President's House Research Articles

Building Washington: Engineering and Construction of the New Federal City, 1790–1840

Building Washington is a meticulously detailed account of the early construction of the capital city. After an introduction that reviews the decision to place the capital on the Potomac River, the first chapter briefly summarizes Pierre L'Enfant's famous plan for the layout of the city and thoroughly examines his construction plan for the project. The next two chapters look at the financial difficulties surrounding the undertaking and the challenges of assembling materials and workers. Harbor, bridge, canal, and aqueduct initiatives take up three of the ten chapters, two centered on the period from the early 1790s into the 1820s and one beginning with breaking ground for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in 1828. Another chapter turns to military installations. Three chapters that together are almost 40 percent of the book chronicle the year-by-year progress of the Capitol and the President's House under a set of commissioners from 1791 to 1802, under Benjamin Henry Latrobe as surveyor of public buildings from 1803 to 1811, and in the postwar rebuilding from 1815 to 1824. Robert J. Kapsch's interest is less the political implications of this complex process than the technical problems it presented. He reports that the Capitol “was the largest single building erected in the country at that time” and “the President's House was the largest single house in the country” (p. 257).

Amateur Drone Monitoring: State-of-the-Art Architectures, Key Enabling Technologies, and Future Research Directions

The UAV or mini-drones equipped with sensors are becoming increasingly popular for various commercial, industrial, and public-safety applications. However, drones with uncontrolled deployment pose challenges for highly security-sensitive areas such as a President's house, nuclear plants, and commercial areas because they can be used unlawfully. In this article, to cope with security-sensitive challenges, we propose point-to-point and FANET architectures to assist the efficient deployment of MDrs. To capture an ADr, an MDr must have the capability to efficiently and quickly detect, track, jam, and hunt the ADr. We discuss the capabilities of the existing detection, tracking, localization, and routing schemes, and also present the limitations of these schemes as further research challenges. Moreover, the future challenges related to co-channel interference, channel model design, and cooperative schemes are discussed. Our findings indicate that MDr deployment is necessary for the care of ADrs, and intensive research and development is required to fill the gaps in the existing technologies.

Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President's House at Independence National Historical Park, and Public Memory

Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President's House at Independence National Historical Park, and Public Memory

Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President's House at Independence National Historical Park, and Public Memory

Preface1 Discovering the Truth: The Revelation of Ugly History2 Re-collecting the Past: The Complexity of Public Memory3 Displacing the Inconvenient: The Incomplete Story of Liberty4 Honoring the Ancestors: The Quest for Acknowledgment5 Shaping the Place: The Design Competition6 Revealing the Foundations: The Excavation of the Site7 Telling the Stories: The Opening of the Installation8 Continuing the Conversation: The Legacy of the President's HouseAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

A Shambles for the President's House

ABSTRACT “The President's House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation.” Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia, PA. http://www.nps.gov/inde/historyculture/the-presidents-house.htm. Permanent exhibition, opened December 15, 2010. Kelly/Maiello, Architects & Planners, designers.

The President's House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation

The President's House: Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation

When Memories and Discourses Collide: The President's House and Places of Public Memory

This paper proposes a loose model for illustrating how a multitude of discourses are pulled into political contests about the meanings of places of public memory. Specifically, the model suggests that selected discourses circulating around and within the memory place are pulled into the site by publics affectively invested in defining the site in particular ways. As, and after, those discourses collide within the place of memory, some stick and others are expelled—often to reappear in other, and sometimes related, controversies about public memory. These ideas are illustrated through a study of the controversy about how to best remember the past residents of the President's House, site of the nation's first executive mansion, in Independence National Historical Park.

