Progress In America Research Articles

The Role of Elijah Muhammad to Spread Islām in Modern America : an Analysis of his Efforts and Approaches

Based on the available materials and literature, Islām got to America as far back as 1530 when the early African Muslim slaves were taken to the land of America. Elijah Muhammad was one of the Muslim who works and struggled hard on how Islam would be spread and progress in America. Later on, the Muslim Emigrants from various parts of the World also entered America around 19th Century. Hence, it's increasing the population and strengthening the growth of the religion of Islām in the area. The West particularly America known for her secularism, capitalism and extreme individualism with a political ideology not based on the recognition of the creator talk less of monotheism. From all indication, Islām continues to grow from strength to strength despite all odds in its way. Its therefore in the light of the above, the methodology adopted for this paper was historic and descriptive method in order to describe the nature of Islām in America and its practices among the black America and the emigrants during the early days of Islām. The paper concluded that Elijah Muhammad was a great revivalist, preacher and scholars in the spread of Islam in America. Islām equally penetrated in one way and the other into the nook and cranny of America through the peaceful preaching among the Muslim slaves and the people of America.

Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press, by Iain Crawford

Reviewed by: Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press by Iain Crawford Jessie Reeder (bio) Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press, by Iain Crawford; pp. xii + 332. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $110.00, $29.95 paper, $110.00 ebook. Comparing two Victorian authors’ experiences in the United States might not seem a particularly expansive prospect. And yet, in Iain Crawford’s Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press, we see just how wide the view can get. Crawford identifies Harriet Martineau’s and Charles Dickens’s early visits to the United States as formative to their views of the periodical press, their own careers, and, ultimately, their incompatible philosophies of liberalism that led to their infamous and public falling-out. While the two authors share much in their parallel trajectories as self-fashioning authors and liberals, they turn out to diverge on subjects as wide-ranging and consequential as the role of women in the public sphere (something Martineau advocated and Dickens disliked) and the nature of progressive history (Martineau adhering to a stadial arc while Dickens saw more indeterminacy than pattern). Crawford follows these fissures through an impressive array of subjects, including abolition, working-class and Irish unrest, urban versus rural prospects, and the role of the celebrity author. Working adroitly in three fields—transatlantic studies, periodical studies, and liberalism—Crawford’s two-author study offers a vision of the early Victorian press as “shaped by a transatlantic community of letters broadly united in [End Page 691] support for the advance of progressive values but crucially divided over core elements of the ideology of liberalism itself” (2). Chapters 1 and 2 track Martineau’s political philosophy as it developed in the early 1830s in England and then during her lengthy stay in the United States. Influenced by Friedrich Schiller and Adam Smith, Martineau believed the key to social progress was the creation of sympathy through robust public discourse, which in turn required a free press and universal access to education, particularly for women. In her American writings, then, Crawford argues, Martineau depicts the United States—and especially the western frontier—as “a potential if still partially realised exemplar of liberal progress” in which slavery, constrained womanhood, and a restricted press all threaten the otherwise promising advance of liberal subjectivity (50). By turning to Dickens in chapters 3 and 4, Crawford offers a striking comparison of the two authors’ American experiences. Reading American Notes (1842), Crawford shows that where Martineau privileged the frontier, Dickens favored New York City; where Martineau saw the promise of progress in America, Dickens saw degeneration from a British ideal; and where Martineau despised the restrictions of American republican motherhood, Dickens condoned domesticity and limited subjectivity for women. Both writers, however, “examined the American press as a predictor of what the future might hold in store for British journalism” (119). And so, on his return to Britain, Dickens penned Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), which Crawford reads as a response to widespread criticism of American Notes—and as a doubling-down on its critiques of American society. Martin Chuzzlewit depicts an atopic America, drowning in a tide of unregulated mass media, disconnected from both history and future, and corrupted by women’s independence. These first four chapters contain some of Crawford’s most compelling close reading, particularly as he tracks Martineau’s and Dickens’s divergent senses of the temporality of American landscapes. And he makes a persuasive case that the transatlantic voyage was formative for both authors’ political views and professional futures. Crawford is somewhat more critical of Dickens’s version of liberalism than of Martineau’s in these early chapters. And although he concedes that both authors “endors[ed] the underlying theory [of progress] that pushed Native Americans beyond the pale of civilised society,” one wishes for a more critical orientation toward Martineau’s erasure of violence against Indigenous and enslaved people (118). Martineau is apparently concerned with miscegenation only as it affects white families and not Black victims of sexual violence, and she locates Andrew Jackson’s threat to liberalism in his censorship of the press rather than in his genocidal policies of Indigenous displacement. These are features of her...

