bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Add‐on mirtazapine improves depressive symptoms in schizophrenia: a double‐blind randomized placebo‐controlled study with an open‐label extension phase
Authors: Terevnikov Viacheslav , Stenberg Jan‐Henry , Tiihonen Jari , Joffe Marina , Burkin Mark , Tchoukhine Evgueni , Joffe Grigori
Published: April 2011

Depression is common in schizophrenia and worsens its course. The role of antidepressants for schizophrenic depression remains unclear. In this study, the efficacy of add‐on mirtazapine on depression in schizophrenia was explored in a subsidiary arm of a recent randomized controlled trial.

Patients (n = 41) with chronic but stable schizophrenia and inadequate response to stable doses of different first‐generation antipsychotics were treated with add‐on mirtazapine 30 mg or placebo during a 6‐week double‐blind phase and with open‐label add‐on mirtazapine during a 6‐week extension phase. Efficacy measures were the Calgary Depression Scale for Schizophrenia (CDSS) and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale depression item.

During the double‐blind phase, both measures' scores decreased significantly in the mirtazapine group but not in the placebo group (for the CDSS, 52.0% vs 19.6%, respectively). During the open‐label phase, both groups demonstrated significant improvements. In between‐group comparison, a trend favoring mirtazapine did not reach statistical significance. The changes in the CDSS correlated positively with those in the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale negative, positive and total (sub)scales for mirtazapine‐treated patients during the double‐blind phase.

Depressed patients with schizophrenia may benefit from mirtazapine–first‐generation antipsychotics combination, with no increased risk for psychosis. However, more studies are needed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Fibroblast growth factor 23 regulates renal 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D and phosphate metabolism via the MAP kinase signaling pathway in Hyp mice
Authors: Ranch Daniel , Zhang Martin YH , Portale Anthony A , Perwad Farzana
Published: April 2011

In X-linked hypophosphatemia (XLH) and in its murine homologue, the Hyp mouse, increased circulating concentrations of fibroblast growth factor 23 (FGF-23) are critical to the pathogenesis of disordered metabolism of phosphate (Pi) and 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D [1,25(OH)2D]. In this study, we hypothesized that in Hyp mice, FGF-23-mediated suppression of renal 1,25(OH)2D production and Pi reabsorption depends on activation of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling. Wild-type and Hyp mice were administered either vehicle or the MEK inhibitor PD0325901 (12.5 mg/kg) orally daily for 4 days. At baseline, the renal abundance of early growth response 1 (egr1) mRNA was approximately 2-fold greater in Hyp mice than in wild-type mice. Treatment with PD0325901 greatly suppressed egr1 mRNA abundance in both wild-type and Hyp mice. In Hyp mice, PD0325901 induced an 8-fold increase in renal 1α-hydroxylase mRNA expression and a 4-fold increase in serum 1,25(OH)2D concentrations compared with vehicle-treated Hyp mice. Serum Pi levels in Hyp mice increased significantly after treatment with PD0325901, and the increase was associated with increased renal Npt2a mRNA abundance and brush-border membrane Npt2a protein expression. These findings provide evidence that in Hyp mice, MAPK signaling is constitutively activated in the kidney and support the hypothesis that the FGF-23-mediated suppression of renal 1,25(OH)2D production and Pi reabsorption depends on activation of MAPK signaling via MEK/ERK1/2. These findings demonstrate the physiologic importance of MAPK signaling in the actions of FGF-23 in regulating renal 1,25(OH)2D and Pi metabolism. © 2011 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research
Heisenberg — der Chemielehrer und Drogenkoch
Authors: Osterath Brigitte
Published: April 2011

In der US‐amerikanischen Fernsehserie “Breaking Bad” gründet ein Chemielehrer ein Start‐up der besonderen Art: Mit einem ehemaligen Schüler synthetisiert er N‐Methylamphetamin und verkauft die Aufputschdroge im großen Stil. Aber die Drogenszene hat andere Regeln als die Chemieindustrie.
Beilstein und Gmelin in Reaxys vereint
Authors: Vogt Jürgen
Published: April 2011

Der Server Reaxys enthält in einer gemeinsamen Struktur die Beilstein‐ und Gmelin‐Nachschlagewerke sowie eine Chemie‐Patentdatenbank. Suchen lässt sich nach Reaktionen wie nach chemischen, physikalischen, spektroskopischen, pharmakologischen und ökotoxikologischen Eigenschaften.
Proteomic analysis of the coagulation reaction in plasma and whole blood using PROTOMAP
Authors: Niessen Sherry , Hoover Heather , Gale Andrew J.
Published: April 2011

