bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Executives, Executive Politics, and the LGBTQ Community
Authors: Sellers Mitchell Dylan
Published: November 2020

Executives in the United States influence politics and policies involving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community. While this is more of a modern phenomenon, presidents and governors actively shape politics that directly influence the community. This allows executives to set the tone of discourse and the eventual result of LGBTQ politics. Most presidents in modern times shaped debate surrounding LGBTQ rights in a positive light, but President Trump’s tone and policies go against recent trends. Executives on every level of government can shape, and have shaped, LGBTQ politics using formal powers, such as executive orders, administrative orders, directives, memorandums, and councils. The various executive documents allow executives to directly set policy through orders or to provide guiding philosophy for how policy should operate. Councils and advisory boards inform executives by providing expertise that executives need to create sound policy. Executives rely on each of the policymaking tools to varying degrees, but all presidents and governors have the ability to use the powers. One often ignored way executives influence policy is by setting the agenda by “going public” to bring the issue to everyday citizens. Executives have shaped many policies that directly affect the LGBTQ community, but three policy areas deserve special focus: the ban on gay and transgender service members in the military, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and nondiscrimination protections. In each of these cases, multiple executives have stepped in to shape policy and enforcement of regulations. In some cases, this is for the better. For instance, nondiscrimination policies came about in many states using gubernatorial executive orders. In other situations, executive action, or inaction, worked to the detriment of LGBTQ individuals, such as the failure of the Reagan administration to respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Executives have influenced policy and implementation of policies since the 1970s. This influence is likely to continue for decades to come, not just with these issues, but in many policy areas that affect the lives of LGBTQ individuals.
Family Law and Policy for LGBTQ Individuals and Families: Adoption, Foster Care, Assisted Reproduction, and Parental Rights
Authors: Goldberg Naomi G. , Hasenbush Amira
Published: November 2020

LGBTQ-headed families face a complicated legal landscape when it comes to legal recognition. The 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling , permitting same-sex couples nationwide to marry, substantially shifted the legal landscape for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) parents. Many families now have access to legal recognition through joint adoption, stepparent adoption, and the long-held legal presumptions of parentage for children born to married parents. Yet access to marriage has not fully created the necessary legal protections for the diverse ways in which LGBTQ-headed families form and live their lives. The patchwork of legal protections across the states means that many LGBTQ-headed families lack needed security, stability, and legal recognition.
Advisory Groups and Crisis
Authors: Preston Thomas
Published: November 2020

Advisory groups and their dynamics play a critical role in crisis management. If they function well and complement the leadership styles of political leaders, advisory groups can provide broad information search, diverse advice and perspectives, and reinforce a leader’s own strengths. They can surround an inexperienced leader with advisors possessing policy expertise or experience in an issue area. On the other hand, advisory groups can also easily fall into more dysfunctional patterns where they do not compensate for a leader’s weaknesses, fail to provide varied perspectives or alternative views, and engage in limited information gathering. Advisory groups can help seal an administration into an “alternative reality bubble” during crises, resulting in policy decisions being made based upon faulty perceptions instead of realities. How should we seek to understand advisory groups and crises? The first cut should involve the consumer of the advisory group’s inputs themselves, the leader. Advisory groups almost always serve at the pleasure of the leader, not themselves, and therefore the leaders will play a major role in determining their influence, how the groups will function, and their importance during crisis decision making. Important variables such as leadership style, sensitivity to context and need for information on the part of leaders, how much control they require over the policy process, and how their prior experience or expertise leads them to rely more or less upon advisors must be examined. The second focus should be upon the advisory groups themselves, their internal dynamics and reactions to stress, how decision rules and policy formulation occurs, and how group pathologies can undermine their crisis performance. Variables such as group malfunctions resulting from stress and the needs for cohesion during crisis (like groupthink) or the splintering of group consensus to warring factions that undercut cohesion (like polythink) must be considered. The stage of development an advisory group is in (i.e., newgroup versus established), the stage of the policymaking process involved (i.e., deliberative versus implemental), how sequential decision-making processes function, the composition of the group members (i.e., experts versus novices), the type of crisis the group faces, and the bureau-political dynamics involved all impact crisis management.
Congo-Kinshasa: The Military in the State-Building Process
Authors: Kisangani Emizet F.
Published: November 2020

