People In New York Research Articles

H.M. Naqvi's Home Boy: A Socio-Cultural Conflict Analysis in the Context of Disruption and Multiculturalism

Through the lens of multiculturalism, this inquiry examines Home Boy by H.M. Naqvi. In particular, this study will look at how the selected literary work portrays several types of socio-cultural conflict that make it hard for the protagonists to blend in with their new communities. Concerns about intergroup tensions are at the forefront of multicultural communities' minds. According to this research, "socio-cultural conflict" describes when two or more cultures clash in areas such as politics, economics, religion, and society. The current study focuses on the book in question as an example of the socio-cultural conflict that might arise in heterogeneous society. Summing up the current human condition and the difficulties people face in a diverse city like New York is offered here. Characters in that society suffer as a result of these tensions as a result of immigration struggles, terrorist attacks, and identity issues. Cultural priorities, as shown in the book, lead to the denial of rights to many people in heterogeneous societies. Terrorist attacks and other forms of discrimination against them serve to solidify their inferiority complex. The facts on the hardships experienced by people in New York's postcolonial multicultural society are unearthed via the use of qualitative content analysis. Home Boy faces a plethora of socio-cultural conflicts and shows an interest in the real-life situations of the people living in such civilizations, according to the study. Their socioeconomic position is deteriorated by the prevailing culture, and H. M. Naqvi has communicated this misery via this work.

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Working-Class Germans in the Salt City: Syracuse, New York, 1860–1916

Working-Class Germans in the Salt CitySyracuse, New York, 1860–1916 Daniel Koch (bio) The central city of the Empire State was once the home of thousands of Germans, the largest contingent in a multicultural, multilingual urban melting pot. Syracuse was one of the key industrial cities of the United States during the Civil War era and into the twentieth century. Like other American cities, its industrial might was built on immigrant labor, much of which was German. Yet, there has not been a historical study of German Syracuse since the editors of the German-language Syracuse Union newspaper produced a book called Geschichte der Deutschen in Syracuse und Onondaga County (The history of the Germans in Syracuse and Onondaga County) in 1897. Like the tomes of county history produced around the same time, the Geschichte focuses on the great and the good. Its subtitle gives its intention away—Nebst Kurzen Biographien von Beamten and Hervorragenden Buergern (With short biographies of officials and prominent citizens). The book is handsomely illustrated with portraits of eminent German Americans who achieved great success in their careers, and who also gave back to their communities by supporting churches, schools, and charities. These leaders were a source of pride at a time when "great man" status was the aim to which young men were taught to aspire. But the men (and they are all men) whose portraits adorn the Geschichte were exceptions. Most German immigrants worked in industrial jobs, living in what urban accommodation they could afford. They clustered in immigrant neighborhoods with other Germans but also often in mixed communities with other groups of immigrants—Irish, particularly in the early decades, and Italian and Polish in the later part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article seeks to expose a little-studied German community, going beyond the limited great-man focused nineteenth-century sources that exist. Both the Geschichte and Dwight H. Bruce's Memorial History of Syracuse (1891), the two most detailed views of the city in the late nineteenth century, portray a highly positive view of a flourishing German [End Page 361] American community that exemplified civic virtue.1 Historians have maintained that Germans were widely accepted, even celebrated, in American society between the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I.2 The purpose here is not to try to undermine this view; indeed, the records from Syracuse in this period clearly bear it out. Nor is it to write a labor history of Germans in Syracuse. It is rather to bring back to life some of what was left out or swept under the carpet in building this narrative of German success in America. This article seeks to answer why these omissions occurred and argues that it was at least partially related to pervasive racialist discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, studying Syracuse's German community enables us to reconstruct the urban geography of a nineteenth-century industrial center and take a new look at a lost German neighborhood in a key American city. Syracuse was a relatively late city to emerge in New York State. The land upon which it is built was part of the Onondaga Reservation, a 64,000-acre tract that was exempt from white settlement by the terms of the 1788 treaty between the State of New York and the Onondaga Nation.3 Syracuse is still known as the salt city due to the briny waters that flow into Onondaga Lake, from which salt can be made using a boiling process. Water from Syracuse's salt springs, an 1834 map boasted, produced nearly seven times as much salt as the same quantity of sea water. "Solar salt" was also produced by allowing the water to evaporate in the sun and raking in the remaining salt. Subsequent exploitative treaties with the state chipped away at the Onondaga Reservation (other Haudenosaunee people in New York experienced the same in the so-called treaty period between the 1790s and 1820s). The land upon which Syracuse was built was transferred first to the state and then sold off to private buyers. Settlers poured in, mainly from New England, in the early decades...

