Society Scholars Research Articles

Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism by Betsy Wood

Reviewed by: Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism by Betsy Wood Kevin A. Murphy (bio) Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism. By Betsy Wood. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020. Pp. 266. Cloth, $110.00; paper, $28.00.) The U.S. Civil War engendered the abolition of chattel slavery but left unaddressed the status of the youngest members of the republic. In this slim, engaging book, Betsy Wood explores how debates over child labor changed between the 1850s and the 1930s. In so doing, she suggests that the continued fight over the presence of children in the workplace underscores not only the legacies of abolitionism and antislavery activism, but also continued sectional tensions between the North and the South. Previous scholarship on the decline of child labor attributes the decreasing numbers of children forced to toil in unsafe factories to mass industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century and the growing emotional value of children within increasingly smaller family units. Upon the Altar of Work offers a new interpretation by highlighting postbellum reformers' discursive invocations of free and unfree labor, concepts that heretofore have occupied the attention of scholars of slavery, abolition, Reconstruction, and postemancipation society and culture. Rather than conceptualizing the era of antebellum reform and the Progressive Era as two distinct periods separated by secession, war, and reunion, Wood sees a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constructed out of clashing interpretations over the need for and value of juvenile work. Readers learn about the fight over child labor from five chapters. Wood first analyzes the placing out movement of the 1850s, during which the Children's Aid Society (CAS) sent primarily male children to live in the developing West. The transportation of children siphoned off the labor surplus from northeastern cities, such as New York and Boston, while simultaneously instilling free labor ideology in the emigrant children. As southern fire-eaters called for the dissolution of the Union, reformers such as Charles Loring Brace, head of the CAS, touted the value of free labor, which contrasted [End Page 571] with both wage working and, more importantly, slavery. In chapter 2, Wood presents case studies of the northern padrone system and child apprenticeship laws in the South in the contexts of the expansion of child labor within northern factories and Reconstruction. While northern reformers labeled the Italian immigrant children who performed street music as a new generation of slaves, freedpeople asserted their right to control their own progeny and to benefit from their labor in the face of planters' underhanded actions to retain control over and profit from young Black bodies. The third chapter focuses on the industrializing South during the 1880s and 1890s. Wood contends that southern manufacturers' reliance on poor, rural white children ended northern reformers' appeals to free labor ideology. In its place, advocates against child labor framed their efforts in racial terms as the United States turned its imperial ambitions abroad. Within the New South Montgomery, Alabama, minister Edgar Gardner Murphy began a campaign to eradicate child labor across the former Confederacy. While northerners pushed for national legislation, Murphy insisted on a parochial approach, one committed to white supremacy. He argued that impoverished white children could not assume their rightful place atop the South's racial hierarchy if work supplanted education. Despite his growing notoriety, including a leadership position within the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), Murphy never wavered in his insistence that states, not the federal government, should regulate child labor. Although a similar outrage against manufacturers who relied on child labor united Murphy and northerners, a common solution to the problem failed to materialize. Chapter 4 traces southerners' vigorous defense of the use of child labor through appeals to the free market, states' rights, and the danger of outside interference in their affairs, while northern progressives sought the liberation of so-called enslaved child laborers with a religious zeal that befit the Social Gospel movement of the time. Despite southern resistance, the NCLC lobbied for a unitary, national law that prohibited child labor. The organization's leadership was pleased when Congress passed...

