describe the history of the engagement between television, black America, and black music culture. Television, more than any other form of media, has historically been valued for its potential as an effective tool in fostering public sentiment. While the first generation of dramatic and comedic shows featuring black characters did not challenge the racial and ethnic stereotypes that had been advanced through popular culture, this changed with the highlighting of black music and black musicians on television during the 1950s and 1960s. Programs such as Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town (later called The Ed Sullivan Show), Steve Allen's Tonight Show, and Shindig! provided important platforms for the promotion of black music, black artistry, and racial pride. One needs only look to the countless baby boomers who recall seeing the Supremes or the Temptations on Ed Sullivan during the early... You do not currently have access to this content.

Reparative readings: re-claiming black feminised bodies as sites of somatic pleasures and possibilities

ABSTRACTBlack girls and women in the west reside at the nexus of racism and sexism, pinned down by a vitriolic hate for the black feminised body that is wedded to legacies of slavery. Dominant discourses configure these bodies as animalistic and other (than human), thus informing a range of (educational) policies, practices, and programmes. These narratives shape teachers’ curricular and pedagogical practices in ways that potentially objectify and wound black girls. In this paper, we use Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips [Lee, Andrea. 1984. Sarah Phillips. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press] and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia [Senna, Danzy. 1999. Caucasia. New York: Riverhead] to trouble said dominant discourses by engaging in ‘reparative readings’ [Sedgwick, Eve. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press Books] of the texts’ black female protagonists. We re-read these main characters' bodies as sites of pleasure and possibility, not singularly or solely harm. In doing so, we show how curriculum theorising can be mobilised for repair, and can function to humanise othered and marginalised bodies.

The man that got away: the life and songs of Harold Arlen

The Man That Got Away: The Life and Songs of Harold Arlen. By Walter Rimler Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 209pp. $29.95 How strange that, for some, Harold Arlen isn't a known name: a composer of mid-century popular music who deserved the celebrity of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Harry Warren, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, and so many others! For others, his music is one of the foundations of the Great American Songbook. These two opposing worlds are bridged in Walter Rimler's fascinating new biography. From the introduction, the book takes a approach to Arlen's life (Rimler calls it Arlen's personal story), especially regarding Arlen's alcoholism and his wife Anya's behavioral issues. Arlen friend and biographer Edward Jablonski's earlier opus, Harold Arlen: with the Blues (Doubleday, 1961), written during Arlen's lifetime, did not touch on such issues, although his second work, Harold Arlen: Rhythm, Rainbows & Blues (Northeastern University Press, 1996), did. This intimacy creates a rounded picture of the artist, whose work is woven into the fabric of his life. A dispassionate overview of Arlen's life and career, this primer has the necessary distance from its subject to give the twenty-first-century reader and music lover the information needed to understand this most essential composer. Shy by nature, bold by craft, Arlen had a career that began in the Cotton Club and went beyond the era of the Beatles. Such longevity belies the fact that Arlen was a musical laborer, ever searching for inspiration, which did not always come easily. Not finding any ideas for the music for Judy Garland's ballad in The Wizard of Oz, Arlen and Anya drove to the Grauman's Chinese Theatre for distraction, and along the way the melody for Over the Rainbow came to him out of the blue, at which time they pulled over and he jotted it down. For Arlen, inspiration was divine. Like Peter Shaffer's Mozart, Arlen's music pre-existed and he was the scribe. Son of a cantor, Arlen was also the blackest of the great American melodists. His first success, the 1929 Get Happy (lyrics by Ted Koehler), is a feel-good rouser that could have been invented by no one but Arlen. He next contributed the music to a good number of now-standards that were first featured at the Cotton Club, among which were Stormy Weather (1933, made famous by Ethel Waters), Long As I Live (1934, as sung by Lena Horne), and Ill Wind (1934, as sung by Adelaide Hall). His Hollywood career included many a film that is today forgotten, but those years produced a wealth of songs that are today considered standards. His Broadway notables included such musicals as You Said It (1931), Life Begins at 8:40 (1934), Hooray for What! (1937), Bloomer Girl (1944), St. Louis Woman (1946), House of Flowers (1954), Jamaica (1957), and Saratoga (1959). Like the Gershwin brothers, his list of song classics and standouts in Hollywood and New York is long and outstanding, from 1932's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea to 1976's Looks Like the End of a Beautiful Friendship. In an October 29, 2015, posting to the Songbirds Yahoo! group (https://groups.yahoo. com/neo/groups/songbirds/info), author Walter Rimler stated: The two Jablonski biographies of Harold Arlen will always be essential reading for anyone who wants to learn about this great composer. But it seemed to me a good idea that he have more than one biographer, and that the time to write a new one was now because it's still possible to interview people who knew Arlen. I was able to speak at length to his sister-in-law, Rita Arlen, who explained internal family dynamics and showed me letters to Arlen, including revealing ones from Cantor Samuel Arluck (his father) and--surprisingly--Paul McCartney. …

