Tour Scheduling Research Articles

Secure Travel Planning Using a Heuristic Algorithm

Security perception in the urban area has a significant effect on travel behaviour, preferences, and tour planning. The perceptions of security risks can vary depending on factors, such as age, gender, and previous experiences. This study aims to consider security risks when developing travel plans and schedules for various activities. An improved heuristic algorithm, based on the Travelling Salesman Problem with security parameter and flexibility aspects, is proposed. Public transport is considered in three situations: fixed, flexible, and flexible-security situations. The outcomes demonstrate that the flexible situation significantly decreases travel times by 21% compared to the basic (fixed) situation. At the same time, with a slightly increased travel time the security risk can be avoided in the flexible-security situation. Travelers can enjoy a higher quality of travelling and enhanced personal experience by minimizing the journey duration and the impact of security risks on the tour schedule. The proposed method provides significant benefits for transport operators by increasing the efficiency of the transportation system and higher customer satisfaction.

A large-scale neighborhood search algorithm for multi-activity tour scheduling problems

A large-scale neighborhood search algorithm for multi-activity tour scheduling problems

Off the Beats and Track: Finding Historical Lesbian and Queer Women’s Feminist Spaces through Musicians’ Tour Schedules, Concert Flyers, and Correspondence

This article explores historical research methods used to locate lesbians and queer women, especially within American and Canadian contexts from the 1960s onward. It begins by discussing methods such as analyzing women’s and lesbian travel guides, directories, maps, periodicals, newsletters, newspapers, websites, oral histories, social media, archival fonds and collections. In particular, this article explores how utilizing lesbian and queer women musicians’ tour schedules, calendars, correspondence, and contracts for shows and appearances can be a valuable historical research method, especially for locating impermanent historical lesbian and queer women’s spaces off the beaten track. The article focuses on the Alix Dobkin Papers as a case study to explore aspects of historical lesbian and queer women’s spaces and demonstrate the utility of this historical research method beyond Dobkin. The papers of Alix Dobkin include business correspondence, fan mail, fliers and programs from concerts, subject files, t-shirts, photographs, and memorabilia. As Dobkin played an important role in the women’s music movement and toured regularly, her papers provide useful insight into historical debates about lesbian anti-racist politics, ethical consumption, community organizing, and transgender inclusion and exclusion.

Webcam-Based Bus Passenger Detection System Using Single Shot Detector Method

Buses are one of the most widely chosen transportation methods to support the mobility of the Indonesian people. Mobility that is often found in addition to public transportation, is also often found in the mobility of tourism tour activities for a travel group. The number of tourist destinations to which passengers go up and down makes the assistant bus driver or group leader work hard to ensure that the number of passengers boarding the bus matches the number of groups. It often takes a long time to ensure the accuracy of the number of passengers before departure to the next destination. This conventional method results in the delay of the tourism tour schedule. In this research, the author designs a webcam-based bus passenger face detection system using the Single Shot Detector (SSD) method that can provide real-time information to bus drivers, assistant bus drivers or group leaders. The results obtained by the system obtained an achievement of 95% of the total system creation along with testing the detection of bus passenger faces in actual conditions resulted in an average accuracy of 77.5%.

Optimal dwelling time prediction for package tour using K‐nearest neighbor classification algorithm

AbstractWe introduce a machine learning‐based web application to help travel agents plan a package tour schedule. K‐nearest neighbor (KNN) classification predicts the optimal tourists' dwelling time based on a variety of information to automatically generate a convenient tour schedule. A database collected in collaboration with an established travel agency is fed into the KNN algorithm implemented in the Python language, and the predicted dwelling times are sent to the web application via a RESTful application programming interface provided by the Flask framework. The web application displays a page in which the agents can configure the initial data and predict the optimal dwelling time and automatically update the tour schedule. After conducting a performance evaluation by simulating a scenario on a computer running the Windows operating system, the average response time was 1.762 s, and the prediction consistency was 100% over 100 iterations.

