bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Periodic System
Authors: Scerri Eric
Published: November 2020

In ancient Greek times, philosophers recognized just four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—all of which survive in the astrological classification of the 12 signs of the zodiac. At least some of these philosophers believed that these different elements consisted of microscopic components with differing shapes and that this explained the various properties of the elements. These shapes or structures were believed to be in the form of Platonic solids (figure 1.1) made up entirely of the same two-dimensional shape. The Greeks believed that earth consisted of microscopic cubic particles, which explained why it was difficult to move earth. Meanwhile, the liquidity of water was explained by an appeal to the smoother shape possessed by the icosahedron, while fire was said to be painful to the touch because it consisted of the sharp particles in the form of tetrahedra. Air was thought to consist of octahedra since that was the only remaining Platonic solid. A little later, a fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, was discovered, and this led to the proposal that there might be a fifth element or “quintessence,” which also became known as ether. Although the notion that elements are made up of Platonic solids is regarded as incorrect from a modern point of view, it is the origin of the very fruitful notion that macroscopic properties of substances are governed by the structures of the microscopic components of which they are comprised. These “elements” survived well into the Middle Ages and beyond, augmented with a few others discovered by the alchemists, the precursors of modern-day chemists. One of the many goals of the alchemists seems to have been the transmutation of elements. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the particular transmutation that most enticed them was the attempt to change the base metal lead into the noble metal gold, whose unusual color, rarity, and chemical inertness have made it one of the most treasured substances since the dawn of civilization.
Mendeleev
Authors: Scerri Eric
Published: November 2020

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev is the undisputed champion of the periodic system in at least two senses. First of all, he is by far the leading discoverer of the system. Although he was not the first to develop a periodic system, his version is the one that created the biggest impact on the scientific community at the time it was introduced and thereafter. His name is invariably and justifiably connected with the periodic system, to the same extent perhaps as Darwin’s name is synonymous with the theory of evolution and Einstein’s with the theory of relativity. Although it may be possible to quibble about certain priority aspects of his contributions, there is no denying that Mendeleev was also the champion of the periodic system in the literal sense of propagating the system, defending its validity, and devoting time to its elaboration. As discussed in chapter 3, there were others who produced significant work on the system, but many of them, such as Alexandre-Émile Béguyer De Chancourtois, William Odling, and Gustavus Hinrichs, moved on to other scientific endeavors. After publishing their initial ideas, these contributors devoted their attention to other fields and never seriously returned to the periodic system to examine its full consequences to the extent that Mendeleev did. This is not to suggest that Mendeleev himself worked only on the periodic system. He is also known for many other scientific contributions, as well as for working in several applied fields, such as the Russian oil industry and as the director of the Russian institute for weights and measures. But the periodic system remained Mendeleev’s pride and joy throughout his adult life. Even toward the end of his life he published an intriguing essay in which he returned to the periodic system and, among other speculations, attempted to place the physicist’s ether within the periodic system as a chemical element. Much has been written on Mendeleev, and it would be impossible to do justice to his contributions in the space of a few pages.
The Electron and Chemical Periodicity
Authors: Scerri Eric
Published: November 2020

J.J. Thomson’s discovery of the electron is one of the most celebrated events in the history of physics. What is not so well known is that Thomson had a deep interest in chemistry, which, among other things, motivated him to put forward the first explanation for the periodic table of elements in terms of electrons. Today, it is still generally believed that the electron holds the key to explaining the existence of the periodic table and the form it takes. This explanation has undergone a number of subtle changes. The extent to which the modern explanation is purely deductive or whether it is semiempirical is examined in this chapter. While Dmitri Mendeleev had remained strongly opposed to any attempts to reduce, or explain, the periodic table in terms of atomic structure, Julius Lothar Meyer was not so averse to reduction of the periodic system. The latter strongly believed in the existence of primary matter and also supported William Prout’s hypothesis. Lothar Meyer did not hesitate to draw curves through the numerical properties of atoms, whereas Mendeleev believed this to be a mistake, since it conflicted with his own belief in the individuality of the elements. This is how matters stood before the discovery of the electron, three years prior to the turn of the twentieth century. The atom’s existence was still very much a matter of dispute, and its substructure had not yet been discovered. There appeared to be no way of explaining the periodic system theoretically. Johnston Stoney first proposed the existence and name for the electron in 1891, although he did not believe that it existed as a free particle. Several researchers discovered the physical electron, including Emil Wiechert in Königsberg, who was the first to publish his findings. Because these early researchers did not seriously follow up on their results, it was left to the British physicist Thomson to capitalize upon and establish the initial observations.
Forms of the Periodic Table
Authors: Scerri Eric
Published: November 2020

