Richard White Research Articles

So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848 (review)

Reviewed by: So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848 Clyde A. Milner II (bio) So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848. By Will Bagley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Pp. 458. Cloth, $45.00.) Will Bagley has begun an epic four-volume journey through the mountains of personal accounts, newspaper reports, government records, and scholarly studies that have recounted the saga of the overland trails. This book examines the era before the California gold rush, an event that changed dramatically both the number and destination of the emigrants. Starting in 1812 allows Bagley to recognize the importance of Robert Stuart's discovery of South Pass, the gateway through the Rocky Mountains that made transit to Oregon and California more accessible. Other extreme obstacles lay farther west, such as the formidable Sierra Nevada in eastern California. A public historian with over a decade of experience working in the National Park Service, Bagley knows both the terrain and the literature. Bagley is an accomplished writer and historian whose earlier book Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2002) produced enough concern within the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that a team of Mormon historians attempted a refutation. The book built on the heroic efforts of Juanita Brooks, the Mormon author who in 1950 exposed the Mormons' involvement in the 1857 killing of at least 120 men, women, and children. Here Bagley's first installment has another vital scholarly antecedent, John D. Unruh's monumental The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 (1979). Unruh's foreshortened career never intersected with those of a new set of historians, like John Mack Faragher, who demonstrated that westward emigration had a greater complexity than popular assumptions about heroic pioneers and wagon trains. By the mid-1980s, a "new western history" arose exemplified best by the work of Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White. Bagley's interpretations are influenced by these no-longer-so-new historians, but his extensive research is impressive in its own right. He has utilized some five hundred overland narratives unknown to scholars before 1988. The desire of so many to record what they experienced in the journey has provided the greatest source of information. The prominent trails historian Merrill Mattes "estimated that of the almost 500,000 sojourners . . . [End Page 82] between 1812 and 1866, about 1 in every 250 left some sort of meaningful record of their adventure" (285). Perhaps only the accounts of Civil War soldiers can match such an outpouring. These records contain many surprises. For example, native peoples played an important peaceful role interacting with the overland migrants. John Unruh first researched this aspect of the journey, and Bagley effectively expands this analysis by looking at the work of Lillian Schlissel and Glenda Riley. Their examination of women's trail diaries revealed much fear of possible Indian hostilities but remarkably few, and in many cases no, incidents. As Bagley recognizes, "Until the 1860s, the level of violence on the road west was surprisingly low" (348). Women's stories along the trail demonstrate the dominant male attitude in gender relations. Bagley incorporates the accounts of two women—Lucinda Jane Saunders and Narcissa Burdette Land Vasquez—that are not included in earlier histories of the overland trails. Saunders's and Vasquez's accounts reveal the hostility, as well as the occasional admiration, that independent women elicited from male observers. Yet, Bagley does not ignore the better-known episodes and prominent characters. For example, John Charles Frémont appears regularly with his government expeditions and political ambitions. The two disastrously foolish purveyors of "shortcuts" to California, Lansford W. Hastings and Peter Lassen, retain their notoriety. And the Donner party becomes trapped in the high Sierra Nevada, with many succumbing to desperate measures and starvation. Very appropriately, Bagley uses the Jesuit missionary and traveler Father Pierre-Jean De Smet as a narrative bookend for his study. In 1841, De Smet journeyed with the Bidwell-Bartleson party, often proclaimed as the first pioneer train to reach the Oregon country. Before the end of...

Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White

 Reviews reviews Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White W.W. Norton, New York, 2011. Illustrations, maps, graphs, notes, index. 660 pages. $35.00 cloth. Whenever we disdainfully criticize some dysfunctional condition, we often say: “What a way to run a railroad!” That catchphrase rests on an image of railroads as the epitome of efficient and successful enterprises, the gold standard of competency. But what if the management of the most famous of the great nineteenth-century railroads — the transcontinentals — was inefficient, unsuccessful, and incompetent? It is Richard White’s conclusion in his new history, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, that the phrase should be inverted to become a legitimate question — did the industrialists truly run their railroads? — as well as a political and economic description: building the great iron roads from the Midwest to the Pacific Coast was an uneconomic proposition. This book is an intense and intimate investigation of the inner workings of highly leveraged enterprises — the most detailed and revealing we have seen. The author’s discoveries and analyses create a storyline that contrasts sharply with the familiar triumphalist saga seen even in recent histories: David Howard Bain,Empire Express (2000),StephenAmbrose,Nothing Like it in the World (2001), and Walter Borneman, Rival Rails (2010). White’s rendition of the transcontinental story begins with the dream of spanning the continent that enticed nearly everyone. The means, though, became tangled in politics. Enterprising industrial financiers wanted to build the roads without risking their own money,while Congress tried to protect taxpayers from footing the bill. Financiers pursued wealth by fashioning an inventive combination of bond issues and accounting deceits. Their shenanigans passed a good portion of the risk and most of the costs on to the government. The prime example of the financial filching by a transcontinental,the Union Pacific Railroad, benefitted from a gullible and bribed Congress that handed the railroad $43 million in unearned payments from 1864 to 1893.The end of the story stood as a bookend to the financial audacities that launched the effort,a vast failure that White labels “Collapse.” It was the result of incompetence on a grand a scale, he argues, as immense as the extent of western railroad mileage in 1900. More important for his larger purpose in writing this book,White asks how a disaster that plunged all but one of the transcontinentals into bankruptcy within thirty years can be seen as an example of triumphal industrial capitalism.“Seen from within western railroads and Congress,”White concludes, “modernity seemed to me the reverse of the homilies of the Gilded Age: it was the triumph of the unfit, whose survival demanded the intervention of the state, which the corporations themselves corrupted” (p. 509). White focuses on the synergistic creation of modernity that jelled in the late nineteenth century, the essential casting of an industrial republic that begged for reformulation in the twentieth century. In his hands, the story is not a perverted Darwinian tale of the fit and unfit,but a neo-Darwinian narrative where the American West stands as a geographical stage for the co-evolution of modern corporations and a new industrial state. At more than five hundred pages of text,plus fascinating graphic appendices of financial information,we might ask if the book has to be so massive, as if it needs to match the extent of manipulative finances it details so relentlessly. The answer is  OHQ vol. 113, no. 1 yes, even if the author’s pique is undisguised and his tone, often lilted with biting humor, sometimes conveys a wagging finger of reproach.The length is more justified,though, by the author’s method. It is the revelatory descriptions of individual and often quite personal actions of key actors that carry the narrative. In Railroaded, readers see the developing network of financial schemes and questionable dealings from the viewpoints of major players: Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Francis Adams, and many others. The information comes from a deep investigation in manuscript collections that offer personal and business correspondence that amounts to an eavesdropping wiretap on insider collusions. For readers of this journal, White...

No More Heroes:

in 1994, Richard White and the Newberry Library created a subversive exhibit titled The Frontier in American Culture, which powerfully paired the two master narratives that Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody presented at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Turner delivered his scholarly paper to a small group of historians at the Chicago Art Institute while Cody performed his Wild West extravaganza in front of a midway grandstand filled with perhaps eighteen thousand people. Turner spoke of the orderly settlement of a seemingly empty continent and the creation of a distinctive American culture; Cody told of violently wresting the continent from the Indian peoples who occupied the land. Each man claimed to represent history and—as different as these two stories were—each led to a remarkably similar conclusion: the frontier had come to a close. As visitors to the Newberry made their way through the exhibit, they could not help but conclude that both Turner and Cody engaged in myth-making. And those myths had consequences. When Turner erased indigenous people from mental maps of the “frontier,” he absolved Americans from blame for the appropriation of Indian homelands. Similarly, when Cody focused on Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn and showed Indians attacking apparently helpless pioneers, he turned the truth upside down and encouraged Americans to think of themselves as the victims of the Indian Wars rather than as aggressors. Viewing a traveling version of this exhibit at the public library in Las Cruces, New Mexico—one of the last stops on a national tour that ended in 2001—I was delighted to see the insights of the new western history brought into the public arena. The public was not always quite as thrilled. When the exhibit first opened in Chicago, some visitors applauded White’s interpretation while others jeered that it