일본 여행안내서와 기행문으로 본 일제강점기 인천의 관광지 연구

After Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese regime encouraged its people’s trip to colonies, leading to a boom of overseas trip to Manchuria and Joseon in Japan.
 The Japanese regime established tourism policies as suppliers of tourism and actively created tourist attractions. Meanwhile, Incheon was urbanized as a port city that served as the entrance to Seoul after the opening of the port, but its image as a tourist city has also been established since the 1920s. The purpose of this study was to first review tourist guidebooks to examine tourist attractions in Incheon created and recommended by tourism suppliers in Japanese colonial era, and second, to analyze travel writings to examine how Japanese, who were the main tourists of Incheon at the time, toured Incheon's tourist attractions. In this analysis, we attempted to capture changes over time. As a result, Most of the tourist attractions in Incheon recommended by tourism suppliers were created after Japanese colonial era, and most of them recommended by suppliers of tourism were mostly places justifying the Japanese rule and showing the superiority of imperial Japan. Japanese who visited Incheon did not deviate much from the tourist attractions and tour schedules proposed to tourism suppliers. Therefore, it can be evaluated that Incheon's tourism in a Japanese colonial era has properly realized the intention of the tourism supplier.

The Impact of V2G Charging/Discharging Strategy on the Microgrid Environment Considering Stochastic Methods

Although electric vehicles (EVs) play a vital role in realizing remarkable features, however, the integration of a huge number of EVs leads to grid congestion as well. As a result, uncontrolled charging might give rise to undervoltage and complex congestion in the electric grid. The reasons for the uncontrolled charging of EVs have been investigated in the recent past to mitigate the effects thereof. It is very challenging to achieve controlled charging due to different constraints at the customer end; therefore, it is better to take the benefits of power prediction schemes for the charging and discharging of EVs. The power prediction scheme is based on a practical power forecast system that exploits the needs of various patterns, and the current research focuses on considering users’ demands. The primary objective of this study is to develop an effective and efficient coordination system for the charging and discharging of EVs by exploiting a smart algorithm that intelligently tackles the possible difficulties to attain optimum power requirements. In this context, a model is proposed based on stochastic methods for analyzing the impact of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging and discharging in the microgrid environment. A Markov model is used to simulate the use of EVs. This method works well with the Markov model because of its ability to adjust to random changes. When considering an EV, its erratic travel patterns suggest a string of events that resemble a stochastic process. The proposed model ensures that high power requirements are met during peak hours in a cost-effective manner. In simpler words, the promising features of the proposed scheme are to meet electricity/power demands, monitoring and the efficient forecasting of power. The outcomes revealed an effective power system, EV scheduling, and power supply without compromising the electric vehicle’s presentation of the EV owner’s tour schedule. In terms of comprehensiveness, the developed algorithm exhibits a significant improvement.

Optimal Scheduling of Waitstaff with Different Experience Levels at a Restaurant Chain

Restaurants often face strong pressure to reduce costs. Managers regularly respond by hiring temporary or part-time workers and by trying to reduce the size of the workforce as much as possible, which makes it difficult to develop a personnel schedule that provides sufficient service to the customers. The problem gets even more complicated if (frequent) employee turnover and demand fluctuations occur and if employees have different experience levels. This paper presents mathematical models to support waitstaff scheduling at a restaurant chain based in Baku, Azerbaijan, taking into account the managerial requirements of the company. The problem we address is equivalent to a general tour scheduling problem that assigns waitstaff to work shifts throughout the week. We develop three integer programming models taking account of factors, such as employee types and experience levels, differences in the complexity of customer orders, and side tasks and responsibilities, to find the optimal number of employees together with the best tour for each of them. The models are solved to optimality, and the results are applied at a branch of the restaurant chain in Baku. Compared with the existing schedule, the optimized schedule enabled the restaurant to reduce overstaffing levels by approximately 40% and labor costs by 20% while keeping the same service standards.

A tactical multi-week implicit tour scheduling model with applications in healthcare.

In many healthcare tactical scheduling analyses, we need to solve large tour scheduling problems in which required staffing levels vary by time of day and day of week. A tour is a set of shift start times and shift lengths worked over a scheduling horizon of one or more weeks. As the degree of scheduling flexibility increases, the resulting tour scheduling problems get larger and this increase in size is exacerbated when the scheduling horizon is longer than one week. In this article, we present a tactical multi-week implicit tour scheduling model intended to complement operational scheduling systems. The implicit nature of the model allows us to solve problems that would be prohibitively large if modeled using traditional explicit tour scheduling approaches. We incorporate a variety of tour types with both intra-tour start time and shift length flexibility as well as varying degrees of weekend flexibility. We test the performance of our models on a set of medical units with different demand patterns. Computational experiments have shown that the developed implicit model can play an important role in quantifying trade-offs between labor costs, understaffing levels and scheduling flexibility. Our models have been released as an open source project in the hopes of facilitating practitioner use and also providing access to other scheduling researchers.