A good deal has been said about the periodic table in previous chapters, but one important aspect has not yet been addressed. This is the question of why so many different periodic tables have been published in textbooks, articles, and on the Internet. One may also wonder whether there exists an “optimal periodic table” and whether such a question even makes sense. Assuming it is a legitimate question, one would like to know what progress has been made toward identifying such an optimal table. Before plunging into this further aspect of chemical periodicity, at least two kinds of differences among periodic tables should be distinguished. First, there is the question of whether the table is presented as having 8, 18, 32, or even higher numbers of columns. Second, there is the question of variations among tables concerning the placement of specific elements such as hydrogen, helium, lanthanum, actinium, lutetium, and lawrencium. In a classic, though flawed, book on the history of the periodic table, Edward Mazurs included illustrations as well as references to about 700 periodic tables that have been published since the periodic table was first assembled in the 1860s. In the 45 or so years that have elapsed since the publication of Mazurs’s book, at least another 300 tables have appeared, not to mention the numerous new periodic systems posted on the Internet. The fact that so many periodic tables exist is something that requires an explanation. Of course, many of these tables may not have anything new to offer, and some are even inconsistent from a scientific point of view. But even if we were to eliminate these misleading proposals, a very large number of tables still remain. In chapter 1, we saw that there are three basic forms of the periodic table: the short form, the medium-long form, and the long form. All three convey very much the same information, although the grouping of elements with the same valence is treated differently in each of these formats.
Surface Chemistry and Physicochemistry of Oxides
Authors: Jolivet Jean-Pierre
Published: November 2020

Oxide particles resulting from precipitation have at least one dimension less than a few nanometers. Therefore, as their specific area (surface-to-mass ratio) may reach several hundred square meters per gram, the behavior of these particles is closely related to their surface physical-chemical characteristics. Thus, the dispersion state of particles in solution is dependent on attractive and repulsive forces between surfaces. The balance control of these forces limits the aggregation of particles and promotes the formation of sols or gels, or, contrariwise, flocculates the particles and separates them from a suspension. The divison state of solids resulting from precipitation is ruled by forces that exert themselves onto the surface (interfacial—or surface—tension). They determine the extent of the surface area and, therefore, the particle size. Adsorption of ions or molecules within the dispersion depends on forces exerting between soluble species and the surface. These forces may be due to electrostatic charges on the surface. They may also be due to the ability of the surface cations to be coordinated by soluble species and/or the ability of surface oxygenated groups to coordinate cations from solution. The attachment of various species on the surface of oxide particles plays a major role in various fields—for instance, the transport of matter in natural or industrial waters, catalysis and corrosion phenomena, formation of stable and homogeneous dispersions. It is somewhat difficult to characterize the surface of nanometer-sized objects from structural as well as chemical standpoints. The geometry of such small particles is not easily defined with precision, and the surface often includes defects such as steps, truncations, and stacking faults. These sites are difficult to recognize but exhibit largely variable chemical reactivities. In addition, the study of the oxide– solution interface is complicated because few of its physical quantities are experimentally accessible. These quantities are treated as fitting parameters in more or less complex modelings. The current state of the art, however, allows suit­able interpretation of experimental data.
Conclusion
Authors: Jolivet Jean-Pierre
Published: November 2020

Metal oxide nanostructures are of major interest in technology. It is therefore es­sential to have a full understanding of the phenomena involved in the aqueous synthesis of nanoparticles, so that their properties can be adjusted to a desired application. Understanding these phenomena is also important in other fields, for instance, in geology and environmental sciences, enabling us to explain the presence and formation of a given mineral. The precipitation of metal oxy(hydroxi)des is a complex phenomenon initiated by hydroxylation of the cations in solution and resulting from condensation of the hydroxylated species. Therefore, the acidity of the cations is the main charac­teristic of their reactivity. Three main parameters are essential in predicting and rationalizing the behavior of metal cations in water: the formal charge (the oxida­tion degree), size, and electronegativity, which determine the degree of polariza­tion of the oxygenated ligands. One may thus define five classes of cations: . . . The too weakly polarizing cations that form only aquocomplexes unable to condense and to precipitate; for instance, the alkaline cations M+, The cations that condense by olation and form polycations and hydroxides, typically, the divalent cations and also Al3+. The cations that condense by olation and oxolation and form oxyhydroxides and oxides (such as Cr3+, Fe3+, and Mn3+). The cations that condense essentially by oxolation and form oxides that are more or less hydrated (Ti4+, Mn4+, V5+). The cations that form anionic oxocomplexes and exhibit no trend toward condensation, typically, MnVII. . . . This series thus includes cations of increasing polarizing power, that is cations of increasing oxidation degree and electronegativity. Precipitation usually generates nanosized particles. In a system that is not con­tinuously fed, in which a limited amount of matter is available in the reactor, the nucleation step is always sudden and easy enough, allowing lower supersaturation and creating nuclei that have stopped growing because of the too low concentra­tion in soluble precursor. That does not, however, exclude an intense dynamics of dissolution–crystallization because of the evolution of the criticality of the particle size during the decrease in supersaturation.
Saving the Dammed
Authors: Wohl Ellen
Published: November 2020