The Law: Prerogative Power and Executive Branch Czars: President Obama's Signing Statement

On April 15, 2011, Barack Obama issued a controversial signing statement that effectively nullified a provision of a bill he had signed into law. Specifically, president abrogated section 2262 of budget compromise law, which prohibited using for salaries and expenses of czars of energy, health reform, auto recovery, and urban affairs (Obama 2011). defunding provision was part of a larger effort by Congress to prevent increased centralization and control of public policy by White House aides who are not confirmed by Senate. moniker czar is shorthand term used by media, politicians, and scholars to describe certain officials who are appointed by president to provide advice, coordinate policies among multiple departments and agencies, and even to make important personnel and spending decisions. Lacking senatorial confirmation and even prohibited many times from testifying, czars are a controversial feature of executive branch. Given substantial number of czars in Obama White House, Republican members of House had been trying to pass similar anti-czar measures for nearly two years before successfully adding anti-czar provision to budget bill (Fabian 2009; O'Brien 2011; Zimmermann 2009). Senate Republicans had also sought information about 18 positions in Obama administration that they considered czars and asked that president refrain from creating any new czar-type posts (Lerer 2009). Obama justified his plan to set aside anti-czar provision by stating that President has well-established authority to supervise and oversee executive branch, and to obtain in furtherance of this supervisory Continuing, Obama noted that he has the prerogative to obtain advice in fulfilling his from any official or employee within executive branch or White House. Legislative efforts that significantly impede President's ability to exercise his supervisory and coordinating authorities or to obtain views of appropriate senior advisers, he claimed, violate separation of powers by undermining President's ability to exercise his constitutional responsibilities and take care that laws be faithfully executed. result being that Obama would construe section 2262 not to abrogate these Presidential prerogatives (Obama 2011). Obama's signing statement set off a variety of criticisms, most notably from Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA), author of anti-czars provision of budget bill: The does not have option of choosing which laws he will follow and which he will ignore. He continued: The United States is not a kingdom run by a political dictator, and Obama needs to quickly reverse course and abide by law eliminating czars that were part of budget resolution agreed to be Speaker Boehner, Senator Reid, and Obama himself (Scalise 2011). Some Democratic lawmakers, however, countered by saying that section 2262 was intrusive micromanagement of president's White House staff via appropriations (Bravender 2011). controversy over president's signing statement raises a significant constitutional question: is there a constitutional or any legal basis for presidents to claim that they have authority to shield themselves and their aides from statutory direction and controls? Obama believes so, and he went so far as to invoke concept of prerogative power as a defense of his action to void a provision of a bill he had signed into law. To answer constitutional question raised by Obama's action, this article describes concept of prerogative power and provides an assessment of whether presidents possess such authority. It poses question of whether presidents have ability to set aside laws after they have signed them. …

How to Stay Sane as a Dean or VP

How to Stay Sane as a Dean or VP

Redefining the "Cradle of Liberty": The President's House Controversy in Independence National Historical Park

This article examines the public controversy surrounding the National Park Service's decision about how best to recognize the site of the nation's first executive mansion—the President's House—in Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park. The first of the house's two presidential occupants, George Washington, kept nine slaves in the mansion while circumventing a Pennsylvania law that could have given the slaves their freedom. The National Park staff's resistance to acknowledging Washington's actions led to an ongoing and lengthy public debate that eventually resulted in the decision to build an installation that recognized all of the occupants of the house. Advocates for building such a site invoked two types of vernacular discourse—a counternarrative ("Liberty has been incompletely enacted") and a representative anecdote ("Excavating buried history")—that embraced the traditions of storytelling at Independence National Historical Park.

