York Town Research Articles

Four Elegies

Four Elegies

Memorials to John Snow - Pioneer in anaesthesia and epidemiology.

John Snow was an English physician and a founding father of epidemiology, whose name is inextricably linked with tracing the source of the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho, which killed over 600 people. Despite his recommendation to remove the water pump handle and thus reduce the spread of cholera, his theory of faecal-oral transmission was not widely believed until after his death. Furthermore, he also pioneered substantial achievements in the development of anaesthesia. He studied both chloroform and ether, improving the accuracy of their delivery. In his obstetric practice, he achieved the feat of obtaining satisfactory analgesia with a safer technique and is remembered for administering chloroform to Queen Victoria, during the delivery of her last two children. There are several interesting and unusual memorials to Snow, ranging from replica water pumps, blue plaques and a public house named after him. The most recent new memorial was erected in 2017, in his home town of York, which commemorates his origins and his subsequent contribution to curbing the cholera outbreak. All the memorials commemorate his achievements, which remain relevant today. Public health and epidemiology expertise is required in the current world of the COVID-19 pandemic, where his legacy remains as important as ever.

The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town by Edward Berenson

Reviewed by: The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town by Edward Berenson Joel Streicker (bio) The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town By Edward Berenson. W. W. Norton & Co., 2019. 271 pp. When four-year-old Barbara Griffiths disappeared in the woods outside the upstate New York town of Massena on September 22, 1928, a rumor spread that she had been kidnapped by Jews intent on ritual murder. There is something mercifully anticlimactic about the recent book on the incident by Edward Berenson, a distinguished professor of history at New York University. The case drew national attention for a bit more than a week, occasioned widespread national support for the town's Jews among their co-ethnics and non-Jews alike, and has been mostly forgotten except by the area's dwindling Jewish population and their descendants, of whom Berenson is one. Perhaps most remarkable is that the accusation was leveled at all: it is the only known case of blood libel in American history. Given the uniqueness of the case, Berenson focuses mainly on explaining the historical circumstances giving rise to the Massena accusation. This requires a deep dive. Relying heavily on the work of Israel Yuval and David Nirenberg, he ably explores the genesis and significance of the blood libel in medieval Europe in the context of the Catholic Church's new (in 1215, that is) dogma of transubstantiation, the claim that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are literally—not merely metaphorically—the body and blood of Christ. Fascination with blood in that era, and the widely held notion that Jews engaged in satanic rituals involving cannibalism, also played a role. The miracles of Mary took on new importance in this era, with Jesus widely depicted as an infant in stories, paintings, and sculpture. This contributed to the notion that Jews sacrificed Christian children as a symbolic means of killing Christ. Moreover, Jews' supposed propensity for the ritual murder of children was, in Christian eyes, given credence by reports of Jewish fathers who killed their own children to prevent them from conversion at the hands of [End Page 287] Crusaders in the eleventh century. In some of these accounts, the murders were said to have taken the form of ritual sacrifice to atone for sins. While Jewish interpreters saw these as praiseworthy acts of martyrdom (many of these men were reported to have committed suicide after killing their children), they also disposed many Christians to believe Jews capable of murdering children. From these origins, Berenson traces blood libel and the anti-Jewish violence it generated through the modernera and, in an epilogue, to our ownday. The idea of blood libel never took root in America. Berenson attributes this to the dominance of Protestantism, which lacks a belief in transubstantiation, never developed a cult of Mary and baby Jesus, and, of course, postdates the Crusades. The author takes great pains to recount the antisemitism plaguing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American society. However, antisemitism did not, by and large, result in anti-Jewish violence. When violence did occur, such as the lynching of Leo Frank, it did not take the form of blood libel. So why Massena? And who was behind the accusation? Here Berenson's account is swift, succinct, and convincing. He provides a brief history of the town's rise as an industrial center near the Canadian border, relying on mostly Catholic immigrant labor from Europe and, especially, Quebec. There is no hard evidence as to who actually started the rumor that Barbara Griffiths had been kidnapped by Jews for ritual murder, but many townspeople credited (or later blamed) an unnamed French Canadian immigrant. Others claimed that volunteer firefighters associated with the Ku Klux Klan, which was experiencing a revival in the area (and nationally), had spread the rumor. Timing here is everything. Berenson makes a case that Quebecois workers likely were behind the accusation. Quebec had, for decades and at that very moment, an active antisemitic press with clear connections to European antisemitism, which was ascendant on the Continent. Moreover, the United States was in the midst of a divisive presidential campaign. Drawing on decades of antagonism toward Catholic and Jewish immigrants...