Levinas, the Philosophy of Suffering, and the Ethics of Compassion

The Heythrop JournalVolume 53, Issue 1 p. 111-123 ARTICLE Levinas, the Philosophy of Suffering, and the Ethics of Compassion Richard White, Richard White Creighton University, USASearch for more papers by this author Richard White, Richard White Creighton University, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 September 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2011.00707.xCitations: 11Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume53, Issue1January 2012Pages 111-123 RelatedInformation

Iron Horse and Gilded Age

[O]ne of the most distinguished historians of our time, Richard White, has written a book [ Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America ] about an epic story of the First Gilded Age: the building of the transcontinental railroads between the 1860s and the 1890s. From the moment the first of these railroads was finished at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, these immense undertakings became an American obsession, eliciting both marvel and anger.

Rememorando os Filhos de Onontio: Richard White, The Middle Ground e a escrita da história da América do Norte colonial

Publicado em 1991, o livro The Middle Ground, do historiador norte-americano Richard White, ajudou a revolucionar a escrita da história da América do Norte colonial, com uma perspectiva que enfatizava a ação indígena e a formação de um processo de acomodações e compromissos na região dos Grandes Lagos. Com isso, White conseguiu criar uma narrativa que fugia dos simples tropos de "assimilação" e "conquista", fornecendo, assim, uma história preocupada com a recuperação do Outro enquanto ator histórico legítimo.

Sojourning and Settling: Locating Chinese Australian History

During the past thirty years, our understanding of the history of Chinese Australians has been remade. Today, as a growing community of researchers delves into the archives, new insights into the political, economic and cultural dimensions of Chinese Australian experiences are emerging. The tired, one-dimensional depictions of the sojourning celestial digger have, at last, given way to a more complex view. Historians of the Chinese in Australia have been both instigators and beneficiaries of a move towards a more inclusive, multicultural approach to Australian history within the academy and beyond. They have played an important role in challenging the often peripheral status of specialised ethnic and multicultural studies, or ‘ethno-histories’, within Australian historiography. At the same time, their efforts to better understand the history of the Chinese in Australia have provided a ‘valuable counterpart’ to ongoing research into Australia's relations with Asia.1 1Hsu-Ming Teo, ‘Multiculturalism and the Problem of Multicultural Histories: An Overview of Ethnic Historiography’, in Cultural History in Australia, eds., Richard White and Hsu-Ming Teo (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003), 146; For the peripheral status of ethno-history in Australia into the 1990s see Barry York, Ethno-Historical Studies in a Multicultural Australia (Canberra: Centre for Immigration & Multicultural Studies, 1996), 27.

Capitalism, Counterfactuals, and the National State: Reflections on Richard White's Railroaded

Research Article| January 01 2011 Capitalism, Counterfactuals, and the National State: Reflections on Richard White's Railroaded Daniel Carpenter Daniel Carpenter Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2011) 89 (1): 16–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/23215288 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Daniel Carpenter; Capitalism, Counterfactuals, and the National State: Reflections on Richard White's Railroaded. California History 1 January 2011; 89 (1): 16–70. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/23215288 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 California Historical Society Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reseña de The Middle Ground. Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Twentieth Anniversary Edition with a new preface by the author. de Richard White. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011

Ampliamente conocido por sus valiosos trabajos sobre historia colonial, republicana e historia ambiental de las vastisimas regiones del oeste norteamericano, el historiador Richard White —actualmente profesor del Departamento de Historia en Stanford University— acaba de publicar la ultima version de su obra mas importante, su Opus Magnum, atendiendo a los calificativos que suelen emplearse para los estudios historicos que terminan por convertirse en libros de culto. Practicamente, desde su pu...