A Halfway House for Women: Oppression and Resistance. By Gail Caputo. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2014.Can’t Catch a Break: Gender, Jail, Drugs, and the Limits of Personal Responsibility. By Susan Starr Sered and Maureen Norton-Hawk. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Review. By Gail Caputo. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2014. A Halfway House for Women: Oppression and Resistance. By Gail Caputo. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2014. Can’t Catch a Break: Gender, Jail, Drugs, and the Limits of Personal Responsibility. By Susan Starr Sered and Maureen Norton-Hawk. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014.Allison McKimAllison McKimBard College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 41, Number 2Winter 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/682926 Views: 324Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Party School: Crime, Campus, and Community. By Karen G. Weiss. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2013. Pp. xxviii+226. $85.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsParty School: Crime, Campus, and Community. By Karen G. Weiss. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2013. Pp. xxviii+226. $85.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper).Brian N. SweeneyBrian N. SweeneyLong Island University, Post Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 120, Number 2September 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/678211 Views: 289Total views on this site For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Clergy Sexual Abuse: Social Science Perspectives ed. by Claire M. Renzetti, Sandra Yocum (review)

Reviewed by: Clergy Sexual Abuse: Social Science Perspectives ed. by Claire M. Renzetti, Sandra Yocum Nicholas P. Carfardi Clergy Sexual Abuse: Social Science Perspectives. Edited by Claire M. Renzetti and Sandra Yocum . Lebanon, NH : Northeastern University Press , 2013 . 216 pp. $35.00 . This book is a collection of essays by social scientists, adding insights from their areas of expertise – sociology, criminology, cultural anthropology, and psychology – to the rather saturated issue of clergy sexual abuse. While most of the essays deal with the sexual abuse of children by clergy, primarily Roman Catholic clergy, two of the essays deal with the sexual abuse of adults by clergy. It was those two essays that I found the most interesting because they provided the freshest insights. In “Don’t Call it an Affair,” Diana Garland, writes a striking essay on the primarily female victims of sexually predatory pastors. Perhaps I found this piece so interesting because it did not deal with the ever-depressing topic of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. The pastors involved here are ecumenical abusers. They include both celibate Catholic priests and married Protestant pastors and Jewish rabbis. I was struck by how similar the response of adult women who had been sexually abused by their pastors was to those of the children who had been abused – from not understanding what was happening to not knowing how to tell people about it to the years of recovery required. The other piece on adult sexual abuse, “Clergy Sexual Misconduct with Congregants or Parishioners,” by Bradley Tobin and Kris Helge is primarily a brief on the need for state statutes criminalizing sexual activity between ministers and their adult congregants. Evidently thirteen states already have such laws, and evidently they pass constitutional muster. The other articles are more specifically on clergy, primarily Catholic, abuse of youngsters. Karen Terry, whose work I admire, summarizes her John Jay data, but also repeats the canard that the infamous Mouton-Doyle-Peterson report was circulated to the American Catholic bishops at Collegeville in 1985. It was not. John C. Gonsiorek is justifiably angry with the Catholic hierarchy. His [End Page 67] description of them as out of touch aristocrats gets more support everyday from dioceses across the country. But his solution to the problem requires rewriting the First Amendment in a way that is unlikely. I am sure that Paul Steele in “Contingent Crimes” was saying something insightful, but his retreat into jargon made his insights inaccessible to me. Sandra Yocum in her “The Priest and Catholic Culture as Symbolic System of Purity,” is on to something in the idea that when spiritual authority is built on sexual purity, the holders of that authority who act out sexually completely devastate their victims and destroy their authority. She seems to think, however, that the child victims of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the United States were more vulnerable because they were trained on the Baltimore Catechism’s exalted view of priesthood. This is truer of the priest abusers – trained in the 1950s and 1960s – than it is of their victims. Children abused in the 1970s and early 1980s – which is when most of the abuse occurred – never saw a Baltimore Catechism. It was long gone from the scene by then. Like most collections, this one has its highs and lows. The editors did a fine job in choosing interesting topics and in making sure that there was no overlap in coverage, not an easy task in compiling such works. Nicholas P. Carfardi Duquesne University School of Law Copyright © 2014 American Catholic Historical Society