Tour Scheduling in Attended Home Delivery

In this paper we study a tour-scheduling problem for an attended home delivery problem with uncertain order requests. The problem is modelled as a two-stage stochastic programming problem and solved using the multi-cut L-shaped method. Weekly working patterns are generated by means of a pricing heuristic. Numerical results on randomly generated instances show that including weekly working rules increases the total cost by only a small amount (up to 2.54%) when compared to an approach that only considers daily working rules for the generation of driver schedules.

Rail transport network reliability with train arrival delay: A reference indicator for a travel agency in tour planning

As a tour agency plans a tour schedule with rail transport, it is necessary to evaluate the capacity of the rail transport network to determine the number of passengers in the tour group that can be served. This study develops a stochastic rail transport network (SRTN) according to the train timetable and tour schedule, such that each available train’s loading capacity (that is, the number of cars) may be fully and partially reserved for other requests. Under the consideration of a tour group including q passengers, the network reliability accordingly means the probability that the q-passenger group can successfully depart from a source station for a sink station via the SRTN. In addition, the passengers might not punctually change trains at a transfer station owing to train arrival delay. Because the travel agency cannot control the situation of train arrival delay while planning a tour schedule, the uncertainty of train arrival delay results in an acceptable delay probability that the passengers traveling by non-direct trains can successfully change trains and this must be considered for the network reliability evaluation. An algorithm integrating the minimal paths and the modified Recursive Sum of Disjoint Product are integrated to solve the addressed problem. A real case of a rail transport network in Taiwan is adopted to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach. The travel agency can view the network reliability as a reference indicator to evaluate the number of passengers in the group that can be served.

Determining optimal workforce size and schedule at the retail store considering overstaffing and understaffing costs

A three-stage iterative sequential methodology is proposed for the staffing and tour scheduling problem of a retail store. The proposed work differs from the existing works in the following ways (i) Existing studies usually considered the tour scheduling problems for a given workforce size. However, this work attempts to solve both staffing and tour scheduling problems. (ii) The proposed work incorporates a large number of shift flexibilities such as the requirement of break window, meal break assignment, day-off scheduling, multiple shift start time, and other business and regulatory constraints. Previous studies have usually focused on limited flexibility as it makes the problem formulation complex and difficult to solve. The first stage of our methodology uses deterministic finite automata (DFA) that handle the above-mentioned flexibilities well and generates all the feasible shifts. The use of DFA reduces the problem complexity, search space, and the number of constraints. The second stage formulates a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model considering all the feasible shifts generated in the first stage. The MILP finds the optimal workforce schedule for the given workforce demand. The third stage presents a heuristic that iteratively solves MILP by varying the workforce size and determines the near-optimal staffing level that minimizes the total overstaffing and understating cost. The proposed methodology is applied in a specialty store on 550 randomly generated problem instances of realistic sizes. It obtains the solution within a 2.35 percent average optimality gap in a reasonable computational time. The result shows that the proposed heuristic outperforms in terms of solution quality and runtime on the workforce demand instances generated using Poisson distribution over those generated using Uniform distribution. The percentages of overstaffing and understaffing decrease with the increase in the mean and standard deviation of hourly workforce demand.