The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy, and American States (review)

Reviewed by: The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy, and American States Daniel Carpenter Daniel M. Fox . The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy, and American States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. xii + 168 pp. $29.95 (978-0-520-26238-6). In the aftermath of congressional passage of federal legislation that will shape American health care for decades to come, it is easy to forget that significant and monumental health reform has been shaped by state governments. Daniel Fox's Convergence of Science and Governance documents a gradual but substantial transformation in the way that states regulate and compensate health services. In Fox's lovely and concise volume, the states effect broad shifts in methods, rules, concepts, and resource allocation. These shifts portend and presage much of what can be expected to occupy the agendas and minds of policy makers in state capitols and Washington in the coming decades. Fox conveys how state health policy makers have come to regulate therapeutics and health services by relying on systematic reviews of comparative treatment effectiveness. Some of the names and networks in this narrative are familiar—in particular Donald Berwick, who at this writing has been nominated by President Obama for head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Yet Fox introduces us to new personalities in this saga. They range from female effectiveness pioneer Mindel C. Sheps and University of Michigan scholar Avedis Donabedian to Oregon officials Mark Gibson and Mark Helfand to policy makers in Idaho, Washington, and Canadian provinces who became early and risk-taking champions of coverage policy based on systematic evidentiary reviews. There are also previously understudied networks and organizations that will now, thanks to Fox, populate the annals of health service reform: the Reforming States Group, the founders of the Drug Effectiveness Research Project (pp. 80-82) in the western states, the federal government's User Liaison Program. [End Page 706] In a volume that functions as an intersection of political and methodological history—I am reminded, in some ways, of Richard White's brief and boundary-spanning Organic Machine—Fox gives shrewd attention to the political economy of health research methods. He ably shows how randomized trials have transformed many debates but also how their prohibitive cost tends to confer advantages on the organizations that can afford to sponsor them (pp. 7, 22). The modern embrace of randomized controlled trial methods leads to a cat-and-mouse game about how to perform these studies and how to apply their lessons (see his concluding chap. 5). And Fox exhibits a sharp understanding of the role, limitations, and complicated politics of statistical inference. His musings about the tension between average effects and individual or subpopulation results and his cautionary notes about libertarian and industry-sponsored abuses of the distinction should be required reading in graduate seminars (pp. 92-93). Fox devotes chapter 4 to an understanding of the Drug Effectiveness Review Project (DERP). It is, in my reading, the crowning effort of the book and represents simply the best encapsulation and narrative on the project that has been written. The fledgling effort received a political boost from its narrow passage in Oregon and the failure of a judicial challenge to Maine's law, and the role of DERP systems in sounding an early warning on Vioxx and its cardiovascular risks lent additional legitimacy to the effort. There is convergence is this narrative, but Fox avoids teleology. There are limitations to an effort like this, not least a somewhat contrived distinction between "general government" and "specialist government." This binary both confuses the reader and results in what, for a gifted historical writer, are some rather anachronistic statements (the idea that state government specialists' "priority is to justify, and advocate for, more money and authority for their agencies"; p. 52). Yet the credits far outpace the debits here. The deep legacy of American health reform in the twenty-first century expresses and signifies, perhaps inescapably, a deeply federalist history. More than any scholar writing, Daniel Fox has set readers on that path of understanding. Daniel Carpenter Harvard University Copyright © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Introduction to Focus: Environmental Humanities

