bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Augustan Manipulation of Traditional Ideas of Provincial Governance
Authors: Drogula Fred K.
Published: January 2016

This chapter examines Augustus’s role as a provincial commander and his contribution to the evolution of Roman provincial command. In particular, Augustus took advantage of changes in the fundamental, underlying concepts that had shaped and defined provincial command to give himself a radically new but traditional-sounding position as Rome’s main commander or imperator. The gradual evolution of Roman thinking about imperium and the provincia in the last two centuries of the republic gave Augustus different interpretations of each concept to choose from, and selecting those ideas that best served his purposes, he was able to establish what would become of the imperial monarchy.
Conclusion
Authors: Drogula Fred K.
Published: January 2016

This concluding chapter summarizes the main points of previous chapters, in arguing that the evolution of provincial command—particularly of imperium and the provincia—is in large part the history of Rome itself. As Rome grew from a village to a Mediterranean-wide empire, change became a normal feature of the Roman Republic. Because of this, provincial command was not a static conceptual monolith that remained unchanged throughout the republic, but a complex idea that was defined or made up by simpler ideas like imperium, auspicium, magistratus, and provincia, all of which evolved over time. As fundamental ideas of authority and responsibility individually evolved over time, they caused the larger idea of military command to change as well. In this respect, Rome’s concept of provincial command was highly reactive, in that it developed in response to Rome’s military needs.
Rural Slave Networks and Insurgent Geographies
Authors: Finch Aisha K.
Published: January 2016

This chapter canvasses the everyday locales in which men and women discussed and contemplated a rebel movement during the 1840s. It explores how work regimes and social networks became critical to the evolution and dissemination of insurgent ideas and designs. Throughout the plantation world, enslaved people created rival geographies and alternative itineraries in their work and leisure which facilitated an entrenched culture of black mobility and enabled rebel collectivities to emerge. Both the licit and illicit movement that fed these fissures, together with the community networks that reached into towns and cities, illustrate how slaves and free people found a range of opportunities to plan for a rebel movement.
The 1843 Rebellions in Matanzas
Authors: Finch Aisha K.
Published: January 2016

This chapter argues that the insurgent designs of 1844 grew out of a longer insurrectionary tradition in the rural plantation countryside. While slaves in rural Matanzas had unleashed destructive rebellions for close to two decades, the greatest concentration of these rebellions took place in the 1840s, culminating in the two slave insurrections of 1843—the Bemba and Triunvirato rebellions discussed in Chapter 2, which erupted in March and November 1843, respectively. The chapter explores the possibilities that insurgent rupture both opened up and closed off for women and men in nonleadership positions. As the smoke cleared, literally and figuratively, authorities began to discover plans for an even more encompassing rebellion that was intended to erupt in 1844.
The Anatomy of a Rural Movement
Authors: Finch Aisha K.
Published: January 2016

This chapter highlights the enslaved men and women who rose to prominence as estate lieutenants and captains across the western rural landscape, in envisioning alternative forms of leadership during the 1844 movement. It examines those who came to the forefront of the rebel leadership on these and other estates—particularly the black assistant overseers—and the ways their perceived status, mobility, and access helped to consolidate their positions of leadership. This chapter also pushes against the trope of “leadership” itself, even as it examines the alternatives thereof, partly by exploring the women who made critical contributions on their home estates. This study loosens the tradition of the leader's iconic role by examining slaves who were critical to local rebel planning, who helped shape this planning in unacknowledged ways, and who often fell on the periphery of these designs.
African Cuban Sacred Traditions and the Making of an Insurgency
Authors: Finch Aisha K.
Published: January 2016

This chapter explores the ways a range of African spiritual practices became the lynchpins in a sacred insurgent geography of 1844. This cultural architecture, particularly through amulets and rituals, proved useful to slave organizers as they encouraged awareness and support for the bourgeoning movement. This chapter considers how the cultural infrastructure of West and Central Africa—primarily its religious cosmologies and expressive cultures—provided a vehicle and a language for rural black people to access rebellious ideas and articulate a revolutionary agenda. In doing so, these practices became instrumental in connecting people to the idea of insurgency in the rural areas.
Conclusion
Authors: Finch Aisha K.
Published: January 2016

This concluding chapter synthesizes the lessons realized in the previous chapters, in which the African Cubans had, prior to the 1844 movement, a very clear understanding of their rights and freedoms, and a marked desire to act upon these against the larger colonial powers that sought to keep them at bay. This growing political consciousness was what had enabled the 1843 and 1844 movements to arise. The year 1844 then was not merely a period of subjugation and brutalities suffered by the colonial subjects; it must also be remembered as a complex political movement of enslaved and free Cubans of African descent, who planned judiciously for their freedom. Though this insurgency was discovered before its time, it was one of the most significant and widespread movements ever undertaken against Cuba's colonial regime.
General Hood Will Attack Me Here!
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: January 2016

