Panama Hat Research Articles

Straw craft, imperial education and ethnographic exhibitions as tightly braided sites of gender production in Haiti and Curaçao

Woven straw work produced in the Caribbean in the early twentieth century represented a small but sustainable percentage of the region's exports. Following the US occupation in Haiti (1915–1934), handicrafts were promoted as economic ‘development’: commodified folklore fashioned for the delight of visiting tourists. Up until 1946 in Curaçao, as a strategy of the Catholic church's civilising mission, young women trained to plait the so-called ‘Panama hat’ at technical schools (Römer, 1977); the products of their labour were often exhibited at international expositions and exported for sale in Europe and the United States. This article argues that missionary education that claimed to modernise, industrialise and revalue local handicraft skills to the benefit of local populations in Haiti and the Dutch Caribbean has instead perpetuated colonial gendered and racialised divisions of labour that prepare and discipline students for factory work in the global textile industries. I use straw artefacts and photographs from the collection of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures as a starting point to trace the entanglements between imperial education and ethnographic exhibitions as sites of gender production. Drawing on Jean Casimir's concept of contre-plantation (2001), I explore how histories of indigenous craft knowledge during specific periods of resistance in Haiti have nurtured disidentification with a gendered logic of labour exploitation and racial capitalism.

In vitro Multiplication of Iraca palm (Carludovica palmata Ruíz & Pavón)

Carludovica palmata Ruíz & Pavón is a plant that belongs to the Cyclanthaceae family. Its commercial interest is related to the production of fibers for the manufacture of handicrafts, mainly the Panama hat, so it is important to study its propagation. This investigation aimed to determine the effect of 6-benzylaminopurine (BAP) in the formation of new shoots and 1-naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA) in the formation of roots, as well as the adaptation in greenhouse conditions of Carludovica palmata Ruíz & Pavón. In order to find the optimal multiplication rate, 0.5 cm length explants were planted in glass jars with 15 mL of semisolid MS with different concentrations of BAP and cultured under in vitro conditions for 90 days. The multiplication parameters in this stage were number of shoots per explant (NSE), length of shoots (LS), and length of roots (LR) as multiplication parameters. In a similar procedure, the number of roots per explant (NRE), length of roots (LR), and length of plantlets (LP) was determined using different concentrations of NAA. Finally, different substrates were evaluated for the adaptation of plantlets of C. palmata produced in vitro, under greenhouse conditions for 80 days. The highest multiplication rate (17±3 shoots per explant) was obtained with 2.0 mg L-1 of BAP. Root formation occurred efficiently in all treatments, without significant statistical differences between them. On the other hand, the use of substrate soil-t15 was the best treatment for the growth of C. palmata under greenhouse conditions. From the results obtained, it is concluded that C. palmata can be efficiently multiplied under in vitro conditions and did not present problems during the in vivo rooting process.

Reconstructing Violence: The Southern Rape Complex in Film and Literature by Deborah E. Barker (review)

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Violence: The Southern Rape Complex in Film and Literature by Deborah E. Barker Michele Curran Cornell Reconstructing Violence: The Southern Rape Complex in Film and Literature Deborah E. Barker Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015, 288 pages, Hardcover, $47.50, ISBN: 978-0-8071-6062-6 During the Jim Crow era, all-white juries and white vigilantes defended white supremacy by using the southern rape complex to justify violence against African American men in the name of protecting the so-called honor and purity of white women. Court-ordered executions and lynch mobs killed thousands of black men in the 19th and 20th Centuries, who were accused of raping or even flirting with white women. The southern rape complex vilified black men as rapists and threats to southern culture, and provided white men a discourse to support the actions they took to reinforce white male privilege and racial hierarchy. In Reconstructing Violence, Deborah Barker shows how variations of the southern rape complex in American film and literature racialized cinematic conceptions of violence throughout the 20th Century. Across an introduction, six chapters, and a coda, Barker explores how six film—Birth of a Nation (1915), The Story of Temple Drake (1933), Sanctuary (1961), Touch of Evil (1958), Cape Fear (1968), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1968). —all of which were adapted from literary novels, reconstructed ideas about sexual violence and race for American audiences from the 1910s through the 1960s. Barker explains how authors, directors, and film studios influenced the process of adapting books into movies. Through this process, she distinguishes the similarities and differences between the original stories and final theatrical cuts to show how tropes of southern rape culture influenced each film's development. The films all take place in the American South during times of national crisis such as Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights Movement. Barker uses D. W. Griffith's Reconstruction tale, Birth of a Nation, as a point of origin for many of the themes she discusses. She explains that Griffith's earlier Civil War films presented "troubling images" of former Confederates dealing with "cowardice and shame" after the Civil War (25). In Birth of a Nation, however, Barker argues that Griffith used southern rape culture to reconfigure "the defeated Confederate as the victorious Klansman" (26). In the film, southern men create the Ku Klux Klan to protect white women from the sexual aggression of black men and to protect southern whites from black rule when the government failed to do so. Using Birth of a Nation as a point of comparison, Barker shows how the tropes of the southern rape complex "are used across genres, in different time periods, in different stylistic modes, and with significant variations in narrative and character" (4). In the remainder of the book, Barker explores racial symbolism within other films by employing theoretical concepts such as racial coding and the "state of exception," both to be explained below. In most of the films Barker analyzes, white actors play the cinematic rapists, but Barker argues, "a character can be encoded as one race while visually signifying another" through "such things as speech, dress, and behaviors" (74). For example, the plot of Cape Fear explores Max Cady, an ex-convict and serial rapist who stalks and attacks the family of Sam Bowden, the prosecuting attorney who convicted him. Barker asserts that filmmakers encoded Cady as black through his defiant behavior, the familiar language he uses with black workers, his casual dress, and objects "'supercharged' with primitive power," such as Cady's "ever-present cigar and rakish Panama hat" (159-160). Furthermore, the police refer to him as "boy," and attempt to use vagrancy laws—originally designed to control the movements of black men—to force Cady to leave town (161). Barker suggests that Cady's ability to outmaneuver the legal measures Bowden [End Page 84] takes to exile him, create a frightening character for white audiences because, "as a bestial, white male rapist, Cady evades the restrictions of Jim Crow segregation" (155). Likewise, in The Story of Temple Drake, the setting is the Depression Era south where Barker explains that hillbillies, gangsters...