Author Response

Author Response

Mark Bingham

In this article, the author recounts some of the events that occurred on September 11, 2001, when four doomed airlines crashed after being hijacked by 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists, resulting in the deaths of 2,977 people in New York, New York, at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and on an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It is at this latter location, where United Flight 93 crashed killing everyone onboard, including 31-year-old Mark Bingham, an openly gay businessman and member of a small group of people who, it is believed, wrested control from the hijackers and brought the plane down. In the years post-September 11, Bingham has become known as a modern-day hero by the various queer communities, while also garnering a high level of notoriety among many mainstream people as well. The author maintains, however, that Bingham’s hero status simultaneously contributes to the dismissal and erasure of countless other queer people, primarily Black, Brown, and transgender, who have also performed heroic acts throughout modern U.S. history. Without diminishing the actions Bingham and the others took on board United Flight 93, the author questions why this particular gay man is remembered, while countless other queer/trans people of color remain largely unknown.

Evaluating the Impact of New York's Executive Order on Face Mask Use on COVID-19 Cases and Mortality: a Comparative Interrupted Times Series Study.

BackgroundOn April 17, 2020, the State of New York (NY) implemented an Executive Order that requires all people in NY to wear a face mask or covering in public settings where social distancing cannot be maintained. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended face mask use by the general public, there is a lack of evidence on the effect of face mask policies on the spread of COVID-19 at the state level.ObjectiveTo assess the impact of the Executive Order on face mask use on COVID-19 cases and mortality in NY.DesignA comparative interrupted time series analysis was used to assess the impact of the Executive Order in NY with Massachusetts (MA) as a comparison state.ParticipantsWe analyzed data on COVID-19 in NY and MA from March 25 to May 6, 2020.InterventionThe Executive Order on face mask use in NY.Main MeasuresDaily numbers of COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths.Key ResultsThe average daily number of confirmed cases in NY decreased from 8549 to 5085 after the Executive Order took effect, with a trend change of 341 (95% CI, 187–496) cases per day. The average daily number of deaths decreased from 521 to 384 during the same two time periods, with a trend change of 52 (95% CI, 44–60) deaths per day. Compared to MA, the decreasing trend in NY was significantly greater for both daily numbers of confirmed cases (P = 0.003) and deaths (P < 0.001).ConclusionsThe Executive Order on face mask use in NY led to a significant decrease in both daily numbers of COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths. Findings from this study provide important evidence to support state-level policies that require face mask use by the general public.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11606-020-06476-9.