Lessons Learned the Hard Way: Questioning Presidents

On February 7, 2001, as the new Bush White House settled into a rhythm, a handful of reporters from various news organizations secured some time to interview Larry Lindsey, the president's top economic advisor, who had also advised George W. Bush during his campaign. Young White House Press Office aides--graduates of the hard-fought Bush-Cheney campaign and new to Washington--walked the band of reporters to the West Wing lobby to await a final escort to Lindsey's office. The reporters sat on a cushy sofa and several chairs, browsed courtesy copies of the morning newspapers, and enjoyed the sweet scent of blush roses arranged by the White House florist specifically for the receptionist's desk just 10 feet away. The reporters, most of whom had covered Bush's predecessors, understood right away that the president's new press team had made a small mistake, but they remained mum, accepted the hospitality and made themselves comfortable. The West Wing lobby, which is basically a hushed waiting room, was, in an era long gone, accessible to reporters covering presidents. But over the decades, journalists found themselves confined to press quarters near Richard Nixon's covered-over swimming pool. They are escorted during all movements (and often roped off like a herd) and branded as PRESS with color-coded ID tags. Bush, like his father before him, frowns on reporters who shout questions and simply ignores journalists who try waving their hands to summon his attention. Loitering in the lobby, therefore, afforded the band of scribblers unsupervised access to both observe and question the president's top aides and their associates, who strode through the clubby expanse in mid-conversation, aiming for a doorway that opens to the VIP offices beyond. The longer the reporters sat, the richer the pickings. Karen Hughes, then the president's communications counselor, had never laid eyes on some of Washington's economic reporters when she nodded a cheery hello while sailing by. Seizing the opening, the journalists identified themselves and brought her to a halt with a few impromptu questions. Clearly caught off guard, Hughes frowned, volunteered as little as possible and beat a hasty retreat. The reporters chuckled as they returned to their seats, knowing the lobby would be off limits to the Fourth Estate for the remainder of Bush's tenure. Karen Hughes and her colleagues could have learned from the assembled journalists there, if they had sought a few tips. On inauguration day 2009, when the new president and his White House team trudge indoors and peal off their thermal underwear after the final parade float turns off Pennsylvania Avenue in the dark, there will be three groups of people who at that moment know a lot more about the White House and presidential routines than they do. First are the members of the residence staff who control the president's new house and the traditions of the presidency within it; second are the career executive branch workers who understand what continuity of government really means and can be an incoming president's best friends; and third is the White House press corps, including journalists who know the Oval Office well enough to give the new president an engaging tour and seasoned enough to remind him that, in a democracy, communicating is governing. No president can move an agenda forward or win reelection without majority support of the American people, and a free press continues to furnish voters with the best fact-based translations of the president and his chosen administration. History is littered with tales of newly inaugurated chief executives who vowed to soar over the heads of the media to control their messages and speak directly with voters; all of them revised those goals when they dug into the job. Even with the explosion of the Web and other instantaneous, direct-connect forms of communication, presidents remain locked in a mutually dependent and politely adversarial relationship with the White House press corps. …

Queen's Royal College, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad

The Founder's building at Queen's Royal College, built between 1902 and 1904, has achieved iconic status as one of Trinidad's most important seats of learning. The building's deteriorating condition has prompted the Trinidadian Ministry of Works and Transport to fund the restoration of the building. The intention has been to use this project and the restoration of the President's House nearby to increase the level of conservation skills both at a professional level and within the local construction industry. The design and construction of the building, and the local approach to project management and site supervision, have presented a number of problems which have meant that not all the project objectives have been met so far.

Interview with Florentino Flores Castro [II] / Una Entrevista con Florentino Flores Castro [II