This chapter describes the state of both Union and Confederate armies in the few hours before Ezra Church was to become a battleground, as well as the ensuing skirmish. The battle itself tested the leadership skills of both armies, with Sherman's close supervision of his army, and the conflict of battle plans between Lee and Hood. The outcome of the skirmishing along Lick Skillet Road would end in favor of the Federals, but soon the tide seemed to turn. The course of the skirmishing near Ezra Church demonstrated once again that the Federals were willing to commit substantial manpower to the mini-battles that developed between the lines. Due to a tragic miscalculation on Lee's part, the Confederate army would lose thousands of its men on a dubious battlefield endeavor.
That Shrill, Terrifying Yell
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: January 2016

This chapter chronicles the attack and repulse of Brantley's Mississippi troops, the first of Lee's efforts to drive the Federals away from Lick Skillet Road. William Felix Brantley's Brigade of Mississippi troops constituted the far left element of Lee's line. Born in Alabama but nearly a lifelong resident of Mississippi, Brantley practiced law and helped to vote the state out of the union at the secession convention. He was commissioned brigadier general on July 26 and at that time was leading the brigade into battle for the first time. Brantley opened the conflict by coming close to crushing Logan's right flank. If Lee had given the situation more thought and made an effort to shift troops westward to flank the end of the Union line, the chance for a Rebel victory would have increased.
A Scene of Absolute Horror
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: January 2016

This chapter describes the maneuvers of Sharp's brigade and Johnston's brigade against Union skirmishers. Brigadier General Jacob Hunter Sharp's Mississippi brigade occupied the center of Brigadier General John C. Brown's line while General Joseph E. Johnston's Alabama brigade held down the right wing, both of which covered a surprisingly wide extent of the battlefield, in part because the Confederate line had been extended a great deal. Both units conducted their attack with enough spirit and determination to challenge the opposing Federal line and pressed three Union brigades and part of a fourth. Brown's division would ultimately fail in breaking the main Union line, yet his troops had thus far driven back the Federal skirmishers (although not by any means on a permanent basis) and cleared the Lick Skillet Road for Confederate use.
The Blood-Stained Path
Authors: Hess Earl J.
Published: January 2016

This chapter narrates the assault led by Major General Edward C. Walthall's Division—the leading division in Lieutenant General Alexander P. Stewart's corps. At Lee's urging to continue the offensive against the Union line—an offensive Brown's Division had failed to penetrate—Walthall's Division, which had been resting in a supporting position since July 25, moved out of the trenches on the morning of July 28 and marched along Lick Skillet Road. Commanded by a stalwart officer from Mississippi, the division was one of the best in Stewart's Corps. Although Walthall's assault would impress Union officers, he ultimately had to withdraw his troops from the battle, as they had suffered immense casualties and, should they have succeeded in breaking the Union line, there would not have been anyone available to exploit the advantage.
We Only Had This One Thing in Common: We Liked All Types of Music
Authors: Hughes Charles L.
Published: January 2016

This chapter traces the development of the country-soul triangle through the experiences of Arthur Alexander, a black singer-songwriter who launched the Muscle Shoals recording scene and became one of the earliest southern soul stars. Alexander and the white musicians at FAME—most notably producer and studio owner Rick Hall—understood that success required them to perform a racial contradiction. They created a crossracial blend of styles that reflected the many sounds they learned from years of listening and live performance, but they also understood that these genres—particularly country and soul—remained separated by the “musical color line” that structured the South's recording industry. The chapter describes how Alexander and the other musicians at FAME made records that appealed to a diverse audience but marketed them in ways that affirmed racial division. It analyzes Alexander's “You Better Move On,” which offers a potent crystallization of the triangle's central dynamics.
Pride and Prejudice
Authors: Hughes Charles L.
Published: January 2016

This chapter analyzes the tight association between country music and the racial backlash brought by the New Right Movement against the Black Power Movement. In the mid-1960s, country musicians allied with conservative politicians and causes in the hopes of making their music the soundtrack to the post-civil rights backlash that propelled Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1968 and transformed U.S. politics. At the same time, these musicians continued using black-identified sounds and (occasionally) black personnel to craft their increasingly white-associated music. The chapter describes that tensions played out vividly in the career of African American country superstar Charley Pride, whose incongruous position as an African American who chose country over soul illustrates the crucial role that soul's reputation as a symbol of blackness played in establishing country's whiteness in the popular imagination.
Introduction
Authors: LeFlouria Talitha L.
Published: January 2016