Attica's Ashes

Attica's Ashes Joshua Melville (bio) On the morning of September 20, 1971, the radical defense attorney William Kunstler had a difficult choice. That day there would be almost two dozen funerals for inmates of Attica killed during the assault to take back the prison. Kunstler, whose name was in the New York Times nearly every day for representing the inmates, could deliver a eulogy for only one. He chose my father, Sam Melville. Days earlier, members of the Weather Underground, incensed by what they felt was my father's state-sanctioned murder, had set off a bomb in the office of the New York prison commissioner, Russell Oswald. Rumors spread that their next action would be to steal my father's remains and burn them on Governor Rockefeller's lawn. To prevent this, on the day of his memorial, a van pulled up to the small church in the East Village filled with a battalion of African American men in black berets. Militant organizers in the Black Panther Party had asked some of their toughest to stand over my father's body. Although there was no precedent for guarding the remains of a white man, none needed reminding that my father was like John Brown, an abolitionist who crossed the ethnic divide to help forge the most effective "slave revolt" in modern U.S. history. Authorities must have agreed; while the names of Attica victims were being withheld for weeks, Rockefeller seemed anxious to announce on the same day of the retaking that Mad Bomber Melville was shot randomly in D Yard while running with Molotov cocktails toward an oil drum, presumably to blow it up, but, thanks to Rockefeller's decisive leadership, my father was "no longer a threat to the good people of New York." Rockefeller (whose office my father destroyed the day before his arrest) also claimed that Sam Melville was responsible for the making of about three hundred Molotov cocktails out of peanut butter and instant coffee jars, a rocket launcher from plumbing scraps, and the electrifying blockades made from file cabinets, and organizing the "L" shaped trench, visible in many Attica photos, which was allegedly designed to entrap troopers in flames when they descended the catwalks. As a child, however, I'd been told only that he was simply far away doing volunteer [End Page 38] Click for larger view View full resolution Prisoner intake photograph of Samuel Melville, ca. 1970. new york state archives Click for larger view View full resolution State Police investigators examine the "rocket launcher" allegedly constructed by Sam Melville during the uprising at Attica. The makeshift launcher, now disassembled, is part of the Attica Collection at the New York State Museum. new york state police, ltc (ret) benziger work. That was the cover story he and my mother had agreed to, and which he represented faithfully when he wrote to me from prison. Almost two years after his death, at age eleven, Mom showed me his picture on the front page of the New York Times. It was then I learned that the man I'd always called Dad was known to the rest of the world as the Mad Bomber, the engineer of over a dozen targeted explosions to protest racism and U.S. imperialism in the summer of 1969. In 2010, one historian labeled him "the essential blueprint for every radical organization throughout the 1970s." That day, mom also showed me Letters from Attica, an anthology of his prison letters, posthumously published. By 1975 the book had begun to inhabit the same conversations as the revered radical bibles Soledad Brother by George Jackson and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. [End Page 39] Click for larger view View full resolution New York State Police evidence photo displaying an assembly of Molotov cocktails purportedly manufactured under the guidance of Sam Melville. new york state archives I was angry and cried for much of that afternoon. I felt that my father had been stolen from me. Then I opened Letters from Attica and learned there were others who shared my grief: activists, lawyers, and lovers. We were now a unique sort of family. I would spend the next twenty...

Précis of Vigor: Neuroeconomics of Movement Control.

Why do we run toward people we love, but only walk toward others? Why do people in New York seem to walk faster than other cities? Why do our eyes linger longer on things we value more? There is a link between how the brain assigns value to things, and how it controls our movements. This link is an ancient one, developed through shared neural circuits that on one hand teach us how to value things, and on the other hand control the vigor with which we move. As a result, when there is damage to systems that signal reward, like dopamine and serotonin, that damage not only affects our mood and patterns of decision-making, but how we move. In this book, we first ask why, in principle, evolution should have developed a shared system of control between valuation and vigor. We then focus on the neural basis of vigor, synthesizing results from experiments that have measured activity in various brain structures and neuromodulators, during tasks in which animals decide how patiently they should wait for reward, and how vigorously they should move to acquire it. Thus, the way we move unmasks one of our well-guarded secrets: how much we value the thing we are moving toward.

New York Militia and Opposition to the War of 1812

New York Militia and Opposition to the War of 1812 Harvey Strum (bio) The response of the New York militia to the War of 1812 reflected the widespread opposition in New York to the war. Seven of New York's ten Republican Congressmen and one of its Senators voted against war. Of course, the Federalist members of the House delegation rejected the war as unnecessary and a threat to the safety of the people of New York. When Republican Governor Daniel Tompkins proposed loaning the federal government $500,000 to prosecute the war the Federalist-controlled Assembly blocked him. Over the course of the war, 4,000 militiamen were fined for refusing to show up for service. Historians of the War of 1812 have not emphasized the anti-war sentiment in New York and how it affected the performance of the militia during the war; instead, they stressed the anti-war sentiment in New England. The response of New York's militia, for example, at the battle of Queenston, reflected, in part, the deep divisions the war created in New York and the politicization of the state's militia. Mutual antagonism between Federalists and Republicans prevented effective use of the militia during most of the war. Predominantly Federalist militia units in the upper Hudson Valley and elsewhere refused to heed the callups of the pro-war Republican Governor Daniel Tompkins. During the War of 1812, counties dominated by Federalists tended to defy militia callups. Federalist political leaders and editors repeatedly opposed the invasion of Canada and encouraged the militia to resist calls to cross the border as both unconstitutional and a violation of the rights of New Yorkers. Militia officer appointments were not made based on skills, military training or military experience, but were political. Prominent individuals in towns and counties won their appointments due to their political and social prominence and political connections, which further exacerbated partisanship in the militia. When the Federalists won majorities in the Assembly in 1809, 1812, and 1813 it gave them partial control over the Council of Appointment; this allowed the Federalists to influence militia appointments and civil offices, such as New York City mayor, in 1810, 1813, and 1814. In other years the Republicans controlled militia and civil appointments. Partisanship, rather than unity in wartime, played a key [End Page 114] role in officer appointments. When the Federalists controlled the Council of Appointment Governor Tompkins refused to assign Federalists to official duty or to command positions, instead selecting Republicans when he had the option of selecting someone of the "correct" political persuasion. Historians John and Kathleen Kutolowski, in their analysis of the militia in Genesee County, found that the local militia became a fertile ground for political communication and partisan political activity. Officers won appointments to their positions due to political connections and used their positions to influence the political loyalties of the enlisted men under their command. In some parts of western New York, like Genesee County, enlisted militiamen brought a tradition from New England of electing their non-commissioned officers, lieutenants, and captains. This enhanced electioneering and partisanship for militia appointments and in parts of western New York created another level of political conflicts between elected and appointed officers further raising the question of political loyalties and partisanship in the militia. Under the New York state constitution, the militia was a defensive force, and militiamen did not have to participate in offensive operations requiring an invasion of Canada. Men serving in the militia expected to protect their families, their communities, and New York, and did not expect to invade Canada. Throughout the war Federalists hammered away at this point, and repeatedly discouraged militiamen, Federalists and Republicans, from engaging in offensive operations. Similarly, men in the New Jersey militia expected assignments within the Garden State and did not relish orders to serve outside of the state. Some men refused orders to go to Fort Richmond on Staten Island. Men in the militia, whether in New York or in New Jersey, expected to protect their communities and states from invasion, not to cross state or international borders. In counties dominated by the Republicans the militia would usually volunteer or heed the governor's...