Routing for tourist and excursion bureaus based at parametric network models

This study is devoted to applying parametric network models for the process of defining a guided tour route within route networks on the example of Denmark. This is caused by difficulty in determining variations when organizing guided tours. Under the actual digitization conditions, tourist and excursion bureaus are being restructured from static organizations administering various excursions into dynamic ones. They are actually getting adjusted to the customers’ needs and demands, taking into account the actual possibilities for covering a certain topic by the tour party within a route. The main problem encountered by tourist and excursion bureaus is the following. Although the nomenclature of presented guided tours is established by the economic entity independently, those are not always carried out according to a clearly defined itinerary and on the same conditions for all participants. When providing such services, customers’ demands and service peculiarities are not known in advance. The purpose of the present study is to provide a substantive basis for routing in tourist and excursion bureaus, based on parametric network models and taking into account the peculiarities of dynamically adaptable tables containing the best routes. To achieve the research goal, network planning methods were used, such as analytical, tabular, cloud computing in the AnyLogic Cloud environment. As a result of the study, a substantive basis of routing of the tourist route was presented for tourist and excursion bureaus, through their parametric network models. The study was implemented at the sample of the Denmark Tour -Your Guide Office, a company founded within cooperation with Russian, Ukrainian, and Denmark partners and providing travel services within the Denmark tourist market. The Office includes about 20 affiliates in Denmark, where route networks have already been adapted to designing tours in practice and parameterization of such networks is well underway, in particular by shifting the focus from the route distance rate to minimization of transfers between attraction sites. However, to provide a substantive basis for the routing in a tourist office, parameters of the routing networks should be determined not only based on the list of actions (activities) to be carried out, but also on their minimum and maximum possible duration. A lack of due attention to the servicing time for the tour groups will lead to breaking tour schedules. Thus, in 2020, as a result of the inefficient parameterization at Denmark Tour - Your Guide, about 5-6 tours around Aalborg and its vicinity were cancelled monthly. Denmark Tour- Your Guide incurs monthly profit losses at 15% in 4-6 tours around Aarhus and its surroundings, Jursland peninsula, rated at a fixed cost, as the result of payment of a fixed cost for the selected excursions. A similar situation, with breaking tour schedules and monthly losses incurred, is common with tourist and excursion bureaus in various countries around the world, including Ukraine. According to the results of the study, it is marked that the routing of tourist itineraries designed by tourist agencies, based on parametric network models turns their static time reserves and operational metrics into dynamic values depending on the duration of the tour activities. This not only ensures following schedules properly in all tours but also minimizes monthly profit loss, at an estimated EUR 2,250 for the Aalborg and its surroundings routes. Meanwhile, there may be situations where it is not possible to change the total tour cost. For example, in the company Denmark Tour - Your Guide, when working with intermediate parties, this price is fixed. To prevent incurring monthly losses within 15% of the profits for 4-6 tours of Aarhus and its surroundings, Jursland peninsula, Aalborg and Surroundings, it is necessary to make some quite specific adjustments in some activities at the sites. These should take into account the time reserve values on the longest route. A special tour activity complex is to be completed, with a maximum difference in early and late schedule times, standard and urgent pricing for the site operations). A procedure is compiled for minimizing losses in routes (over 8K euro annually), providing for completion of the activity complex within the schedule with a minimum additional charge to the operating metric (the route price), since it is not reimbursed by the tourists. It is important that the results presented should identify the path adjustments of each route simultaneously, taking into account the actual time reserve (available based on the tour group location and the previouisly completed schedule items on the tour). Prospects for practical implementation of the presented substantiation basis for the itinerary routing to be used in tourist and excursion bureaus, based on parametric network models, are in establishing facilities for creating dynamic graphic images of the whole tour procedure, in the form of a directed graph of the route network.

A copula-based continuous cross-nested logit model for tour scheduling in activity-based travel demand models

This paper introduces a multi-dimensional continuous activity scheduling choice modeling framework. The paper is focused on modeling the joint choice of arrival to an activity and departure from the activity. Each of the choices is modeled in continuous time using the continuous cross-nested logit model. The continuous cross-nested logit model is able to capture various types of correlation between alternatives in continuous time. In addition to the correlation between alternatives, this paper uses copula to capture the correlation between the two dependent choices of arrival to an activity and departure from the activity. Copula can model the correlation structure without knowing the actual bivariate distribution function. With its multidimensionality and ability to capture different sorts of correlations and model demand in fine time resolution, the introduced framework can provide a sufficient tool for the time-of-day component of various travel demand models.