This introductory chapter focuses on Georgia's (and the South's) most inconspicuous workforce—black convict women—chronicling how imprisoned women's lives and labors were ordered within Georgia's carceral polities. Inside the cavernous hold of Georgia's state penitentiary system, black women's laboring bodies were tossed to and fro. Some had landed on the northwest side of the “Empire State of the South” in the Dade coal mines, while others had been set adrift in “flying” railroad camps and mobile chain gangs. Though limited in volume, black women prisoners were a fundamental asset in the development of Georgia's postbellum industries. They had formed the nucleus of the state's African-American female industrial workforce, which, at the present, have remained overlooked in the historical literature.
The Gendered Anatomy of “Negro Crime”
Authors: LeFlouria Talitha L.
Published: January 2016

This chapter narrates the account of Carrie Massie, a sixteen-year-old black girl who was convicted of murdering a well-known owner of a general store in a town near Macon, Georgia, and was sentenced to forced labor. The girl's ordeal was part of a larger story of black women's sufferings in the post-Civil War South. Freedwomen and their daughters' lives were broadly circumscribed by racial hostility, violence, terror, poverty, and exclusion. The confluence of these menacing social and economic forces, combined with a predatory legal establishment, fostered a fertile environment for notions of black female crime to emerge. Thus, the body of “Negro crime”—a subcategory of race-based criminality—demonstrated racial and gendered prejudices and a desire to create causal links between the Negros' moral, mental, sexual, and biological “inferiorities,” and their “inherent” predisposition toward delinquency.
Broken, Ruined, and Wrecked
Authors: LeFlouria Talitha L.
Published: January 2016

This chapter addresses the misdemeanant experience of black convict women in New South Georgia. Such an experience has proven that chain gangs are “worse than slavery.” Like female felons, minor offenders' lives were distinguished by perennial work routines, cosmic exploitation, and neglect. Chain gang operators had sought to compress a large quantity of labor into a compact sentence resulting in the suffering of female chain gang laborers with serious health concerns. In addition, the exoneration of feeble, unproductive women workers had been, in most cases, steered by the economic infeasibility of maintaining sick laborers, who were incapable of expanding local economies and unable to provide for the state's physical and monetary advancement.
The Wife of his Youth
Authors: Marvel William
Published: January 2016

This chapter focuses on Edwin M. Stanton's personal life, career, and involvement in politics. Stanton corresponded with Mary Lamson as often as his office schedule and study permitted. Just as Stanton finished his legal education at Kenyon College, President Andrew Jackson was preoccupied with his battle against the Bank of the United States. With his income as a lawyer rising, his family scattered, and Mary patiently waiting, Stanton concluded it was time to unite everyone under one roof. In 1836 he and Mary got married. In the autumn elections of 1837 he filed as a Democrat for prosecuting attorney of Harrison County, and won. Stanton became a member of the Democratic Party's Central Committee for the nineteenth Congressional District and attended the party conventions in Columbus, Ohio each winter. The rest of this chapter discusses Stanton's legal career and his role in the presidential campaign of 1840, along with Mary's death.
The California Mission
Authors: Marvel William
Published: January 2016

This chapter examines Edwin M. Stanton's California mission and its impact on his career and reputation. As Stanton and Ellen were enjoying their honeymoon, American politics became increasingly volatile. Slavery had come to dominate public debate, especially after 1854, when Senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska legislation. The hard-fought Compromise of 1850 had left the territories of Utah and New Mexico to decide their own fate when they applied for statehood, and Douglas's legislation extended the same privilege to Kansas and Nebraska. That concession secured the Southern votes, but it simultaneously alarmed legions of Northerners who had been content with barring slavery's expansion. Salmon P. Chase, Ben Wade, and other antislavery senators seized on Douglas's bill as proof of Southern aggression. At the height of the Panic of 1857, Stanton received an offer to serve as government counsel in California and work on various land cases there.
The Court Spy
Authors: Marvel William
Published: January 2016

This chapter examines Edwin M. Stanton's secret communication with the Buchanan administration's political enemies in the North, to whom he routinely revealed the confidential discussions of the president's inner circle. A decade after Stanton entered President James Buchanan's cabinet as attorney general, Jeremiah Black admitted that some people had tried to caution him about Stanton. One of those people was Black's son-in-law, James F. Shunk, who cautioned that Black's trust in Stanton was misplaced. The rest of this chapter discusses two controversies that hounded the Buchanan administration: the disappearance of $870,000 worth of Indian bonds from the Interior Department and the planned shipment of scores of heavy guns from the Allegheny arsenal near Pittsburgh to destinations along the Gulf Coast. It also considers the controversy surrounding Buchanan's decision on Major Robert Anderson's occupation of Fort Sumter as well as his stand on secession and Stanton's surreptitious services to the incoming administration of Abraham Lincoln.
The War Within
Authors: Marvel William
Published: January 2016