Plotting a Better Future for Agriculture, Women, and the Empire State: Historical Pageantry in the 1920s

Plotting a Better Future for Agriculture, Women, and the Empire State:Historical Pageantry in the 1920s Nancy K. Berlage (bio) The craze for historical pageantry swelled rapidly in rural New York during the early 1920s. While what was then called "the new pageantry" had been gaining in popularity over the previous decade throughout America, its orientation had been toward the city and town. Now, the phenomenon brought excitement to rural areas, inspiring amateur thespians, would-be playwrights, and snappy song writers from the farm. New York took the lead over other regions in presenting small plays and pageants that were aimed at farm people and centered on agricultural and rural issues. New York farm pageantry was important for several reasons. First, it linked farm populations to national developments in popular and mass culture. The New York farm theatricals, for the most part, drew upon the template and symbols used by other pageants of the period, but shifted them to an agricultural setting. Alongside the usual shimmering spirits, neo-classical nymphs, medieval knights, and American patriots guiding the plotlines now stood the venerable farm man and woman. Second, it inserted farming into the national dialogue on contemporary socio-political and economic agendas that historical pageantry, as a whole, facilitated. Many Americans were troubled by the rapid changes wrought by increasing industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. Moreover, farm people in New York were deeply affected by economic downturns in agriculture and outmigration from the farm to city. Through pageantry, communities came together to promote agriculture and farm life. Finally, some pageants reflected attitudes about changing gender ideals as women slowly gained more access to public life through their reform efforts and enfranchisement. Women dominated New York farm pageantry, turning it into a form expressing various notions about women's goals, needs, and [End Page 319] desires. Indeed, female pageantry authors of the day penned a commentary on gender relations both subversive and iterative of dominant ideals about farm men and women's labor, political, and social roles. My focus on farm pageants fills a gap in the growing body of cross-disciplinary scholarship on historical pageantry, which has primarily focused on productions in urban areas. In his foundational study of American historical pageantry, David Glassberg showed us how to unpack the historical narratives of theatricals, revealing, among other insights, how cultural elites used the past to assert social control in the present. Subsequently, historical geographers, public historians, and others have examined historical pageants as tourist attractions, mnemonic devices, and commemorative statements and revealed how they had implications beyond these prosaic functions. Other scholars have focused on pageants as shapers of national identity and as symbolic ideations of local civic orders. Even so, the scholarship on historical pageantry rarely addresses farm themes or gender relations on the farm.1 This article examines a set of rural plays and historical pageants authored by members, predominantly female, of farm and home bureaus in New York. The small collection of scripts constitutes a unique subset of the pageantry genre. Written specifically for an organization, they differ from the popular place-based narratives celebrating a particular town or city. My inquiry focuses less on their use for organizational purposes, and more on how reading these texts can provide insight into the values projected and [End Page 320] applauded by ordinary citizens. Moreover, these texts express relatively unguarded notions about gender that were rarely written down by farm women. Indeed, within this context, the act of writing and then producing the plays was an assertion of female agency.2 These theatricals promoted a scientific ethos as a necessary corollary to improvement in the countryside. This is not surprising, for a primary purpose of the farm and home bureaus, and the cooperative extension service with which they worked, was to promote scientific knowledge. Yet, these plays promoted science in a way that differed from the dry, technocratic words describing local project work found in extension service bulletins and farm bureau newspapers. The spectacle of the performances offered a powerful visceral experience, one fraught with emotion. The dialogue and the background sets prompted an audience to feel a particular way. Dramatic performances simultaneously appealed to the aural, visual, and olfactory senses...