Dance Overview of the Australian Performing Arts Collection

The Dance Collection at Arts Centre Melbourne traces the history of dance in Australia from the late nineteenth century to today. The collection encompasses the work of many of Australia's major dance companies and individual performers whilst spanning a range of genres, from contemporary dance and ballet, to theatrical, modern, folk and social dance styles. The Dance Collection is part of the broader Australian Performing Arts Collection, which covers the five key areas of circus, dance, opera, music and theatre. In my overview of Arts Centre Melbourne's (ACM) Dance Collection, I will outline how the collection has grown and highlight the strengths and weaknesses associated with different methods of collecting. I will also identify major gaps in the archive and how we aim to fill these gaps and create a well-balanced and dynamic view of Australian dance history. Material relating to international touring artists and companies including Lola Montez, Adeline Genée, Anna Pavlova and the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo provide an understanding of how early trends in dance performance have influenced our own traditions. Scrapbooks, photographs and items of costume provide glimpses into performances of some of the world's most famous dance performers and productions. As many of these scrapbooks were compiled by enthusiastic and appreciative audience members, they also record the emerging audience for dance, which placed Australia firmly on the touring schedule of many international performers in the early decades of the 20th century. The personal stories and early ambitions that led to the formation of our national companies are captured in collections relating to the history of the Borovansky Ballet, Ballet Guild, Bodenwieser Ballet, and the National Theatre Ballet. Costume and design are a predominant strength of these collections. Through them, we discover and appreciate the colour, texture and creative industry behind pivotal works that were among the first to explore Australian narratives through dance. These collections also tell stories of migration and reveal the diverse cultural roots that have helped shape the training of Australian dancers, choreographers and designers in both classical and contemporary dance styles. The development of an Australian repertoire and the role this has played in the growth of our dance culture is particularly well documented in collections assembled collaboratively with companies such as The Australian Ballet, Sydney Dance Company, and Chunky Move. These companies are at the forefront of dance in Australia and as they evolve and mature under respective artistic directors, we work closely with them to capture each era and the body of work that best illustrates their output through costumes, designs, photographs, programmes, posters and flyers. The stories that link these large, professional companies to a thriving local, contemporary dance community of small to medium professional artists here in Melbourne will also be told. In order to develop a well-balanced and dynamic view of Australian dance history, we are building the archive through meaningful collecting relationships with contemporary choreographers, dancers, designers, costume makers and audiences. I will conclude my overview with a discussion of the challenges of active collecting with limited physical storage and digital space and the difficulties we face when making this archive accessible through exhibitions and online in a dynamic, immersive and theatrical way.

Dataset for solving a hybrid flexibility strategy on personnel scheduling problem in the retail industry.

This data article describes datasets from a home improvement retail store located in Santiago, Chile. The datasets have been developed to simultaneously solve a staffing and tour scheduling problem that incorporates flexible contracts and multiskilled staff. This Data in Brief article is related to the published article “Hybrid flexibility strategy on personnel scheduling: Retail case study” [1]. The datasets contain real, processed, and simulated data. Regarding the real and processed datasets, they are presented for three different store sizes (4, 5 or 6 departments). Real datasets include information about the employment-contract characteristics, cost parameters, and a forecast of the number of employees required in each department for each day of the week and each time period into which the operating day is divided. As regards the data processed for the case study, they include the set of skill sets considering that the employees can be trained in a maximum of two store departments. Regarding the simulated datasets, they include information about the random parameter of staff demand in each store department. The simulated data are presented in 90 text files classified by: (i) Store size (4, 5 or 6 departments). (ii) Coefficient of variation (10, 20, 30%). (iii) Instance identification number (10 instances per scenario that resulted from combining the store sizes and coefficients of variation). Researchers can use the datasets for benchmarking the performance of different approaches with the one presented by Porto et al. [1], and in consequence, they can find solutions to the same (or similar) type of personnel scheduling problem. The dataset includes an Excel workbook that can be used to randomly generate staff demand instances according to a chosen coefficient of variation.

The flexible break assignment problem for large tour scheduling problems with an application to airport ground handlers

The paper examines the complexity of assigning multiple breaks to shifts in the context of large-scale tour scheduling. A mixed-integer programming (MIP) model is presented that includes shift and days-off scheduling along with break assignments for a multi-skilled workforce. To achieve tractability, a two-stage decomposition procedure is proposed that separates the tour scheduling problem (TShP) from the break assignment problem (BAP). The former MIP is first solved to determine the shifts and days off for the workforce that minimize labor and shortages costs over the planning horizon. The results are used as input to a second MIP that optimally places the breaks to minimize the costs of working hours and uncovered periods. Three implicit BAP formulations are investigated. To better understand the literature and the models previously developed, a 3-field break classification scheme is introduced. The first field characterizes the number of breaks permitted per shift, the second specifies whether the length of the breaks is fixed or variable, and the third limits their position in a shift. A complexity analysis of the resulting 12 BAPs along with a few special cases is also included. Most problems are shown to be strongly NP-hard. Computations are presented for a wide variety of scenarios for both the TShP and the BAP using data provided by a European airport ground handler company. In all, over 500 instances were investigated using high and low demand fluctuation curves and the various break and shift flexibility options. The results indicate that increasing flexibility in break regulations can make a significant difference in coverage, but the degree depends on the underlying structure of the demand curve as well as on the types of shifts permitted. Formulations with the most flexible shift and break regulations reduced undercoverage by up to 16.68% compared to the most common scenarios in which shifts are limited to a single lunch break.