The ability of beavers to create an abundant habitat for a diverse array of plants and animals has been analyzed time and again. The disappearance of beavers across the northern hemisphere, and what this effects, has yet to be comprehensively studied. Saving the Dammed analyzes the beneficial role of beavers and their dams in the ecosystem of a river, focusing on one beaver meadow in Colorado. In her latest book, Ellen Wohl contextualizes North St. Vrain Creek by discussing the implications of the loss of beavers across much larger areas. Saving the Dammed raises awareness of rivers as ecosystems and the role beavers play in sustaining the ecosystem surrounding rivers by exploring the macrocosm of global river alteration, wetland loss, and the reduction in ecosystem services. The resulting reduction in ecosystem services span things such as flood control, habitat abundance and biodiversity, and nitrate reduction. Allowing readers to follow her as she crawls through seemingly impenetrable spaces with slow and arduous movements, Wohl provides a detailed narrative of beaver meadows. Saving the Dammed takes readers through twelve months at a beaver meadow in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park, exploring how beavers change river valleys and how the decline in beaver populations has altered river ecosystems. As Wohl analyzes and discusses the role beavers play in the ecosystem of a river, readers get to follow her through tight, seemingly impenetrable, crawl spaces as she uncovers the benefit of dams.
October: Of Beavers and Humans
Authors: Wohl Ellen
Published: November 2020

By mid-October, the first snow has fallen on the beaver meadow. There is no sign of snow when I visit a few days later, but the air feels chill in the shadows and a cool breeze leavens the sunshine’s warmth. Mostly, the beaver meadow seems a golden place. Many of the willow, aspen, and birch leaves have already fallen, but enough remain to create a glowing ménage of yellow, gold, palest orange, and tan. Each leaf refracts and filters the light so that it comes from every direction rather than only from above. Aspens on the north-facing valley slope stand bare and pale gray. Those on the south facing slope form bursts of gold among the dark green conifers. The beaver meadow remains lively with activity. Dance flies move upward and downward in a column of air backlit by sunshine, their delicate bodies shimmering in the low-angle light. A little black stonefly lands on the back of my hand. I resist the urge, bred by summer mosquitoes, to reflexively slap it away. As I cross smaller side channels, brook trout dart away from the warm shallows where they have been resting. The narrow band of white on each dorsal fin flashes as the fish moves swiftly toward deeper water. When one small trout gets momentarily stuck between two exposed cobbles, I cup its slender, wriggling body between my hands and help it along. Windrows of fallen leaves form swirling patterns on the water surface and streambed. Filamentous algae grow in thick green strands along the side channels, where lower water exposes wide bands of mud along the channel edges. The mud bands record the comings and goings along the channel: precise imprints of raccoon feet and deer hooves and blurrier outlines left by moose. Moose beds mat down the tall grasses scattered among the willow thickets. As usual, the beavers themselves elude me, but I see fresh mud and neatly peeled white branches with gnawed ends on some of the dams. Lower water in the beaver pond exposes an entrance hole in the side of the lodge.
What are specific learning difficulties?
Authors: Selikowitz Mark
Published: November 2020

This is a book about children like Angela and Michael: intelligent children who have a significant and unexplained difficulty in learning. Each child with such difficulties is unique, but they have enough in common with one another for their condition to be summarized by one collective term. I shall use the term ‘specific learning difficulties’ as an umbrella term for this whole group of disorders. A specific learning difficulty can be defined as: . . . an unexpected and unexplained condition, occurring in a child of average or above average intelligence, characterized by a significant delay in one or more areas of learning. . . . In order to understand this definition fully, a number of important questions must be answered. Which areas of learning are involved? What is a ‘significant delay’? Which other causes of difficulty must be excluded? Let us look at these questions one by one. . . . Which areas of learning are involved? . . . The areas of learning involved in specific learning difficulties can be divided into two groups. The first group consists of the basic academic skills: reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, and language (both comprehension and expression). These are relatively easy skills to measure, and are of central importance to success at school. The second group contains areas of learning that are also vitally important, but are far less well understood. These involve the learning of skills such as persistence, organization, impulse control, social competence, and the coordination of movements. I shall use the term specific learning difficulty to cover significant delay in any of these areas. Children may have only one area involved, or a number of areas. I am, therefore, using the term ‘learning’ in a broad sense, to include all areas of learning, not only academic areas. There are good reasons for grouping all these difficulties together. It has been well established that difficulties in these different areas of learning are closely related. They often coexist in the same child, they are all more common in boys, they all share the same theories of causation, and they all share the same general principles of management.
Coordination and clumsiness
Authors: Selikowitz Mark
Published: November 2020