Eurojazzland: Jazz and European Sources, Dynamics, and Contexts ed. by Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny, Franz Kerschbaumer (review)

JAZZ Eurojazzland: and European Sources, Dynamics, and Contexts. Edited by Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny and Franz Kerschbaumer. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2012. [xviii, 484 p. ISBN 9781584658641 (hardcover), $39.95; ISBN 9781611682984 (e-book), $29.99.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.Eurojazzland, collection published by Northeastern University Press, considers the significance of European musicians and musical traditions in the development and dissemination of jazz. When first hearing of this project, I was reminded of historian Krin Gabbard's iconic discussion of the 1930 film revue, King of (John Murray Anderson and Pal Fejos, dirs. [Uni- versal Pictures]) in the introduction to Jammin' at the Margins: and the American Cinema ([Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 9-14). Gabbard shows how King of exhibits thorough denial of the African American role in jazz, thus reflecting an unfortunately commonly-held view of the time (p. 10). For example, the final number The Melting Pot of Music presents bandleader Paul Whiteman stir- ring cauldron containing the ingredi- ents of jazz. Said ingredients, portrayed through montage of musical perfor- mances, are decidedly not African American, but rather stereotypically Euro- pean, and include Scottish bagpipes, fla- menco guitar, and Italian accordion players (p. 13). While many today would under- stand this as largely ridiculous, it nonethe- less encapsulates the whitewashing that tinged much of early-twentieth-century reception and criticism. In accordance, modern scholars invested in exploring the European influences of need not only show awareness of this history and histori- ography, but also take care not to re- inscribe white or Eurocentric biases. My mental conjuring up of Gabbard's discus- sion of King of which Eurojazzland evoked, served as warning I hoped to not be reminded of again while reading the text. As I will show, my initial concerns about Eurojazzland proved prescient. After reflecting on the contents of Eurojazzland, I concluded that while it is admirable to ac- count for Europe's role in within one massive volume, unfortunately, some of the authors fail to heed Gabbard's warning about whitewashing.Massive appropriately describes the scope and length of After an introduction by Luca Cerchiari (one of the three editors), nineteen English-language articles, totaling nearly 450 pages, follow. Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny, and Franz Kerschbaumer (the three editors), are Europe-based scholars with decades of research between them. volume's re- maining authors come from diverse geo- graphic locations. majority of the contributors are scholars, curators, and critics, many of whom are accomplished performers, from Continental Europe; few contributors hail from the U.K. and U.S. as well.In his introduction, Cerchiari stresses that Eurojazzland should not serve as comprehensive history of European jazz. Rather, the concept driving the project was to compile a series of essays dedicated to the complex, broader subject of the rela- tions between and jazz (p. vii). editors divide the contributions into three broad categories, Europe as Source of Jazz, Jazz Meets Europe, and The Circulation of Eurojazzland. Thus, the volume approaches the idea of from multitude of angles-as tradition, geographic space, set of interlocking musical communities, and as source of inspiration.The first section, Europe as Source of Jazz, examines various points of European influence on the tradition. most convincing articles in this section (and frankly, the entire text) are those that pre- sent focused scope, and that trace geo- graphically or stylistically specific threads of influence. One highlight, by Bruce Boyd Raeburn, goes Beyond the 'Spanish Tinge,' to examine Hispanics and Latinos in Early New Orleans Jazz. …