The fundamental challenge facing social engineers is to project authority. State building is a process that establishes political order over time. As a top-down strategy, it emerges as an antidote to state collapse. The success of a state is in its capacity not only to provide national security while controlling the means of violence, but also to supply other public goods funded through direct taxes on citizens, who are supposed to make their rulers accountable. The absence of such state capacity perhaps explains the unending political crisis that plagues many post-colonial states, because they tend to control populations rather than territories. Although some efforts have been made toward state building, the state remains fragile in many post-colonial states. Territorial control is limited, and private taxation continues. Local tensions based on ethnic affinities rather than national allegiance remains intense. The analysis of Congo-Kinshasa illustrates these assertions by contrasting three successive periods: the Congo Free State (1885–1908), the Belgian Congo (1908–1959), and the post-colonial period (1960–2019). Of these three periods, only the second entity was able to professionalize the military for state-building purposes. The emphasis on this top down approach in state building overlooks other configurations that postcolonial state builders should contemplate. Societies have historically compensated for the failure or absence of statehood through a number of mechanisms that include, among others, councils of elders and secret societies that may not be difficult to reconcile with the demands of the modern state. The search for this bottom-up approach to state building perhaps explains so many internal conflicts in most post-colonial states as marginalized groups intend to insert themselves into the political system that has excluded them from power.
South Korea: The Journey Toward Civilian and Democratic Control Over the Military
Authors: Saxer Carl J.
Published: November 2020

Many have seen the establishment of civilian and democratic control over the military as a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for the consolidation of a nascent democracy. The establishment of civilian and democratic control over the military in South Korea was a long and, some would argue, uncompleted process. A coup in 1961 led by Park Chung-hee, a major-general, led to the establishment of an authoritarian regime that, while going civilian, was based on the control of the military and the intelligence services. Park was assassinated by the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in October 1979; however, the hopes of moving in the direction of democracy were soon squashed when Chun Doo-hwan, and his comrades in arms from the secret Hanahoe (One Mind) club of Korean Military Academy graduates, first took power over the military through an internal coup, and then took control over the government. Under significant internal, and external, pressure Chun Doo-hwan agreed to step down from the presidency in 1987 and allow the writing of a new constitution that led to free elections to the presidency in December 1987. The opposition lost the 1987 election due to its inability to agree upon a united candidate. The winner was Roh Tae-woo, a participant in the 1979–1990 coup, who would during his presidency take important steps when it came to establishing civilian control over the military. However, it was first with the inauguration of the Kim Young-sam in 1993 that the establishment of firm civilian control was achieved. He engaged in a significant reorganization of, and moved against the power of the secret societies within, the army. He also promoted the idea of a politically neutral military. This most likely played a significant role when Kim Dae-jung, the first opposition candidate, won the presidency in December 1997, as the military remained neutral and accepted the outcome of the electoral process. There has since been a strengthening of civilian control over the military in South Korea. However, there are a number of important issues that need to be dealt with in order to ensure full democratic control over the military and the intelligence services. While the military, as an institution, has stayed neutral in politics, military and intelligence resources have been used in attempts at influencing public opinion in the lead-up to elections. In addition, comprehensive oversight by the legislature continues to be weak and the National Security Law remains on the books.
Homosexuality and Political Scandal Until 1919
Authors: Clark Anna
Published: November 2020

Same-sex scandals often had political implications both on a superficial level of political rivalries and the larger level of political ideas. Scandals gain traction when sexual misbehavior becomes a metaphor for larger political misbehavior, for instance, mixing up one’s personal interests with governmental actions. Pre-20th century scandals were different than later ones because the notion of homosexuality as a fixed identity had not emerged. As historians have long shown, in the past same-sex desire was defined in very different ways, and not as a fixed, exclusive sexual orientation. In ancient Greece and Rome, politicians accused enemies of sexually submitting to other men to undercut their claims to citizenship even though it was acceptable for men to sexually dominate male slaves, foreign men, and non-citizen youths. In the early modern period, enemies could accuse politicians, aristocrats, or monarchs of indulging in sex with both men and women. In doing so they undercut the acceptability of a political structure based on dynasties and personal patronage. In the period up to World War I, radicals used same-sex desire not just to challenge individual politicians, but to challenge the militaristic, aristocratic dominance. Same-sex scandals could also justify imperial interventions, or conversely, undercut white pretensions to superiority. By the late 19th century, same-sex scandals also emerged out of larger controversies over police regulation of prostitution. Only at the very end of this period did the sexological notion of the homosexual as a distinct personality emerge as a (minor) factor in political scandals.
Inquiry-Based Curriculum in Early Childhood Education
Authors: Nxumalo Fikile , Gagliardi Lisa-Marie , Won Hye Ryung
Published: November 2020