Rachel is eight years old. She was slow to crawl and walk. She still cannot pedal a tricycle, fasten small buttons, or tie her laces. She is very poor at sports and is often teased by the other children for her awkward running style. She is a messy eater and washes herself and brushes her teeth with great difficulty. Her mother says that she has a poor sense of direction and still confuses right with left. Rachel’s school work is satisfactory. Her writing is untidy, but if she prints slowly it is legible. Rachel has been tested by a psychologist and found to have some visual perception difficulties, but to be of normal intelligence. Her reading, spelling, and arithmetic are in the average range. A paediatrician has examined Rachel and detected no abnormalities that can account for her clumsiness. The term ‘clumsiness’ will be used in this chapter to refer to unexplained, significant difficulties in the coordination of movement in a child of average, or above average, intelligence. This sort of clumsiness is commonly associated with other forms of specific learning difficulty, such as reading difficulty. This does not mean, however, that most children with specific learning difficulty are clumsy. Many are, in fact, well coordinated. But clumsiness is far more common in children with specific learning difficulty than in other children. Clumsiness is more common in boys and quite often runs in families. The word ‘motor’ is used for movement. Gross motor skills involve large groups of muscles responsible for activities such as walking, running, jumping, hopping, and bicycle riding. Fine motor skills involve the hands and fingers, and are concerned with activities such as writing, drawing, using scissors, and tying knots. There are a number of standardized tests of both gross and fine motor proficiency. These may be performed by a physiotherapist, an occupational therapist, or a doctor. Activities must be carefully observed to detect the presence of tremors and other unusual movements. Balance, strength, tone, reflexes, and ability to interpret certain sensations are all assessed. It is essential that rare, serious conditions associated with poor coordination are excluded by a doctor.
Adulthood
Authors: Selikowitz Mark
Published: November 2020

All children with specific learning difficulties improve as they grow. In some, the difficulties resolve completely, while others continue to have some degree of difficulty in the specific areas of learning affected. We still have no way of determining which children will continue to experience difficulty and which will not. Nor do we have reliable figures on the relative proportions of those where the difficulties resolve completely and those where they persist. This chapter provides information and advice for adults with persisting specific learning difficulties. Many people are designed to be better adults than children. A child has little opportunity of selecting those things that he enjoys or finds easier, and to avoid those he dislikes or finds difficult. He is required to be an all-rounder, performing a wide range of activities, many under the critical scrutiny of his teachers and peers. It is daunting to think of what many children are required to do regularly at school: reading aloud, writing something that will be marked (for content, neatness, and spelling), doing arithmetical computations that will be checked, playing competitive sport, performing in a play in public, and playing a musical piece to a critical audience. An adult, on the other hand, can have a successful career and avoid any, or all, of these activities. Many famous people are said to have had a specific learning difficulty as children, but it is very difficult to know for certain if this is true. Nevertheless, many of their stories are highly suggestive of the condition. What they all show, whether they had a specific learning difficulty or not, is that problems with learning in childhood need not be a bar to outstanding achievements in adulthood. There follow some examples. . . . Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) . Famous as an author of children’s stories such as ‘The Little Match-girl’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’, his handwriting shows characteristics of specific learning difficulty. . . . . . . Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). Now famous for his sculptures, such as ‘The Thinker’ and ‘The Burghers of Calais’, he was regarded as ‘an idiot’, and ‘ineducable’ as a child. . . .
Mad cats and mad hatters: accidental mercury poisoning
Authors: Emsley John
Published: November 2020