The Navigation of Afrocentricism in Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” and Incident”: The Poetics of Identity

This paper brings forward the course and determination of Afro-American people toward their origin as experienced by African Americans. It remarkably remaps the poetics of identity amid the racial segregation as projected in Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” and “Incident.” Further, it deals with the color line discrimination over enslaved community and fabricated knowledge about their history as problematic of research. Because the slavery system has belittled Afro-Americans and alienated them from their atavistic culture so that they fail to enjoy human dignity and identity. My purpose, here, is to delve into the issue of color discrimination that not only hems the Afro- American community but also dislocates them from their heritage. Largely, this paper navigates their alienated position amid the vast opportunities of material progress in America. Moreover, this paper intends to go through the genealogical studies of the race as envisioned by Paul Gilroy and W.E.B. Du Bois who advocate for enslaved community’s dignity and identity. Admittedly, genealogical history of the race takes the Afro-American people back to the time before ‘the slave trade’ era when they were happy and free enjoying their culture and language with human dignity in their atavistic land, Africa.

Reopening Racial Wounds: Whiteness, Melancholia, and Affect in the English Classroom

This article critiques a classroom encounter between a Black student, Richard, and a white student, Nick, that complicated the white English teacher, Mr. Turner’s, attempt to facilitate a discussion about racial progress in America. Students positioned their bodies on a continuum between 1, no racial progress since the 1930s, and 10, full racial equity. When Richard positioned himself at the low end of the continuum and Nick located himself on the high end, a disruption occurred after Mr. Turner moved his body toward Nick while verbally validating Richard’s perspective. I argue that the classroom’s affective register was altered by racial melancholia, reopening racial wounds and reproducing whiteness, evoking emotions I call “melancholic affects.”

Abstract 359: C1GALT1 activates multiple RTKs and promotes malignant behaviors in pancreatic adenocarcinoma cells

Abstract Pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PDAC), stands up to the 4th in all cancer mortalities and remains the most in progress in America. Curative resection remains the most and only potential strategy but only 15~20% of patients are candidates. Even though, many of them have dismal prognosis. Aberrant glycosylation illustrates an attribution of cancer, especially fot promoting malignant behaviors in adenocarcinomas. Altered expression of glycans, such as GalNAcα1-O-S/T (Tn antigen) and Galβ1,3-GalNAc-S/T (T antigen), is hallmark of cancers. Core 1 β1,3-galactosyltransferase (C1GALT1) catalyzes the transfer of Gal to Tn antigen to form T antigen. C1GALT1 is reported to contribute to clinicopathological features and malignant phenotypes in various cancers. However, the expression and function of C1GALT1 in PDAC remain unrevealed. Our data showed that C1GALT1 was overexpressed in PDAC tissues and correlated with poor prognosis. C1GALT1 knockdown inhibited viability, migration, and invasion analyzed by MTT, transwell migration, and Matrigel invasion assays, respectively, in PDAC cells, associated with increased Tn antigen but decreased T antigen expression. Conversely, C1GALT1 overexpression promoted these malignant behaviors. C1GALT1 knockdown inhibited AKT and ERK activities in PDAC cells. Consistently, phospho-receptor tyrosine kinase (p-RTK) array showed decreased phosphorylation of several RTKs including EGFR, IGF1R, and FLT3. Additionally, flow cytometry of C1GALT1 knockdown cells showed enhanced apoptosis, which was associated with decreased catalase, Bcl-x, and death receptor DR5 revealed by apoptosis array. We also found that C1GALT1 knockdown arrested G1 progression in PDAC cells. Furthermore, gene set enrichment analysis of cDNA microarray indicated that C1GALT1 regulated cell cycle, cytoskeleton, and chromatin structure in PDAC cells. These findings indicate that higher C1GALT1 expression predicts worse survival of PDAC and enhances malignant characters in PDAC cells, highlighting a fundamental role of C1GALT1 in PDAC development. Note: This abstract was not presented at the meeting. Citation Format: Ting-Chun Kuo, Hsueh-Fen Juan, Yu-Wen Tien, Min-Chuan Huang. C1GALT1 activates multiple RTKs and promotes malignant behaviors in pancreatic adenocarcinoma cells [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 359. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-359