Proteases are critical in many physiological processes and the human genome encodes for 566 predicted proteolytic enzymes. Therefore, there is great interest in identifying and characterizing physiologic protease–substrate relationships. The coagulation cascade is a well‐described network of serine proteases. However, new interactions of the coagulation cascade with other biological pathways have been discovered only recently. Therefore, we hypothesized that a non‐biased protease degradomics analysis of the physiologic coagulation reaction would identify new interactions between the coagulation cascade and other pathways. We used the recently described PROTOMAP technique to profile the complete coagulation degradome. This analysis detected virtually all of the proteins of the coagulation cascade and identified a majority of the expected proteolytic events, suggesting significant coverage of the coagulation degradome. Multiple potential new proteolytic cleavages were detected, including two of transmembrane proteins that may be shed from the surface of blood cells. In addition, this analysis was able to identify several new potentially secreted proteins. A significant majority of the newly identified events were of proteins involved in innate immunity (complement and inflammation). This highlights potential new areas of crosstalk between these linked systems. Future studies will elucidate the details and functional consequences of these proteolytic events during coagulation.
The extracellular proteome of Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis BB‐12 reveals proteins with putative roles in probiotic effects
Authors: Gilad Ofir , Svensson Birte , Viborg Alexander H. , Stuer‐Lauridsen Birgitte , Jacobsen Susanne
Published: April 2011

Probiotics are live microorganisms that exert health‐promoting effects on the human host, as demonstrated for numerous strains of the genus Bifidobacterium. To unravel the proteins involved in the interactions between the host and the extensively used and well‐studied probiotic strain Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis BB‐12, proteins secreted by the bacterium, i.e. belonging to the extracellular proteome present in the culture medium, were identified by 2‐DE coupled with MALDI‐TOF MS. Among the 74 distinct proteins identified, 31 are predicted to carry out their physiological role either outside the cell or on its surface. These proteins include solute‐binding proteins for oligosaccharides, amino acids and manganese, cell wall‐metabolizing proteins, and 18 proteins that have been described to interact with human host epithelial cells or extracellular matrix proteins. The potential functions include binding of plasminogen, formation of fimbriae, adhesion to collagen, attachment to mucin and intestinal cells as well as induction of immunomodulative response. These findings suggest a role of the proteins in colonization of the gastrointestinal tract, adhesion to host tissues, or immunomodulation of the host immune system. The identification of proteins predicted to be involved in such interactions can pave the way towards well targeted studies of the protein‐mediated contacts between bacteria and the host, with the goal to enhance the understanding of the mode of action of probiotic bacteria.
Corrigendum to the paper ‘Linear Time Varying Model Predictive Control and its Application to Active Steering Systems: Stability Analysis and Experimental Validation’ (International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control 2008; 18(8):862–875)
Authors: Falcone P. , Borrelli F. , Asgari J. , Tseng E. H. , Hrovat D.
Published: April 2011

This note is a corrigendum of the paper ‘Linear Time Varying Model Predictive Control and its Application to Active Steering Systems: Stability Analysis and Experimental Validation’, published on the volume 18, issue 8, pages 862–875 of the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control in 2008. Next we point out a technical error in the proof of Lemma 2 of the paper, and provide the corrected version of the lemma. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Amandinea myrticola, a new corticolous species from Portugal
Authors: GIRALT Mireia , van den BOOM Pieter P.G. , ELIX John A.
Published: April 2011

Amandinea myrticola is described as new from Portugal. This corticolous species is characterized by the thin, smooth to minutely rugose and greyish thallus lacking secondary metabolites, the small lecideine apothecia which exhibit a pseudothalline margin when young and the small, smooth, Physconia-type ascospores with strongly pronounced and persistent median wall thickenings. It occurs on smooth bark in two localities characterized by a Mediterranean climate with an Atlantic influence.
Spenser's Lexicon
Authors: Gelfant Blanche H.
Published: April 2011

The Spenser of this essay is not the poet Edmund Spenser who wrote in mellifluous rhyme of chivalry and honor, but the wisecracking, hard-hitting, Boston-based private eye of Robert B. Parker's novels, a highly popular series in which murder produces mysteries, and ordinary words a disturbing, if common, mystification. Among these words —honor, courage, loyalty, friendship, andtrust, a lexicon of moral values — one of the most mystified ishonor, a cognate in the novels for coerciveness and violence. Though unremarked, this semantic slippage achieves rhetorical power as it persuades readers that virtue and violence are inseparable, and that violence and lawlessness — breaking and entering, burglary, assault, shooting to kill — are legitimate means to a moral end. Mystifications effected by an insinuating rhetoric differ from the bafflements conventional to private-eye fiction, such as the confusions created by characters who plant false clues within plots devised by mystery writers to puzzle and intrigue their readers. Typically, such crime plots end by revealing secrets concealed within a mystery's inherent darkness and within mystery novels as a literary genre. In the Spenser series, however, a melding of violence and honor produces mystifications that the narrator-hero deepens rather than dispels as he imbues familiar words with morally dubious meanings.
Clover Adams's Dark Room: Photography and Writing, Exposure and Erasure
Authors: Saltz Laura
Published: April 2011