Responsibilised Resilience? Reworking Neoliberal Social Policy Texts

Responsibilised Resilience? Reworking Neoliberal Social Policy Texts

Are Workers More Likely to be Deviant than Managers? A Cross-National Analysis

Using Robert Merton’s perspective on social structure [Social theory and structure. Free Press, New York, 1968], this study tested the individual-level association between job position and ethical reasoning. Anomie theory was employed to examine how country-level factors moderate that individual-level association. The hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) method was used to analyze 22,359 subjects from 28 nations. The statistical results proved that workers are more likely to justify ethically suspect behaviors, and that this individual-level relationship is moderated by the country-level factors of power distance, masculinity, social inequality, and education accessibility. These results imply that Merton’s view of social structure and contemporary anomie theorists’ perspective of anomie [Messner and Rosenfeld (Crime and the American dream. Wadsworth, Belmont, 2001); Rosenfeld and Messner (The future of anomie theory. Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1997)] are mutually complementary rather than exclusive.

The Court of Cal

The Court of Cal Fred Muratori (bio) With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, & Others. Kathleen Spivack. Northeastern University Press. http://www.upne.com. 256 pages; paper, $19.95. “Boston,” wrote Elizabeth Hardwick in December 1959, “is a winter city,” not the flowering American Athens of literary legend but “defective, out-of-date, vain and lazy,” a promising destination only to those who naively sought “a lost ideal, a romantic quest.” Still a senior at Oberlin College, the poet and essayist Kathleen Spivack arrived in Boston less than a year before Hardwick’s anti-paean appeared in Harper’s Magazine. She had earned a scholarship to study writing with a prominent poet “acceptable to the Oberlin English Department” and wanted nothing more than to spend a year in San Francisco under the tutelage of Allen Ginsberg. Alas, as the apparent ringleader of the notoriously wanton Beats, Ginsberg failed to meet the staid Oberlin standard, so Spivack, “reluctantly, oh very reluctantly,” turned to “the airless atmosphere of puritanical Boston” and Robert Lowell instead. Despite Lowell’s solid critical reputation, neither she nor her advisors had read a word of his difficult poetry, but Lowell agreed to the arrangement and set into motion the defining experience of a young writer’s life. In this record of that experience, from her first meeting with Lowell until his death in 1977, Spivack conjures Boston’s most laureled and learned inhabitants as they wrote, taught, drank, and confided within an urban landscape of poorly lit classrooms, chilly apartments, and greasy spoon restaurants. No stranger to the company of intellectuals—her father was noted economist Peter Drucker—Spivack nonetheless found ready acceptance in Boston’s academic circles unforthcoming: “The coldness of the Boston literary scene was not to be believed, and first attempts to broach that were impossible.” The new arrival’s introduction to her future mentor is a case in point. Lowell had no recollection of admitting her to his Boston University poetry seminar and, as her memory of their first encounter reveals, his demeanor could change in an instant: “Who are you?” he queried mildly. He was eating his lunch, and looking abstracted. I had arrived in a rainstorm, in blue jeans and boots. “I never take anyone under thirty,” he countered coldly. He didn’t remember getting my letter, or the arrangement with Oberlin. I was stunned. As I stood in the crowded office, wet and depressed, not knowing quite how to handle his amnesia, Lowell took pity on me. “Would you like part of this sandwich?” he offered. Eventually their friendship blossomed and “Mr. Lowell” became “Cal,” but not before Spivack witnessed more troubling mood swings, particularly the awkward classroom moments that preceded Lowell’s manic-depressive phases (“Cal’s prebreakdown periods over the years were mainly signaled by an increased and obsessive classification of other poets”). To her credit, she avoids rehashing the sensational anecdotes detailed in Ian Hamilton’s biography and elsewhere, admitting that she distanced herself when sensing a manic episode in the wings, a response that Lowell would notice afterward. For Spivack, as for most of his devoted students, Lowell’s emotional instability was secondary to his critical brilliance and encyclopedic knowledge of literature and history. She recalls that while he “always tried to find something good to say,” Lowell’s “opinions had the randomness of a natural event. Praise or damnation fell equally upon our heads.” Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and George Starbuck, each no more than a year from publishing their debut collections, were among Spivack’s first Boston classmates. She quickly observed that the two female poets—who, with W.D. Snodgrass and Lowell himself, were to be forever linked with “confessional poetry”—couldn’t have been more different in taste and temperament. The formally schooled Plath admired Wallace Stevens; the largely self-taught Sexton favored William Carlos Williams. Coolly preoccupied, the conservatively dressed Plath sat in quiet contrast to the chain-smoking, ex-fashion model Sexton. Where Plath’s classroom demeanor “was serious, focused on the matter at hand, almost pained,” Sexton’s was the opposite: Her entrances were dramatic: she stood at the door, rattling her...