Inquiry-based curriculum is a responsive approach to education in which young children are viewed as capable protagonists of their learning. Inquiry-based curriculum has the potential to challenge the dominance of developmental psychology as the primary way of understanding young children’s learning. This approach to curriculum-making also disrupts the instrumentalist “technician” image of the early childhood educator. Practices of inquiry-based curriculum can also extend beyond the early childhood classroom as a potentially transformative teacher education tool, and as a research methodology that counters dominant deficit discourses of childhood. Inquiry-based curriculum in North American early childhood education has been greatly influenced by the Reggio Emilia approach, which is a powerful alternative to predetermined theme-based didactic curriculum. The revolutionary possibilities of inquiry-based curriculum, inspired by Reggio Emilia, are not standardized frameworks to be copied in practice; rather, they create critical entry points into contextual, creative, rigorous, meaningful, and justice-oriented curriculum. One of these entry points is the practice of pedagogical documentation, which not only makes children’s learning visible but also enables educators’ and researchers’ critical reflection. Such reflections can act to foreground the complex, political, and dialogical thinking, doing, and exchanging that happens in inquiry-based early childhood education classrooms. Reggio Emilia–inspired inquiry-based curriculum has brought attention to the important role of the arts in young children’s inquiries. Important research in this area includes work that has put new materialist perspectives to work to gain insight into new pedagogical and curricular possibilities that are made possible by attuning to children’s relations with materials, where materials are active participants in learning. While more research is needed in this area, recent research has also engaged with how attention to the arts and materials does not preclude attending to and responding to issues of race and racialization. In U.S. early learning contexts, an important area of research in inquiry-based curriculum has demonstrated that this approach, alongside a pedagogy of listening, is central to shifting deficit-based practices with historically marginalized children. This is important work as access to dynamic inquiry-based curriculum remains inaccessible to many young children of color, particularly within increasing policy pressures to prepare children for standardized testing. Finally, there is a growing body of work that is investigating possibilities for inquiry-based curriculum that is responsive to the inequitably distributed environmental precarities that young children are inheriting. This work is an important direction for research in inquiry-based curriculum as it proposes a radical shift from individualist and humanist modes of understanding childhood and childhood learning.
Sexuality Education and Feminist New Materialisms
Authors: Allen Louisa
Published: November 2020

School-based sexuality education has existed in various forms since the 1800s. Sexuality education researchers have recently turned to feminist new materialist thought to rethink debates that occupy this field. These debates include whether sexuality education should be taught at school, who should teach it, and what constitutes appropriate content. While these issues have been important historically, some sexuality researchers view them as stifling other possibilities for teaching and generating knowledge in this field.

Feminist new materialism emerges from a broader ontological turn within the social sciences and humanities that diverges from social constructionist accounts of the world. This work is associated with scholars such as Barad, Bennett, Haraway, and Braidotti and draws on thinking from Deleuze and Guattari. Employing theoretical tools, such as “intra-action,” “onto-epistemology,” and “agentic matter,” feminist new materialism reconceptualizes the nature of sexuality education research. These concepts highlight the anthropocentric (human-centered) nature of sexuality education research and practice.

Feminist new materialisms encourage us to think about what the sexuality curriculum might look like when humans are not at its core, nor bestowed with the power to control themselves and the world. These questions have profound implications for how we teach aspects of sexuality underpinned by these assumptions, such as safer sex and sexual consent. Ultimately, feminist new materialism encourages us to question whether issues such as prevention of sexually transmissible infections and unplanned pregnancy should remain the conventional foci of this subject.
Test-Based Accountability in England
Authors: Santori Diego
Published: November 2020