Review: Building Seagram, by Phyllis Lambert

Phyllis Lambert. Building Seagram New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013, 320 pp., 140 b/w and 56 color illus. $65.00, ISBN 9780300167672 “Can there be a need for yet another book on Mies van der Rohe, who has been more exhaustively written about than any other of the hero figures of modern architecture?”1 J. M. Richards, the British critic and editor of Architectural Review , asked this question in 1975—thirty-eight years ago. Since then, the literature on Mies has grown substantially, and the most recent addition to it, Phyllis Lambert’s sumptuous monograph, Building Seagram , demonstrates once more that there is still plenty about Mies, his work, and its context to be uncovered.2 No one could tell the history of the most seminal office building of the twentieth century as well as Lambert, who selected the architect in 1954 and then worked closely with all participants as director of planning and representative of the client, her father, Samuel Bronfman, the president of Seagram. The experience changed her life. She went on to study architecture under Mies at IIT and immediately afterward designed the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts (known today as the Segal Centre for Performing Arts) in Montreal. She became an architectural historian, an active preservationist, and the founding director and main supporter of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the premier research center for architectural history and theory in the world. The story of how the young Parisian art student rose up against her father, whose “fierce temper” had terrified her as a child, and interfered in his selection of an architect for the new company headquarters in New York, is so well known that it long ago assumed the quality of an architectural myth, equal to, perhaps, the account of Frank L. Wright sketching his famous perspective of Fallingwater between a phone call from the client, Edgar Kaufmann, and his arrival at Wright’s home half an hour …