This chapter examines the problems that beset the Lincoln administration at the height of the Civil War. Edwin M. Stanton chose the man who would help him smash the coterie of Major General George B. McClellan: Joseph Holt, who would assume the post of judge advocate general. Because of their close association during the rest of the war, it bears noting that Holt could be just as duplicitous as Stanton. The rest of this chapter discusses McClellan's battle with Robert E. Lee's rear guard at South Mountain, Maryland; Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; the losses suffered by Northerners in the war against the South; speculations about the relations between Lincoln and Stanton; the conflict between Radicals and conservatives; the desertion and mutiny within the ranks of the Army of the Potomac; and Stanton's lobbying for a more comprehensive draft law to compensate for the attrition in the Northern armies.
Organizing Victory
Authors: Marvel William
Published: January 2016

This chapter examines Edwin M. Stanton's role in the Republican Party's victory in the October 1863 elections in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. In March 1863, Stanton sent Lorenzo Thomas on a recruiting mission and urged him to impress on General Ulysses S. Grant's officers that resistance to the raising or use of black troops would not be tolerated. The conflict between Grant and General John A. McClernand at the height of the Civil War resurrected the concern over Grant's capacity and conduct. The rest of this chapter discusses Stanton's appointment of Charles Dana as a confidential agent of the War Department, his punishment of soldiers whose political viewpoints differed from his, and his justification for military rule. It also considers the death of Christopher Wolcott, the confrontation between George G. Meade and Robert E. Lee in the Battle of Gettysburg, and the riots in New York due to the government's attempt to impose the new draft law.
Avenging Angel
Authors: Marvel William
Published: January 2016

This chapter examines Edwin M. Stanton's efforts to implicate Confederate officials—and to demonize the entire South—in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. The military trial resumed immediately after the grand review. When each of the witnesses had testified satisfactorily, Stanton or Joseph Holt would recommend their release and pardon. All eight of the defendants were convicted. The rest of this chapter discusses the clemency petition for the accused; Stanton's order to have the homes of prominent Confederates searched for evidence against the officials he and Holt were trying to implicate in the Lincoln assassination; the trial of Henry Wirz; the Radicals' dispute with President Andrew Johnson over black suffrage; and Johnson's veto of the Freedmen's Bureau bill.
The Trojan Horse
Authors: Marvel William
Published: January 2016

This chapter examines Edwin M. Stanton's surreptitious moves that it seems undermined Andrew Johnson's presidency. It begins by discussing the New Orleans riot and its impact on Johnson's administration and how the president's obstinacy alienated him from a solid majority in Congress. It then considers Stanton's suppression of the telegram from Absalom Baird that was intended for Johnson; Johnson's tour of the North; Stanton's support for Joseph Holt, who was accused of suborning perjury in prosecuting the suspects in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865; Stanton's opposition to the Tenure of Office Act and faithlessness to Johnson's Southern policy; and the debate between Johnson and his cabinet over Henry Stanbery's evolving interpretation of the Reconstruction Acts.
The Wake County Public School System
Authors: Parcel Toby L. , Taylor Andrew J.
Published: January 2016

This chapter examines how Wake's school system and assignment policy changed after the establishment of a single countywide district in 1976. It discusses how the district achieved an early consensus regarding both the importance of diversity and of improving student educational outcomes. It also describes key strategies, such as magnets, that Wake County used to mix public schools. The chapter then investigates the root causes of the dissolution of consensus in an examination of the major demographic changes caused by dramatic population growth, the rise of the county's Republican Party, and the subsequent increased role of partisanship and ideology in local elections of all types. It demonstrates how divisions within the school board along partisan lines affected many issues, including funding and bond issuances. It describes the social and political events beginning around 2000 that set the stage for the 2009 election and, in turn, concerted efforts to change Wake's diversity assignment policy.
A Focus of Conflict I
Authors: Parcel Toby L. , Taylor Andrew J.
Published: January 2016

This chapter focuses on the general assignment policy of the Wake school board. It emphasizes that disagreements about the conflicting cultural models of public education were a leading cause of the breakdown of Wake's consensus. Wake initially assigned students in order to balance schools by race, but as districts across the country came under political and legal pressure to end the practice, the school board utilized socioeconomic status. Supporters argued that the approach was fair, essential to the system's overall academic achievement, made the area attractive to newcomers, and involved the busing of only a small proportion of students for diversity reasons. Advocating the neighborhood model, opponents argued that diversity restricted choice, caused hardship by assigning children far from their homes, undermined collective academic performance, and constituted a form of social engineering. The chapter presents survey results demonstrating that, although inversely correlated according to media coverage, respondent preferences for diversity and neighborhood schools were not diametrically opposed. The findings suggest that neighborhood schools had a high degree of support among many citizens, but a subset was also very supportive of diversity. This chapter also investigates diversity preferences by race and shows that African American views on school assignment policies were very different from whites' views.
Race, Nationality, and Gender
Authors: Shoemaker Nancy
Published: January 2016