There are two kinds of mercury poisoning: chronic poisoning in which the body is subjected to regular small doses of mercury which exceed the amount it can excrete every day, and acute poisoning, in which a person is exposed to a life-threatening dose. It is the former type of poisoning that this chapter is about. Large doses deliberately given will be the topic of the next chapter. Chronic mercury poisoning used to be an occupational hazard for many employees. Those affected suffered from the physical symptoms of fatigue, general weakness, and a tremor of the hands, to the extent that their handwriting became spidery, and these symptoms were due to the effects on the central nervous system. More serious were the psychological symptoms such as irritability, depression, and a paranoid belief that other people were persecuting them, all of which came as a result of mercury seeping into the brain. The groups of workers most at risk from chronic mercury poisoning were gilders, hat makers, dentists, those in the electrical industries – and detectives. Most of these occupations no longer use mercury, and in those that do it is strictly controlled so that the risks are now negligible. Monitoring those exposed to mercury in their employment can be done via their urine or blood. Yet it was a long struggle to make people aware of the dangers this metal posed, and along the way there were some major examples of exposure involving hundreds of thousands of individuals, many of whom had their lives made wretched by mercury. Indeed the campaign against mercury really started 300 years ago when an Italian physician was the first to become interested in the link between occupation and illness. That physician was the surgeon Bernardino Ramazzini (1633–1714), who is today regarded as the founder of occupational and industrial medicine. In 1700 he wrote the first book on the subject: De Morbis Artificum Diatriba [The Diseases of Workers]. In it he outlined the health hazards associated with various chemicals, dust, and metals encountered by those working in 52 different occupations, including the miners who worked in the mercury mines.
Leaves, genes, and greenhouse gases
Authors: Beerling David
Published: November 2020

The Galileo spacecraft, named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who launched modern astronomy with his observations of the heavens in 1610, plunged to oblivion in Jupiter’s crushing atmosphere on 21 September 2003. Launched in 1989, it left behind a historic legacy that changed the way we view the solar system. Galileo’s mission was to study the planetary giant Jupiter and its satellites, four of which Galileo himself observed, to his surprise, moving as ‘stars’ around the planet from his garden in Pardu, Italy. En route, the spacecraft captured the first close-up images of an asteroid (Gaspra) and made direct observations of fragments of the comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 smashing into Jupiter. Most remarkable of all were the startling images of icebergs on the surface of Europa beamed backed in April 1997, after nearly eight years of solar system exploration. Icebergs suggested the existence of an extraterrestrial ocean, liquid water. To the rapt attention of the world’s press, NASA’s mission scientists commented that liquid water plus organic compounds already present on Europa, gave you ‘life within a billion years’. Whether this is the case is a moot point; water is essential for life on Earth as we know it, but this is no guarantee it is needed for life elsewhere in the Universe. Oceans may also exist beneath the barren rocky crusts of two other Galilean satellites, Callisto and Ganymede. Callisto and Ganymede probably maintain a liquid ocean thanks to the heat produced by natural radioactivity of their rocky interiors. Europa, though, lies much closer to Jupiter, and any liquid water could be maintained by heating due to gravitational forces that stretch and squeeze the planet in much the same way as Earth’s moon influences our tides. To reach Jupiter, Galileo required two slingshots (gravitational assists) around Earth and Venus. Gravitational assists accelerate the speed and adjust the trajectory of the spacecraft without it expending fuel. The planets doing the assisting pay the price with an imperceptible slowing in their speed of rotation. In Galileo’s case, the procedure fortuitously permitted close observations of Earth from space, allowing a control experiment in the search for extraterrestrial life, never before attempted.
Oxygen and the lost world of giants
Authors: Beerling David
Published: November 2020

Oxygen, in its molecular form, is the second most abundant gas in our atmosphere but second to none in courting controversy. Its discovery is often credited to the great experimenter Joseph Priestley (1733–1904), who in 1774 showed that heating red calyx of mercury (mercuric oxide) in a glass vessel by focusing sunlight with a hand lens produced a colourless, tasteless, odourless gas. Mice placed in vessels of the new ‘air’ lived longer than normal and candles burned brighter than usual. As Priestley noted in 1775, ‘on the 8th of this month I procured a mouse, and put it into a glass vessel containing two ounce measures of the air from my mercuric calcinations. Had it been common air, a full-grown mouse, as this was, would have lived in it about quarter of an hour. In this air, however, my mouse lived a full half hour.’ Later experiments revealed that mice actually lived about five times longer in the ‘new air’ than normal air, giving Priestley an early indication that air is about 20% oxygen. About the same time, the Swedish chemist Carl Scheele (1742–86), working in Uppsala, showed that air contained a mixture of two gases, one promoting burning (oxygen) and one retarding it (nitrogen). Like Priestley, Scheele had prepared samples of the gas that encouraged burning (‘fire air’) by heating mercuric oxide, and also by reacting nitric acid with potash and distilling the residue with sulfuric acid. However, by the time his findings were published in a book entitled the Chemical treatise on air and fire in 1777, news of Priestley’s discovery had already spread throughout Europe and the great English chemist lay claim to priority. Only later did it become clear from surviving notes and records that Scheele had beaten Priestley to it, producing oxygen at least two years earlier. The harsh lesson from history, which still rings true today, is that capitalizing on a new exciting discovery requires its expedient communication to your peers. The talented Scheele died at 43, his life shortened by working for much of the time with deadly poisons like gaseous hydrogen cyanide in poorly ventilated conditions.
Introduction to Stuart Hall
Authors: Howe Stephen , Hall Stuart
Published: November 2020