Environmental effects and initiatives of nuclear power via international initiatives in 1980s as a bipolar international policy

In 1980 American Nuclear Society scholars Walter Jordan and Samuel Glasstone delivered a coherent and methodological presentation of the consequences of nuclear power on the environment. Focusing on a multitude of matters extending from nuclear power and reactor safety to the discarding of waste heat and the biological outcomes of radiation, enclosed many of the concerns involving to nuclear environmental effect. Furthermore, America’s diverse legacy has allowed competing claimants to propose conflicting opinions of its position in the conclusion of the Cold War and the reduction of nuclear conflicts in the 1990s. Particular specifics, nevertheless, are beyond argument. United States headed over a immense nuclear accumulation and sprung an costly struggle to construct a defense versus strategic missiles that aggravated frictions with Soviet Union. This paper is aimed for specialists in any specific area and they will find the study presented as of a specific time period in nature and is therefore studies of later periods is recommended for advanced studies. Nevertheless, the educated scholars will possibly find the study informative and illuminating, and the paper will serve well the commitment to educating of misinformed community too. This study is thus endorsed for use in any activities engaged at public education in its subject matter.

Knowledge Graphs: Trust, Privacy, and Transparency from a Legal Governance Approach

This paper presents the Knowledge Graph Usage framework, which allows the introduction of Knowledge Graph features to support Trust, Privacy, Transparency and Accountability concerns regarding the use of its contents by applications. A real-world example is presented and used to illustrate how the framework can be used. This article also shows how knowledge graphs can be linked to the elements of legal governance. Thus, it is an invitation to dialogue for legal and Law & Society scholars who might be interested in how the evolution of the web of data and computational sciences intersects with their own discipline.

Sally Merry as an Advisor & Advocate for Law & Society Scholars

Sally Merry's scholarship is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. Throughout her career she worked in the field of legal anthropology, carrying out research projects in low-income neighborhoods, courthouses, mediation sessions, in Hawaii, and internationally. Sally conducted participant observation, interviews, surveys, used court records, and drew on historical archives. As a graduate student of hers, I have always appreciated the diversity of her knowledge and methods, her creativity in approaching questions about the role of law in society, and her broad interest in how society shaped legal systems. Her long-standing involvement with national and international associations, as well with the American Bar Foundation, meant that she actively participated in the debates surrounding law and society scholarship and was able to communicate the importance of legal anthropology to an interdisciplinary field of sociologists, criminologists, attorneys, political scientists, and historians among many others.

S&C Electric, John W. Estey Support IEEE Power & Energy Society Scholars [Newsfeed

Reports on the recipients of the S&C Electric, John W. Estey Support IEEE Power & Energy Society Scholars.

Untangling the Concept of Adversarial Legalism

The concept of adversarial legalism has been widely used by scholars of law, public administration, public policy, political science, sociology, and Law and Society, but the varying ways in which the concept has been employed raise concerns that it has become stretched to the point of incoherence. We argue that adversarial legalism entails both a style, an everyday practice of dispute resolution and policy making with distinct attributes, and a structure of governance that can be compared to other structures of authority. Untangling these aspects of adversarial legalism allows us to make sense of its different uses and identify future avenues of inquiry. Despite its wide application, adversarial legalism is in fact underutilized, especially in studies aimed at understanding consequences of judicialization, legalization, and juridification in the United States and abroad.

Business and Society Research in Times of the Corona Crisis

No crisis in recent history has shaken the world the way coronavirus has. Starting at the end of 2019 in a province in China, it is poised to reach every corner of the world, if it has not already done so at the time of our writing of this commentary (end of March 2020). The spread of this pandemic in the span of a few months is a clear testament that we now live in a global village that is fully interconnected. As cities, states, and countries are locking down and limiting economic activity to the bare minimum, the costs of this crisis to humans, businesses, and societies are just unfolding. Medical researchers are working overtime to find a cure, and economists are attempting to avert a recession. As coeditors of Business & Society, we watch these developments and wonder: What should business researchers and educators do, if anything, besides shifting and adapting their teaching to an online mode? The role and relevance of business research in addressing any societal concern is difficult to fathom for many of our colleagues conducting research on mainstream business topics, but it is not so for scholars working on topics at the intersection of business and society. If nothing else, this crisis underscores the fundamental premise of our field: the interdependence of business and society (Editorial, 1960). What binds business and society scholars is a central belief that businesses need to consider societal implications of their actions, respond to societal concerns, and play a positive role in society, more broadly. What the current crisis will eventually mean to individuals, businesses, and societies is very uncertain at the time of this writing and may remain so for a long time to come. Yet, everyone is trying to make sense of and respond to the crisis as it evolves. So, it is only natural that we do the same as business and society scholars. In that spirit, we attempt to dwell on what this crisis means for business and society research and what new questions it raises. Our commentary is neither a definitive nor exhaustive coverage of these issues; rather, it is meant to be a conversation starter among business and society scholars, and hopefully among the broader business research community interested in addressing grand societal challenges (George et al., 2016).