This chapter explores how the policies and customs regulating life on the ship were racially strategic and selective. The social landscape of the whaleship was complicated in its makeup, as native whalemen constituted just one small part of this diverse workforce. The merchant investors, who did the initial hiring, sought trustworthy, skilled officers and cheap, hardy, and obedient laborers. With profit as their objective, they were open to hiring any man who could do the job but not if the crew’s social composition threatened orderly collaboration. From the top down, federal laws and industry standards applied measures to enhance productivity by dampening the volatility such diversity produced: they privileged rank over race and regulated the number of foreigners serving on American ships.
Cultural Encounters
Authors: Shoemaker Nancy
Published: January 2016

This chapter discusses the dominance of cultural encounters depicting the white, clothed, civilized, Christians coming upon the primitive, exotic, naked, heathen (or newly missionized naïve Christians), savage, and dark skinned “Indians” within the colonial imagination, despite the racial diversity of whaling crews outright debunking that myth with the mere fact that the “Indians” in question had stood on both sides of the beach. The cultural encounter narrative as a way of seeing had an ideological utility, which gave it an endurance despite its inherent fallacy. Although the obvious diversity of whaling crews should have been enough to expose the cracks in tales of white exploration and conquest, nineteenth-century whaling literature did not confront the ambiguity of the category “Indian” head-on. One consequence is that such representations made invisible the labor of colonized people in imperial expansion.
New Heaven
Authors: Shoemaker Nancy
Published: January 2016

This chapter shows how American whaling had more of an impact on local communities around the world through the slow creep of economic, social, and cultural exchanges. In these interactions, whalemen of all backgrounds still had interests that bound them to the ship and their shipmates. Although they would become connected to “natives” and “Indians” of other places through the process of cultural contact and exchange, their status as American sailors took precedence. The Native American whalemen were not identifying as or claiming to be white, but they defined themselves as American sailors when they traveled to foreign lands because the situation they were in delegated to others the role of native.
Conclusion
Authors: Shoemaker Nancy
Published: January 2016

This concluding chapter synthesizes the historiography of Native American whaling from the previous chapters, citing the ways in which the native subject is able to rise above their position aboard a ship, yet find themselves denied of the same respect and opportunities onshore. Such a profound difference in the racially charged treatments effected toward these natives has plenty to do with the colonizing process, in which racial stereotypes and other such ideological tools had been constructed to keep the subjugated natives in line, even as these same categories and stereotypes would afford them opportunities to attain respect. The social station of Native Americans aboard and at home were vastly different because the situation—not the people—established how race would function in that setting.
Introduction
Authors: Shoemaker Nancy
Published: January 2016

This introductory chapter briefly maps the cultural ambiguity embodied by Native American whalemen as pragmatic mercantile aims—among a host of other factors—blurred racial lines within whaleship hierarchies and upset the classic colonial narratives of civilized, culturally superior European seamen touching base with savage, culturally inferior natives. These whalemen were able to move up the ranks in the ship’s pecking order; they also shifted the colonized/colonizer dynamic as they stepped onto port. Yet despite the ambiguities afforded these crewmen as they traversed these varying cultural spaces, their lives at home remained as subjugated, inferior savages undergoing a process of “civilization” at reservations and the like—a drastic counterpoint to the racial freedoms they obtained at sea.
They Want to See You Fail
Authors: Silver Lauren J.
Published: January 2016

This introductory chapter sets out the organization of the book. This book reveals how the child welfare system compromises its own mission, and how it fails to lessen hardship in the lives of young families. It argues that the child welfare system has blocked the youth from prospering through unfair spatial divides between administrative settings and program spaces. It also analyzes the ideal of self-sufficiency and how it compelled both the youth and caseworkers to hide their structural insecurities. Finally, it explores how conditions within the system caused a divisive culture of fear. The book uses feminist methodology and critical youth studies. Its main objectives are: analyzing gender in the context of constructions of race, class, and sexuality; using research for social change; and exploring researcher reflexivity.
The Program Allowed Me to Get Pregnant
Authors: Silver Lauren J.
Published: January 2016

This chapter defines and demonstrates a range of individual and collective resistances. Most often, clients rebelled in program familiar zones, where they believed they would likely avoid punishment. Sometimes, confrontation escalated and backfired against particular clients. In one case, a Child and Youth Services (CYS) worker ignored the official procedures involved in taking a client’s child under custody. The client was so upset that she had hit her SIL program manager, and charges were brought against the client as a result. The mother had little recourse against the CYS worker’s unreasonable discretion to take her child away, and her resistance appeared to stem from helplessness and rage. Thus, unpredictable repercussions and shifting alliances contribute to a divisive ethos of blame among participants.
Introduction
Authors: Gilbert David
Published: January 2016