The I-35W Bridge Collapse: Crimes of Commission and Omission Resulting from the Confluence of State Processes and Political-Economic Conditions

The Interstate-35 West Bridge collapse offers a unique case of state crime. First, it illuminates a new topical area in the state crime literature, public infrastructure. Second, it illustrates how the bridge collapse was not a discrete act (Tombs in State Crime 1(2):170–195, 2012), but rather the outcome of relationships between different social institutions. Specifically, it demonstrates how processes within a state, in confluence with the broader political economy, produced decisions (omissions) not to invest in infrastructure repair, take expert advice, and improve coordination between agencies. Simultaneously, these same processes resulted in deliberate actions (commissions) to invest in new infrastructure rather than in maintenance and repair of existing infrastructure, and to reduce both regulatory oversight and safety procedures. We provide a detailed overview of the bridge collapse, then utilizing Kauzlarich and Kramer’s (Crimes of the American nuclear state, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1998) integrated theoretical framework, contextualize the causes of the collapse and highlight how state processes and political-economic conditions resulted in the simultaneous occurrence of crimes of omission and commission on the part of the state.

Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment. By John D. Bessler. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2012. 456 pp. $39.95 cloth.

Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders' Eighth Amendment. By John D. Bessler. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2012. 456 pp. $39.95 cloth.John D. Bessler's Cruel and Unusual is a meticulously researched and clearly written treatise on the Eighth Amendment and capital punishment. Through an extensive description of the influence of Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments on American legal thinkers, this book offers a compelling normative argument that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment.Cruel and Unusual begins with a discussion of Roper v. Simmons (2005), one of the three twenty-first-century U.S. Supreme Court cases that curtailed the death penalty in the United States, and as such exemplifies the recent trend in America away from capital punishment. The question at issue in Simmons was whether the Eighth Amendment prohibited executing persons who were under 18 when they committed murder (Simmons was 17) due to of decency. The Court's ruling in Simmons allows Bessler to delineate the two basic jurisprudential positions on how to interpret the Eighth (or any) Amendment, namely the evolving view and the originalist view. In Simmons, the evolvers won by a bare majority, and their arguments exemplify Bessler's position- that the meaning of the Eighth Amendment was not frozen in 1791 and that Supreme Court Justices should consider contemporary facts about the world when deciding legal controversies. Bessler argues this evolutionary approach is principled and should allow Justices to follow the arc of history, and rights (p. 30) to total abolition.Bessler's primary source of logic and human rights is Beccaria's (1764) classic On Crimes and Punishments. Bessler makes clear that Beccaria was a staunch utilitarian, arguing that only necessary punishments were just (p. 36). But missing from this discussion is enough attention to the alternative view. Kant believed the opposite of Beccaria and said so at the time (p. 39). These contrasting Enlightenment-era perspectives reflect an abiding and fascinating dialectic about punishment: Should we punish if it does not benefit society? Cruel and Unusual would be stronger had the author attended more to this fundamental debate. Nevertheless, Bessler makes clear that Beccaria identified or anticipated nearly all of the problems that have plagued and-continue to plague-capital punishment (p. 55) and had a significant influence on the founders of the United States, despite their almost universal support of at least some form of capital punishment.The middle part of Cruel and Unusual traces the arguments for penal reform that emerged during early American history, mostly in relation to the work of abolitionist and humanist Dr. Benjamin Rush, and his and Beccaria's influence on the Founding Fathers. In doing so, Bessler identifies an important complexity in understanding early utilitarian penal reformers: For Rush, solitude-not death-was the worst possible punishment (p. 78). If this is so, how does that make Rush such a reformer? Would not isolated confinement constitute cruel and usual punishment? This lack of clarity in the big picture of Cruel and Unusual is minor, but it, along with a few others sticks out, perhaps reflecting a minor case of normative blinders on the author. Despite minor lapses such as this, this section conveys that the Framers believed in or at least entertained utilitarian/reformist ideas under their era's standards of decency and, by implication, would probably be abolitionists today. …