Bright Shining World by Josh Swiller

Reviewed by: Bright Shining World by Josh Swiller Natalie Berglind Swiller, Josh Bright Shining World. Knopf, 2020 [304p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593119570 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593119594 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 9-12 Wallace has been to fourteen different high schools, skipping town whenever his emotionally detached dad gets pulled somewhere new for work, a mysterious position he holds at energy monopoly Jackduke. In Wallace’s newest New York town, something is off with the high schoolers, who are prone to fits of hysteria, and Jackduke may somehow be causing it. As Wallace begins to talk to trees and hallucinate his deceased mother alongside the dad from Roseanne, he becomes [End Page 147] personally invested in solving the mystery, especially if it means getting closer to hot cheerleader Megan Rose. This is a darkly humorous story, and Wallace, an unlikable, self-proclaimed outcast at school, has a strong narrative voice loaded with acerbic jokes (though the jokes sometimes miss), covering topics that range from masturbation to parental emotional neglect. The bizarre, overwrought elements in the story, from the talking trees to a four-foot-tall tennis ball named Susie to the corporation that harvests “clean” energy that sucks out people’s souls, will likely appeal to fans of Andrew Smith, and under the veil of sarcasm there’s a surprisingly effective moral about the ability of young people to implement change and the importance of focusing on climate issues. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Boy from Tomorrow by Camille DeAngelis

Reviewed by: The Boy from Tomorrow by Camille DeAngelis Sarah Sahn DeAngelis, Camille The Boy from Tomorrow. Amberjack, 2018 [267p] ISBN 978-1-944995-61-4 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-7 Josie and her younger sister, Cass, live an isolated life in their small upstate New York town in 1915; they're confined to their house by their eccentric mother, a medium of dubious authenticity and favorite subject of the town gossips. A hundred years later, Alec and his mom move from Manhattan into the same house after his parents' divorce, and Alec finds the medium's "talking board"—a hand-painted Ouija board she had used in her psychic readings. It's beautiful, but Alec never expects it to actually work—until he finds himself using to communicate with Josie, Cass, and their tutor, Emily. Josie is twelve, like Alec, and they both find the kind of friend and confidant they had longed for in one another. Things get complicated when Josie's mother discovers Josie's across-time communication and [End Page 330] tries to use Alec to make accurate predictions about the future, and Alec comes to realize that the medium isn't merely eccentric but abusive. DeAngelis crafts an engaging tale of friendship in chapters that alternate between 1915 and 2015, as Josie tries to navigate her mother's capricious moods, and Alec's investigations into the past convince him to somehow help Josie and Cass escape from their mother before she hurts one of them. Both Alec and Josie are introspective by nature, and they give plenty of consideration to the possible consequences of their connection across time—rather more wisely than the adults who come into contact with the talking board. Their inevitable parting is bittersweet, but the novel itself is full of hope for the future. Fans of historical fiction and ghost stories will devour this title, and those new to either genre will find it a heady introduction. SS Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

No Fracking Way: An Empirical Look at Why New York Towns Banned Shale Development