This introductory chapter reflects on the implications of the 1912 Carnegie Hall concert held by the Clef Club Orchestra, as black musicians skirted the color line in appealing to the broader cultural sensibilities of their audiences—be they black or white. The Clef Club concert was memorable because it disrupted so many basic assumptions that Americans had about the pressing issues of race, culture, modernity, and nation in the early years of the twentieth century. It transcended the commonly accepted distinctions between art and entertainment, folk and modern, African American identity and American national character. Conductor James Reese Europe's ensemble called attention to these opposing poles of cultural value, seeming to identify them as social constructs even as he undermined them.
Appreciate the Noble and the Beautiful within Us
Authors: Gilbert David
Published: January 2016

This chapter describes how the Hotel Marshall musicians advanced new and transgressive approaches to racial politics and representations. Their visions of blackness saw beauty in the vernacular of the masses, even as they are snubbed by the cultural elitism of the Talented Tenth's own efforts at racial uplift. Instead of trying to change the masses, the Marshall community attempted to change the perception of black vernacular expression. The Marshall musicians' strategies for increasing the professional and cultural value of black commercial culture presented a different approach to racial uplift. Centering on professionalizing African American performers and expanding the number of blacks who could become full-time professionals, Marshall entertainers expanded the social respect, cultural authority, and weekly wages of hundreds of blacks, not only in New York but throughout America.
You Ain’T Shit if You Don’t Ride a Harley
Authors: McBee Randy D.
Published: January 2016

This chapter examines the rise of the middle-class motorcyclist and how their impact on motorcycle culture shaped the public's perception of motorcyclists. Postwar affluence and an increasingly pervasive consumer culture contributed to the 1960s “craze” for motorcycling. The middle-class motorcycle enthusiast made motorcycling respectable and family friendly and stood in sharp contrast to the traditional working-class rider. The middle-class rider was simply better at consuming motorcycles than producing them and affected a style that highlighted those differences. The potential to change motorcycling culture was clear, and it translated into an increasingly bitter debate over brand-name loyalty, highlighting the ways in which race shaped motorcycle culture but also reflected a deep-seated class divide that became more conspicuous as consumption became one of the defining issues dividing motorcyclists.
The Value of a Slow Break-in Cannot Be Overemphasized
Authors: McBee Randy D.
Published: January 2016

This chapter examines the arguments in support of helmets and the emergence of a motorcycle rights movement to oppose them. While helmet advocates struggled to establish an ideological focus during these early years, divisions among riders based on class were particularly conspicuous and responsible for the establishment of helmet regulation and the conflict that undermined effective resistance to it. Support for helmets was never simply about the loss of life but the loss of middle-class life, and opposition to helmets was never simply about freedom or individual rights. While motorcyclists began organizing “freedom of the road” demonstrations at state capitals across the country, they also consistently blamed these middle-class riders for the rise in the number of accidents and fatalities and for the enactment of helmet laws and other forms of regulation.
Erratum to: Quantifying Socioeconomic and Lifestyle Related Health Risks: Burden of Cardiovascular Disease Among Indian Males
Authors: Purohit Neetu , Bhati Divya K. , Gupta Shiv D. , Kundu Azad S.
Published: January 2016

During the type-setting of the final version of the article,1 the title was misspelled on the website, page 2 of Word Document, and page 2 of PDF. The title was written as “Quantifying Socioeconomic and Lifestyle Related Health Risks: Burden of Cardiocascular Disease Among Indian Males” and the corrected title is “Quantifying Socioeconomic and Lifestyle Related Health Risks: Burden of Cardiovascular Disease Among Indian Males.”
Countess Almaviva and the Carceral Redemption: Introducing a Musical Utopia into the Prison Walls
Authors: Romero Luis Gómez
Published: January 2016

Modernity conceived prison as a primary vehicle for the humanization of criminal punishment. Contrarily to this theoretical and normative model, the practice of imprisonment has conserved several elements of the physical and psychological affliction typical of pre-modern forms of criminal retribution. Prison actually embodies a major theme of dystopian fiction because of the useless suffering it somehow implies. Nonetheless, the concrete dystopian experience of incarceration has frequently been challenged by the utopian horizons of opera, which Charles Fourier once conceived as a passionate pivot for social change. From Fidelio to The Shawshank Redemption, opera has represented a utopian wonder of voices that soar “higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream.” Surrounded by the walls of prison, opera is not merely a snobbish artistry: it may constitute a real pre-text for the rights and dignity even infamous men and women deserve.
Examining perceived barriers to healthcare access for Hispanics in a southern urban community
Authors: Edward Jean , Hines-Martin Vicki
Published: January 2016