In Memory

In Memory Tobie Meyer-Fong As this issue of Late Imperial China went to press, the editors learned of the death at the age of 88 of Harold L. Kahn, who taught Chinese history at Stanford for most of his multi-decade career. A beloved teacher and leader in the field, Hal once described himself as an “inadvertent radical,” and professed that the three things at the core of his being were “food, words, and baseball.” While his culinary acumen, verbal wit, and love of the game were known to many, Hal defined himself and the field through his generous gifts as a friend and mentor. He will be remembered for his still-relevant work on the Qianlong emperor, published in 1971, and for the masterful and often humorous letters of recommendation that he wrote on behalf of his students (a medical school once called to offer him admission after reading a letter he wrote for an undergraduate). Having signed up for the PhD program in political science at Harvard following a Fulbright year in Sweden, he switched to Chinese history at the invitation of John King Fairbank, who observed that Kahn had already mastered a tonal language (Swedish). Hal followed an unconventional path, proudly telling his PhD students that he had not attended an Association for Asian Studies annual meeting since 1968—even as he urged them to attend and present papers themselves. He wore Birkenstock sandals and ancient flannel shirts and a Panama hat to the office, which was filled (literally) floor to ceiling with what seemed to be every important work published on Chinese history in English, Chinese, and Japanese. He stored articles and student work in precariously stacked file cabinets and declared fearlessness in the face of potential earthquake risk. He taught his students the vital importance of writing (and cooking) well, insisted that they find their own scholarly voices, and included them in Thanksgiving dinners and hiking trips to Mt. Tamalpais and the California coast. He regaled his friends with the stories of how he drove a taxi in New York during one sabbatical and about his experiences of onsen and the student movement in Japan in the 1960s. He gently engineered connections among his former students, creating a multi-generational network of friends and scholarly influences. He took tremendous pride in his students’ accomplishments, whether they remained in the profession or not. A rebel and an aesthete, he sought his own path, read voraciously, commented abundantly, and taught by example the signal importance of originality, generosity, rigor, and independence. He possessed wideranging knowledge of literature and the arts—and suggested novels and exhibits to all and sundry. He shared his office with students, friends, visiting scholars, and famously, with canine companions—one of whom, he observed, took his Qing documents course several times—and never learned a damn thing. The rest of us learned more than we can express. And for that, and for his remarkable example, we will always be grateful. December 2018 Copyright © 2019 Society for Qing Studies and Johns Hopkins University Press

模造パナマ帽をめぐる産地間競争 : 戦前期台湾・沖縄の産地形態の比較を通じて

模造パナマ帽をめぐる産地間競争 : 戦前期台湾・沖縄の産地形態の比較を通じて

Modeling of a Neuro Fuzzy System to Develop an Efficient Method to Get a Specific Color Paint from the Color Model Cyan, Magenta and Yellow (CMY) under Terms of Open Source

In this paper we present the modeling of a neuro-fuzzy system to be applied in the mix of paint from color model cyan, magenta and yellow (CMY). We aim to research an efficient method to get a specific hue color that is located within color wheel. The modeling is focused in to generate a wide gamma of colors to paint crafts like Panama Hats only with mentioned colors. Variables of the system are given by the frame and shape of selection of color. We use a fuzzy controller to generate the magnitude of the CMY percentages and a neural network to interpret the components to dosage the assigned color. Finally proceed data are used to develop an embedded controller under open source, the resulting color from the system is verified using different samples to determine the accuracy with selected color.