Uncovering the Voting Rights Act: The Racial Progress Argument in Shelby County

The coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act succumbs in Shelby County v. Holder due to the majority’s narrative of racial progress in America. While they concede that the nation has a tarnished racial history, and is far from perfect, the majority makes a big deal of the fact that “history did not end in 1965.” They rest their novel argument against the coverage formula on the claim that the “entrenched racial discrimination in voting” in covered states in 1965 that justified exceptional legislation back then is no longer prevalent or flagrant. This perspective can be summed up with the motif, “that was then, this is now.” In this Article I reconstruct the majority’s racial progress argument in Shelby County, and raise some concerns about ways of answering it that merely replace a conservative narrative about racial progress with a liberal one. Although I am partial to the latter narrative, and believe that the argument for striking down the coverage formula is deeply flawed, it seems unwise to rest the entire case for saving the Voting Rights Act and defending the right to vote — moving forward — on winning the racial progress argument, especially in a nation so smitten by the view that we have reached the “postracial” promised land. I conclude with speculative remarks about where we might turn to safeguard the right to vote post-Shelby County.

The Rising Tide Of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific ed. by Moon-Ho Jung (review)

Reviewed by: The Rising Tide Of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific ed. by Moon-Ho Jung S. Ani Mukherji THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific. Moon-Ho Jung. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2014. There is a well-worn narrative of racial progress in America according to which the state is the guarantor of the rights and liberties for people of color. From the Revolutionary War of The Patriot (2000) to the Civil Rights era portrayed in Mississippi Burning (1988), the federal government has been depicted as a magnanimous and trans-historical instrument of social change. This pervasive myth of the benevolent nation-state is, according to the editor of a new collection of historical essays, The Rising Tide of Color, “fatally flawed and horribly distorted” (8). To correct this pernicious fiction, editor Moon-Ho Jung has assembled essays from emergent leading scholars of American racism and radical social movements. The volume is framed by two excellent introductory essays by Jung and historian George Lipsitz. Jung’s “Opening Salvo” will remind some readers of the classic left histories of William Preston and William Appleman Williams. Jung provides a succinct, but critical overview of the forces of racism, empire, radical movements, and repressive violence as they have played out across the trans-Pacific from the “opening” of Asia to the present. It is an edifying primer attuned, in the tradition of Preston and Williams, to connecting our [End Page 136] contemporary crisis to the problems of the past. Lipsitz’s subsequent “Standing at the Crossroads” delves into the dilemmas of engaged radical historical scholarship. Nearly fifty years after the dawn of New Left history, the seasoned practitioner Lipsitz cautions that radical scholarship holds out both rewards and traps, outlining some common pitfalls—presumptions to vanguardism, syndicalist day-dreaming, archival