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

25 Years of Eyewitness Science……Finally Pays Off

research-article2013 PPSXXX10.1177/1745691613500995Loftus25 Years of Eyewitness Science 25 Years of Eyewitness Science……Finally Pays Off Perspectives on Psychological Science © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1745691613500995 pps.sagepub.com Elizabeth F. Loftus University of California, Irvine When I stumbled into psychology and law research back in the mid 1970s as an outgrowth of my basic memory research, hardly any psychologists were working in that area. A psychology professor at Brooklyn College, Bob Buckhout, was doing the odd study here and there on eyewitness testimony, mostly describing them in his own in-house journal called Social Action and the Law. I remember one fascinating piece from those early years entitled “Nearly 2,000 Witnesses Can be Wrong.” It described a finding of an unusual study in which a TV station staged a mugging for the nightly news. The announcer showed a lineup of six men and viewers called in to register their choice as to which person was the criminal. Only 14% were correct, not very different from chance. Although not well known today, Buckhout’s role in launching an interest in eyewitness research was important, and for posterity it is ably recounted in attor- ney James Doyle’s (2005) wonderful history called “True Witness.” By 1988, when APS was born, there were a number of serious researchers doing far more sophisticated studies and publishing them in the major psychology journals (e.g., Cutler, Penrod, & Martens, 1987; Wells & Turtle, 1986). By then, I and my collaborators had published scores of studies, and I had testified on the science of eyewitness testimony in over l00 trials. But psychologists were also frequently not permitted as experts on this topic. Judges ruled that the expert testimony on memory would invade the province of the jury. That is, it is up to the jury to decide whether a particular witness was in a position to see and to faithfully remember what was being claimed. Another concern from judges was that the proposed testimony was common knowledge to the jury and was therefore not a proper subject matter for expert testimony. Early on, the eyewitness research was embraced pri- marily by criminal defense attorneys who knew the perils of trying a case that included prosecution eyewitness evi- dence along the lines of “that’s the man, I’ll never forget that face as long as I live.” But the work was largely ignored or dismissed by prosecutors, many courts, and legislatures. The mid l980s did see one important event (for the field and for me personally) involving a criminal case decided by the Arizona Supreme Court (State of Arizona v. Chapple, 1983). Dolan Chapple had been convicted of murder based largely on the eyewitness evi- dence of two individuals who had identified Chapple’s photograph more than a year after the murder. The defense had tried to introduce expert testimony on eye- witness issues but the judge refused to admit it claiming that the proffered testimony was all within the common experience of jurors. The Supreme Court reversed the criminal conviction because an eyewitness expert had been excluded. Over the next two decades, a string of other higher courts would similarly reverse criminal con- victions on this basis. And a smattering of trial courts clearly reacted more favorably to this type of expert opinion. For example, People of New York v Jeffrey Williams (2006) dealt with a case of robbery in which the defendant sought to introduce expert testimony regard- ing a number of issues, such as double-blind lineups, confidence malleability, and cross-racial identification. The court ruled that the testimony was grounded in sci- entific research that was generally accepted by the rele- vant scientific community. Moreover, it was likely to benefit jurors by providing them with “a better perspec- tive and significant information beyond their common knowledge and experience.” But the biggest boost to public appreciation of eyewit- ness research came as a result of progress in forensic DNA testing. It was DNA that helped exonerate many wrongfully convicted individuals in the mid 1990s, and today over 300 innocent people owe their freedom to that testing (Innocence Project, 2013). These cases taught us that faulty eyewitness testimony was a major factor in wrongful convictions, present in roughly three quarters of those cases (see Garrett, 2011). It was getting nearly impossible for law enforcement and the legal community to ignore these wrongful convictions. U.S. Attorney Corresponding Author: Elizabeth F. Loftus, University of California, Irvine, 2393 Social Ecology 2, Irvine, CA 92697 E-mail: eloftus@uci.edu

Reverse Influence Modeling: Estimating Source-by-Source Health Benefits of Reduced Emissions

Traditional model-based studies that evaluate air quality control measures predict how the health benefits of a prescribed reduction in emissions will be distributed across different locations—for instance, how reformulating gasoline will benefit people in New York versus those in Los Angeles. But traditional models cannot feasibly quantify the influence of individual emissions sources on human health. Now researchers from Carleton University in Ontario have devised a method for tracing nationwide short-term mortality back to reductions at specific locations [EHP 121(5):572–579; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1205561]. The researchers integrated U.S. and Canadian epidemiological data with the adjoint, or reverse, of an air quality model based on a grid of cells measuring 36 square kilometers. This enabled them to estimate how reducing emissions within each grid cell would translate into public health benefits—i.e., decreased mortality. Although adjoint sensitivity models have been used in fields such as meteorology and atmospheric chemistry, this study is the first known to apply the method to epidemiological data derived from air quality time-series studies. For Canada, the researchers calculated mortality from short-term exposure to ozone and nitrogen dioxide. For the United States, there was insufficient epidemiological evidence to link nitrogen dioxide to U.S. mortality, so they looked only at deaths in relation to ozone exposure. A Hamilton, Ontario, steel mill at sunset. The authors found that the reductions in nitrogen dioxide and ozone exposure—and the consequent health benefits—associated with reducing nitrogen oxide emissions varied substantially across North America. For instance, a 10% reduction in emissions in Hamilton, Ontario, would result in estimated public health benefits from reduced mortality of Can$253,000 per day, while the same reduction in Detroit would benefit Canada by Can$47,000 per day. In the United States, a 10% reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions near Atlanta would result in estimated societal benefits of US$181,000 per day, whereas a 10% reduction in volatile organic compound emissions in New York would result in benefits of US$294,000 per day. These figures represent only a fraction of the total expected health benefit. The researchers did not look at particulate matter, a known contributor to mortality. Nor did they consider long-term exposures to ozone or the societal costs associated with less fateful impacts of air pollution, such as asthma attacks or sick days. In many cases, the researchers believe, the cost of polluting may be underestimated. In a benefit–cost analysis framework, reverse influence modeling may prove a useful tool in air quality decision-making by allowing for accurate estimates of the societal benefits of reducing emissions on a location-specific basis.