Haiti’s Prized Presidential Legacies

Throughout Haitian history, the country's presidents have not been viewed as effective heads of state. When they are acknowledged at all, they are not recognized for the progress made in Haiti. As of today over fifty heads of state have acceded to the Haitian leadership position, and all have been accused of corruption in one way or another, as any random reading of Haitian history will reveal.1 Such a conclusion, if true, would be quite a disheartening aberration. Is it believable that over fifty successive Haitian presidents, in over two hundred years of independence, were nothing more than corrupt people? Aside from the canonized founder and second chief of state Henry Christophe from 1807 to 1820, were there no celebrated post-founders, say a Franklin D. Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy of Haiti? Foreign accounts of Haitian history seem to suggest a resounding NO!2 Haitian accounts of their history certainly make such mention, but one would be hard pressed to find a consensus surrounding one or more presidents among a group of Haitians in the homeland or migrants living abroad.This essay briefly reviews some of the achievements of lasting significance of seven such chief of states: Christophe-the reigning King of Hayti (as it was spelled until 1890)3; Boyer-the Unifier of Hayti; Geffrard-the Redeemer of the Republic; Salomon-Leader of the Black National Party; Hyppolite-the Panama Hat- and Iron Pants-wearing horseman; the 1946 Revolution of Estime; and Magloire-the military man who led the way to Haiti's Golden Age. These men represented seven instances of a functioning Haitian state, yet the positive impacts of their leadership have been minor footnotes in historiographies of Haiti. I will focus on these seven chiefs of state since they have some notoriety among Haitians in the country and abroad.Henry Christophe, King of Hayti, 1807 to 1820Probably the best known of these seven leaders is Henry Christophe, a self-proclaimed monarch. Christophe's major accomplishments include establishing a monarchy in northern Haiti as well as amicable relations with the British and the Germans.4 He also created a trading partnership between Haiti and Jamaica, constructed the Citadelle fortress and SansSouci palace, and recruited teachers for the nation's schools. The lasting significance of Henry Christophe's rule is immortalized in the Citadelle and Sans-Souci, which now symbolize Haitian nationality.Christophe was the King of Hayti from 1807 to 1820. His legacy was forged during the slave abolition movement emerging in Great Britain. Having secured their independence in 1804, Haitians emerged as crusaders for Black people under bondage, but this fact angered slaveholding nations, which feared slave revolts, and Haitians as well, who feared imperial retaliation. More than Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines before him, Christophe became concerned about securing Haitian independence and protecting the country from another assault, which seemed ever more vulnerable (as the French seemed ever more determined) to a reinvasion after the failed French invasion of 1802.Christophe seems to have felt that Great Britain was a nation that advanced the abolition of slavery-far more than imperial France, which had offered earlier plea deals of slave emancipation during the Haitian Revolution, and the United States and Spain, which as slaveholding nations lagged behind the antislavery movement. Moreover, Christophe believed that if a kingdom such as Britain could do more to abolish slavery than France and the United States, Haitians might be better off within a kingdom.5Christophe thus modeled northern Haiti after a monarchy. This move was as much as to venerate Black independence as it was to incense slaveholding powers in the international realm. As the first-ever Negro of a liberated colony, however, Christophe sought the respect of the international community, sending several letters requesting national leaders to address him as such. …

My Hearts Are Your Hearts

In the BeginningIn one of the tents at Adelaide Writers' Week, Antony Elmer read from his latest novel, answering questions from a large audience of keen journalists and adoring fans. It was hot in the tent, there in the Pioneer Women's Memorial Gardens, and Antony sweated, the audience sweated, but it was worth it. He was brilliant. In another tent, Viviana Vincent did much the same, ditto the journalists and fans, except while her audience also poured with sweat, Viviana appeared cool (also calm and collected). Antony's novel, his seventh, was what is called literary, and it concerned a murder in Oxford in the 1990s. Viviana's was the latest in her Venus McVicker romances. The audiences in the two tents were different. Antony's lot was drawn from what is called the intelligentsia, and was clearly male, fellows pack- ing down with the big boys. A smattering of women, mostly middle-aged. Viviana's people were predominantly women, women of all ages, their faces alight with ex- citement at being so close to the darling of their reading groups and book clubs. Antony's books sold very well, were warmly reviewed in all the best papers and journals, won prizes; Viviana's sold in fantastic numbers. They were ecstatically reviewed (in women's magazines). They did not win prizes.Who is Antony?Antony Winston Elmer was born in Canterbury in 1949. At Oxford he studied Medieval History. He has been married three times, his current wife being the cel- ebrated TV presenter Minki Sackville. He has four sons and three daughters (the youngest daughter is screen actress Leaf Bath-Dickens). Three of his novels have been short-listed for the Booker Prize. Two have been made into films: The Clear Spring and The Mourning of Exiles.Who is Viviana?Viviana Maria Vincent was born in Hobart in 1960, named after her mother's favor- ite aunt. It's a lovely old-fashioned name, darling, a romantic name. Your great aunt was a very romantic lady. The name was tailor-made for a writer of romance, and, as fate, luck, or destiny would have it, that's what Viviana became. Her Venus McVick- er novels took off, and Viviana was a success, a sensation, a star. Fortunately she had a heart-shaped face, a dazzling smile, long lustrous chestnut curls, long legs, a lithe and seductive body. A lilting speaking voice. A certain wit and charming manners. Clothes loved her; the camera loved her also. She was a true gift to any publicist.She lives, her biography will tell you, in a rambling Georgian house overlooking the Derwent River on the outskirts of Hobart in historic Tasmania. With, it says, her husband (childhood sweetheart-can this be true? It is.) Her children (a film- maker, a barrister and a sculptor) all live overseas. There is soon to be a baby grand- daughter. (Imagine!) Viviana and husband Will also have a most beautiful house in Provence. The children are called Xenia, Yvonne and Zac. VWXYZ. Yes. Please don't give this a moment's thought.The NovelsThe latest, St. Valentine's Day, was heralded on long banners in airports across the world, alongside, as it happened, banners shouting out Antony's title, Carnival of Lust. When people stopped at the airport bookshops, the two books were dropped into separate bags, and they left on different arms. Supermarkets discounted both. It has to be said that St. Valentine's Day outsold Carnival of Lust in the supermar- kets. But the latter novel was going to win important prizes; the former, naturally, was not. Viviana has read several of Antony's novels; Antony would not be seen dead reading any of hers.In the Book TentAfter the sessions in the tents, Viviana and Antony (she in pale green silk and sandals, he in white jeans, white shirt, pale blue linen jacket, bright pink face and panama hat) were shepherded by their publishers to the table in the Book Tent where they would sign the books bought by their fans. They sat side by side, some distance from each other, and each had a glass of chilled champagne. …