Interview with Florentino Flores Castro [II] / Una Entrevista con Florentino Flores Castro [II] Charles H. Rowell and Marcus Jones Interview with Florentino Flores Castro [II] Charles H. Rowell and Marcus Jones This interview took place in two parts: on February 19, 2007, in Mata Clara and on February 20, 2007 in Cuitlahuac, Veracruz, Mexico. CASTRO: That school has been around since 1840 [pointing]. ROWELL: Did the abolition of slavery occur before that? CASTRO: Slavery was abolished throughout the entire country of Mexico in 1829. ROWELL: What percentage of young people here in Mata Clara go through high school and then on to university, particularly among blacks? CASTRO: In 1970, it was still difficult for us to finish junior high school. It was with difficulty that some finished elementary school. Currently, since 1990, there are no limits in education, whether it be for whites or blacks. At first there were limitations, because everything cost more in economic terms in the '70s. And I'll say it again, not everybody got to go to elementary or junior high school. I think that there were about two out of every ten who could go. Nowadays, it's not like that. Now, all of them go to elementary school, junior high school, high school—all of the basic education. ROWELL: Are there professionals here in Mata Clara? CASTRO: Yes, there are professionals now, with limitations. We're not going to compare ourselves with the United States. In that respect, the U.S. did worry about educating blacks as well as whites. Mexico never segregated us, but it also didn't worry about blacks making the same progress as whites. The U.S. always demanded education of you. Our government never demanded anything from us. In the past, if a black person learned to read, it was a bad thing. JONES: Are there many blacks from here who go to the United States to join the military? [End Page 111] CASTRO: No. The few we have heard about who are in the U.S. military are there because they were born in the U.S. They have had a different perspective. They're probably legally in the U.S. Currently the ones who go from here to the U.S. aren't going with the intention of qualifying or offering their services to the military. Besides, they wouldn't be able to, and the U.S. government wouldn't allow it. JONES: But what's the situation like here? CASTRO: Here, blacks aren't segregated in the military, either. JONES: Are there many black Mexicans who join the military here, in Mexico? CASTRO: No. Here, they dedicate themselves first to studying. Whoever wants to join the military can join it. They're not forced to. The military tries to recruit them so that they will sign up and join. Here, those who are going to devote themselves to studying devote themselves to studying; and those who are going to go straight into the military will go, even if they don't study. The military doesn't require a large amount of education. It's enough if you've finished junior high school. It's like the saying goes, "As long as he knows how to write his name" [laughing]. That's the requirement here in Mexico: that he knows how to write. We have to admit that the United States is ahead of us by 50 years. JONES: Why do you think there aren't many documents from colonial times? CASTRO: I think our government has neglected valuable things, primarily relics. I am going to talk about Yanga, about Cuitlahuac, which preserves a bit of the same structure as Yanga. Cuitlahuac had even more of a colonial structure, which has been dismantled completely. But that's part of the political control that we live with—the same government, municipal, state and federal offices, which don't put any effort into preserving items that identify what used to exist. The most quintessential colonial things, Cuitlahuac had them. Nowadays, it doesn't have them. The only thing Yanga still preserves is the municipal president's house. There's no longer anything else. The ones to blame are...

Don't Give Up the Ship!: Myths of the War of 1812 (review)

Give Up the Ship!: Myths of the War of 1812. By Donald R. Hickey. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. 376. Cloth, $34.95.)Reviewed by Gene Allen SmithThe War of 1812 does not play a central role in the national creation story, nor does it currently garner much attention in the collective American memory. In fact, the conflict has been greatly overshadowed by the War for Independence, the American Civil War, and most recendy by World War II. While students of the American past might remember that George Washington's army crossed the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776, or that Confederate commander Robert E. Lee's home sat just south of the Potomac River overlooking the capital city, they most likely remember little about the War of 1812.Some may acknowledge that the national anthem and the iconic Fort McHenry Flag (the Star-Spangled Banner) both relate to the September 1814 British attack against Baltimore. Others may recognize that also in that year British forces burned public buildings in Washington, including the capitol and the president's house. But few realize that the nation's oldest active warship, the USS Constitution, secured its nickname, Old Ironsides, during the war. Fewer still know that the motto of the U.S. Navy, Don't give up the ship!, supposedly came from Captain James Lawrence's dying words when the British captured his frigate the Chesapeake in June 1813. In fact, most of what people think they understand about the war are mydis perpetuated in the years after the conflict. Moreover, other important episodes of this war have failed to be cemented in the American memory, despite their obvious importance.Most of what we believe we know about the War of 1812 has been generated by the post-War of 1812 selective memory. In the aftermath of the conflict Americans carefully chose to embellish the positives of the war while discounting the negatives. A new pantheon of American heroes-including Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Richard M. Johnson, Oliver Hazard Perry, Stephen Decatur, and Thomas McDonough-emerged and focused attentions on the postwar era and future rather than on the past. As a country, the United States had stood up to Great Britain once again and had not suffered defeat as had Napoleon and the French. In fact, the Treaty of Ghent did not declare a winner, prompting Americans to believe that since they had not lost the war, they had won. Thereafter the selective memory melded with an emergent nationalism to give Americans the psychological and cultural independence that had eluded them since 1783. Finally, since the United States was no longer a de facto British colony, nationalistic American accounts of the conflict held sway, perpetuating a host of myths that have lasted until the present.Donald R. Hickey's unique study Give Up the Ship!: Myths of the War of 1812 addresses the myths, half truths, and realities of the forgotten last Anglo-American conflict. Organized into six broad sections-(1) The Causes of the War; (2) Battles and Campaigns; (3) The Maritime War; (4) Soldiers, Sailors, and Civilians; (5) The Mechanics of Waging War; (6) The End of War-along with a prologue that features a summary and overview of the war and an epilogue that assesses the war's legacy, this book successfully combines history, memory, and myth. …