Introduction to Focus:Environmental Humanities Ursula K. Heise, Focus Editor (bio) and Allison Carruth, Focus Editor (bio) From pollution and nuclear energy to deforestation and global warming, environmental issues play an ever more dominant role in our daily news cycles. The conflicts these issues generate at times revolve around the familiar lines of wilderness conservation, social justice, and economic growth that environmentalist thought has foregrounded for decades. The spring 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused by an explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform—and the discourse the spill has fueled—pits a transnational corporation against local residents and a delicate marine ecosystem with complex and devastating consequences: a scenario well-known not only from other oil disasters such as the Exxon Valdez in Alaska, the Prestige off the Galician coast, or the multiple large-scale spills in the Niger Delta, but also from other industrial accidents and catastrophes ranging from Minamata, Seveso, and Love Canal to Bhopal, Times Beach, and Chernobyl. But other conflicts over natural resources, renewable energy, and sustainable agriculture unsettle the very meaning and aims of environmentalism. The contested construction of a major solar energy facility in California's Panoche Valley, for example, is difficult to parse in terms of environmentalist and anti-environmentalist projects. In this somewhat remote but by no means pristine valley—which has served as ranchland for decades and is home to a grassland ecosystem but also oil fields and a large asbestos-contaminated site—the company Solargen plans to build a facility comprised of 1.2 million solar panels that would provide more than 300,000 homes with renewable energy. The proposal responds to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's mandate that California derive 33 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, and given the urgency to shift away from coal and oil power due to their impact on climate change, Solargen's ambitious plan would seem like one environmentalists would find hard to resist. But local farmers as well as conservationists from organizations like the Audubon Society are protesting the solar facility, voicing concerns over increased traffic and pollution, the development of open land, and the alteration of animal habitats that might endanger rare species. While these concerns are all in themselves classic environmentalist ones, the central conflict here emerges not from the clash between industry and nature lovers, between economic and ecological values, or between exploitation and conservation, but from rifts over how to prioritize goals that are all, at bottom, environmentalist. Recent work in the Environmental Humanities—in such fields as environmental history, ecocriticism, and environmental philosophy—engages with this thorny sociopolitical, legal, and cultural landscape in which the old environmentalist struggles rage on even as new ones arise from the combined impact of greater public awareness, the diversification of the environmentalist movement itself, and the global reach of environmental problems. Environmentally oriented research in the Humanities, a selection of which we are reviewing here, has long functioned as complement to and critique of the political rhetoric of environmentalism. Scholars who undertake this research are often themselves impassioned conservationists committed to finding sustainable ways of inhabiting the environment and interacting with the natural world; yet these same scholars are just as often skeptical vis-à-vis the narratives, metaphors, and dichotomies that have structured much environmentalist thought since the 1960s. Environmental historians such as Donald Worster, William Cronon, and Richard White, for example, have emphasized that the conservationist commitment to purportedly untouched landscapes ignores long histories of human inhabitation as well as the oppressive political ideologies that enabled the removal of indigenous populations and attendant myth of "pristine wilderness." Ecofeminists such as Annette Kolodny, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, and Stacy Alaimo have highlighted how Western environmentalism, by representing the typical encounter with nature as that of a lone male surviving in the wilderness, has perpetuated patriarchal ideologies. Literary ecocritics have interrogated the environmentalist use of genres such as pastoral and apocalypse to structure verbal as well as visual stories about the decline of nature under the impact of human—and particularly modern—society. The Environmental Humanities, then, are situated at a site of double struggle—against the concepts and stories that have enabled environmental degradation in...

The Law Relating to Adoption and Fostering in England and Wales: The Contribution of BAAF

Richard White summarises BAAF's considerable influence on the development of child care law in England and Wales, from the Children Act 1975 and Adoption Act 1976 through to the Adoption and Children Act 2002.

‘A worse importation than chewing gum’: American Influences on The Australian Press and Their Limits—The Australian Gallup Poll, 1941–1973

In studies of the Australian press, a wide range of American influences—on news genres, on notions of newsworthiness and presentation, and on the language in which stories are written—has been larg...

‘Differences … in Dealing with The Australian Public’: Australia as A Foreign Market in the 1920s

‘Differences … in Dealing with The Australian Public’: Australia as A Foreign Market in the 1920s

Reflections on the recommendations of the EWMA Patient Outcome Group document

Last month, JWC published recommendations on improving the quality of evidence in wound management. In response, the Wounds Research Group from the University of York and Richard White, Professor of Tissue Viability, outline their very different perspectives on the type of evidence needed in tissue viability

American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State , and: River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain (review)