Searching for Mr. Stevens: Poems by Ken Lauter (review)

Reviewed by: Searching for Mr. Stevens: Poems by Ken Lauter James Finnegan Searching for Mr. Stevens: Poems. By Ken Lauter. Xlibris, 2011. To be a poet (maker/creator) one must be audacious. Perhaps the most audacious project is to try to get inside the head of a major artist, especially such an outsized and commanding maker, and mind, as the poet Wallace Stevens. Ken Lauter has crafted a series of poems that together become an idiosyncratic portrait of Wallace Stevens. Idiosyncratic, because as much as these poems are about Stevens, and as much as they rely on Stevens’ poetry, letters, and biography, it’s Lauter’s particular vision of Stevens that pervades the poems. Both in a psychological and in a poetic sense, many of the poems literally try to speak Stevens’ mind. Others explore and elaborate various incidents from Stevens’ life and times. Clearly, Lauter knows his Stevens inside and out. And wisely he has entitled his collection Searching for Mr. Stevens. This helps undercut the inevitable [End Page 251] questions that arise when we read a poem speculating upon what Stevens might have thought or felt on a particular occasion during his life. Here Lauter not only searches but finds Marianne Moore and Stevens strolling together in New York City: down streets of glitter, stink, horns, smoke, smiles, curses, and cops. Did people passing by them wonder if they were a circus act? He was huge, a suave bear in a Panama hat and bow tie and she was bird-like—not a sparrow but a falcon—in a long, black coat and jaunty tri-corner hat. . . . (from: “Mr. Stevens & Miss Moore Take a Stroll”) I think of Stevens as more of a fedora man myself, and in poems like these, Lauter certainly takes his share of imaginative liberties. But if I can’t always believe Lauter’s vision, I don’t have trouble reading or rolling along, having some fun inhabiting Lauter’s inventive jaunts. The poems are most successful when Lauter makes (or approximates) a Stevensian poem to tell us about Stevens: He thinks of the thick stack of files of surety claims on his office desk waiting for him, oblivious to the gray of the sky, ignorant of the blue, high above the gray, and the always-burning eye high above the blue. He thinks all this thinking is a waste of time but knows time is all he has—and it isn’t gray. (from: “Mr. Stevens Overcast”) In many of his poems, Lauter quotes Stevens’ poetry and letters. These materials certainly lend authority to the poet or poem’s speaker, and being Stevens’ words they do good service within the poem. Direct quotes are italicized by convention, which is fine. But many of the quotes are also marked with an asterisk or a hashtag in the text, and then footnoted below. I understand the need to credit these quotes, but the alternative of adding a few notes at the end of the collection, citing specific sources within a particular poem, would have been less intrusive than running into an “*” or “#” within the text. To write one or two poems with Stevens in mind perhaps expresses one’s passion. To write a dozen borders on obsession. To write a book’s worth of poems based on Stevens may be the act of a fanatic. But for any fan of Stevens’ [End Page 252] poetry this collection will be a joy—partly because the poems touch on so many aspects of Stevens’ works and biography, partly because Lauter’s writing is direct and often deft. In the following poem, for instance, in which he imagines a love-like bond between Stevens and his much younger niece Jane, Lauter ends quite aptly with understatement and undertones: When these two finally speak, it is in slow, patient, syllables. Let us leave them there, an old man and a young woman sitting at peace in Elizabeth Park, awaiting December’s revisions. (from: “Wallace and Jane in Elizabeth Park”) Wallace Stevens is Lauter’s poetic paramour, and he has not failed to speak fully of that relationship, which he has so liberally imagined. Lauter writes clearly to and of...