Across the United States, local governments and states have adopted measures to restrict shale development that uses high-volume hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling (collectively, fracking) within their borders, hindering a national energy policy that relies on continued access to natural gas trapped within shale formations. This Article takes an empirical look at what might motivate these local anti-fracking measures by analyzing the behavior of New York towns from 2010 through the end of 2013. Before New York’s highest court recognized a town’s authority to ban fracking and before the state officially banned fracking, more than a hundred shale-rich New York towns adopted bans or moratoria on fracking. The results show that towns most likely to adopt bans were those with residents that were more vulnerable to potential water contamination and those with little history of prior oil-and-gas development. Moratoria adoption, in contrast, was largely associated with residents’ environmental preferences. The results suggest that, at least when deciding to ban fracking, towns weigh the local costs and benefits of the practice, relying on their knowledge of local conditions and vulnerabilities. The results, then, lay the groundwork for state and federal efforts to reduce local opposition by facilitating responsible shale development, with provisions for taking into account local knowledge and incentives for optimal activity levels, acceptable risk-taking, and comprehensive remediation.

Banjo Boy: Masculinity, Disability, and Difference in Deliverance

Banjo BoyMasculinity, Disability, and Difference in Deliverance Anna Creadick (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution The "dueling banjos" scene in John Boorman's 1972 spectacular film adaptation of James Dickey's best-selling 1970 novel Deliverance is an iconic moment in American movie history … The "banjo boy" scene in Deliverance is pivotal for understanding how such a lasting legacy of hillbilly horror and banjo shame could have been instilled by one fictional crossing of America's monumental cultural divides. Still from Deliverance, Warner Brothers Studios, 1972. [End Page 63] 1. the backstory I'm what you might call a "closeted" banjo player, so this may well be my coming-out paper. My parents were hippie folkies, and I grew up in the Appalachian region marinating in so much old-time string band music that around age twenty I literally picked up a banjo and just knew how to play it. Soon after learning I could play, I took my banjo to Merlefest, and I bought a bumper sticker that read "Have You Hugged Your Banjo Today?" and put it on my car. But then I sold that car and went off to graduate school in Boston and, well, I just couldn't play the banjo there. It's not even that no one played, some did, but they always seemed to do so with a strange enthusiasm, an academic interest that made me nervous. When I moved to western New York for work, an African American historian friend who had grown up in New York City told me he actually could not stand to hear banjo music, because it always made him think of lynchings. That too gave me pause. Skating on the thin ice of being a North-dwelling southerner with a mild accent, I got to hear all the slurs about rednecks, white trash, and hillbillies. As a white southern Appalachian from a town called Boone, who had spent a lot of time on porches and a little time on food stamps, I was not about to tell anyone I also played the banjo. Everyone in my small New York town would keep paying a fortune to go see Béla Fleck, and I would just have to travel in the summers to my hometown in western North Carolina, where Doc Watson was from and where the tourist shops sell bumper stickers that read "Paddle Faster, I Hear Banjo Music." It's a damn shame. And it's about shame, damn it. I'd like to say it's nobody's fault, but it is. It's James Dickey's fault. Or John Boorman's. Or both. The "dueling banjos" scene in John Boorman's 1972 spectacular film adaptation of James Dickey's bestselling 1970 novel Deliverance is an iconic moment in American movie history. In the novel, the scene launches an increasingly unsteady communion between four urban outsiders and a series of increasingly dangerous mountain boys and men. As the film version unfolds into a violent "game" of kill-or-be-killed, the sporadic bluegrass score carries the dueling banjos scene forward, so that it echoes and intermingles with terrorizing incidents of violence, including the now infamous male-on-male rape. The "banjo boy" scene in Deliverance is pivotal for understanding how such a lasting legacy of hillbilly horror and banjo shame could have been instilled by one fictional crossing of America's monumental cultural divides.1 [End Page 64] 2. the scene The banjo boy scene begins when the four city-slicker businessmen, Ed, Bobby, Lewis, and Drew, finally arrive at a crossroads called Oree after driving ever deeper into the mountains from their urban and suburban Atlanta homes for a rugged weekend canoe adventure. They stop in Oree for gas and to find a couple of local drivers willing to drop off their cars at an agreed-upon spot downriver. Dickey's narrator Ed calls Oree a "sleepy, hookwormy, ugly, and inconsequential" rural county seat, and yet it offers the modern necessities the adventurers require: fossil fuel and paid labor. An old man, described as looking "like a hillbilly in some badly cast movie," approaches, chats, pumps gas, and then, spying the...