American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State. By Stephen Aron. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Pp. 301. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $29.95; Paper, $21.95.)River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain. By Thomas Ruys Smith. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. 232. Cloth, $38.00.)Reviewed by Ann OstendorfJust as the American public turned attention to the Mississippi River at the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, so too have scholars begun revisiting the significance of the river region to the nation. Although both Stephen Aron's American Confluence and Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams present studies of this river, their questions, methods, and approaches present very different but very useful stories of this place.In American Confluence, Stephen Aron tells the tale of what he calls the or the area surrounding the eastern Missouri, western Ohio, and middle Mississippi rivers, from its earliest Native history to Missouri's first years of statehood. This is story whose parts have been told multiple times in many ways before; however, Aron attempts to unify the disparate interpretations by re-imagining them within new framework. Using primarily secondary sources and drawing on approaches from global history, Aron describes place where interculturai interaction, accommodation, and cooperation dominated. The word refers not only to the joining of rivers but also to the meeting of people. By leaving the boundaries of the confluence region purposefully vague, the author successfully expresses history of the place more as contemporaries experienced it; moveable, fluid, and changing. The region remained place of transition for both Natives and colonials, where new trading partners passed through, new arrivals found home, and new colonial administrators divided and redivided their territorial claims. That is, until the arrival of the Americans.Thus, the story reverts to the more familiar political history of aggressive frontier expansion at the expense of the accommodationist precedents, which had been carefully and consciously maintained by the French, Spanish, British, Osage, Shawnee, and Delaware. Although the rivers continued to merge, the confluence of people ended. With American hegemony, the borderland disappeared. Without the ability to play one colonial power off another, Native lost power in the confluence region, especially with the flood of Kentucky and Tennessee settlers after the War of 1812. During this deluge, squatters swept away generations of inclusive intercultural relations (158-59), system Aron implies existed as mutually beneficial to natives and colonists alike. Despite the familiar ending, Aran's retelling of the regional events avoids assuming the inevitability of Missouri statehood and American domination, with more emphasis on how the American actions were radical disruptions with jarring effects on the Native and colonial population already in the confluence region.Although it does not deliver any new research, it is Aron's approach that is most useful for scholars of the region. In some ways this work is an application of Richard White's middle ground theory applied to the region further south. Aron re-envisions the Mississippi Valley historically as place of exchange and adaptation, describing the confluence region as moving, like other borderlands, from contested boundaries between colonial domains to frontier - which he defines as a meeting place of peoples - and eventually to place of oppositional border states (xiii, xvi). During this first change, the Osage dominated; however, their position deteriorated once the region ceased being meeting place between people and became meeting point of north, south, east, and west with the birth of the border state of Missouri. By the 1820s, Missouri's border state status, as opposed to its borderland position, had thoroughly reshaped the interactions of the population. …

Review

Reviewed by: Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians, and: Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature Renee Bergland Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians. By Cari M. Carpenter. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. xiv + 177 pp. $39.95. Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature. By Laura Mielke. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. xvii + 255 pp. $26.95. Scholars have long recognized that there can be a racist edge to antiracist sentiment. Nineteenth-century writers who intended to fight racism (Lydia Maria Child, for example, or Harriet Beecher Stowe) used sentimental tropes and conventions that sometimes reinforced the stereotypes or practices they intended to counter. But sentimental conventions are not all bad. During the past decades, critics including Glenn Hendler, Mary Louise Kete, Marianne Noble, Susan Ryan, Shirley Samuels, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, and Laura Wexler (to name a few) have established that understanding sentimentalism is central to understanding nineteenth-century American literary and cultural studies, in large part because race and gender were often treated sentimentally. Even so, relatively little attention has been paid to the relation of sentimentalism to Native American writings and issues. Examining the convergence of Native American nineteenth-century literature and the discourse of sentimentalism proves remarkably productive for Cari M. Carpenter and Laura Mielke in their recent books. Although the two scholars approach sentimentalism differently, both expand its definition and both implicitly reject Renato Rosaldo's notion of "imperialist nostalgia" as an oversimplification. They are well aware of the dangers of "missionary zeal" (as Carpenter styles "non-Native anger on behalf of American Indians" [137]). Nonetheless, both Carpenter and Mielke seek to recuperate sentimentalism's potential for antiracist activism—Carpenter by emphasizing anger, Mielke sympathy. In Seeing Red: Sentimentalism, Anger, and American Indians, Carpenter convincingly argues that sentimental tropes are effective vehicles for Native American women writers' anger. She contends that "sentimentality is a tactic [End Page 206] through which anger may be articulated in the defense of an indigenous nationhood" (15). Her larger point, also quite important, is that anger itself is a crucial part of sentimentalism. Seeing Red examines works by three Native American women writers: S. Alice Callahan, E. Pauline Johnson, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. The book explores "how feeling is crucial to playing Indian—and female" (10). Carpenter's focus on Native American women writers at the close of the nineteenth century is praiseworthy in itself. Any book about this topic would be a winner because there is not enough scholarship about these writers. Further, Seeing Red shows why such scholarship is important—Carpenter's focus on anger, necessitated by the anger in the sentimental texts she discusses, expands the boundaries of sentimentalism. For example, in her reading of Zitkala-Sa, Carpenter points out that the tears we associate with sentimentalism do not necessarily preclude rage. In a passage that Laura Wexler has described as "anti-sentimental," Zitkala-Sa describes weeping and mashing turnips so hard that she grinds glass into them. Carpenter disagrees with the antisentimental label. Zitkala-Sa may be angry, she contends, but she is also a sentimental writer: "[T]he genre's emphasis on the power of tears remains intact" (131). Angry tears are certainly possible—and writing that calls forth angry tears of sympathy with Native Americans enables (or even forces) its readers to "see red." Carpenter's book shows that studying Native American writers enriches our understanding of American literature more broadly. Seeing red, in this case, helps us to see clearly and to gain insight into both nineteenth-century Native American politics and sentimental literature. Mielke's Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum America also redefines sentimentalism, as it "reconstructs a critical middle ground between a naïve acceptance of sentimentalism and a prejudiced dismissal of all sympathy as suspect" (10). The concept of a "critical middle ground" derives in part from Richard White's description of Native/White borderlands as a "middle ground" and offers another good example of why attending to Native American studies can be so useful. Mielke's central point is that even though sentimentalism may be double-edged, its absence—which necessitates the absence of cross...