The Enemy Within: Regulating Prostitution and Controlling Venereal Disease in Cisleithanian Austria during the Great War

During summer 1917, civilians using the city baths in Olmütz, Moravia, demanded that soldiers stationed at the local Emperor Francis Joseph infantry barracks cease swimming nude in the March River opposite the city baths, especially during the women's swimming hour. In addition to those of soldiers, the bathing habits of other culprits offended the good citizens of the city. One resident complained that children, adolescent boys and girls, and even some grown-ups, among them “buxom” prostitutes, were swimming nude in the March and thus offending the morals of others. “Flashers” also caught the attention of the public and the police, including the unknown man who made “immoral,” but unrecorded, remarks and exposed himself to the women who frequented the promenade under the Freundschaftshöhe in the western Bohemian spa town, Karlsbad, during the summer. The offended women provided the police with a good description of this man, said to be between forty-five and fifty years old, of average size, with gray, grizzled hair, a graying mustache, and a goatee. They described his clothing, a dark suit with knee-length pants, knee-high stockings, hiking boots, and a panama hat. (Records do not indicate whether police apprehended the suspect.) In the Bukovinian provincial capital Czernowitz, an eighteen-year-old electrical technician accused a forty-seven-year-old man from Saxony who allegedly propositioned him on the city's Ringplatz one late summer's evening in 1918 of “crimes against nature.” The most common “morals” problem to preoccupy the police and the military during the Great War, however, was neither flashers nor nude bathers; it was prostitution.

NETWORKING THE WAVES: OCEAN LINERS, IMPRESARIOS, AND BROADWAY'S ATLANTIC EXPANSION

InThe Great Wet Way,a humorous account of transatlantic travel, American theatre critic Alan Dale represents ocean liners as sites of transformation, frivolity, and performance. In the passage above, he ponders the peculiar metamorphosis that overtakes him whenever he crosses the Atlantic. Cut off from the hustling world of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, he loses his “real self,” becoming instead an autograph-hunting, bridge-playing, opera-glassing “ship self.” It is as though the ship has remade Dale and the social world around him (Fig. 1). Within this altered world, new sights become old sights, and eccentric clothing or mannerisms come to seem commonplace. Dale recalls seeing a young woman wearing a Panama hat covered with autographs from her fellow passengers. If the woman dared to “walk down Broadway or Fifth Avenue wearing that hideous autograph hat,” he writes, “[s]he would probably be followed by a howling and derisive mob. . . . Yet on board she was unmolested. After the first few days nobody noticed the autograph hat.”

Bob Dylan and The Emperor Jones Revisited

Bob Dylan's “Sweetheart Like You” (1983) includes the following lines: “Steal a little and they throw you in jail/Steal a lot and they make you king.”1 Michael Gray identifies prior iterations of this “commonplace,” including one from The Emperor Jones: “For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin' dey makes you Emperor.”2Gray perhaps stopped short. Another passage from the song better encapsulates O'Neill's theme: “Well, the pressure's down, the boss ain't here/He gone North for awhile/They say that vanity got the best of him/But he sure left here in style.” These lines recall O'Neill's soi-disant “boss,” redolent of vanity (e.g., “Think these ign'rent bush niggers dat ain't got brains enuff to know their own names even can catch Brutus Jones?”) and stylishness (e.g., “He reaches in under the throne and pulls out an expensive Panama hat with a bright multi-colored band and sets it jauntily on his head”). In The Emperor Jones, vanity and style, figured sartorially, follow identical downward trajectories. But the nearly naked Jones “leaves” with his panache intact. “Gawd blimey,” declares Smithers in his curtain-speech, “but yer died in the 'eighth o' style.”3A rewrite of the lyric from Dylan's website reframes the connection: “He gone North, he ain't around/… But he sure left here after sundown.”4 Jones hurries to reach the forest while light remains; at least by the time he arrives there, darkness has descended, much to his disadvantage.Dylan's only overt statement about O'Neill concerns a circa 1988 performance of Long Day's Journey Into Night. “The play was hard to bear, family life at its worst, self-centered morphine addicts, I was glad when it was over,” he writes, “I felt sorry for these people, but none of them touched me.”5 We do know, however, that Dylan sometimes responded more generously to modern drama.6 And on at least one occasion he may have incorporated a line from a modern play into a song: the title of his early, unrecorded “Love Is Just a Four Letter Word” perhaps derives from Tennessee Williams—not, as Gray suggests (550), from the 1968 screenplay of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (which Williams did not write), but from “Block Twelve” of Camino Real (1953). The Emperor Jones, like Camino Real, seems more Dylan's “style” than Long Day's Journey into Night (and Cat).7Recent work emphasizes the allusiveness of Dylan's lyrics, and the publication of his Chronicles showed Dylan to be a broad reader. It would not be remarkable if he had been aware of The Emperor Jones, nor would it be odd if he had responded positively to this first manifestation of O'Neill's “Dylanesque” tendency to jettison his own recent and successful artistic formulae.