Opening Biblical Meditation

While Jesus was by the lakeside, the president of one of the dynagogues came up, Jairus by name, and, when he saw him, threw himself down at his feet and pleaded with him. “My little daughter”, he said, “is at death's door. 1 beg you to come and lay your hands on her to cure her and save her life.” So Jesus went with him, accompanied by a great crowd which passed upon him.Among them wad a woman who had suffered from haemorrhages for twelve years; and in spite of long treatment by many doctors, on which she had spent all she had, there had been no improvement; on the contrary, she had grown worse. She had heard what people were saying about Jesus, do she came up from behind in the back of the crowd and touched his cloak; for she said to herself, “If I touch even his clothes, I shall be cured.” And there and then the source of her haemorrhages dried up and she knew in herself that she wad cured of her trouble. At the same time Jesus, aware that power had gone out of him, turned round in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” His disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing upon you and yet you ask, ‘Who touched me?” Meanwhile he wad looking round to see who had done it. The woman, trembling with fear when she grasped what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “My daughter, your faith had cured you, Go in peace, free for ever from this trouble.”While he wad still speaking, a message came from the president's house, “Your daughter is dead; why trouble the Rabbi further?” But Jesus, overhearing the message as it was delivered, said to the president of the synagogue, “Do not be afraid; only have faith.” After this he allowed no one to accompany him except Peter and James and James's brother John. They came to the predident's house, where they found a great commotion, with loud crying and wailing. So Jesus went in and said to them,“Why this crying and commotion? The child id not dead: she is asleep”: but they only laughed at him. After turning all the others out, he took the child'd father and mother and his own companions and went in where the child was lying. Then, taking hold of her hand, he said to her, “Talitha cum”, which means, ‘Get up, my child’. Immediately the girl got up and walked about‐she was twelve years old ‐ at that they were beside them‐selves with amazement. He gave them strict orders to let no one hear about it, and told them to give her something to eat.

Source Material: Sequestered from the Court of History: The Kissinger Transcripts

On February 11, 2002, after nearly 30 years, Henry Kissinger agreed to release 20,000 pages of transcripts of his telephone diplomacy with foreign leaders made between 1969 and September 1973 when he was special assistant to the president for national security affairs in the Nixon administration. This disclosure followed his agreement just months earlier in August 2001 to turn over to the State Department 10,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made from 1973 to 1977 during his time as secretary of state under the presidencies of Nixon and Ford. Kissinger had his secretaries tape the calls or listen and take shorthand on what was said, then type summaries, sometimes verbatim transcripts, of the conversations. (1) Upon leaving office with the 1976 presidential victory of Jimmy Carter, Kissinger donated the documents to the Library of Congress as his private property under restrictive terms that effectively sealed them until after his death. He argued from the beginning that the transcripts and summaries were his personal property and not government records or Nixon historical materials as others claimed. Nonetheless, his shrewd evasion of federal records laws with the aim of exercising unfettered control over the materials argued otherwise. Indeed, Kissinger's determination to conceal the documents and monopolize the history of his deeds after leaving office matched the urgency and secrecy with which he directed the affairs of state during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Against those who claimed the materials were public documents subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Kissinger fought a dogged and ultimately successful legal campaign all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to ensure his unbridled discretion over access to the transcripts and summaries. Nonetheless, his victory before the Supreme Court provided little protection from claims that the transcripts and summaries from January 1969 until August 1974 were Nixon presidential records under the 1974 Presidential Records and Materials Preservation Act, which Congress passed to seize the former president's White House tapes and records for the continuing Watergate trials and investigations. Because Nixon's presidential materials contained Kissinger's national security and state department files and because these transcripts and summaries appeared to come under the purview of the Act, Nixon's subsequent constitutional challenges to the statute significantly helped Kissinger's own campaign to keep the full record of his activities under wraps. No doubt, Kissinger had concerns about potentially embarrassing revelations concerning his most controversial dealings with foreign governments. At the time, Kissinger was making extensive use of the transcripts and summaries to write his massive two-volume chronicle of his diplomacy during the Nixon years--a work evidently written with great care to his place in history and to perpetuating his image as the consummate strategic thinker who executed sweeping and highly successful radical shifts in American foreign policy: the opening of China, detente with the Soviet Union, extrication from the war in Southeast Asia, the establishment of a new foundation for Middle East dialogue, and other dramatic breakthroughs that set the global stage for the monumental changes to come in succeeding decades. In assiduously developing this self-portrait through his memoirs and other writings, speeches, and public persona, (2) it seemed imperative for Kissinger to control access to the very same documents that perhaps could support an alternative assessment of his diplomatic accomplishments. His efforts to close the most detailed record of his activities were therefore carefully calculated to give the facade of legitimacy, while knowingly sidestepping federal statutes and regulations. Years later in January 1999, not long before finally agreeing to release the transcripts, he stated in an interview with a CNN international reporter that I am not trying to hide government documents. …

Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government

When Thomas Jefferson moved his victorious Republican administration into the new capital city in 1801, one of his first acts was to abolish any formal receptions, except on New Year's Day and the Fourth of July. His successful campaign for the presidency had been partially founded on the idea that his Federalist enemies had assumed dangerously aristocratic trappings a sword for George Washington and a raised dais for Martha when she received people at social occasions in the first capital cities of New York and Philadelphia. When the ladies of Washington City, determined to have their own salon, arrived en masse at the president's house, Jefferson met them in riding clothes, expressing surprise at their presence. His deep suspicion of any occasion that resembled a European court caused a major problem, however: without the face-to-face relationships and networks of interest created in society, the American experiment in government could not function.Into this conundrum, writes Catherine Allgor, stepped women like Dolley Madison and Louisa Catherine Adams, women of political families who used the unofficial, social sphere to cement the relationships that politics needed to work. Not only did they create a space in which politics was effectively conducted; their efforts legitimated the new republic and the new capital in the eyes of European nations, whose representatives scoffed at the city's few amenities and desolate setting. Covered by the prescriptions of their gender, Washington women engaged in the dirty business of politics, which allowed their husbands to retain their republican purity.Constrained by the cultural taboos on petticoat politicking, women rarely wrote forthrightly about their ambitions and plans, preferring to cast their political work as an extension of virtuous family roles. But by analyzing their correspondence, gossip events, etiquette wars, and the material culture that surrounded them, Allgor finds that these women acted with conscious political intent. In the days before organized political parties, the social machine built by these early federal women helped to ease the transition from a failed republican experiment to a burgeoning democracy.

Just Remember My Name . . .