Detection and Separation of Inorganic Cations in Natural, Potable, and Wastewater Samples Using Capillary Zone Electrophoresis with Indirect UV Detection.

Capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) is a sensitive and rapid technique for determining traces of inorganic cations in water samples. CZE with indirect UV-diode array detection (CZE-DAD) was utilized to identify several inorganic cations in natural, potable, and wastewater samples. A pH 4.35 background electrolyte system was employed and consisted of 15 mM imidazole, 8 mM malonic acid, 2 mM 18-crown-6 ether as complexing agents, 10% v/v methanol as an organic modifier with indirect absorbance reference at 214 nm. The CZE method involved electromigration injection at 5 kV for 5 s, a separation voltage of 20 kV at 25°C, and a detection wavelength of 280 nm. Six main cations (ammonium , potassium K+, calcium Ca2+, sodium Na+, magnesium Mg2+, and lead Pb2+) were tested, and all but lead, were detected in the water samples at concentrations between 0.03 and 755 ppm with a detection limit ranging between 0.023 and 0.084 ppm. The successful evaluation of the proposed methodology allowed us to reliably detect and separate six metal ions in different water samples without any pretreatment. All water samples were collected from Northern New York towns and the Raquette River water system, the third longest river in New York State and the largest watershed of the central and western Adirondacks.

Detection and Quantification of Inorganic and Organic Anions in Natural, Potable, and Wastewaters in Northern New York Using Capillary Zone Electrophoresis and Indirect UV Detection.

Capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) is a sensitive and rapid technique used for determining traces of inorganic and organic anions in potable, natural, and wastewaters. Here, CZE with indirect UV-diode array detection (CZE-DAD) was employed with a background electrolyte system comprising of an Agilent Technologies proprietary basic anion buffer at pH 12.0 and a forensic anion detection method. The limits of detection (LOD) for this method ranged between 3 and 5 ppm and involved hydrodynamic injection of 50 mbar for 6 s with a negative polarity separation voltage of −30 kV at 30°C, a detection wavelength of 350 nm and indirect reference of 275 nm. Fourteen different anions were checked for in the water samples that were examined and included bromide, chloride, thiosulfate, nitrate, nitrite, sulfate, azide, carbonate, fluoride, arsenate, phosphate, acetate, lactate, and silicate. The water samples were collected from Northern New York towns and the Raquette River water system, the third longest river in New York State and the largest watershed of the central and western Adirondacks. The concentrations detected for these anions ranged from <5.0 ppm to 260 ppm.

The Blood Libel in North America: Jews, Law, and Citizenship in the Early 20th Century

While Mendel Beilis stood trial for murder in Ukraine, the small Jewish population of Quebec City in Canada pursued legal action against perpetrators of the blood libel. This article traces the attempts by Jewish populations in Quebec City, Montreal, Winnipeg, Manitoba, and in the small upstate New York town of Massena (USA), to use legal means to combat manifestations of the pernicious blood libel in North American locales. While each instance took place in unique social, political, and cultural contexts, what they share is a common belief by Jewish populations that they enjoyed full and emancipated citizenship rights, and that law was a tool available to them as citizens of North American democracies to combat these manifestations of Jew hatred.

The Distributional Impact of Greater Responsiveness: Evidence from New York Towns

Making leaders more responsive to voters is a frequent goal of institutional reforms in democracies. Given that some citizens participate more in politics than others, however, there is a risk that increased responsiveness may conflict with another democratic value: the equality of policy outcomes. This article studies this trade-off using institutional reforms in New York towns, where officials known as assessors are charged with ensuring equitable treatment in property taxation. Over time, hundreds of towns reduced responsiveness by making their assessors appointed instead of elected. The local context thus allows for more precise measurement of who gets what from government, as well as more credible estimates of the effects of institutions. Results show that local policy decisions are biased against low-income residents and that elections serve only to compound this bias.