Thinking East and West in Nuestra América: Retracing the Footprints of a Latinx Teatro Brigade in Revolutionary Cuba

Thinking East and West in Nuestra AméricaRetracing the Footprints of a Latinx Teatro Brigade in Revolutionary Cuba Eric Mayer-García (bio) The photographs in self-described Chicana cultural worker Ana Olivarez-Levinson’s private collection provide new visual documentation of the transnational exchange that propelled Nuevo Teatro, a theatre movement during the 1970s and 1980s that sought to create a distinct Latin American expression in defiance of Eurocentric cultural hierarchies and the hemispheric domination of the United States.1 Her photographs (a selection of which appear in the Mayer-García and Olivarez-Levinson photo essay in this volume) document important meetings, workshops, and performances as well as the lives of the artists happening around those events. For instance, several photos in her collection show a cookout in a park when Chicanx collective Teatro de la Esperanza hosted Cuban collective Grupo Teatro Escambray in Santa Barbara in 1982.2 Taking a break from the hectic tour schedule gave Chicanx cultural workers and Cuban teatristas (theatre artists) the space to build relationships. Photos show the artists on picnic tables overlooking a bluff. They enjoy a meal together, listen carefully to the conversation, and play music on a guitar. One photo shows an artist stretched out on a reclining folding chair not far from a portable radio sitting on one of the tables. In a large group photo, about twenty cultural workers and teatristas gather around another dozen laying and sitting on blankets in the grass. Some people look up and smile toward the camera (see the Olivarez-Levinson and Mayer-García photo essay).3 Others break from their poses and turn in toward each other, laughing, smiling, and reflecting. The larger circle is made up of smaller orbits of [End Page 140] intimacy, friendship, and familia. The image captures a microcosm of the Nuevo Teatro movement and the transnational bonds upon which it was built.4 In this regard, the cookout was just as important to the movement as performances or formal workshops. The personal collection and the personal touch of moments like the cook-out point up the ways that affect both organizes and preserves knowledge often disregarded in the institutional collection. One important case in point is Olivarez-Levinson’s records of the East and West Coast Teatro Brigade, a three-week visit to Cuba by thirty Latinx theatre artists in August 1981.5 The East and West Coast Teatro Brigade is exemplary of the transcontinental interchange happening between Puerto Rican, Chicanx, and other US-based Latinx artists via Latin American theatre.6 In this regard, the Teatro Brigade is important because it adds to our understanding of the ongoing emergence of a coordinated, panethnic Latinx theatre in the United States during this period, which, as “East and West Coast” suggests, mobilized a west-east sense of the hemispheric that contrasts with the more ubiquitous orientation of south-north. Because her experience as a participant in this cultural exchange meant so much to Olivarez-Levinson and her development as a cultural worker, she kept detailed records of the event. As a testament to the importance of personal collections made by artists, we might not have records of the Teatro Brigade without Olivarez-Levinson’s careful archiving.7 In this essay, I analyze the fragmented archives of two US-based collectives that were active in promoting exchange among Nuevo Teatro artists: Teatro 4 (Teatro Cuatro), which was founded in 1974 to address the social and economic injustice facing Latinxs and African Americans living in the area surrounding Fourth Street between Avenues A and B in the Lower East Side, and Teatro de la Esperanza, which formed at UC Santa Barbara in 1971, made theatre by, about, for, near, and with Chicanx communities throughout California, and eventually relocated to San Francisco in the 1980s.8 I concentrate on these groups’ ongoing exchange with Nuevo Teatro artists in revolutionary Cuba during the 1980s. Particularly, I focus on materials in the personal collection of Olivarez-Levinson, a former member of Teatro de la Esperanza who completed her formal theatre training in Cuba as a result of Esperanza’s ties to Grupo Teatro Escambray.9 The Cuban Ministry of Culture...