Founders and Helpers Just Remember My Name Rudy Abramson Two years after her husband, John Stephenson, took the reins of Berea College in 1984, Jane Stephenson was still looking for a project. By nature, she was an activist in the tradition of other wives who had preceded her at the President's House on Chestnut Street, but she still had found no consuming cause to call her own. Her search ended rather abruptly one morning in the fall of 1986—with a telephone call from her friend Gurney Norman, the writer and English professor at the University of Kentucky. Norman was looking for help. He had a female friend facing a crisis. The middle-aged woman was going through a divorce; she was financially distressed; she had no marketable job skill; and she was on her own. Her problems were compounded by a debilitating lack of Rudy Abramson, retired Washington, D.C., correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, is author o/Spanning the Century, a biography of W. Averell Harriman, published in 1992. confi dence. It was, of course, an increasingly familiar story, and it was especially so to Stephenson. Growing up in the mountains at Banner Elk, North Carolina, she had known a great many women like Norman's friend. She had worked with people like them as a specialist in adult education and the wife of an Appalachian scholar. Theirs was one of the recurring tragedies of the mountains, the kind of lives that Loyal Jones once described as a trip on a "circular sorghum mill." Norman's friend was still on Stephenson's mind the following day and she spoke with her husband about it. Later on John Stephenson received a call— this one from the California-based Educational Foundation of America. The organization had supported Berea programs in the past. It was completing its budget planning for the coming year, and its officials wanted to know whether Berea had a special need where the foundation could be helpful. John Stephenson answered with a question of his own. Would the foundation be interested in a program to help low-income women desperately needing jobs? It was. Thus was born the New Opportunity School for Women. Facing a deadline less than a week away, Jane Stephenson put together a formal proposal. Using Norman's friend as a prototype, she sketched an intense and ambitious program designed to instill selfesteem and confidence in women whose aspirations had been stillborn. It was a quixotic plan to help them believe that middle age was the beginning of their life, not the end. Six months later, in June of 1987, the new school welcomed its first students to the Berea campus. Without fully realizing it even then, Stephenson had found her cause—as part of what is perhaps the most significant social movement in Appalachia during the last years of the twenieth century: the emerging ofwomen. The New Opportunity School opened for business in the midst of a decade in which the collapse of the coal economy and revolutionary changes in technology shook the social order of the mountains. Unemployment in coal towns soared as men found themselves with job skills no longer needed in their native hills—and with attitudes and prospects irrelevant in the cities to which miners used to migrate. A generation of mountain men now finds itself "with attitudes and values no longer consistent with the modern world," says Ronald Eller, director of the Appalachian Center at the University of Kentucky. For them, migration to Cincinnati or Charlotte or Pittsburgh is no longer the option that it once was. Consequently, efforts to bring about grass-roots community change are increasingly being led by women, who have assumed growing 10 responsibility for the feeding, clothing, and maintaining of families. As employment of men stagnated or declined, robust numbers of women have joined the work force. Birth rates have plummeted. Three-fourths of the students now entering community colleges in the region are female. With divorce and single parenthood becoming acceptable, families headed by women are commonplace in the mountains, as they have long been in inner cities. Women, authorities such as Eller and Loyal Jones, retired director of the...

The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello.

Thomas Jefferson was, by any reckoning, one of the most remarkable men ever to have crossed America's political stage. In 1776 he drafted the Declaration of Independence, and throughout the Revolution and in the posts he held thereafter - governor of Virginia, minister to France, secretary of state, vice president, and president - Jefferson's responsibilities were enormous and his accomplishments profound. Yet during those years he also was able to design his own house, Monticello, the magnificent Palladian mansion in central Virginia, and later to establish the University of Virginia and to plan its principal buildings. And, through all this, Jefferson made purchases for a lifetime. Needing to furnish not only Monticello but also the ministerial residence in Paris - the Hotel de Langeac - and the President's House in Washington, Jefferson bought with consummate taste and an extraordinary eye for the newest in American, English, and French styles. Fascinated by science and the growing field we now call technology, Jefferson procured or had built devices for copying letters, telescopes for exploring the stars, and even dumbwaiters to minimize dependence on servants at mealtimes. He was keenly curious about his native land and devoted to promoting its virtues, and he acquired examples of its fossils, flora, and fauna and studied its indigenous peoples. Determined that the former colonies should both enjoy their cultural patrimony and preserve their own history, he purchased original paintings and had copied what could not be bought. He commissioned busts of his intellectual heroes, as well as of the heroes of the American struggle for independence. The Worlds of Thomas Jeffersonassembles more than 150 of the objects Jefferson acquired - the first time they have been seen together since the contents of Monticello were dispersed at his death. This astonishing collection reveals the limitless range of his curiosity and the acuteness of his taste, portraying not o

Power and Young People

David Kaimowitz reflects the energy and idealism of youth. He has translated his theories into action through work with Youth Liberation,* the President's White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1970-71, the Saginaw-[Michigan] Student Rights Center, and Ozone House, a home for runaway youth in Ann Arbor.