Shifting Our Focus on New York's Rural History: Politics, Prisons, and Social Reform

Shifting Our Focus on New York's Rural History:Politics, Prisons, and Social Reform Jeffrey A. Mullins (bio) In 1839, a bitter partisan battle broke out in the central New York town of Auburn, the modest market town serving as the seat of Cayuga County, with conditions at the state penitentiary there constituting the core of the controversy. Following reports of squalid living conditions and a series of physical abuses, the death of Louis Von Eck at the hands of prison guards prompted a full-scale investigation. The controversy was politically charged, with the newly empowered Whigs leading the attack against those prison officials still in place from the recent Democratic administration. In some ways, the dispute might reasonably be understood as a matter of state-level politics, with Democrats and Whigs each picking up on any issue that they could use to assail their opponents. More broadly, one might justifiably cast the controversy in national terms, as simply an embodiment of broader conversations on social reform, and the proper role and limits of government in supporting such endeavors. Indeed, this has overwhelmingly been how historians have treated such matters. In contrast, this essay argues that this episode—and many like it—was decidedly local, rural, and regional. Specifically, two arguments are forwarded here. First, in addressing state-level politics in the first half of the nineteenth century, historians have largely ignored the extent to which political dynamics percolate up from the local and rural to the center and metropolitan. Interestingly, historians of politics on the national level generally have been more sensitive to this. It is still possible, of course, to find leading historians describing the key period of the 1830s in a top-down vision of the "emergence of national parties with tentacles extending into states and localities." For the most part, though, historians stress the extent to which the 1830s and 40s political groupings on the national scale began as little more than loose alliances, and even at their height were more of [End Page 427] a disparate amalgam than a unified whole. In describing this process, historians often point to states and national regions as the building blocks of political ideology. The Whigs, for example, had to hold together members with abolitionist sympathies in the North and those with pro-slavery sentiments in the South.1 The localized process of building state politics, however, gets little attention. For New York, historians certainly have emphasized statewide ideological schisms, but these are generally treated as if the texture of such partisan divisions lay uniformly across the land. Thus in studies of New York during the 1830s and 40s we know a lot about the "radical" and "conservative" factions of the Democratic Party (wholly splitting into two different state conventions in 1847), and the "hard-shell" and "soft-shell" Whigs. In terms of specific locales, the most one tends to read about is that the western part of the state was more Whig leaning. By focusing on Cayuga County in the 1830s, we can begin to reveal the dynamics by which rural politics shaped the larger statewide discussion.2 Furthermore, by paying attention to the ways in which politics played out beyond the major urban centers, a second finding emerges. Although the standard narrative of the emergence of the "second party system" in the 1830s—giving rise to the Democratic and Whig parties—overwhelmingly prioritizes economic issues such as the struggle over whether to re-charter the Bank of the United States, other factors contributed to the ideological [End Page 428] differences between the two major parties. Indeed, in accounts of the more fully formed Whig Party of the 1840s, historians routinely mention the Whig emphasis on humanitarian reform movements that gave rise to such institutions as mental hospitals, penitentiaries, and schools for the blind and deaf. Treatment of this commitment, however, is almost always done in passing, and generally nothing is said about how Whigs came to embrace this position as part of their political platform. While historians have scrutinized the pathways by which contemporary concerns about slavery and racial inequality entered into and transformed political dialogue, little has been done to offer analogous explanations for the wide...