Marian Hooper Adams, called Clover, was one of the few American women who were serious amateur photographers before the mass marketing of the Kodak in 1889. Clover first learned her craft in 1872–73 while on her honeymoon with her husband, historian Henry Adams. Henry brought along a camera to document their journey up the Nile, and Clover took up his hobby. Henry, in the tradition of expeditionary photographers, took pictures of Egyptian monuments and landscapes, whereas Clover's only extant photograph from the honeymoon portrays interior realms: it shows Henry in the stateroom of theIsis, thedahabiehthat carried the couple up the Nile (Figure 1). In the image, Henry sits within a displaced parlor, casting his gaze down and directing us inward to some subjective space. But though Henry appears before the camera, he is not the subject of the image. Clover's own interior terrain, made invisible and inaccessible, is pictured here.
Jump for Joy: The Jump Trope in African America, 1937–1941
Authors: Caponi-Tabery Gena
Published: April 2011

Fdormer Boston Celtics player and coach Bill Russell wrote, “People in all kinds of cultures are known to ‘jump for joy’ in moments of supreme happiness. Jumping is an internationally recognized expression of joy, and basketball is a sport organized around jumping.…It's possible for a player to jump because he's happy, but it's more likely that he's happy because he's jumping. I have heard players complain about almost every detail of the game — the rules, the size or color of the ball, the shape or temperature of the dressing room — but I've never heard anybody complain about the fact that the game requires jumping.”
Making Generations and Bearing Witness: Violence and Orality in Gayl Jones's Corregidora
Authors: Hardack Richard
Published: April 2011

In gayl jones's novel Corregidora, Ursa Corregidora, the protagonist and last member of many generations of women who have suffered from a history of abusive relationships centered around the question of reproduction, rejects the written word as a corollary of a male heterosexual violence associated with slavery. Ursa, as well as her author, must then face the question of how to narrate her family's once “written” history in nonpatriarchal terms. In this sense, Jones produces what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has notably designated as the “speakerly text” in African-American tradition, in this case one “designed to represent an oral literary tradition” and to claim that tradition as female (181). Jones's text is consequently structured around a complex sexual and literary antipathy between a primarily male-gendered violence and a female-gendered orality. Throughout the text, reproductive sexuality is constructed as written, violent, patriarchal, and immutably inscribed. By contrast, Jones posits orality as an alternative to male heterosexual desire and Western writing, which are thematically (and, in the end, too univocally) characterized as abusive. The violence that had been almost incestuously handed down from the Portuguese slaver Corregidora to a succession of black men in Ursa's family is ineradicably tied to the process of reproductive sexuality and written inscription. Homosexuality, though problematized for Ursa, is nevertheless imagined as predicated on several kinds of orality, particularly oral narrative and oral sex, that might offer the possibility of nonviolent relationships and noncoercive communication; the text never fully embraces that alternative, however, leaving both Ursa and the reader caught in a kind of closed system. The orality Ursa embraces is explicitly nonreproductive in the terms of slave breeding, the condition that Ursa desperately flees but reifies, and perhaps finally transcends. This orality provides Ursa an alternative to the essentialized genital definitions of the feminine that white slavers and black husbands impose.
Toward a Democratic Politics of Meaning-Making: The Transcendentalist Controversy and the Rise of Pluralist Discourse in Jacksonian Boston
Authors: Cayton Mary Kupiec
Published: April 2011

I begin with a foundational premise: that the basic beliefs about truth and morality that undergird a culture — any culture — are social and discursive constructions. I cannot establish this claim with absolute certainty, although I can provide the reasoning behind such an assertion. I can furnish models that show the explanatory power of such an assertion, and I can provide examples of people who use the premise to useful ends. But finally, the regime of truth I propose — one based on the belief that all truth is provisional and endemic to the culture that produces it — is one accepted on faith. In accepting it, I also accept as credible the rules of meaningmaking, the procedures, the heuristics, and the institutions through which the authority of truths are established in the culture(s) of which I consider myself a part. I can enter into dialogue with the community of those who, at least for the purposes of conversation, share these basic premises with me. With those who do not, I am at an impasse.
Melville's Puritan Imagination
Authors: Sheffield Marcus L.
Published: April 2011

To a remarkable degree the literary works of Herman Melville (1819–91) have been read as subversive to traditional American religious aspirations. Some early reviewers, while praising the vivid recreations of the smell of salt air and the taste of hardtack, noted the blasphemy, perversion, and immoral elements they perceived in Melville's narratives of life among the peoples of Polynesia. Especially prominent for reviewers were Melville's literary assaults on Christian missionaries. Later, as his career progressed, he appeared to abandon the vivid for the mystifying and turned to regaling his readers with profundities, allegory, and metaphysics, or so the critics said. Melville's literary reputation glowed warmly for a short while, cooled, then died. As from the dead, the reputation was reborn in the 1920s.
Charles W. Chesnutt'sThe Colonel's Dream:The Failure of Critical Realism
Authors: Wilson Matthew
Published: April 2011