Sports Justice: The Law and the Business of Sports

Book Review| July 01 2012 Sports Justice: The Law and the Business of Sports Abrams, Roger A. Sports Justice: The Law and the Business of Sports. Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 2010. Pp. 228. Illustrations. $35.00 cb. Thomas M. Hunt Thomas M. Hunt University Of Texas At Austin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2012) 39 (2): 333–334. https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.39.2.333 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Thomas M. Hunt; Sports Justice: The Law and the Business of Sports. Journal of Sport History 1 January 2012; 39 (2): 333–334. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.39.2.333 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Sport History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 University of Illinois Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Sex, Drugs, Rock &amp; Roll, and Musicals (review)

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals. By Scott Miller. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2011. [v, 281 p. ISBN 9781555537425 (hardback), $85; ISBN 9781555537432 (paperback), $24.95.] Scott Miller, founder and artistic director of New Line Theatre in St. Louis, Missouri, brings his directorial and artistic insights to ten post-Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, ably demonstrating their social references and resonances through the popculture triumvirate of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Miller asserts that the infusion of rock music styles into the musical vocabulary, along with their often sexually related subject matters, ushering in new golden age for the genre. (The classic mid-century musicals of Rodgers and Hammer stein and their contemporaries are generally thought of as the first golden age of the musical.) In Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals, Miller champions each of the shows he presents and provides insights into their backgrounds, musicaldramatic dimensions, and reception histories. Miller has directed many of these shows, and his familiarity with the works as performance pieces makes his vantage point stand out from those of other writers on musical theater. His commentaries will be of interest to performers, directors, students, and scholars who are interested in any of these shows as well as to readers who enjoy musicals, particularly more recent ones. While many of the musicals included here have played on Broadway, this certainly not always the case. Indeed, it the inclusion of wider span of musical theater works, namely those with healthy lives in regional theaters and off-Broadway, that contributes to this book's value. The book has twofold organization. At first the chapters seem to be arranged according to the musical style of the focal works. The book begins with recent show, The Wild Party, one whose music largely rooted in the 1920s. The next chapter concerns Grease and its evocations of late 1950s rock. The author's approach then shifts to an essentially chronological one and becomes survey of rock musicals from Hair through High Fidelity. Andrew Lippa's aforementioned The Wild Party opened off Broadway in 2000 and ran for just 54 performances. The story set in the 1920s, and Lippa creatively employs period music for external action and more contemporary sounds for the characters' interior moments. Miller asserts that Lippa's fluid score is as close to jazz opera as it can be without actually crossing that line (p. 12). A cast album was released, although, as Miller discloses, it includes only some of the score and listeners cannot therefore hear much of the show's extraordinary music. Grease, which began life in 1972 as a rowdy, rebellious, oversexed, and insightful piece of alternative theatre (p. 25), strove for authenticity in its depiction of teenage life in 1959. Miller posits the show as concerning itself fundamentally with the shift from sexual repression in the 1950s to sexual adventuring in the 1960s and furthermore, with how rock and roll itself changed concepts of sex in America. He effectively argues that Grease concept musical, combination of plot-driven show and concept-based revue. The epochal Hair opened off Broadway at Joseph Papp's Public Theatre in 1967 and moved to Broadway the following year. Miller places Hair within the social and spiritual influences of the 1960s, including the Vietnam War, as well as in New York's experimental movement. He addresses the show's innately ritualistic elements, drawing parallels to Christian theology-Claude as Jesus, Berger as John the Baptist, and Jeanie as Mary Magdalene (p. 77)-and illuminating its subversive messages concerning race and sexuality. As in Grease, authenticity paramount in Hair, according to Miller, who claims the show is not musical; it happening (p. 82). Miller's passionate prose on Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) begins Here's the truth: Jesus Christ Superstar about politics, not religion, about political activist, not the son of God. …

Women on Probation and Parole: A Feminist Critique of Community Programs and Services. By Merry Morash. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2010. Pp. 192. $85.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewWomen on Probation and Parole: A Feminist Critique of Community Programs and Services. By Merry Morash. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2010. Pp. 192. $85.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).Patricia O’BrienPatricia O’BrienUniversity of Illinois at Chicago Search for more articles by this author University of Illinois at ChicagoPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Social Service Review Volume 86, Number 1March 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666350 Views: 36Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.