RNA Modification in Cancer

N6‐methyladenosine (m6A), the most abundant internal modification in eukaryotic mRNAs, has been shown to play essential roles in various normal bioprocesses. We show recently that histone H3 trimethylation at Lys36 (H3K36me3) guided m6A deposition co‐transcriptionally. Evidence is emerging that m6A modification and the associated regulatory proteins also play critical roles in cancers. We have revealed the important functions of m6A regulatory proteins (e.g., FTO, METTL14 and IGF2BP1/2/3) in the development and drug response of cancer, especially acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and in the self‐renewal of leukemia stem cells (LSCs). We found that FTO is highly expressed in certain subtypes of AMLs including AMLs carrying t(11q23), t(15;17), NPM1 mutation, and/or FLT3‐ITD, in which FTO plays an essential oncogenic role in promoting leukemogenesis and in affecting drug response through post‐transcriptionally regulating expression of its critical target RNAs (such as ASB2 and RARA) in an m6A‐dependent manner. Subsequently, we found that FTO is also a direct target of R‐2‐hydroxyglutarate (R‐2HG), which is produced at high levels by mutant isocitrate dehydrogenase 1/2 (IDH1/2) enzymes and has been reported as an oncometabolite. We show that by targeting the FTO/m6A/MYC‐CEBPA axis, R‐2HG exhibits a broad and intrinsic anti‐tumor effect in vitro and in vivo. We also show that METTL14 is overexpressed in AML and plays a critical role in the development and drug response of AML, and is also required for the self‐renewal of leukemia stem cells, by post‐transcriptionally regulating of expression of a set of essential oncogenes such as MYC and MYB. Very recently, we have developed highly selective and effective FTO inhibitor compounds that shows potent therapeutic effects in treating human AML and solid tumors in preclinical animal models, demonstrating that as an mRNA demethylase, FTO is a druggable target for cancer treatment. Collectively, our studies highlight the critical roles and therapeutic implication of m6A modification and its regulatory proteins in cancers.Support or Funding InformationThis work is supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grants R01 CA214965 (J.C.), R01 CA236399 (J.C.), R01 CA211614 (J.C.). J.C. is a Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) Scholar.

Where Do Nonprofit and Civil Society Researchers Publish? Perceptions of Nonprofit Journal Quality

The field of nonprofit and civil society studies has grown tremendously in the past few decades, and scholarly journals have played a central role in this growth by facilitating circulation of research in the academic community. To date, only three nonprofit journals are indexed in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and, as such, have an impact factor. There are, however, far more journals serving the nonprofit and civil society academic community. Thus, focusing solely on impact factors is not necessarily suitable for creating rankings or assessing journal quality in this field. Indeed, doing so fails to capture most scholarly publication outlets that focus on nonprofits and civil society. Seeking to overcome shortcomings of relying merely on impact factors, this exploratory study uses survey data collected from nonprofit and civil society researchers in the United States and Europe to provide insight into which journals they perceive to be quality outlets for nonprofit and civil society scholars. Our findings reveal that, while the impact factor can be one indicator of journal quality, newer outlets without an impact factor are also perceived to be viable outlets for publication by scholars in the field.