obscurantism, self-aggrandizing academics, and self-indulgent misery. It is useful counsel for the novice and an important reminder for veteran researchers. The following four sections of the book—each comprised of two essays—are grouped thematically and in rough chronological order. As constraints of space preclude the discussion of each contribution, this review will highlight the essays that best capture the rethinking of region, transnationalism, state violence, and the formation of social movements promised by this volume. Denise Khor’s “Dangerous Amusements” imaginatively argues that the film culture of colonial Hawai’i’s plantation society provided an important basis for the making of a creole working-class. Tracing the circulation, manner of exhibition, and reception of early westerns, Japanese silent films, and “wholesome features,” Khor suggests that migrant laborers’ collective experience of going to the cinema paved the way for the making of an interracial labor movement in Hawai’i. Christina Heatherton’s “Relief and Revolution” also explores the formation of a multiracial class struggle on the eve of a wave of labor militancy in Depression-era southern California (and the world). Combining local detail with theoretical sophistication, the author balances political economy, state forces of repression, and internationalist solidarities in an account of workers’ radical confrontations with capitalism. Dan Berger’s analysis of the intellectual work of imprisoned radicals in 1970s California offers readers a number of insights. Especially revelatory is his discussion of the circulation of black radicalisms “from the rural and urban South to urban Los Angeles, and then again from the industrial metropolis to the small towns where the prisons were (and are) located,” and how these movements allowed prisoners to understand incarceration as a form of slavery that implicitly refuted Western claims to multiracial liberalism (231). Simeon Man’s “Radicalizing Currents” demonstrates how antiwar activism after the 1969 “Vietnamization” of the war led to “a short-lived yet remarkable global insurgency” (269). Following the example of the Third World solidarity set by the Venceremos Brigade in Cuba, American activists expanded their radical activities from the Pacific Coast of the US to imperial outposts in the Philippines and Okinawa in the 1970s, linking the struggle against American empire with local labor and anticolonial movements. Transnational in scope and attentive to intricacies of geography and intersectionality, the contributions to Rising Tide represent a promising wave...

A Review of Detection, Evaluation and Repair Technology for Hydraulic Concrete Structures

This paper provides a review of the progress in America, Europe, Japan and china withnumerous standardizations and investigations for the protection and repair of hydraulic concrete structures.These researches include detection technologies, evaluation methods, applications of newconcrete reinforcing and repair materials. This paper identifies the significant progress made by theInternational Commission on Large Dams(ICOLD).At the same time, some specific investigations are carried out on the ageing of hydraulic concrete structures in china. On this basis, the detection, assessment and remediation analysis of hydraulic concrete structures are summed up, and someadvice is put forward to the next stage of work.

Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America (review)