The Hall-Mills Murder Case: The Most Fascinating Unsolved Homicide in America

he jacket blurb on William Kunstler's recently reissued book on Hall-Mills case dubs it the most fascinating unsolved homicide in annals of American crime.1 For once, such promotional hype is not hyperbole, although I admit to some prejudice in this view which I will explain in a moment. There was national, even international sensation in September 1922, when bodies of an Episcopalian rector and of a choir singer from his church in New Brunswick were discovered under a crab apple tree off a well-known lovers' lane just outside town. The pair had been missing for two nights and a day when a young working-class couple stumbled across grisly tableau which had been staged by murderer or murderers. Edward Wheeler Hall and Eleanor Reinhardt Mills lay on their backs, side by side, she with a scarf draped over her neck and her head resting on minister's outstretched arm, he with his glasses resting on his nose and his face partly covered by a Panama hat. Effusive and incriminating love letters from Mrs. Mills to Reverend M r . Hall were strewn about bodies; and minister's calling card with his name printed in gothic letters was carefully propped up against his lifeless foot. The forty-one-year-old minister had been shot once in head; and thirty-four-year-old soprano had three bullets in her skull. The woman's throat, moreover, had been slashed with such violence that head was nearly severed. To this day, local residents still regale newcomers to New Brunswick with rumors that victims' bodies were also sexually mutilated; there is no credible supporting evidence for such claims.

Dean Acheson and the Making of "the West"

Robert Beisner's book is a monumental, deeply researched biography of Dean Acheson, focused on his years as secretary of state. It is in all respects a first-rate political study. A bishop's son and a literary stylist who published essays somewhat in the manner of Lamb and Hazlitt, Acheson was also, somewhat improbably, a sharply distinctive Washington lawyer and political insider. Indeed, this sartorial dandy sometimes seems in the mind's eye to have sprung from a New Yorker cartoon rather than his actual milieu of rough politicos in the spittoon and panama hat culture of Harry Truman's Washington. Yet in reality he was a dominating figure. President John F. Kennedy, consulting him later, commented on his “intimidating seniority” (p. 330). Acheson on another occasion told Lyndon Johnson, who was complaining about fickle public support, “Mr. President, its simple. You're not a very lovable person” (p. 633). This was a man who spoke truth to power, in season and out.

Listening to Noddy

As a young journalist at the Courier-Mail newspaper, my mother once met the famous British children's writer Enid Blyton, who stopped in Brisbane briefly. There was a press conference in a hangar out at the airport. Many important people were there — the Australian publisher, someone from the British High Commission, someone from the Prime Minister's Office, along with reporters from Sydney and Melbourne — and my mother, my beautiful young mother, in a panama hat with gloves and white glasses, excited to be there, to be amongst it.

First Report of a Phytoplasma-Associated Leaf Yellowing Syndrome of Palma Jipi Plants in Southern México.

The palm-like monocot Palma Jipi (Carludovica palmata, Cyclanthaceae), from which Panama hats are traditionally made, is important to the rural economy of southern Mexico and other Latin American countries. A lethal decline of C. palmata plants was first recognized by farmers at Kalkini in the state of Campeche, Mexico, during 1994. Characterized by a progressive yellowing of successively younger leaves, affected plants died within a few weeks after the onset of this primary symptom. Annual losses estimated at 10% of the naturalized C. palmata population have since occurred in the vicinity of Kalkini, an area in which coconut lethal yellowing (LY) disease is also prevalent. The close proximity and superficially similar symptomatology of these two diseases suggested that both might share a common etiology. DNA samples were obtained from five diseased and five healthy C. palmata plants by small scale extraction of immature leaf bases and assessed for phytoplasma DNA by use of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) at laboratories in Mérida, INIFAP/Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (Nuevo León) and the University of Florida (Fort Lauderdale). Samples from symptomatic plants consistently tested positive by PCR employing universal rRNA primers (P1/P7), which amplify a 1.8-kb phytoplasma rDNA product (4), and negative when LY-specific primers LYF1/LYR1 (1) or MMF/MMR (3) were used. No PCR products were evident when DNAs of symptomless plants were evaluated with these primer combinations. Fragment patterns resolved by 8% polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of rDNA digested separately with either AluI, BamHI, BstUI, DdeI, DraI, EcoRI, HaeIII, HhaI, HinfI, MspI, RsaI, Sau3AI, TaqI, or Tru9I endonucleases revealed no differences between phytoplasma isolates associated with five C. palmata plants. Collectively, restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) patterns generated with key enzymes AluI, BamHI, DraI, and HaeIII clearly differentiated the C. palmata yellows (CPY) phytoplasma from LY and other known phytoplasmas previously characterized by this means (2). A sequence homology of 99.21% between 16S rDNA of CPY (1,537 bp; GenBank accession, AF237615) and LY (1,524 bp; accession, U18747) indicated that these strains were very similar. This relationship was confirmed by phylogenetic analysis of 16S rDNA sequence, which placed both strains into the same phytoplasma subclade.