Stuart Hall has inspired, influenced, and often provoked at least two generations of scholars and activists, across Britain and far beyond. He has held distinguished academic positions in both Cultural Studies (a discipline, or discourse, in whose making and remaking he has been a central figure) and Sociology. But his ideas and their impact have not been, and could not be, confined to any disciplinary mould, nor to the academic world alone. He has written on and been a significant and original voice in debates on popular culture, media and the arts, Thatcherism and the future of the Left, Marx and Gramsci, modernism and postmodernism, racial theories and race relations, concepts of diaspora, globalization, ethnicity, identity, and hybridity—and even that is just a near-random selection from among the themes that his work has addressed. His influence may be encountered, his name invoked, among artists and film-makers, especially younger black British ones, as well as academics. Strikingly, in a recent poll seeking to rank the ‘100 Greatest Black Britons’, Hall was the only living intellectual to feature at all prominently (at no. 10) among musicians, sportspeople, and TV personalities. This polymathic presence does not, however, extend to absolute ubiquity: it should be pointed out that the presenter of the once-popular TV show ‘It’s a Knockout’ was an entirely different Stuart Hall. Our Stuart Hall is, on the face of it, very much a ‘public intellectual’. This is a label more familiar in America than in Britain, and one which sometimes seems to mean ‘glib, media-friendly polemicist’. That is clearly not Hall at all, and perhaps the idea of the public intellectual fits him better if it is redefined: not (just) as someone who appears frequently in the public sphere, but as one whose efforts have always been directed towards defending and extending that sphere, its integrity, democracy, and inclusiveness. It is an ethical as well as a political endeavour. Hall’s lifelong adherence to it, no less than the subject-matter and intellectual power of his essay here, makes him an apt choice to open this collection of Oxford Amnesty Lectures.
Introduction toJames D. Wolfensohn
Authors: Mallaby Sebastian , Wolfensohn James D.
Published: November 2020

James David Wolfensohn is a surprising figure. A wildly successful investment banker, he nonetheless found time to take up the cello in middle life; he would cross the Atlantic on Concorde, buying two seats so that his cello could fly with him. A corporate insider, he nonetheless identified with the world’s least fortunate; he took an interest in international family planning, the environment, and AIDS, even as he was merging and restructuring the world’s leading companies. Appointed to lead a World Bank known chiefly for prescribing macro-economic austerity, Wolfensohn distanced the institution from both macro-economics and prescriptions. He spoke the language of poverty-fighting groups such as Oxfam, and demanded social justice; and after his first press conference, the World Bank’s chief spin doctor, who was concerned that the Bank not be seen as ‘soft’, remarked that Wolfensohn had not been ‘on message’. ‘He’s the President,’ another official said. ‘I think you’ll find that is the message.’ Since that exchange in 1995, Wolfensohn has reshaped the Bank, a formidable, sprawling institution with nearly ten thousand employees and projects in about one hundred countries. The emphasis on macro-economic structural adjustment, which had dominated the Bank’s programmes since the start of the 1980s, was phased out; questions of governance— the transparency of political institutions, the level of corruption, the quality of judicial or media or civil society oversight—came to preoccupy the Bank almost as much as price signals and sound budgeting. Before Wolfensohn’s arrival, the Bank’s apolitical charter was thought to put these governance issues at least partially off limits. But in a speech in 1966, Wolfensohn denounced ‘the cancer of corruption’, and a taboo that had lasted since the Bank’s creation in 1944 was abruptly shattered. Wolfensohn’s focus on poverty and social justice come through strongly in his contribution to this volume. Before his arrival at the Bank, the institution was often vilified for technocratic elitism: its officials’ idea of ‘field work’ was a meeting with a finance minister in a five-star hotel, according to the critics. But in this lecture we find Wolfensohn recounting the life of a poor mother in a Brazilian slum, and explaining that the worst feature of poverty is ‘voicelessness’.
Who Should Foot the Bill
Authors: Likosky Michael B.
Published: November 2020