Building Bridges: Social Movements and Civil Society in Times of Crisis

Social movement studies and studies on civil society and, related to them, studies on voluntarism and the third sector, are burgeoning fields of knowledge, which have, however, only rarely interacted with each other. In fact, social movement scholars have devoted little attention to the concept of civil society, not even when addressing issues of “social capital”. Vice versa, civil society scholars have, with few exceptions, not considered social movements as cognate phenomena. This is all the more puzzling as there is instead ample theoretical and empirical overlapping, which calls for the building of bridges between these fields of study. In political and media discourse some organizations, individuals or events are defined interchangeably as linked to either social movements or civil society. In the social sciences, however, the core conceptualizations have pointed towards different elements as characterizing these phenomena. In particular, social movement studies can contribute to the literature on voluntarism a toolkit of concepts and theory oriented to understand social and political conflicts, learning from the literature on voluntarism about conceptions and practices of solidarity. In this article, I will address some (potential) interactions between the two fields, looking at differences and similarities in the conceptualizations of the two phenomena as well as in their empirical analysis as they have developed in time. I will first of all address conceptualizations in these cognate fields with attention to their theoretical developments. Then, I will point towards some recent trends that have blurred the distinction between social movements and civil society, voluntarism and third sector policies, looking in particular not only at more established analyses of NGOization of social movements, but also, and especially, of what can be defined as an SMOization of civil society—that is, the hybridization of more established civil society organizations into social movement organizations, especially when facing politicization in times of crises and increasing criminalization of solidarity activities.

25 years of ACS Scholars

The year 2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the American Chemical Society Scholars Program. On this milestone year, I’d like to congratulate all those who have participated and thank the individuals who have helped make the program a reality over the past 2½ decades. ACS Scholars is a program that is dedicated to supporting African American, Hispanic and Latino, and American Indian undergraduate students who want to enter fields within the chemical sciences. Scholars are selected according to academic standing, career objective, leadership skills, and involvement in school activities and community service. Participating students can benefit from up to $5,000 per year in scholarships. Since the program started in 1995, there have been more than 3,200 scholarship recipients, totaling over $15 million awarded in financial support. That’s over 3,200 lives transformed by the program. But its impact continues well beyond graduation as an ACS Scholar, with 45% of alumni going

La reforma económica en Cuba tras La aprobación de La nueva Constitución en 2019

El artículo evalúa la evolución del proyecto cubano de cambio económico plasmado en los Lineamientos de la Política Económica y Social del Partido y la Revolución. Casi una década después de su aprobación, estamos en condiciones de identificar avances e insuficiencias y señalar obstáculos que este inacabado proceso previsiblemente habrá de enfrentar, de conjunto con sugerencias de acción para su avance. Tras hacer referencia a etapas precedentes de reformas económicas, se analiza la progresión de los Lineamientos hasta 2019, año trascendente para el país a raíz de la aprobación de una nueva Constitución. Para esta evaluación se tuvieron en cuenta indicadores macroeconómicos, la narrativa dominante en el discurso público de los decisores de política en Cuba así como opiniones de reconocidos estudiosos de la economía y la sociedad cubanas residentes dentro y fuera de la isla. Se incorporó el análisis del contexto internacional como factor de peso en la política económica cubana, con énfasis en la condición de Cuba como Pequeño Estado Insular en Desarrollo –circunstancia a menudo subestimada tanto por los funcionarios públicos como por los críticos del modelo cubano.

Medical historians and traditional Chinese physicians in early Chinese Society of Medical History

In the early 20th century, the Chinese Society of Medical History was the only specialty society accepting members with traditional Chinese medicine background in the Chinese medical association. Therefore, it is of special significance to study the TCM members of the early Chinese Society of Medical History. By combing the medical journals of this period and referring to the researches today, this paper makes a comprehensive investigation on the life stories and academic works of the early 14 TCM doctors and scholars of the Chinese Society of Medical History, so as to understand their contributions to the development of Chinese medicine and the institute of medical history in this special historical period.

Why Legal Transplants?