C. Vann Woodward, in hisOrigins of the New South, suggestively links the economic revival in the South in the late 19th century with a literary revival, a revival that he judges as distinctly inferior to its economic counterpart: “For all the shortcomings and the comparative brevity of the revival … the Southern writers undeniably possessed solid virtues. Among them, however, one will search in vain for a realistic portrayal of their own times … the writers were too preoccupied with the quaint ‘types’ of the hinterland to notice what was going on in their own parlors” (164). Preoccupied with a nostalgic vision of region, Southern writers failed, it is generally agreed, to represent significant social changes in realistic terms. More recently, Jules Chametzky has echoed Vann Wood-ward's observation when he wrote that “local color and regionalism … became … toward the end of the nineteenth century, a strategy, largely, for ignoring or minimizing social issues of great significance” (21). Of course, not all local colorists ignored or minimized these issues – only those who I've taken to calling “weak local colorists.” Writers like Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris looked back, nostalgically, to a romanticized past; in flight from their present, they used the plantation past as a way of attempting to justify the status quo in the South at the turn of the centnry.
Enfreaking War-Injured Bodies: Fallen Soldiers in Propaganda and American Literature of the 1920s
Authors: Fahy Thomas
Published: April 2011

With P. T. Barnum's purchase of the American museum in 1840, freak shows became an organized and profitable institution that systematically used juxtaposition, innovative advertising, and questions of truth and humbug to entice audiences. Along with “scientifically” sanctioned pamphlets and cartes de visite, exhibits such as wild savages from around the world, human-animal hybrids, hermaphrodites, and armless and legless wonders played with the boundaries between self and other. Audiences could gaze safely without compunction about the displayed body as long as these distinctions were maintained within the confines of the show. But as social anxieties about difference intensified in the first few decades of the 20th century, a greater need to solidify the boundaries between black and white, male and female, and abled and disabled made this type of entertainment more disturbing and, at times, even dangerous. These concerns marked the beginning of the end for freak shows. By the 1920s, their popularity was not only threatened by changing attitudes in medical science and the rise of the film industry, but also by the aftermath of World War I.
“A Basic Unity of Experience”: The Jewishness of Ralph Ellison and the Invisible Man
Authors: Meyer Adam
Published: April 2011

Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man has elicited more than its share of critical attention ever since its first appearance in 1952. It continues to fascinate critics because, like one of its forebears, James Joyce's Ulysses, Ellison's novel contains enough material to occupy them for a very long time, no matter what their reading orientation might be. According to Crushing Strout, “Invisible Man has generated metaphysical, psychological, existential, symbolist, and folkloristic readings – all of which have their basis not only in critical fashion but in the fecundity of the novel's linguistic energy” (80). What's more, Strout's list of possible interpretive orientations doesn't begin to exhaust the fecundity of approaches one can take to the text. Ellison's novel continues to call for new ways of being read, new contexts in which to be placed so as to be better understood and appreciated.
Feminism and Alienated Labor: Rebecca Harding Davis'sLife in the Iron Mills
Authors: Roth Marty
Published: April 2011

As One of the primary works of American literature to be recovered by feminist archaeology,Life in the Iron Mills(1861) can also stand as the test of a theoretical blind spot of early feminist criticism – its inability to see “bad writing” – for Davis's novella is notably awkward in its conception and construction. An obvious reason for the lack is that this kind of judgment fulfills an assumption of patriarchy in regard to women's writing: “that the reason for the absence of women [in the literary canon] is that women have not written in the past – or that what they have written is not very good” (Spender, 1). In the older formalist critical dispensation, aesthetic defects had to be publicly identified and labeled, like Hester Prynne's badge of shame. I certainly do not mean to suggest that feminism (however constituted) has any obligation to reproduce this order of judgment, but not owning such effects has consequences. Davis's novella can temporarily resolve this dilemma by using feminism to expose the traditional aesthetics of judgment.
Pathological Identity and the Ambiguities of Race and Class: Nature and the Anxious Naturalism of Frank Norris and Rebecca Harding Davis
Authors: Germic Stephen
Published: April 2011

Distinctions are most zealously producedin theorywhere they least existin fact. This axiom is a crucial aspect of the concept of abjection as it is used by theorists of white male hysteria. Julia Kristeva writes that, for the abject, “‘unconscious’ contents remain…excludedbut in a strange fashion.” They remain excluded to a degree that “a defensiveposition[can] be established, [but] not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object” (7). In particular, it is the presence of theotherwith theselfaround which the often hysteric dance of exclusion takes place. Kristeva writes, “I abjectmyselfwithin the same motion through which T claim to establishmyself”(3).
When Nations Remember: Hiroshima in the American Consciousness and Conscience
Authors: Gross Alan G.
Published: April 2011

Routinely represented by the mushroom cloud that arose from the city immediately subsequent to the atomic attack, Hiroshima has a central place in America's collective memory; it is, to borrow historian Pierre Nora's pregnant phrase, an Americanlieu de mémoire. In the American psyche, Hiroshima is not a place; it is an event of a special kind, one that is “immediately invested with symbolic significance” (Nora, 18). Even as the attack unfolded, even as the bomb left the bomb-bay doors, Hiroshima was “being commemorated in advance,” an event that was transformed, as it occurred, into a denning moment in national identity (18). Did the mushroom cloud mark an American triumph, the last act in the drama of World War II, or did it mask the inception of a new era for which America must take prime responsibility, an era of nuclear terror?
Lorelei's Doomed Performance: Anita Loos and the American Dream
Authors: Silverman Jonathan
Published: April 2011