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and 1920s Flapper Culture

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and 1920s Flapper Culture Donald Pizer (bio) Throughout the great length of An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser does not mention a specific year in which its action occurs. It is nevertheless clear from many incidental details in the setting, especially the prominence of the automobile, that he wishes his readers to understand that they are encountering contemporary events of roughly the early to mid-1920s. (The novel was written during 1923–25 and published in late 1925.) One of the significant characteristics of this post-war period was the rise and prominence of the liberated young woman, commonly known as the flapper. In this essay I will examine Dreiser’s use of the flapper figure in An American Tragedy in relation both to his attempt to authenticate the contemporaneousness of the “American tragedy” theme at the center of the novel and to dramatize a striking cultural irony present in the centrality of the type during this period. An American Tragedy is based on the Grace Brown-Chester Gillette murder case of 1906–08.1 Grace Brown, a resident of the upstate New York town of Cortland, was found pregnant, bruised, and drowned in an Adirondack lake in July 1906. Her lover, Chester Gillette, was convicted of murdering her after a sensational and widely reported trial in Herkimer in late 1906 and was executed at Auburn prison in March 1908. Dreiser was in his late thirties during the period of Grace Brown’s murder and the trial and execution of Chester Gillette. He had grown up in small Indiana towns and had by 1906 worked as a newspaperman in several major Midwestern cities and had lived as well in Chicago and New York. In addition to this personal familiarity with turn-of-the-century America, Dreiser’s documentary sources for the crime, principally the New York World reports of the trial, were of course also those of 1906–08. Yet he chose to set the novel not in that period but in the mid-1920s. [End Page 123] Dreiser’s decision had its roots in his conviction that the conditions underlying the Gillette case were not unique to the first decade of the twentieth century but rather characterized the entire period from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. Little had changed in American society during this period, he believed, except the public misconception that the present was distinguished by a lessening of older social restrictions. Dreiser wrote bluntly on this subject in 1921, just as the notion of the 1920s as a distinctive new epoch was beginning to take shape: I can truthfully say that I can not detect, in the post-war activities or interests, social, intellectual, or otherwise, of the younger or other generations of Americans, poor, rich, or middle class, any least indication of the breaking of hampering shackles of any kind—intellectual, social, monetary or what you will. The American as I encounter him, young or old, is the same old American, thin lipped, narrow-minded, money-centred, interested in the Ten Commandments as they apply to the other fellow, and absolutely blind to everything that would tend to enlarge, let alone vastly extend his world outlook. (Dreiser, “Americans” 230) Dreiser placed a similar emphasis on the cultural continuity of American culture since the Civil War in his frequent discourses on the pernicious effect of the Dream of Success on American youth. In account after account in which he explained the sources and inspiration for An American Tragedy, Dreiser emphasized that the Gillette-Brown case was only one of a long series of crimes with a similar configuration. For example, in a late 1926 interview, he stated that [The novel depicts] a typical American tragedy. There have been scores of cases like it. … It happens time and again in America. I considered this case and the other but the one I chose seemed to me to embody most clearly the elements which made these crimes typically American. A young man starts out after a career, untrained, unqualified, uneducated—with a high school education or even less. He is filled with the common dope of success that is injected into all...

Mediating the Method

The scene is New York City, 1958. That year, in two disparate arenas, American culture was attempting to come to grips with the difference between noise and art. A twenty-five-year retrospective concert of John Cage's work at New York's Town Hall helped create an intellectually coherent canon out of Cage's experiments, which critics had often treated as puerile provocations or exercises in whimsy to be regarded with bemused toleration. For some forward thinkers, noise was becoming intellectually exciting material for experimental music, whereas the audible audience outrage preserved by the recording of the Town Hall concert testifies to the continuing rearguard pique of more conservative sensibilities. Cage himself couldn't have imagined a more apt illustration of his theories than this aleatory auditory event, preserved for posterity by the recording apparatus.

New York Psychiatrists Work to Hold Insurance Carrier Accountable

New York Psychiatrists Work to Hold Insurance Carrier Accountable

Making Change Materialize: An Archaeology of Social Reform in the Age of Obama

The 2008 American presidential election led some to believe that an era of possibility had finally dawned. But change remains elusive, and questions about how to advance social justice causes persist in the age of Obama. Critical examinations of past social movements help answer these questions, and to this end I offer research on Smithfield and North Elba, two New York towns imagined as utopias by reformer Gerrit Smith (1797–1874). While some have emphasized a narrative of utopia realized, research on the artifacts, landscapes, and texts associated with them has revealed past struggles and knowledge of what hinders future imaginaries.