Should the urban poor be asked to pay their way out of poverty? Should transnational corporations be invited to profit from the plight of the urban poor? I fear that, if we use privatization to solve urban poverty, then we are answering ‘yes’ to these questions. In his impassioned and challenging contribution to this collection, World Bank President James Wolfensohn describes the World Bank’s Cities Without Slums action plan. This plan is in the process of upgrading infrastructures and services in urban slums globally. However, this plan and others like it seek in part to solve urban poverty by using the specific privatization technique of the public– private partnership. By harnessing the power of transnational corporations to solve urban poverty, such partnerships demand that the poor pay private companies for what should be their birthright: a basic social and economic infrastructure. In this response, I’d like to highlight three pieces for special attention: the lectures by Stuart Hall, David Harvey, and James Wolfensohn. Hall and Harvey’s account of the relationship between globalization, privatization, and urban poverty is very different from that offered by Wolfensohn. For Hall and Harvey, globalization impoverishes, while for Wolfensohn it is the key to solving the problem of urban poverty. With minor qualifications I will side with Hall and Harvey and argue that, while Wolfensohn’s position has important merits, it should be modified in significant ways. It seems to me that many of the problems of urban poverty are caused by globalization. The bill for eradicating urban poverty should be handed to the beneficiaries of globalization, not to its victims. I’ll start by fleshing out a recurring theme in all three chapters, the privatization of our cities, before giving some sense of how the privatization of urban infrastructure has come about over the last twenty-five or so years. Then I’ll turn to the lectures by Hall, Harvey, and Wolfensohn. The privatization of urban infrastructures started in the late 1970s in the United Kingdom. It was part of what Stuart Hall in his contribution refers to as ‘the privatization of public goods’.
D-Day at Bletchley Park
Authors: Flowers Thomas H.
Published: November 2020

Before the war in Europe started in 1939, I worked as an engineer in the Dollis Hill communications research laboratories of what was then the British Post Office and is now British Telecom. During the war I continued to work in the laboratories; luckily I was not conscripted into the armed forces. Early in 1942 I was directed to go to GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, then at Bletchley Park. I was told that there I would be briefed concerning some top-secret work which they wanted our laboratories to do for them. At Bletchley Park I met Alan Turing. Turing was working on Enigma at that time, and it was he who wanted the top-secret work done—a machine to assist with decoding Enigma messages once the Bombe had produced the message settings. From then until the end of the war, I was a frequent visitor to GCHQ. In the early years of the war, Alan Turing had saved Britain from defeat by the U-boats, by breaking the Enigma code used by the German Navy to communicate by radio with their ships at sea. Radio broadcasting is the only possible way of maintaining contact with mobile units like ships, tanks, and troops, but it is not secret—the transmissions can be intercepted by anyone with a suitable radio receiver. Therefore the messages must be encrypted before transmission. Even then the transmissions are secure only so long as the code remains unbroken by the enemy. The Germans were very sure that their high-grade ciphers could not be broken! British intelligence services had many radio receiving stations at home and abroad, listening continuously to German military radio broadcasts. These stations sent the coded messages they intercepted to Bletchley Park. In 1940 Bletchley Park started to receive teleprinter messages in a code that they could not recognise. The Germans had invented a new coding machine specifically for teleprinter messages. Messages typed into this machine in plain language were automatically encoded before being transmitted. At the receiving end an identical machine automatically decoded the message and printed the plaintext on paper tape.
Introduction
Authors: Nasaw David
Published: November 2020

A history of American public schooling reduced to graphs would tell a simple story of almost continuous growth. In every category, the graphs would incline upwards, recording a steady rise in the number of students in school, the time they spent there, the teachers who taught them, the schools that housed them, and the dollars expended. The upward trend would continue unbroken from the 1820s until the 1970s. We cannot, at this time, chart the downward course that has commenced (if only temporarily) in the mid-1970s. We know only that that part of the American public that votes on school bond issues and makes its opinions known to professional pollsters is no longer willing to spend as much money or place as much trust in public schooling as it once was. It is too soon to predict the future course of public schooling in America, but a good time to reconsider the past. To understand why Americans have grown disillusioned with their public schools we must look beyond the immediate present to the larger history of the United States and its public schools. The public schools of this country—elementary, secondary, and higher—were not conceived full-blown. They have a history, and it is the social history of the United States. This essay will not attempt to present that history in its entirety but will focus instead on three specific periods decisive for the social history of this society and its public schools: the decades before the Civil War, in which the elementary or “common schools” were reformed; the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, in which the secondary schools “welcomed” the “children of the plain people”; and the post-World War II decades, which found the public colleges and universities “overwhelmed” by a “tidal wave” of “non-traditional” students— those traditionally excluded from higher education by sex, race, and class. In each of these periods, the quantitative expansion of the student population was matched by a qualitative transformation of the enlarged institutions.
The Irish and the Common Schools
Authors: Nasaw David
Published: November 2020