When Anita Loos wrote her best-selling novels,Gentlemen Prefer Blondes(1925) andBut Gentlemen Marry Brunettes(1928), American women were in a state of flux. Buoyed by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, many middle-class and upper-class women expected to play a larger role in public life. Nonetheless, men expected women to undertake the same roles of wife and mother as women of previous generations — a demand that put many women and men in conflict. While suffrage had not eliminated the myths and beliefs that bound women earlier in the century, women believed they had tools similar to those implicitly endorsed by Horatio Alger, such as education and determination, to enable them to move into the public sphere.
Transpacific Worlds: Visualizing Asian America inChan is MissingandDim Sum
Authors: Tang Edward
Published: April 2011

In a 1990 interview for the Bill Moyers television series AWorld of Ideas, the Asian-American writer Bharati Mukherjee assessed the cultural experiences of Asian immigrants in the Americas. Playing on the rhetoric of 19th-century Manifest Destiny, she asserted that Asian immigrants should come to America to “conquer” it, to possess the nation and make its ideals their own. After all, she argued, many of the original Euro-American pioneers and settlers had been “hustlers” capable of great violence in their westward conquest of the land and native peoples. Arriving from the East, Asian immigrants metaphorically would have to do battle to make the nation more inclusive, and actively overthrow their colonized images as “outsiders” or “Orientals” that have dominated American culture to this day. Doing so, however, requires that these newcomers to the West also “murder” their old selves. In her novelJasmine(1989), Mukherjee elaborates: “There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams.” Because America represents a “stage for transformation,” as she tells Moyers, these dreams of hope, of having choices and opportunities, are being claimed and reinvented continuously as different waves of new arrivals modify or challenge the rules of interaction. Asian immigrants must therefore cast off their stifling Old World traditions, ones that perpetuate “cynicism, irony, and despair” when reconstructing and negotiating through a cultural order now altered by their very presence in the United States.
The White “Bystander” and the Black Journalist “Abroad”: Albion W. Tourgée and Ida B. Wells as Allies Against Lynching
Authors: Karcher Carolyn L.
Published: April 2011

In March 1886, twenty-four-year-old Ida B. Wells wrote in her diary: “Read all day, after going home, ‘Bricks without Straw’ by Judge Tourgée. It deals with the Reconstruction era of Negro freedom and American history, and I like it somewhat. The writer is actuated by a noble purpose and tells some startling truths.” Wells was referring to Albion W. Tourgée's 1880 novel centering around a group of North Carolina freed-people, who buy land, prosper as tobacco farmers, set up a church and school, and vote for politicians sympathetic to their interests, until Ku Klux Klan terrorism and the return to power of a white-supremacist government reduce them to neoslavery. The qualifier “somewhat” may reflect Wells's disappointment with the pessimistic ending, which leaves little room for black agency after the crushing of resistance.
The Life of Mary Anderson: An Intimate Response to the Turn-of-the-Century World of Transatlantic Migration
Authors: Blower Brooke L.
Published: April 2011

On the green slopes of Slieve Martin in County Down where the Mourne Mountains reach Carlingford Lough rests a forty-ton glacial rock called Cloughmore. According to Irish folklore, the giant Fionn M'Comhal hurled the enormous boulder at Benandonner, his Caledonian foe from Scotland, and many believe that ancient Druids chose the site for their rituals. Rain obscures the view from the stone's side some two hundred days of the year, but on a clear day, a stunning vista from Cloughmore emerges: streams trickling down to the shores of the deep Irish Sea and, amidst woods running uphill, the small village of Rostrevor.
The Road from Memorial Hall: Future Imperfect inThe Bostonians
Authors: Griffin Martin
Published: April 2011

Henry James'S first substantial engagement with matters of nation, reconciliation, and memory — and his last until the “Richmond” chapter ofThe American Scenein 1907 — appeared almost twenty years after the end of the Civil War. Twenty years had also passed since James's 1865Nationreview of Walt Whitman'sDrum-Taps, with its caustic dismissal of the collection as “monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect,” and its final comment that the nation did not suffer through years of war “to put up with spurious poetry afterwards” (“Mr. Walt Whitman,” 626). There is an eerie foreshadowing, in the juxtaposition and the flavor of those phrases, of the trope of national reconciliation in James's novelThe Bostonians(1886). Persuading the soul and the slighting of the intellect are questions of importance in that later text, but time has passed and people have changed. In this novel, the journey to the future now loops back and around, through memory and ideology, confusing and wrong-footing both political thought and emotional affinity. The difference between the James of the Whitman review and the author ofThe Bostoniansis that the latter is no longer certain of where the spurious is located, or how the soul and the intellect — or even if such a dualistic paradigm can be maintained — should now respond to slights and persuasion. The chain of readings that has developed around the novel has itself looped back and around, from approving nods toward thesentiment of sex, through interrogations of the nature of American realism, to the unearthing of the conscious or unconscious empowerment of homoerotic passion.
Fear of a Nonwhite Planet: Clare Boothe Luce, Race, and American Foreign Policy
Authors: Mariano Marco
Published: April 2011