The Case Of Forensics

Steven Barnes’s truck was muddy. As he pulled up on a September day in 1985 to a roadblock for what he thought was a routine traffic stop, the dirt was close to the last thing on his mind. But the mud caught the attention of local police officers in Barnes’s small, upstate New York town. They were investigating the rape and murder of high school student Kimberly Simon, whose body had been found days before, on the side of a muddy dirt road. Barnes, 19, went to the station for more than 12 hours of questioning. He explained to investigators he’d been at a local bowling alley at the time of the murder. He gave police permission to search his truck and figured that was that. Then, two years later, investigators asked Barnes for blood, saliva, and hair samples. Barnes was arrested in 1988. At his trial, forensic experts testified ...

Sweet Diction, South and South

Sweet Diction, South and South Tom French Late in 2011, in the embers of the year, I spent three days on the Boyne in the company of Tony Holten, the author of On Ancient Roads: Recollections, History and Folklore of County Meath and Oliver Delaney, owner of Bective Mill, also a historian, and with the good volunteers of the Meath River Rescue. Like Tony and Oliver, I am also a "book man," a librarian by profession and a writer with a weakness for the marked page. The days yielded many things: views from underneath the joins in ancient bridges where they were widened to accommodate modern traffic; the knowledge that even when you know you are sinking it is better to steer clear of saying, "We're sinking" (saying "We're taking water" is acceptable and communicates the message admirably); that the Meath River Rescue does not place humans above sheep, swans, and dogs, but will respond to all calls; that spiritualists are as useful to a river search as GPS; that the thirst that strikes on the river is a powerful one; and that the word "rescue" is the one that is used but what is generally meant and understood is "recovery." The men who do this work love the river and the necessary work they do. They almost never speak of the things they have seen, apart from the rare mention of a pair of new shoes placed side-by-side at a bridge parapet (which you never forget because the shoes were new or because of how they were placed, as though in a wardrobe, under the suit they were bought to be worn with). They will tell you what they heard about the Boyne having frozen in the winter of 1940 when it was used as a road by the hay carters heading south to the cattle market in Dublin; the nail heads were raised in the shoes of the draft horses to give them purchase on the ice. The rescue men remember spiriting forks from cutlery drawers to spear eels and bring them home to be fried in butter on the range in the pan. They remember using orange onion bags slit fully down the front and slightly less at the back to net the rainbow trout tucked in under the bank. And being sickened from eating too much salmon in the days when the big fish ran these stretches. Another thing that came from that trip was a couplet that got its start from the first day, downstream from the bridge built to accommodate Mel Gibson's [End Page 9] roughshod ride over Scottish history in Braveheart, which presented the medieval Meath town of Trim as the fortified English town of York. Somewhere between Scurlogstown and Bective, as the spotters at the prow kept eyes peeled for fallen trees and discarded shopping trollies, and called to the cox to lift the engine to save the caged propeller from rocks, an otter paused in the middle of its busy life, stood up out of the water on what was left of a medieval weir or an eel trap and looked me in the face. And I, pausing from my enquiring and recording and incessant photographing, looked back likewise into its wide, watery eyes filled with curiosity. Everything around that fixed instant flowed, as in that moment when strangers on the same path encounter each other and take the first tentative steps at sounding each other out or at getting past each other without incident. The otter looked sleek and fit, slimmer than in summer, turning in the air as it would in water, the spine curving with great ease, the back feet sure of their wet ground, the tail strong like an extra limb. The cox killed our outboard engine. Manmade noise fell away, and silence and the sounds of running water grew. Then that instant, too, flowed—for in truth, neither the otter nor I had ever truly stopped. The following spring, a couplet that I titled "The Middle Reaches," presented itself. Staying out of the way of the poem that's trying to get written has often appeared to be the main part...