Less reflection and more action is needed

In their opinion piece published in this week's issue of British Journal of Nursing,1 Richard White and Keith Cutting talk about the implications for nurses of the recent Darzi report on transforming community services.2 They observe that the report gives scant acknowledgement to the full and varied role that tissue viability practitioners play in the community. Indeed, White and Cutting comment that the term ‘tissue viability’ is used only 100 times in the 100-page report. This state of affairs where tissue viability is regarded as a rather quaint backwater is sadly all too familiar.

The most transparent research

Biomedicine would be a breeze if organisms were transparent. With the ability to see through tissues, scientists could spot the development of tumors more easily in study animals. And biologists could study exactly how an animal's organs develop by observing them as they grow. In effect, the secrets of the body would be out there for everyone to see.The thought of peering into our tissues may sound like science fiction, but one day it could be science. Using ideas from genetics, electrical engineering, chemistry and solid-state physics, a handful of researchers are working on ways to render biological tissues transparent.Some have already succeeded: in 2007, Richard White, a biologist at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, used careful breeding techniques to create a transparent adult zebrafish named casper, evoking a reference to the famous cartoon ghost by the same name. Now, more than 100 labs around the world are using these transparent fish to study cancer pathology and development in real time. "The field of in vivo imaging-looking at things that are happening inside an actual organism-is growing rapidly," White says.Researchers are even making strides toward turning human tissue transparent. The primary reason we can't see what's inside of us is that light scatters when it passes through tissue. The body is densely packed with many types of substances, such as bone and fat, and light travels through them at different speeds because they have what physicists refer to as different refractive indices. The result is that light can't pass through biological tissues in a straight line, much as car headlights don't pass through dense fog. To fix this problem, scientists are working on developing ways to stop tissues from scattering light. Indeed, "if you take away the scattering properties of human tissues, we would look more or less like jellyfish," explains Changhuei Yang, an electrical engineer and bioengineer at the California Institute of Technology.Though their approaches (described in the following pages) are diverse, these researchers share the common goal of making it one day possible to see what's going on deep inside of the body-a feat that would provide new insights into our biology and help doctors diagnose and treat disease much more easily. "We're trying to push the limits in terms of what can we uncover," says Bernard Choi, a bioengineer at the University of California-Irvine.

The politics of visualizing an imperial demise: transforming a Byzantine chronicle into a Sicilian visual narrative

A large, brightly painted, gilded image renders in graphic detail the discarding of the body of a slain Byzantine emperor, blood still dripping from his neck. On the middle of the same page in this...