Reviewed by: Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America Min Zhou (bio) Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America, by Lingxin Hao. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007. Ix + 316 pp. $47.50 cloth; $24.95 paper. ISBN-13: 978-0-87154-338-7. Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America is a quantitative study of immigrants' assimilation and their impacts on social and racial inequality in the United States. Using repeated national survey data, Lingxin Hao thoughtfully and meticulously examines the patterns of wealth by various national origins, changes in American race stratification caused by immigration, and implications for assimilation theory and public policy. She argues that contemporary immigrants have changed the class structure of America but not in ways commonly believed. She shows that, while many immigrant groups—Cubans, Jamaicans, Chinese, and others—have acquired more wealth than their native-born coethnics, their progress in America has more to do with structural characteristics—homeland political and educational systems, social reception and treatment by the U.S. society, immigration selectivity, and occupation and residential segregations—than with individual or cultural characteristics. To tell a coherent story about immigrants' assets and wealth inequality in the United States and to account for immigrant-native differences, Hao organizes her book into nine chapters containing 316 pages including sixty-four tables and seventy-four figures. In her introductory chapter, Hao makes a compelling argument that wealth is a better measure than income in capturing immigrants' socioeconomic integration or structural assimilation while gauging more accurately immigration's impact on American society. As a concept, wealth contains assets and debts, absorbing the consequences of past economic behavior and activity, including earning, saving, consuming, portfolio allocating, and investing in children and for old age (2). Drawing on theories of international migration, assimilation, stratification, and wealth accumulation, Hao introduces nativity as a key factor into the racial-ethnic stratification system and conceptualizes the host society as structured by a two-tier race-nativity stratification system in which race stratifies wealth at the primary level and nativity stratifies wealth at the secondary level (chapter 2). She asserts that this two-tier system allows some immigrant groups to transcend color lines and eventually assimilate into the mainstream America while weakening the racial hierarchy. At the same time, many immigrant groups are trapped within the host racial hierarchy. Hao then establishes, step-by-step, the logical linkage between microlevel behavior in motivation, consumption, saving, and lifestyle and macrolevel constraints in wealth accumulation to provide a systematic and comprehensive portrait of [End Page 317] immigrants' wealth over a twenty-year period. She looks closely at the trajectories of both assets and debts in total and specific components by country of origin, family life cycle, and arrival cohort (chapters 3–6). She shows that the existence and salience of a second-tier hierarchy and attributes it to the large variations in the modes of incorporation within different national-origin groups of different racial/ethnic backgrounds. For example, Cuban immigrants make substantially more progress than arrivals from the Dominican Republic, but they do not top whites; Chinese immigrants from Mainland China have more success than Vietnamese or Korean immigrants, but they do not top whites either; and Jamaicans fare better than Haitians and sub-Saharan Africans, but they still fare much worse than whites and some other racial minorities such as Hispanics. Hao provides evidence to show how nativity differences can be subsumed by race-ethnicity and education. For example, while rates of return to education may favor racial minorities, postsecondary degrees earned in developing countries of origin may offset this advantage, which can have varied effects on immigrants of darker or lighter skin color. Hao also shows that a strong motivation to improve life chances of family and a home country culture honoring having children and emphasizing children's education can boost asset building among members of some national origin groups regardless of their current marital and parenthood statuses. In Chapter 7, Hao builds and empirically tests a model of immigrant assimilation through wealth attainment. Her model estimates the strength of racial-ethnic effect and education effect and the strength...

The Interest Convergence Principle and the Integration of Major League Baseball

The integration of Major League Baseball (MLB) in 1947 has long been considered a triumph in America’s ongoing battle with racism and racial discrimination. An undeniably significant accomplishment, Branch Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers organization in 1946 indubitably evokes altruistic feelings of racial progress in America. However, Bell’s interest convergence principle argues that elite Whites in America will not further the status of Black Americans without receiving equal or greater benefit in return for their so-called altruism. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to provide readers with a worthwhile and critical new perspective regarding the integration of MLB by analyzing it through the lens of the interest convergence principle.

What About Disillusionment? Exploring the Pathways to Black Nationalism

Political scientists devote little attention to the attitudinal consequences of Blacks’ disillusionment with racial progress in America. This oversight undermines our understanding of the antecedents of support for the ideology of Black nationalism. I hypothesize that disillusionment and linked fate interact to influence Black nationalism: the stronger one’s disillusionment, the greater her adherence to this ideology, and the weaker the impact of her linked fate on her expression of nationalism. Analyses of the 1993–1994 National Black Politics Study and the 2004–2005 National Politics Study corroborate these expectations, indicating that disillusionment moderates the impact of linked fate on Black nationalism.

Spacefaring Logistics Infrastructure: The Foundation of a Spacefaring America

The American spacefaring dream, which envisions average Americans being able to safely and routinely travel to and work in space, remains the American public's benchmark for measuring progress in America's human space enterprises. This article begins with a brief review of the ideas and developments that led up to the formation of the American spacefaring dream in the late 1950s. It continues with discussion of how building new logistics infrastructure capabilities has enabled America to lead the world in opening new physical and technological frontiers and why this provides a successful model for fulfilling the American spacefaring dream of opening the space frontier. The article concludes with the identification of specific planning objectives to guide the development, construction, and operation of an integrated American spacefaring logistics infrastructure.