INVIGORATING R&amp;D

AS THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY confronts the crisis now gripping world financial markets, glass and ceramics maker Corning shows at least one way to survive: keep investing in R&D. Without a strong R&D pipeline, the once high-flying firm might not have made it to the ripe old age of 157, nor would Corning have been around to celebrate an R&D organization that is now 100 years old. Seven years ago, Corning, with headquarters in the New York town from which it took its name, had a near-death experience when the telecommunications industry bubble burst. Demand for glass fiber-optic cable all but disappeared, and Corning’s sales fell almost by half to $3.2 billion between 2001 and 2002. Losses went into the billions of dollars. Shares that had traded above $100 in the summer of 2000 plunged to around $2.00 in September 2002. R&D could have been decimated and the firm might never have celebrated 100 years ...

Cruel and Unusual Light: Electricity and Effacement in Stephen Crane's The Monster

Cruel and Unusual Light:Electricity and Effacement in Stephen Crane’s The Monster Jonathan Tadashi Naito (bio) Stephen Crane's 1898 novella, The Monster, is among the most cryptic and the most ruthless of his works. In brief, it tells the story of a small town thrown into chaos when Henry Johnson, a black coachman employed by a white doctor, Dr. Trescott, literally loses his face. In the first half of the novella, Henry Johnson's actions range from fatherly to romantic to heroic; but after his face is burned off during his daring rescue of the doctor's son from a chemical fire, Johnson is branded a "monster" and ostracized from the town.1 In a crucial confrontation soon after the fire, Judge Hagenthorpe, an influential town elder, urges Dr. Trescott to simply let Johnson die. When Trescott refuses, the judge and the doctor set out the terms within which Henry Johnson will be described for the remainder of the novella: "He will be your creation, you understand. He is purely your creation. Nature has very evidently given him up. He is dead. You are restoring him to life. You are making him, and he will be a monster, and with no mind." "He will be what you like, judge," cried Trescott, in sudden, polite fury. (The Monster 32) As this passage suggests, Crane's novella is just as interested in the residents of the fictional town of Whilomville as it is in the character at the center of the uproar: they are the ones who label the living Henry Johnson an undead "thing" and thus represent the true creators of the [End Page 35] so-called monster. Even as it touches upon relatively abstract questions such as the relationship between being and non-being, Crane's novella makes it impossible to ignore the fact that the person at the center of the controversy is an African American man in a largely white small town. This issue has deservedly been at the center of recent scholarly interest in The Monster.2 Soon after its publication, critics began to speculate about what could have possibly inspired The Monster's narrative of alienation in small town America and the vivid and disquieting imagery used to describe Henry Johnson. Early critics often begun and ended their discussion of Whilomville by making mention of Port Jervis, New York, where Crane spent much of his youth. In one of the first attempts to identify Henry Johnson with an actual person, Thomas Beer asserted that Henry Johnson was inspired by Levi Hume, a "disfigured teamster" from Port Jervis, though Beer seems to have been thwarted in his attempts to verify his theory through Crane's relatives (Levenson xiii). John Berryman's biography of Stephen Crane includes a brief statement about the origins of the story that has been cited by many subsequent critics: 'The town is based on Port Jervis, as the "monster" was suggested one niece says by a Port Jervis refuse-collector whose face was eaten with cancer; but it is any New York town' (193).3 However, fixating on this individual as the source for Henry Johnson has at least one serious limitation: it does nothing to explain Crane's decision to center so much of The Monster upon racial difference: like Crane, the Port Jervis refuse-collector was white (Stallman 333). Bill Brown's 1996 study, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play, greatly expanded the historical and cultural context for Crane's novella. Even as he accepts the refuse-collector as the immediate inspiration for Henry Johnson, Brown also locates Johnson in relation to a number of embodiments of fin de siècle monstrosity: "'the last slave set free by the Supreme Court,'" an "idiot savant" known as "Blind Tom"; the black dandy of the minstrel stage, "Zip Coon"; and, most suggestively, a man who was actually named "Henry Johnson": a microcephalic African American born in New Jersey (despite his supposed African origins), who was easily the most famous of several sideshow freaks known as both "What is It?" and "Zip" (208, 214–17). He thus reads Crane's Henry Johnson as undergoing a "metamorphosis...