In examining how laws and legal institutions move across jurisdictions, comparative law scholars have employed the metaphor of a legal transplant to conceptualize both the hazards and benefits of taking in another legal system's rules. As law and society scholars become increasingly interested in the international domain, they will naturally seek out disciplines that have grappled with issues of law and culture, diffusion of governance structures, and the social processes involved in transnational lawmaking. We can thus learn a great deal from the rich literature on legal transplants. However, we should also be wary of its anemic examination of relations of power and strive to employ empirical methods to measure the social forces and factors involved. This article gives an historical overview of the key developments and debates within the legal transplant literature and suggests new directions for further research intended for a sociology of the movement of law.

Blood on the Tracks: Turn-of-the-Century Streetcar Injuries, Claims, and Litigation in Alameda County, California

Streetcars were great American tortfeasors of the turn-of-the-century, injuring approximately one 331 urban Americans in 1907. In this empirical study, I consider the entire run of streetcar injuries, claims, trial-court suits, and appeals. My conclusions are based upon data drawn from the claims department records of Alameda County's principal street railway company, from all of the personal injury suits filed in the county's Superior Court, from all appellate cases involving the street railway company, and also from other sources concerning the street railway industry. Plaintiffs in street railway cases very rarely won their cases against the company, and when they did, they won little money. In terms of the bite taken out of the street railway company, I characterize the Superior Court as a flea. I argue that Professor Gary Schwartz was wrong to characterize tort law as generous and that Judge Richard Posner is wrong to call tort law efficient. Like Professor Lawrence M. Friedman and Morton Horwitz, I see the amount taken from the street railway companies as quite small, but I see no evidence of deliberate efforts to subsidize the industry. I argue that the term dispute pyramid, which is common among Law & Society scholars, is misleading. I propose that we instead think in terms of a salmon run, with very large drop-offs from the levels of injuries to claims and, especially, to litigation. I also examine in detail the operation of the street railway's claims department. I describe the relationship of the amount of money paid out through the claims department to the amount paid out in Superior-Court judgments and costs. I show that the average amounts of money that successful claimants received were very small indeed and argue, contra Posner and others, that the bargaining that took place in the claims department was very distant from the level of the trial court. For example, where Posner derived an average figure of about $5,000 for wrongful death claims using appellate data, I show that in the claims department, claimants in death cases averaged $127.32. I also consider some of the fine work done by constitutive theorists, particularly Barbara Welke, of the University of Minnesota. I agree with most of her conclusions regarding the manner in which tort law instantiated gender norms, but I remain convinced that the operation of street railways, as social and economic activities, and also the conduct of trials had much more formative influence on norms of gender than did legal doctrine. That is, along with Chris Tomlins, I think that Welke makes too much of the formative influence of law on American discourse or ideology. This may be a small quibble. I adapt the methods of the constitutive theorists and try to build upon Welke's excellent work to show that the streetcar companies helped to instill norms of negligence within their women riders. This made some women safer and kept others from making claims when they were injured. I argue that the street railway companies' ability to shape norms of negligence show another flaw in Posner's theory regarding the regulatory effect of tort law. Earlier drafts of this work have been cited in the Harvard Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Tulane Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, Harvard Women’s Law Journal, Law & Social Inquiry, Journal of Tort Law, and the Connecticut Journal of Insurance Law. The author is looking for a place to publish this either as a long article or a monograph.

Conditional Survival, Cause-Specific Mortality, and Risk Factors of Late Mortality after Allogeneic Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation

Background: Allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (alloHCT) is an established curative treatment for many hematologic diseases. The number of long-term survivors grows. Conditional survival rates, accounting for time already survived, are relevant for optimal delivery of survivorship care. Methods: We estimated conditional survival rates, and overall and cause-specific mortality risk in a retrospective cohort study of 4485 patients who underwent alloHCT for hematologic diseases during 1976-2014. Findings: The 5-year survival rate from HCT for the cohort was 48%. After surviving 1, 2, 5, 10, and 15 years, the subsequent 5-year survival rates were 71%, 79%, 87%, 94%, and 86%, respectively. The standardized mortality ratio (SMR) was 30·3 (95% confidence interval [CI], 29·2-35·5). Although the SMR declined in longer surviving patients, it was still elevated by 3·6-fold in ≥15-year survivors (95% CI, 3·0-4·1)· Primary disease accounted for 50% of deaths in the overall cohort, and only 10% in ≥15-year survivors; the leading causes of non-disease-related mortality were subsequent malignancy (26·1%) and cardiopulmonary diseases (20·2%)· The risk factors for non-disease-related mortality were male sex, older age at HCT, having an unrelated donor, graft-versus-host disease within one-year of HCT, total body irradiation conditioning, and undergoing HCT in an earlier transplantation era. Interpretation: Survival probability improves the longer patients survive. However, HCT recipients surviving ≥15 years remain at elevated mortality risk, largely due to health conditions other than their primary disease. Our study findings inform preventive and interventional strategies to improve long-term outcomes after HCT. Funding Statement: Lymphoma & Leukemia Society Scholar Award (Armenian). Declaration of Interests: None of the authors have any financial or personal conflict of interest. Ethics Approval Statement: The LTFU protocol was approved by the Institutional Review Board at COH; written informed consent was obtained from all participants in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Overweight and Obese Have Similar Burden of Hip Fracture as Normal Weight Older Adults

This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (T32 4G000262 and R01AG028556, Jennifer Lloyd), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars program (Dawn Alley), as well as from the Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center (P30AG028747, Shari Waldstein).

The decline of yuck: Moral judgment in the anthropocene

The status and development of disgust as a moral emotion is gaining attention from scholars. This increased consideration largely rests on the question of whether disgust can and should play a role—even a decisive role—in moral judgment. Some ethicists believe that disgust manifests the emotional expression of a “deep wisdom,” and in this respect may constitute the last bulwark against eroding social norms associated with technological development. Others see the transformation or displacement of disgust as an appropriate human adaption to the times. This essay investigates the precarious status of disgust in the Anthropocene, a global age of artifice and engineering that increasingly challenges the “natural order” of things. The decline of disgust as a moral emotion presents a critical challenge to ethicists, legal theorists, and scholars of society, culture and technology.

Organized Crime, Kidnapping and Nigerian National Security

One of the greatest challenges human society have faced over the years is crime and delinquency. Crime has been a threat to peace and hope of social reproduction of the society. Many scholars have averred at sundry times and jurisdictions that crime in society is as old as man on earth. For instance, it has been argued that crime and criminality were noticeable human trait in social relation from the creation of man through the Babylonian, Persian, Grecian, and Egyptian epochs, as histories of efforts to check crime at these epochs were documented in extant literature (Ugwuoke, 2015). Crime is a social vice that affects people from different socio-cultural backgrounds in different ways. This has necessitated different perceptions, definitions and content of crime in society. Although there is no agreement among criminologists, sociologists and other scholars of society about an acceptable definition, nature and content of crime across jurisdictions (Reid, 1997; Ugwuoke, 2015), such discrepancies hardly exist among them about the existence, prevalence and abhorrence of majority of citizens for crime in any human society. The reason for this is not farfetched, crime and delinquent behaviours are destructive and anti-development, since it is only when there is peace that people can go about their legitimate duties without fear, and events can more readily be predicted (Nwolise, 2005).
 Furthermore, crime engenders fear among the citizens. The danger in fear generated by crime in society is succinctly captured by Conklin (2007:326) thus:

Developing population health scientists: Findings from an evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program.

•RWJF Health & Society Scholars (HSS) program outcomes evaluated.•HSS alumni have higher scholarly productivity and impact than control group.•HSS alumni are more engaged in population health research than controls.•HSS alumni and controls are similar on other outcome measures.•Training programs can be evaluated with adequate attention to selection bias.