The eighteenth-century jeremiad and progress-piece traditions in anna barbauld's “eighteen hundred and eleven”

Anna Barbauld's use of the progress-piece genre in “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” suggests that her reliance on an Enlightenment model of progress serves mainly as an almost elegiac means of witnessing the regression of western Europe during the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon. Indeed, she places the only hope for the continuation of Western Enlightenment progress in America. Yet this seemingly pessimistic flight of progress may also respond more critically, and in a cautionary way, to the predominantly male progress-poem tradition. Barbauld's use of an anachronistic Johnsonian, neo-Juvenalian verse form may be viewed as a sign of resistance against the supposed “naturalization” of the progress poem by such contemporaries as Coleridge, and against the futile gestures of isolation in mid- to late eighteenth-century poets such as Gray, Collins, and Cowper. She thus positions her view of progress, which recovers earlier cyclical models of civic humanism, more centrally in a public, cosmopolitan forum than did the first-generation Romantics or the Sensibility poets, who relied on the progress piece as more of a vehicle for private reflection or as separation from a corrupt public sphere. She recovers the traditional moral authority of, for instance, Pope's epistles by forsaking another questionable form of “progress”: poetic movements towards naturalized diction, affective lyrical voices, and even the nominal “feminization” of such public genres. Rather, she adopts the more openly artificial modes of Augustan verse to deliver a highly stylized prophecy of cultural extermination for the English nation's complicity in warfare. Such apparently anachronistic verse is germane to Barbauld's aim of relocating this genre in the center of commercial, political, and civic life, rather than allowing it to remain in the isolated, remote retreats of her male contemporaries and immediate predecessors.

Fundamental Properties of Mortar and Concrete Using Waste foundry Sand

The development of automobile, vessel, rail road, and machine industry leads an increase of foundry production used as their components, which cause a by-product, waste foundry sand (WFS). The amount of the WFS produced in Korea is over 700,000 tons a year, but most WFS has been buried itself and only WFS is recycled as construction materials. Therefore, it is necessary for most WFS to research other ways which can be used in a higher value added product. The study on recycling it as a fine aggregate for concrete or green sand has been in progress in America and Japan since 1970s and 1980s respaectively. In this study, two types of WFS were used as a fine aggregate for concrete. Nine types of concrete aimed at the specified strength of 30 MPa were mixed with washed seashore coarse sand in which salt was removed, and WFS and then appropriate mixture proportion of concrete was determined. Moreover, basic properties such as air contents, setting time, bleeding, workability and slump loss of the fresh concrete with WFS were tested and compared with those of the concrete mixed without WFS. In addition, both compressive strength of hardened concrete at each ages and tensile strength of it at the age of 28 days were measured and discussed.

Green Again: Irish-American Lace-Curtain Satire

Just off the boat, unacquainted with American ways, still literally and figura tively carrying the baggage of the Old World, the greenhorn was mocked in songs, vaudeville skits, comic strips, and plays. He was even laughed at by his more assimilated countrymen. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, how ever, American popular culture discovered another comic type in ethnic com munities: the immigrant who, having shed his greenness, understood such essentials of American society as assimilation and making money, and who, having achieved some degree of success, sought to take his rightful place on a higher rung on the social ladder. This move demanded that he and his wife shed the immigrant ways that would make them unacceptable to the WASPS who defined middle and upper-class mores. Within the Irish-American communi ty, this yearning for respectability and social status was symbolized by the curtain. While the raw immigrant was often identified by the term greenhorn, those who sought the curtain received no similar label, yet they represent a comic type every bit as ubiquitous as the greener The and the satires it inspired, were rich in ambivalence. The whole purpose of coming to America was to get ahead. But to get ahead, one had to get ahead of one's own people. The newcomer had to rise out of the immigrant working class, with all of its economic instability and social famil iarity, in order to attain some sort of middle-class status, which offered more economic stability but also more social uncertainty Francis Walsh, in an important early article on the literature of assimilation, notes that the term lace curtain, which first appeared in the 1890s, implied from the beginning a purposful separation of the rising Irish from the less dis ciplined ranks of their fellow immigrants.1 Therefore, for the ambitious immi grant family, progress in America involved something like a second immigra tion. In passing through the members of the family once again found themselves in new, unfamiliar, and confusing places and situations. The physical move out of the old ethnic neighborhood also required a psychologi cal shift, an internal migration, through which immigrant working-class culture