Book Review: Following 9/11: Religion Coverage in the New York Times by Christopher Vecsey

Following 9/11: Religion Coverage in the New York Times. Christopher Vecsey. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011. 477 pp. $34.95 hbk.9/11 presented religion reporting with a set of tremendous challenges. Could it distinguish the Islam of most Moslems from the jihadist strain that motivated nineteen terrorists to kill 2,977 innocent people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia? Could it depict with sensitivity the myriad religious responses to the events and their aftermath? Could it describe the place of religion in the two wars that the United States subsequently waged in Muslim countries?The answer, according to Christopher Vecsey, is a resounding yes! across the board-at least, in the case of the New York Times. I have found the Times' post-9/11 religion coverage to be responsible, estimable journalism, Vecsey says in Following 9/11, not just in any single article in which the reporter tries to define the issue and find viewpoints on its many sides, but also in the totality of reporting.Vecsey, Harry Emerson Fosdick Professor of the Humanities and Native Studies and Religion at Colgate University, is in a good position to judge. Not only has he been privy to the culture at the Times-his brother George Vecsey is a sports columnist and former national and religion reporter there and, of course, a source for this book-but every day since 1970, he has clipped and filed New York articles about religion, by now filling three file cabinets with twelve drawers of clippings. the fall of 2001, Vecsey had just begun to teach a seminar to first-year Colgate students entitled American Religion in These Times when the horrors of September 11 focused the class's attention on the constant coverage of religion on the front page of the Times. retrospect, it seems inevitable that Vecsey would write Following 9/11.The book is divided into four parts. The first, A Newspaper Challenged, traces how the investigated motivations, meanings, and behaviors to explain the significance of 9/11. Articles celebrated interfaith solidarity, memorialized the dead, and characterized sacred places. Some of the most memorable of these articles were the daily tributes to those who died in the attack on the World Trade Center. Emphasizing the unique character and faith of 2,310 lost lives, the Portraits of Grief series offered consolation to those who were leftbehind to grieve. Vecsey quotes Michael Schudson, who observed, In moments of tragedy journalists assume a pastoral role. …

RACIALIZED CRIME CONTROL AND SOCIETAL EXCLUSION

In 1930, W. E. B. Du Bois warned of an approaching backlash of racialized crime control and the two-pronged threat this posed to Black civil society. These were not altogether new threats—American criminal law and crime control practices had always been mechanisms of racialized societal exclusion—but Du Bois anticipated unprecedented levels of Black criminalization and incarceration in the second half of the twentieth century, and some of the collateral damage that would ensue. Du Bois's (1930) warning focused on juvenile crime and justice, “a problem which one can easily see among the better colored people of New York and Philadelphia, of Indianapolis and Chicago, of Pittsburgh and Baltimore, and all of our major cities” (p. 352). Du Bois (1916) had long been concerned with issues of child development and youth justice, since the fate of the “immortal child” inevitably defined the prospects and conditions of the race (Diggs 1976).

“Make of Them Grand Parks, Owned in Common”: The Role of Newspaper Editorials in Promoting the Adirondack Park, 1864–1894

On Tuesday, August 9, 1864, the New York Times published an unassuming editorial titled “Adirondack.” 1 Despite consuming nearly a full column down the right side of the page, to a causal reader that day the topic might have seemed trivial, or at the very least indistinguishable from the news that surrounded it. Included was a report of the city’s expenses for the coming year, intelligence of Admiral Farragut’s campaign against the port of Mobile, and a letter praising the good people of New York for providing blackberry wine “for our noble and suff ering soldiers” entrenched in their third year of civil war. 2

Reflecting Absence or Presence? Public Space and Historical Memory at Ground Zero

Ever since 9/11, the nation has attempted to come to grips with the day and its commemoration. At each relevant site—the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania where Flight 93 crashed—memorials are either in place or in progress. Decisions about how to mark the events in which these locations figured, however, have proven anything but unifying for stakeholders. In particular, the people of New York have engaged in debates, often quite heated ones, concerning the future fate of the site of the World Trade Center bombings, an area at the north end of Manhattan’s financial district now known worldwide as Ground Zero. After a design competition in which applicants proposed plans for the land’s future use, a decision was made to go forward with Daniel Libeskind’s master site plan, which featured the Freedom Tower, an underground memorial, and Michael Arad’s plaza design for “Reflecting Absence,” a space of tribute including demarcation of the footprints of the original twin towers. Above all, placemakers at Ground Zero would do well to remain future-minded, taking into consideration how future generations will read the cultural landscape they construct. Will it remain legible, rich, and relevant for visitors fifty or one hundred years from now? This seems the greater stake in how historical memory takes shape at Ground Zero.