Clare Boothe Luce was arguably one of the most well-known and controversial women in midcentury America. Journalist and playwright, Connecticut Republican congresswoman and New York socialite, she was also the first American woman to be assigned to a major diplomatic post, as she was the U.S. ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956.
Norman Thomas and the Struggle Against Internment
Authors: Robinson Greg
Published: April 2011

Historians of the wartime removal and mass incarceration of West Coast Americans of Japanese ancestry, commonly called theJapanese American internment, have examined with care and thoroughness the actions of the government and of the anti-Japanese-American forces that instigated the signing of Executive Order 9066. Most scholars, with the exception of Robert Shaffer, have paid comparatively little attention to the writings and activities of those non-Japanese Americans who opposed the internment policy. This is no doubt a result of the fact that the number of people who publicly challenged or opposed the government was small, especially at the outset, and that they were unable to mobilize public opinion in favor of Japanese Americans. However, the study of these dissenters is vital to understanding the internment, not as an exercise in political courage or feel-good humanitarianism, but because it points up the level of general awareness of the injustice done to Japanese Americans. By revealing the existence and contours of public debate over the treatment of Japanese Americans, it both suggests, at least heuristically, the availability of possible alternatives to internment and at the same time demonstrates the limits of most people's willingness to follow such alternatives.
Hardly “Small Talk”: Discussing Race in the Writing of Hisaye Yamamoto
Authors: Briones Matthew M.
Published: April 2011

On Saturday, April 13, 1946, an unremarkable headline on page 4 of theLos Angeles Tribune, one of the area's black weeklies, read, “Fontana tragedy was accident, Kenny reports after probe.” Without a credited byline, the article proceeds to deliver the facts of the case: on December 16, 1945, a suspicious fire broke out in the partially built home of O'Day Short, an African American, in the predominantly white suburb of Fontana, fifty miles east of Los Angeles. Mr. Short, his wife, and their two children perished in the fire. Robert W. Kenny, attorney general of California, investigated the incident after “protests of ‘whitewash’ from black organizations and sympathetic white groups,” aided by the San Bernardino County Court. The article reprinted the attorney general's formal statement: “There is no evidence that the fire was of incendiary origin or indicating the identity of any person or persons as the perpetrator of a crime; to the contrary, all evidence adduced supported the conclusion that the fire was accidental.” According to the article, “Kenny's report, besides officially clearing the case of arson, also dismissed the possibility of organized vigilante activity in Fontana with its terse concluding statement, ‘No evidence of such activity has been found.’”
The State of (Dis)Union: American Studies in Britain
Authors: Macpherson Heidi Slettedahl , Kaufman Will
Published: April 2011

“What's in a name?” Janice A. Radway asked in her 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association (1), invoking, without explicit comment, a transatlantic literary reference to explore the Americanness of the ASA's title. Such a gesture speaks to the increasingly transatlantic or comparative element apparent in studies of American culture, both in the United States and elsewhere. What's in a collective proper noun? one might also ask. (And don't those words — proper, collective — just itch to be explored themselves?) If anything, American Studies presents itself as neither collective nor proper, but as an arena for the multiple explorations of mythical Americanness and the boundaries and borders of the term. Lee E. Heller argues that the very term American Studies is “reflective of a variety of imperialist erasures and appropriations” (337), but even Radway could come up with no better term to replace it, trying out a variety of cumbersome titles before returning to the original as the inadequate but perhaps inevitable designation of what we as Americanists do.

If Radway (rightly) questioned the American designation, here we might look again at the second term, for American Studies is delineated with a capital S in the United Kingdom, and often (though not always) by a lowercase s in the United States. Does size matter? Is American Studies in the United Kingdom different from American studies as written, read, produced, and enacted in the United States? The clear divisions suggested here — Americans write studies, Britons write Studies — may be as false as the old, nationally bounded constructions of French feminism versus Anglo-American feminism, and the peregrinations of academics across the globe mean that many British Americanists, like ourselves, have America hiding in our backgrounds (if you don't know us) and foregrounded in our accents (if you do).
“Our Domestic Trials with Freedmen and Others”: A White South Carolinian's Diary of African-American “Exhibitions of Freedom,” 1865–80
Authors: Strickland Jeffery
Published: April 2011

In October 1865, Jacob Schirmer returned to Charleston, South Carolina, after more than three years refuge from the Civil War in the village of Edge-field, South Carolina. Schirmer had brought his slaves with him to Edgefield, but they did not return to Charleston with him, choosing instead to “realize their Freedom” (diary entry for October 28, 1865). Schirmer, a German American, kept a regular diary from 1826 until his death in 1880. Following the Civil War, though, he also commenced a separate journal — “Our Domestic Trials with Freedmen and Others” — in which he recorded his dealings with domestic workers in the free labor system. He hired three domestic servants: a female cook and washer, a male butler, and a male gardener. For the next twenty-five years, Schirmer struggled with the transition from slavery to freedom. “Our Domestic Trials” documents not only Schirmer's reaction to the revolutionary social changes of the era but also offers a telling picture of the ways in which African Americans responded to their newfound freedom and their determination to maintain that freedom.