Women's Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America

Are women victims? Or can they hold their own in the workplace? Whilst the popular belief is that women are systematically discriminated against, the authors of this work on women's economic progress in America show that in many areas of education and employment women have achieved equality.

The New Accommodationists

The 1980s and early 1990s proved to be an era of great advancement for African American political and intellectual leadership. The number of Black elected officials across the country doubled. Major American cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Detroit, Baltimore, Seattle, and New Orleans were headed by Black mayors. As the decade of the 1980s closed, the nation's largest city, New York, elected its first African American mayor. An African American was chosen to chair one of the country's two major political parties. A Black man made two impressive runs for the presidency, and the nation had its first elected Black governor, remarkably in Virginia, the seat of the old Confederacy. Understandably, these successes were greeted with a great deal of self-congratulation on the part of both Black and White politicians, journalists, and political commentators, who pointed to these electoral triumphs as evidence of substantial racial progress in America. African Americans finally were entering the mainstream of American politics. This tone was also mirrored by a new cadre of Black intellectuals who had acquired positions in the major citadels of learning and with the major media outlets. They concurred that race was a moribund issue in American society and that the entrance of African Americans into the American political hegemony was evidence of this. Finally, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of a color-blind American society was coming true. But is this in fact the case? Are these new Black political and intellectual leaders keepers of King's dream or are they its betrayers? Are they harbingers of a new age of racial harmony and justice

Religion and the Business Enterprise: An American Perspective

The main thesis of this essay is that religious inquiry can and should be central to business ethics instruction in both the business school classroom and the corporate boardroom. Religious conviction has always been a major factor in social progress in America. Hence, removing religious inquiry from ethical instruction severely restricts the potency of such instruction to effect change. The essay first analyzes two aspects of American culture that tend to inhibit religious dialogue: (a) American faith in a wall between the secular and the sacred; and (b) a cultural commitment to 'scientific' inquiries when discussing business matters. Although both cultural beliefs must be taken seriously, however, they need not silence one's religious beliefs and values. Two contemporary frameworks for analyzing issues in business ethics—'stakeholder theory' and 'social contract theory'— are then focused upon and it is demonstrated that religious dialogue and religious principles can usefully supplement either approach.

Daniel Batchellor and the American Tonic Sol-fa Movement

Daniel Batchellor, British music educator, immigrated to America in 1877. A nonconformist minister, he was a capable, enthusiastic proponent of the Tonic Sol-fa system. He knew that opportunities were available in Boston to a determined, energetic teacher of the method. In America, Batchellor worked hard to establish the method in conjunction with dedicated Tonic Sol-faists already active in the Eastern states. Despite considerable activity on the part of its proponents toward the end of the nineteenth century, the system did not become established. Batchellor's career in many ways paralleled the progress of the Tonic Sol-fa method in America. His income was derived from teaching private classes, sessional work for various institutions, and summer schools. The financial rewards of such work would have fluctuated with the status of his somewhat specialized method. By the end of his life, Batchellor, like the Tonic Sol-fa system, had sunk into obscurity. As a representative of an important method and its progress in America, Batchellor deserves our attention.

The ABC-CLIO companion to women's progress in America

The ABC-CLIO companion to women's progress in America