Retratos pungentes de populações periféricas: Marshall Berman e Helena Viramontes

The construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, in New York, and of the East Los Angeles Interchange complex, in Los Angeles, contributed immensely to the deterioration of the periphetal neighborhoods they cut through in the middle of the twentieth century. Part of their populations &mdash; most of which belonged to minorities, mainly Jewish people in New York and Latinos in Los Angeles &mdash; was suddenly uprooted, and those who remained had to learn to live in the new landscape. This article focuses on All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, by philosopher Marshall Berman, and Their Dogs Carne With Them and "Neighbors," by Chicana writer Helena Mar&iacute;a Viramontes.These works, apparently so distant from each other, paint poignant portraits of the displacement of these peripheral populations, separated by an entire country, and yet sosimilar in their plight.

God Save the Boer: Irish American Catholics and the South African War, 1899-1902

God Save the Boer: Irish American Catholics and the South African War, 1899-1902 Charles T. Strauss They tell us the Boers must be defeated in the interests of civilization, that they are an uncivilized race. Why is that said of them? Is it because they carry on an effective government at the lowest rate of taxation known? Is it because in their country, education is universal ; drunkedness is unknown; divorce doesn’t exist; and every man lives with his own wife? I can understand a country owning a smart set thinking that nation uncivilized which doesn’t support a divorce court. I would not deny to that set the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of smartness; but I would have them see that though the Boers have not evening dress, they have evening prayers, and though they fear God, the fear of man is not in them.1 W. Bourke Cockran is the greatest American orator that no one remembers today. A respected politician, a skilled diplomat, a devout and well-connected Catholic, and an accomplished speechmaker, Cockran has been overshadowed by other eloquent orators in the crowded pantheon of political giants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the great causes of Cockran’s political life, anti-imperialism and U.S. support for the Boer Republics during the South African War (1899-1902) in particular, is also a little remembered aspect of Gilded Age and Progressive Era history. And yet Cockran’s speech, which he delivered at New York’s Academy of Music on 4 March 1900, and the South African War, an imperial conflict between the British Empire and the descendents of Dutch settlers in southern Africa, provides rare insight into the transnational dimensions of American ethnic politics as the U.S. made its debut as a serious international player. 1 I am grateful to Margaret Abruzzo, Jay Dolan, Donal Lowry, John McGreevy, David O’Brien, Eamonn O’Ciardha, Edward O’Donnell, and Ellen Skerrett for reading various incarnations of my research on the impact of the South African War on ethnic politics in the United States. I am particularly indebted to David O’Brien and Edward O’Donnell for advising me in the early stages of my research and to participants of the seventh annual GRIAN Conference on Irish Studies at New York University, 4-6 March 2005. 1. W. Bourke Cockran, Irish World, 10 March 1900; revised and reprinted in its entirety in the Irish World, 17 March 1900. Cockran was by all accounts the national spokesperson for the pro-Boer movement in the United States.2 The people of New York elected the Irish-born lawyer to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives eight times between 1887 and his death in 1923.3 Dutch Americans, who had initially lobbied for U.S. mediation in the early stages of the South African War, asked Cockran to help them to raise funds for Boer relief and to petition his friends in Washington on the Boers’ behalf.4 Cockran supported the Boer cause mainly through passionate speechmaking, such as his dramatic defense of the Boers at New York’s Academy of Music in March 1900. Clan-an-Gael, a militant Irish nationalist organization, hosted the event and the Irish Americans in attendance filled the Academy’s main hall and all of its galleries. Cockran began by honoring the memory of Robert Emmet, Ireland’s preeminent nationalist leader of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, on the 122nd anniversary of his birth. He praised the Irish leader for his commitment to the universal principles of justice and liberty. However, Cockran devoted most of his speech to a commendation of a people from South Africa whom he praised for defending these principles in his own day. Cockran contrasted the God-fearing Boer with the British people and their “smart set,” which controlled two other provinces in South Africa and were engaged in an imperial war over the Boers’ mineral-rich land. The Boers, according to Cockran, deserved the admiration and support of patriotic Americans and liberty-loving people everywhere and the U.S. should have intervened to stop Britain’s...