Richard Potter: America's First Black Celebrity by John A. Hodgson

Reviewed by: Richard Potter: America's First Black Celebrity by John A. Hodgson Kristen E. Wood (bio) Richard Potter: America's First Black Celebrity. By John A. Hodgson. (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2018. Pp. 352. $29.95 cloth) John A. Hodgson's biography of Richard Potter traces the life of the Black celebrity who was once known nearly nationwide for his virtuosic ventriloquism, magic tricks, and set pieces. The son of an African woman and white man, Richard Potter lived as a Black man in the Black community of Boston, but he sometimes described himself as having West Indian or Indian background. The combination of his variable self-description, appearance, gentlemanly manners, and virtuosity left some white people in doubt about his racial identity. [End Page 336] This ambiguity, combined with his excellent showmanship, enabled Potter to travel not only in New England and Canada but also through much of the South, captivating audiences and earning both good reviews and significant amounts of money in the process. In addition to exploring Potter's skills, his audiences' responses, and the operations of racism in shaping his career, Hodgson pays close attention to Potter's family life and woes. As a celebrity, Potter was an undoubted success. As a man of business, husband, and father, he was less so. While Potter did not end his days in abject poverty or disgrace, neither was he able to provide his family with the financial and social security that was the goal of his exhausting touring schedule. He faced debts and lawsuits, his wife Sally's intemperate drinking, a disappointing son, and a white neighbor's ability to sexually abuse and impregnate Potter's young daughter with no legal consequences. Hodgson observes that Potter bore partial responsibility for some of these troubles: his frequent travel surely took a toll on his family and a significant share of his legal and financial troubles arose from performing without a license. In short, Hodgson is a fair-minded, careful biographer, neither claiming to read Potter's mind nor being a cheerleader-in-chief. For historians of American performers, Hodgson's biography will probably be most useful for its details about how performers trained, collaborated, and organized their tours. Hodgson excavates Potter's youth with great care, tracking down both his childhood years and how Potter began to learn his acrobatic skills in Europe, most probably from the Italian Signior Manfredi, how he met and began to tour with John Rannie, the Scottish ventriloquist, and how he shared billing with other performers, whether as a supernumerary or as the star attraction. Hodgson thus provides significant insight into the trans-Atlantic business of performance. In an invaluable appendix, Hodgson traces Potter's performances across two decades, noting location, venue, dates, co-performers, and sources. Historians of Black life in the early republic will value not only Potter's own unusual story but also the details Hodgson relates of Black life in and around Boston and Andover, New Hampshire, including [End Page 337] the workings of Boston's Black Masonic society. Hodgson also shows how Black New Englanders formed enduring connections, sometimes against their will, with whites. The Potter family's many connections to white families in the area included chattel slavery, employment, patronage, and something rather like friendly acquaintance. Hodgson largely eschews any theories and interpretation that looks past Richard Potter's life and the main actors therein. In his preface, he writes: "I think I serve Richard Potter (and scholarship generally) best" by sticking with "the facts and the story of his life" (p. xvi). This selfimposed limitation—a characterization Hodgson might well dispute—may frustrate some readers who wish for a richer contextualization of Potter's life. To call New England in 1830 "a religiously conservative society," for example, is to prompt the question, in comparison to what? (p. 197). We see little or nothing here of the uneven transformations that the Second Great Awakening wrought in New England and New York, for example. The treatment of family, dependent children, and sexuality also lacks some depth. The law's view that the rape of an underage child represented a crime against her father did not make...

A Tour Proposal Towards Experiencing Circassian Cuisine: The Case Of Düzce Province

It is possible to state that there has been an increase in the interest towards gastronomy tours in recent years. However, those tours have predominantly been to Mediterranean and Southeastern Anatolia Regions. The Black Sea Region in which people coming from different ethnicity live together is rich in gastronomy. “Circassians”, no doubt, one of those ethnic groups living in this region. On the other hand, there is very limited research about experiencing Circassian cuisine. With this research, it is aimed to fill the gap in the literature. In accordance with this purpose, firstly, information was given about important dishes in Circassian cuisine by handling Circassians who immigrated to Anatolia from Caucasia during the second half of the nineteenth century, and settlement policy of The Ottoman Empire. Then, a two-night tour schedule aiming to experience predominantly both Circassian cuisine and culture in Duzce situated in the Western Black Sea Region where population density of Circassians is very high.