A Nine-Year-Old Boy's Memories of World War I

Not Forgotten A Nine-Year-Old Boy's Memories ofWorld War I BY FLOYD WALDREP This firsthand account of small-town life during World War I takes place in Red Bay, Alabama, located near the Mississippi border in northwest Alabama. THE TROOP TRAIN Everyone was talking about a troop train coming, and diat bodiered me. I knew it should be a secret. After all, a German spy might be lurking nearby. I knew this train was important because the government was paying a man five dollars a day to guard the railroads in Red Bay, Alabama, the only water stop between Corinth, Mississippi, and Haleyville, Alabama. This proved to me (and I was to be ten years old the middle of September) that it wasn't safe for everyone to know that this train was loaded with American troops. People were passing our store, which was only a block from the depot. Some whispered that a troop train was coming; others blurted it out loud. I joined the crowd and ran down the road to the neat litde railroad station. The smooth, hard surface of firmly packed cinders felt good against my bare feet. The road gendy curved by a loading dock that joined a corral, and a border of neady arranged cross-ties kept the cinders off the tracks. The yellow building trimmed in brown seemed to be sitting in a cinder box. I found a seat on the freight platform high enough to see over the train. I was looking at the signal when the red light popped on. I knew the train was leaving Vina, which was seven miles east of Red Bay. Traveling at the terrific speed of sixty miles per hour, it would be here soon. My watch was broken so I couldn't figure the exact time. The crowd lined the track to the railroad water tank. Men wiped die sweat from their faces with bandanna handkerchiefs, and the women fanned themselves with dainty litde fans. Across the tracks I could see Uncle Charlie, the division engineer in charge ofall watering stations, standing by his watermelon patch. He was dressed in his best summer clothes, wearing clean white shoes and a new Panama hat. He seemed a litde nervous as he lit his crooked-stem pipe. I heard the strong blast of the steam whisde as the passenger train neared the overhead bridge. Dust was flying, and steam hissed from the giant twentiethcentury engine as the wheels screeched to a stop. 123 Nine-year-old Floyd Waldrep in Red Bay, AUbama, ca. 191S. I24 FLOYD WALDREP The fireman skillfully climbed to the big water box and started the flow from the round, flat-topped water tank The Soldiers covered with wood slats. The soldiers unloaded from the/ j j r . ,., , r . ? ¦ , ? ? , unloaded worn train like a colony of ants and invaded the watermelonJ patch like soldiers in batde. They captured the melonsthe train like a without thumping them to see ifthey were ripe, and toted» p diem to the train and ate them with bayonets. Others~s J dropped to the freshly plowed ground, popped the mei-and invaded the ons open on their knees, and ate with their fingers and. ? , . ? JlU-C U ¦ A TUAACU Ä>rf/tfflH?«0» tOtCD drank the juice out of the rinds. The red dirt from the¿ watermelon stuck to their hands and faces, which were like Soldiers in sticky with juice. The soldiers looked like Indian braves 7 ? going to batde with painted faces and pompadour hair cut short......................... The late arrivals found nothing but vines and green fruit. In their mad frustration they made sport with the remains , tossing and catching the small melons, even throwing them at the train like a bunch of kids playing in the rain. Not all the soldiers were rowdy, though. In fact, most were very friendly. I got off my high seat and joined my neighbors in fraternizing with the young gentiemen . One gave me a poke full ofpretzels. I was so proud of them I showed them for days. The pretzels got so stale my mother made me feed diem to the chickens. Uncle Charlie was talking to a friend...

Craftsmen, Merchants, and Violence in Colombia: The Sucesos de Bucaramanga of 1879

The development of Colombia's import/export economy was accompanied by numerous violent conflicts from the second half of the nineteenth century onward. Craftsmen were among those who fiercely opposed the model of ‘outward-looking development’ (desarrollo hacia afuera). With independence this group initially increased in number during the first half of the nineteenth century. Around 1870, their proportion of the gainfully employed male population may have come to about ten per cent. More than sixty per cent of all working women were involved in handicraft activities. Artesanos, as craftsmen were listed in Colombian population statistics, were one of the most wide-spread occupational classes until the turn of the century. In nearly all towns and cities there were tanners, shoemakers, weavers, dyers, tailors, blacksmiths, bricklayers, carpenters, joiners, and potters, as well as the newly introduced trades of lithographers and letterpress printers, to provide for the local consumers’ demands. However, artisans differed from region to region in terms of quantity (absolutely and as a percentage of the total population), composition of professions, proportion of women and children, as well as in their ethnicity. Moreover, a largely rural textile industry (based on family concerns) developed near Pasto as well as in Santander and Boyacá and became famous beyond these regions. In contrast to urban manufacture in Bogotá and Bucaramanga dominated by mestizoes, and that of Cali and the Atlantic coast dominated by mulattos, these weavers were mainly of Indian descent. In Tolima and in parts of Antioquia and Santander palm straw hats (‘Panama hats’) were produced - mainly by Indian women. This headgear was priced so reasonably that the hats were exported in large quantities to the West Indies and the USA.