The reformers had set out on their crusade for common schools in the middle 1830s, a time when the American white population was still relatively homogeneous. They did not pay special attention to the immigrants because there were too few immigrants to merit special concern. Beginning with the early 1840s, all this would change. A combination of factors had in the later thirties and forties made life not only uncomfortable but impossible in Ireland. An increase in population, several successive potato crop failures, legislation in England that forbade relief to Irish emigrés, a drop in the price of Irish grain, and new laws that allowed landlords to evict previously unevictable tenants set the stage for what would become one of the largest mass migrations of modern history. The wave of Irish immigration that began in the late 1830s would not subside until the middle 1850s. During the peak years of the influx alone (1846 to 1853), nearly 1¼ million Irish men, women, and children would disembark in the New World. Where there had been neither work nor land for the Irish in their own country or elsewhere in the British Isles, there appeared to be plenty of both in the New World. The immigrants would soon discover, however, that the work was of the most menial, degraded, and underpaid variety, and the land, though abundant, cost far more than they could afford. The Irish found work in the coastal cities where they disembarked. They excavated “ditches for gas and water mains, or were taken in gangs to dig canals or prepare the track of new railroads, or served as engine crews in the omnipresent steamboats. Throughout the [antebellum] period their brawn was laying the foundation for the new material civilization of America.” Across the country the pattern was the same. The Irish filled the unskilled laborer jobs, those with the least security, requiring the least skill, and paying the lowest wages. In Newburyport, Massachusetts, foreigners accounted for almost two-thirds of the common laborers. The majority of these were Irish. In Boston, over four-fifths of the laborers enumerated in the 1850 census had been born in Ireland.
Introduction
Authors: Wilkinson J. Harvie
Published: November 2020

One quite remarkable aspect of the Civil Rights struggle of the mid-twentieth century is the protective role played by the United States Supreme Court. The Court sired the movement, succored it through the early years, encouraged its first taking wing, comforted and defended it in times of loneliness and despair,4 and finally—some would say—abandoned it. But to depict the Court as protector is not to denigrate the protected—the individual Americans, many white but mainly black, whose unrecorded sacrifices for human dignity made all the difference. It is simply to say that very little could have been accomplished in mid-century America without the Supreme Court. In a sense the Court was an unlikely patron. Its members have traditionally been detached from most ordinary happenings, certainly from those in the clapboard shacks and rundown schoolrooms of the rural mid-century South. The Supreme Court building itself seems as much a place of privilege as a temple of justice; a place where, in earlier times, kings and noblemen might have gathered among its marbled columns, there to rule the affairs of other men. Much in the history of this forbidding institution has reflected an aloof indifference to the tides of social change, the protection of property and privilege having been its more abiding concern. Throughout the late-nineteenth century, into the Progressive era, and on through the New Deal, the Court discouraged government efforts to relieve human distress. Even the Great Depression failed to shake Justice George Sutherland’s stern sense of constitutional principle: . . . The present exigency is nothing new. From the beginning of our existence as a nation, periods of depression, of industrial failure, of financial distress, of unpaid and unpayable indebtedness, have alternated with years of plenty. . . . If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned. . . . Throughout our history, the Supreme Court may well have seemed to black Americans the epitome of the white man’s world and institutions.
Busing Moves West and North: Denver and Boston
Authors: Wilkinson J. Harvie
Published: November 2020

Busing students for integration did not please Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi. “[P]arents,” said he, “are not going to permit their children to be boxed up and crated and hauled around the city and the country like common animals.” Senators thinking there was public support for busing ought to “get [their] ear a little closer to the ground.” To help make his point, Stennis and other southern Senators sought to require that new federal desegregation guidelines be enforced uniformly across the country or dropped altogether. Their strategy was simple: to arouse racial feelings in the North and bring the whole desegregation effort to a screeching halt. “If you have to [integrate] in your area,” Stennis informed his northern colleagues, “you will see what it means to us.” On February 18, 1970, the Senate adopted the Stennis amendment, thanks largely to a speech by Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut charging the North with “monumental hypocrisy” in condemning segregation in the South while tolerating it in its own backyard. Senator Ribicoff, predictably, was denounced for playing into southern hands. But some in the North felt he had “done a rare and useful thing: He has told his colleagues the truth, which is that many of them would rather flay the dying carcass of southern segregation than face the racism in their own bailiwicks.” Swann had flayed that carcass roundly. The case, said the NewYork Times, reflected “the Court’s belief that the school authorities of Charlotte, N.C., and other Southern districts, have openly defied the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the maintenance of dual school systems.” That, precisely, was Swarm’s viewpoint. The Court noted that it dealt only with school systems having a “long history” of official segregation. It cited the traditional precedents of southern recalcitrance, expressed impatience with the South’s “dilatory tactics,” and spoke to all the world as if the transcendent issue was how finally to bring the South into compliance with Brown. It implied that southern and northern racism were different animals, that the South practiced an evil segregation known as de jure, while that of the North was more “natural,” de facto.