Jacob Schirmer was born in 1803 into a well-known German-American family in Charleston. Schirmer's grandfather was Jacob Sass, a reputable Charleston cabinetmaker. Schirmer operated a successful coopering (barrel making) business, and he owned eight buildings in Charleston. He served as president of the Corporation of St. John's Lutheran Church and as treasurer of the German Friendly Society. It does not appear that Schirmer was active in politics, nor was he a member of the German rifle clubs in Charleston (probably because they were formed by German immigrants in the 1850s).
Revisioning Death and Dying: 19th-Century Attitudes as Reflected in Louisa May Alcott's Antebellum and Civil War Writings
Authors: Talley Sharon
Published: April 2011

In “The Pornography of Death,” an essay originally published in 1955 and later incorporated into a book-length study, anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer was the first to document a dramatic shift between Victorian and contemporary attitudes toward sexuality and death. Victorian society viewed death as a natural, integral part of life, while sexuality was considered obscene and pornographic, a topic unfit for polite conversation and social discourse. In the 20th century, however, Gorer locates an “unremarked shift in prudery; whereas copulation has become more and more ‘mentionable,’ particularly in the Anglo-Saxon societies, death has become more and more ‘unmentionable’as a natural process” (195). Responding to Gorer's provocative argument, other scholars have confirmed this cultural shift from acceptance to fear and denial of death, and as popular interest in this phenomenon has developed in the United States, a credible canon of study has formed to fill the previous void in scholarship regarding the historical, psychological, and cultural dimensions of death that simultaneously fascinate and silence Americans. As a result, death in recent decades has become an acceptable field of scholarly inquiry. However, although often viscerally aroused by abstract death and irresistibly drawn to its depiction, Americans as a society remain uncomfortable with death's immediate implications and, in many contexts, avoid contemplating its relationship to their own lives and the lives of those around them.

In contrast, as Charles O. Jackson observes, “The popular mind of antebellum America was saturated with open concern about death,” a concern prompted not only “by ‘actuarial prevalence’ but by ‘existential proximity’ Life expectancy throughout the century remained limited, measured against today's standards, approximately forty years in 1850 and forty-seven at the close of the century” (61).
Alain Locke: Personality and the Problematic of Pragmatism in the Construction of Race
Authors: Helbling Mark
Published: April 2011

In the current interest in American pragmatism, the role of African American intellectuals within that tradition, together with questions of race and ethnic identity, has increasingly been given serious attention. Cornel West, for example, argued in The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989) that pragmatism represented our most important intellectual tradition for confronting the inequalities that existed due to “hierarchies based on class, race, gender and sexual orientation.” Nevertheless, West claimed, it was a flawed tradition still limited in its intellectual and social reach because “the complex formulations and arguments of American pragmatists shape and are shaped by the social structures that exploit and oppress.” Given this claim, West challenged his readers to expand “the pragmatist canon to encompass a major body of critical reflection on ‘race’ and racism in the United States.”

Of those who have responded to West's challenge, Nancy Fraser was one of the first to link her critical project directly with that of his. In “Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical ‘Race’ Theory, and the Politics of Culture” (1995), Fraser writes, “I intend to take up Cornel West's challenge. I am going to discuss a recently rediscovered work by another African-American theorist of ‘race’ and racism who was trained in philosophy at Harvard under Josiah Royce and William James early in this century and who also deserves a place in the “pragmatist pantheon.” Thus, whereas W E. B. Du Bois was the only African American to appear in West's “pragmatist pantheon,” Fraser gave a careful reading of five lectures that Locke gave at Howard University in the spring of 1916 — “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: A Study of the Theory and Practice of Race” — to establish his pragmatic credentials. These credentials, however, included his specific use of race as a form of social solidarity; that is, as an expression of group solidarity, race served to articulate as well as shape the cultural and political needs of African Americans. For this reason, Fraser argued that although “pragmatism undoubtedly lay at the core of Locke's 1916 vision,” his “lectures present a strand of pragmatist thought that differs importantly from the mainstream of the movement.”
The Therapeutic Gospel: Religious Medicine and the Birth of Pop Psychology, 1850–1910
Authors: Moskowitz Eva
Published: April 2011