Background: Disparities in healthcare access among Hispanics in the U.S. continue to rise as a result of contextually based social determinants of health. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceived barriers to primary healthcare access among Hispanics residing in an underserved, urban region of Louisville, Kentucky.Methods: Guided by critical ethnographic methods, twenty participants were interviewed using a descriptive survey and semistructured interview guide to assess perceived access barriers. Descriptive and analytic coding, and content analysis techniques were used to identify emerging categories, concepts and themes.Results: Persistent barriers to healthcare access were related to time and availability, healthcare personnel and patient-provider communication; documentation; limited income and health insurance coverage; and, discrimination and cultural barriers.Conclusions: Findings inform healthcare systems by identifying the subjective and socially constructed barriers to healthcare access and promoting programs and policies to eliminate access barriers for Hispanics.
Of Hats and Trains: Cultural Traffic in Leskov‘s and Dostoevski‘s Westward Journeys
Authors: Dwyer Anne
Published: January 2016

The first train line connecting St. Petersburg with western Europe opened in 1862, providing the occasion for Fedor Dostoevskii and Nikolai Leskov to take positions in regard to train travel, cultural traffic, and Russia's insertion into modernity. Anne Dwyer's analysis of Dostoevskii'sWinterNotes on Summer Impressionsand Leskov's “From a Travel Diary” reveals an essential paradox. While Leskov is eager to foster the railroad, he switches hats with ease and offers pragmatic performances of an imperial identity based on his competency in the languages of the borderlands. In contrast, the nationalist Dostoevskii fulminates against train travel yet explores the ways in which modernity's onset changes human experience and literary possibilities. Their bifurcated yet equally ambivalent responses to modernity as emblematized by the railroad illuminate the diversity of attempts to articulate a Russian identity in relationship both to Russia's own people(s) and to western Europe in the modern age.
Milcho Manchevski’sBefore the Rainand the Ethics of Listening
Authors: Crnković Gordana P
Published: January 2016

An artistic, popular, and critical success, the filmBefore the Rain(1994), written and directed by Macedonian-American Milcho Manchevski, has been the subject of much critical work largely dominated by issues related to the setting of the story (early 1990s Balkans) and also by the concepts of seeing, watching, and being watched, and the relation of all this with the Balkan discourses. Gordana P. Crnković argues for moving away from this framework in order to explore the film's aesthetic achievements operating in a different sphere, and specifically the film's creation of the practice of proper listening taken in a more philosophical sense envisioned by Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gemma Corradi Fiumara. Intertwining close readings of the film's scenes and especially the film's soundscape with these philosophers’ insights, Crnković shows how listening in this film grounds personal ethics and political acts, and how it relates to the spheres of childhood, nature, and one's own inner voice ordaimon.
Laughter under Socialism: Exposing the Ocular in Soviet Jocularity
Authors: Oushakine Serguei Alex.
Published: January 2016

What do we need, comrades? We need the broad masses laughing as much as possible. We need laughter so badly, it is enough to make you weep. . . . We need laughter. Thoughtful, serious laughter without the slightest grin.

Nikolai Erdman and Vladimir Mass,A Meeting about Laughter, 1933

Laughter can be different. Yet, such terms as “ours” [nash] and “theirs” [ne nash]—trite as they are—have no difficulty in finding dieir proper coun-terparts. . . . “Our laughter” and “their laughter” are not mere abstractions. The two are separated by a gulf of different social reasoning [propasf raznogo sotsial´nogo osmysleniia].

—Sergei Eisenstein,The Bolsheviks Are Laughing,1930s
The Tramp in a Skirt: Laboring theRadiant Path
Authors: Katsnelson Anna Wexler
Published: January 2016

In this article, Anna Wexler Katsnelson focuses on Grigorii Aleksandrov's musical comedy,'Svetlyi put'(The Radiant Path, 1940) as a way of investigating the modes of screening laughter in the USSR in the 1930s and exploring the reasons for the film's gradual disavowal of laughter. The key questions posed by the article are why does laughter disappear from the nominally comedic, purposefully merrySvetlyi put'?Where is its affective energy redirected? And, finally, is laughter on film at all possible under the conditions of high Stalinism?
Mr. Twister in the Land of the Bolsheviks: Sketching Laughter in Marshak's Poem
Authors: Leving Yuri
Published: January 2016

Samuil Marshak's poemMister Twister(1933) is a biting satire about an evil American capitalist who travels to the Soviet Union with his spoiled wife and daughter. The work enjoyed immense popularity among generations of Soviet children until the 1980s and is considered a prime example of a socialist spoof on a genre of travelogue oriented toward mass culture. Yuri Leving puts Marshak's poem into a historical context and observes it against the ever-changing ideological landscape of Soviet literature during the three decades following the poem's initial publication in the satirical magazine for children,Ezh(Hedgehog). In Twister, Marshak was able to strike a careful balance between the comic and the ideological: although an obviously satirical portrayal, the protagonist sometimes appears more sympathetic than malignant. Over the years Marshak tried to adapt his poem to shifting official climates, a process that resulted in a series of curious metamorphoses highlighting a double-edged relationship between the mechanisms of oppression, auto-censorship, and laughter under state socialism. In addition, the article surveys Vladimir Lebedev's illustrative convoy of "Mister Twister" throughout its rich republication history and discusses visual representations vis-à-vis the issue of producing (rather than depicting) totalitarian humor.
Recalling the Dead: Repetition, Identity, and the Witness in Varlam Shalamov'sKolymskie rasskazy
Authors: Young Sarah J.
Published: January 2016