The Person Sitting in Darkness: James in the American South

The Person Sitting in Darkness: James in the American South Eric Haralson Your luggage in America, is “looked after,” but vou are not . . . . —The American Scene Until recently, it has not been common to think of Henry James as a race writer. But under the tonic pressure of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, which posits Africanism as “one of the most furtively radical impinging forces” (5) within the American canon, readers have begun to find racial shadings in many of his works, almost as if bearing out an insight from The American Scene: “To be on the lookout for differences [is], not unnaturally, to begin to meet them” (50). In a sense, these discoveries are hardly surprising. James grew up with abolitionism—including his father’s apocalyptic strain—“intensely in the air”; a prime romantic episode of his New York boyhood involved the midnight flight of two black servants of a neighboring Kentucky family (“They had never [before] been for us so beautifully slaves”); and brothers Wilky and Robertson reported home on the “coloured troops” they fought with in the Civil War, afterward establishing a farm in Florida to promote black labor. Beyond this, young Henry cut his aesthetic teeth on literature centered on race, from the adventure tales of Mayne Reid to miscegenation novels like Elizabeth Stoddard’s Two Men (1865) to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), his “first experiment in grown-up fiction.” Equally keen was his interest in stage renditions of Stowe’s masterpiece, which he remembered savoring with an “appetite” comparable to that of “the more full-bodied Uncle Tom” (A 92–93, 142–43, 468–71). 1 [End Page 249] By these means, James’s grasping imagination annexed the Old South as well, as can be seen from even the briefest survey of his writings. Besides obvious cases like The Bostonians, 2 we note that Roderick Hudson derives part of his unstable genius—a vein of “the old Southern arrogance”—from a slaveholding Virginian father (RH 186). Notice, too, that Strether, regarding the renovated Waymarsh in Paris, thinks of his “fuliginous” face under a panama hat as suggesting “a Southern planter of the great days” (AM 268). And in his autobiography, James recalls a childhood visit to Sing Sing, where an elegant criminal in a “cool loose uniform of shining white” had stared him down as if he were one of the man’s “slaves”: “I envied the bold-eyed celebrity in the array of a planter at his ease” (A 100–101). As these examples demonstrate, James had an abiding fascination for the temper and perquisites of “the cotton gentry,” the power dynamics of slavery, and above all the body politics of Southern racial experience (AS 423). Indeed to his mature mind, the “legacy of the intimate presence of the negro” constituted the sign by which the South was known: thus an 1887 review of Constance Fenimore Woolson speculates that one of her novels is set there, “though there are no negroes,” and praises her collection Rodman the Keeper for its “singularly exact familiarity with the ‘natural objects’ of the region, including the negro of reality” (AS 375; LC 641, 644). To flesh out what James meant by this curious phrase requires us to turn to his correspondence from the early months of 1905 and to The American Scene, his most sustained meditation on “the Southern black as we knew him not . . . at the North” (AS 375). I will contend that a thematics of bodies—black and white, substantive and metaphoric, suffering and well-served—is crucial to the question of “James on race,” and that his view of the place of African Americans in society and culture stood in intricate relation to the trials of his own body during his American tour. But before taking James south, so to speak, a few words about his understanding of antebellum history. In the period just prior to James’s sojourn, as Eric Sundquist shows, the South had launched a campaign (with Northern complicity) to rewrite the past by circulating a “mythology of kind masters and contented slaves”: “Featuring facsimile recreations of plantation life, complete with black spirituals and folk dances, events such as...

Machine Songs IV: The Menace of Mechanical Music

Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. Only by harking back to the day of the roller skate or the bicycle craze, when sports of admitted utility ran to extravagance and virtual madness, can we find a parallel to the way in which these ingenious instruments have invaded every community in the land. And if we turn from this comparison in pure mechanics to another which may fairly claim a similar proportion of music in its soul, we may observe the English sparrow, which, introduced and welcomed in all innocence, lost no time in multiplying itself to the dignity of a pest, to the destruction of numberless native song birds, and the invariable regret of those who did not stop to think in time. On a matter upon which I feel so deeply, and which I consider so far-reaching, I am quite willing to be reckoned an alarmist, admittedly swayed in part by personal interest, as well as by the impending harm to American musical art. I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue--or rather by vice--of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines. When I add to this that I myself and every other popular composer are victims of a serious infringement on our clear moral rights in our own work, I but offer a second reason why the facts and conditions should be made clear to everyone, alike in the interest of musical art and of fair play. It cannot be denied that the owners and inventors