In 1857, a bangor, maine, newspaper announced that a man named Phineas P. Quimby was engaged in “investigations in psychology” and that he had “discovered and in his daily practice carries out, a new principle of treatment of diseases.” A few years later, a Portland newspaper reported that Quimby's “new theory of disease” was “so contrary to the commonly received opinions” that people “hardly dare believe there can be any truth in it.” Contemporary observers found both Quimby's theory of Mind Cure and his medical practice to be highly unusual. Apparently, Quimby would “sit down beside him [the patient], and put himself en rapport with him.” He did “not use medicine or any material agency, nor call to his aid mesmerism or any spiritual influence whatever” in his treatment. Rather, observers maintained that “his power over disease arises from his subtle knowledge of the mind”.
Exile and the Republic: Thomas McGrath and the Legacy of Jefferson's America
Authors: Blake David Haven
Published: April 2011

Of the many authorities Thomas McGrath rejected during his life, one of the most significant was the American Revolution, for his work explicitly questions the founders as a source of aesthetic and political creativity. “The National Past has its houses,” he writes in Letter to an Imaginary Friend, “but their fires have long gone out!” From his pronouncing the death of Virginia's deified presidents to his condemnation of the “local colorist” hunting for patriotic “HEADwaters” by which to camp, the poet's renunciation of the “false Past” amounts to a coherent commentary on the relations between American politics and modernist poetry (Letter, 315). E. P. Thompson has remarked in paving homage to his friend that “McGrath is a poet of alienation…. His trajectory has been that of willful defiance … At every point when the applause – anyone's applause, even the applause of the alienated – seemed about to salute him, he has taken a jagged fork to a wilderness of his own making.” Although his language strongly recalls that of Emerson's “Self-Reliance,” Thompson views McGrath as more than a romantic individualist. McGrath's alienation was not simply the estrangement that Marx saw afflicting all of capitalist society, nor was it a momentarily fashionable pose; rather, it was a calculated and thorough opposition to what Thompson calls “official culture” and its destruction of political, historical, and literary values. McGrath's refusal to make a “usable past” out of the American Revolution participates in this general defiance of “official culture,” as his work insistently reminds us that among the regular patrons of Monticello and Mt. Vernon were the many establishment poets well entrenched in bourgeois universities. In defying modernism's efforts to renovate the 18th century, McGrath makes a wilderness of his own, a wilderness which grows in opposition to the wellplowed fields of American empire.
“The Organ of an Individual”: William Lloyd Garrison and theLiberator
Authors: Fanuzzi Robert A.
Published: April 2011

The political agenda of William Lloyd Garrison and his adherents within the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) can be reconstructed with the rhetoric and practices of print culture, starting with its assumption that the prospects for the slaves' emancipation waxed and waned with the proliferation of writing. In the mid-1830s, the MASS mailed antislavery publications in mass quantities to civic leaders, newspaper editors, and post offices in both the North and South. In 1837 alone, it issued 711, 277 publications, which Garrison noted were falling “thicker than raindrops … nourishing the soil of freedom.” Although their publicity campaign elicited a hostile reaction from political officials, newspaper editors, and most infamously, violent mobs, the abolitionists persisted. A typical budget for the MASS allotted far more money to printing and distribution than any other expenditure, including the remuneration of their often imperiled traveling agents.
In That Golden Land: The Spiritual Odyssey of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep
Authors: Rosenbloom Nancy J.
Published: April 2011

With these words, Henry Roth beganCall It Sleep, a novel published in 1934 when its author was twenty-eight years old.Call It Sleepranks among the most powerful novels of the 20th century, precisely because of the questions it does ask about the conflicts of immigrant life, the demands of assimilation, and the search for spiritual nourishment in the modern world. Roth locates his narrative in New York City during the peak years of mass migration from Europe between 1907 and 1914. At the center ofCall It Sleepis David, a precocious and sensitive child at age six, who is already questioning his place in the universe and the meaning of God. Thus,Call It Sleeppresents a narrative of how a small immigrant boy makes sense of his world, a world defined by both its physical and spiritual dimensions.
The Piazza degli Affari and the contingent nature of urbanism in fascist Milan
Authors: MAULSBY LUCY
Published: April 2011

During the period of fascist rule, Mussolini's government radically transformed the built environment by sponsoring a wide range of public works projects intended to bring fascist values of order and hierarchy to cities and towns throughout Italy. A close look at Paolo Mezzanotte's project for a new business district in Milan demonstrates that changes to the urban fabric were often the result of fierce and prolonged negotiations between multiple centres of power, despite fascism's totalitarian ambitions. This project thus serves as an opportunity to consider the particular forces that shaped urban change in Milan as well as a model for evaluating fascist era projects in other urban centres.
A study in Modern(ist) urbanism: planning Vancouver, 1945–1965
Authors: LISCOMBE RHODRI WINDSOR
Published: April 2011

The implementation of Modern Movement town planning is still regarded as both rapid and relatively unproblematic in the aftermath of World War II. A more complex narrative emerges from an examination of the urban redevelopment policy and practice at Vancouver, British Columbia, during the immediate World War II decades. The analysis focuses on the civic and professional discourse of redevelopment. It illuminates the diverse interests and processes by which Modernist planning theory and practice were introduced, modified and resisted. New concepts and values are shown to have been subject to internal no less than external forces of revision.