From recurring characters to the retelling of stories, repetition plays a central role in Varlam Shalamov'sKolymskie rasskazy(Kolyma Tales). Sarah J. Young examines how repetition functions in Shalamov's collections of short stories as an indicator of trauma, by foregrounding the tensions created by the erosion of identity in the labor camp and its connection to the gulag survivor/narrator's problematic relationship to memory. At the same time, repetition also becomes a means of drawing the uncomprehending reader into the text to act as witness to that trauma. Comparing Shalamov's mode of testimony to Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the nonsurvivor as the true witness to Auschwitz, drawn from Primo Levi's conception, Young argues that Shalamov's stories bear witness to the trauma of Kolyma and to those who did not survive it, not through a transformation of the writer, but through a reciprocity between writer and reader.
No More Horsing Around: Sex, Love, and Motherhood in Tolstoi's Kholstomer
Authors: LeBlanc Ronald D.
Published: January 2016

By giving us a horse's perspective on human life, Lev Tolstoi's Kholstomer (1886) has usually been recognized in the west as a stellar example of the author's use of “defamiliarization.” Most of the critical attention the story has received in Russia, by contrast, consists of Soviet-era studies diat examine the creative history of the text and/or remark on its satiric elements. In this article, Ronald D. LeBlanc examines instead the treatment of the themes of sex, love, and motherhood in Tolstoi's story about a castrated horse. In particular, he explores the significance that castration— with its accompanying cessation of sexual desire—appears to have in this story about a selfless gelding, a tale that may be read as the expression of a desire on the author's part to be unburdened of the affliction of sexual lust and thus to be freed to pursue a more spiritual, less carnal existence on earth.
The Aesthetics of Disaster: Blok, Messina, and the Decadent Sublime
Authors: Presto Jenifer
Published: January 2016

In this article, Jenifer Presto argues that the 1908 Messina-Reggio Calabria earthquake had an impact on Aleksandr Blok no less significant than that which the 1755 Lisbon earthquake had on writers of the Enlightenment and proceeds to demonstrate how it shaped Blok's aesthetics of catastrophe. This aesthetics can best be termed the “decadent sublime, ” an inversion of the Kantian dynamic sublime with its emphasis on bourgeois optimism. Following Immanuel Kant, Blok acknowledges the fear and attraction that nature's forces can inspire; however, unlike Kant, he insists that modern man remains powerless in the face of nature, owing to his decadence—a decadence endemic to European civilization. The decadent sublime is manifested in a host of Blok's writings, ranging from “The Elements and Culture” to Lightning Flashes of Art and The Scythians; it is intensely visual and is indebted to images of ruin by artists such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Luca Signorelli.
What Is the Leninist Legacy? Assessing Twenty Years of Scholarship
Authors: LaPorte Jody , Lussier Danielle N.
Published: January 2016

In this review essay, Jody LaPorte and Danielle N. Lussier examine the “legacies” paradigm dominating postcommunist scholarship in the social sciences. The legacies paradigm has produced a growing list of factors that qualify as historical antecedents to contemporary outcomes without establishing a set of shared standards to guide comparative analysis. Scholars have paid less attention to developing a conceptual definition of legacy, thereby limiting our ability to evaluate the importance of historical factors versus more proximate causes. This critique presents a thoughtful analysis of the communist legacy, develops a typology that can be used to categorize legacy variables for meaningful comparison, and brings the concept into discussion with the broader literature on historical institutions and path dependency. By suggesting tools to aid comparative study, LaPorte and Lussier’s goal is to stimulate both conceptual and empirical analysis in evaluating the effect of communism on contemporary outcomes.
The Industry of Truing: Socialist Realism, Reality, Realization
Authors: Petrov Petre
Published: January 2016

Most existing accounts of socialist realism rely, implicitly or explicitly, on a commonsense notion of truth as correspondence between representation and its object (the state of affairs being represented). In this view, socialist realism is commonly denounced as an epistemological fraud, while quasi-dialectical formulas such as "reality in its revolutionary development" are viewed condescendingly as the fraud's fanciful garnish. Such an approach fails to see in Stalinist culture a radical shift in the understanding of truth—a shift that has less to do with Marxist orthodoxy than it does with the intellectual reflexes of early twentieth-century modernity. In this article, Petre Petrov sets out to describe this shift and, in doing so, to propose a novel theoretical framework for understanding Stalinist socialist realism. The work of Martin Heidegger from the late 1920s through the 1930s serves as an all-important reference point in the discussion insofar as it articulates in philosophical idiom a turn from an epistemological to an ontological conception of truth.