Since the 1980s, the English education system has been a site of experimentation and reform, with test-driven accountability as the predominant form of quality control. The high-stakes accountability system in England is the result of a complex articulation of standardized assessments, end-of-secondary high-stakes examination, and a consequential inspection system that combines public display of performance data via rating systems and league tables. In primary, Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) in English and math are used to measure pupils’ progress between Year 2 and Year 6, and schools’ effectiveness are determined on the basis of these scores, which are publicly available. In addition, there is a range of ad hoc focused tests or “checks” scattered across primary schooling, such as the Phonics Screening Check (Year 1) and the Multiplication Tables Check (Year 4). The main assessment for KS4 is a tiered exit qualification known as General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSEs), which determine school and college sixth-form options (A levels) and subsequent eligibility for university courses. As data and metrics are increasingly privileged over teacher expertise and professional judgment, schools face tremendous pressure to comply with mounting data and inspection demands, resulting in homogenous and rigid practices. Arguably, recent policy reforms at both ends of compulsory schooling, such as the Reception Baseline Assessment (2020) and Progress 8 (2016), were introduced with the aim of mitigating some of the negative effects that layers of test-based accountability had on teaching and learning. However, a closer look at the internal logic of these reforms reveals further intensification of output-driven pedagogy at the expense of equity, well-being, and justice.
Religious and Cultural Diversity in Spanish Education
Authors: Andrés Cabello Sergio , Giró Miranda Joaquín
Published: November 2020

Treatment of cultural and religious diversity is one of the most important debates in education, especially in societies in the first decades of the 21st century, in which globalization processes have led to increased migration. Different models exist for addressing religious and cultural diversity in compulsory education, linked to the different ways of approaching the integration of immigrant groups. The treatment of diversity, equality, and respect for fundamental rights are the axes on which most of these proposals revolve, which in the case of the religious issue acquire specific dimensions by generating a wider debate. In the Spanish case, the treatment of cultural diversity and, fundamentally, religious diversity is situated both within the framework of general conceptions and with particular elements.

The contemporary scenario of how the Spanish educational system addresses cultural and religious diversity is determined from the particular features of Spanish education and the immigration “boom” in Spain in much of the first decade of the 21st century. The evolution of legislation on diversity, the fact that education is a subject for ideological debate, and the need to face the challenge of a new social structure because of immigration, together with the importance of the Catholic Church in Spain, determine to a large extent the way this country has addressed religious diversity. The treatment of religious and cultural diversity continues to generate an important discussion in Spain, based on different theories about the topic.
Buddhist Art and Architecture
Authors: Lee Sonya S.
Published: November 2020

The art and architecture of Buddhism has shaped the physical and social landscape of Asia for more than two millennia. Images of the Buddha and other Buddhist deities, alongside the physical structures built to enshrine them, are found in practically all corners of the continent, where the religion has enjoyed widespread dissemination. India boasts some of the earliest extant works dating from the 3rd century bce, whereas new images and monuments continue to be made today in many countries in East and Southeast Asia as well as in North America and Europe. Spanning across diverse cultures, Buddhist material culture encompasses a wide range of object types, materials, and settings. Yet the Buddha represented in anthropomorphic form and the stupa that preserves his presence through either bodily relics or symbolic objects remain the most enduring forms through time and space. Their remarkable longevity underscores the tremendous flexibility inherent in Buddhist teaching and iconography, which allows local communities to adapt and reconstitute them for new meanings. Such processes of localization can be understood through close analysis of changes in style, materials, production techniques, and context.

The ubiquity of Buddhist art and architecture across the globe is made possible chiefly by a fundamental belief in religious merits, a concept that encourages believers to do good in order to accumulate positive karma for spiritual advancement. One of the most common forms of action is to give alms and other material objects to the monastic community as well as make offerings to the Buddha, thereby giving rise to active patronage of image-making and scripture production.
Women in Cameroon
Authors: O'Rourke Harmony
Published: November 2020

Cameroon is a nation-state in West Central Africa. Historical evidence about the precolonial period has revealed the diverse ways women valued their motherhood and fertility, knowledge of agriculture production, membership in secret societies, and their role in transitioning deceased women and men through dance and ritual. Women exercised varying levels of power and experienced a spectrum of belonging as wives, mothers, concubines, slaves, queen mothers, and political intermediaries. Near the turn of the 19th century, political centralization and the expansion of long-distance trade produced new forms of inequality for women as wealth became more concentrated in the hands of elite men who sought to control women’s labor and sexuality.

With colonial rule and postcolonial nationhood in the 20th century, Cameroonian women were increasingly integrated into a capitalist political economy that supported local patriarchal authority, changed women’s relationships to land, and engendered new socioeconomic inequalities. At the same time, women worked to check gendered disempowerment through secret societies, cooperative groups, schooling, religious conversion, changes in marriage and family structure, entrepreneurship, and new avenues for political engagement. In so doing, Cameroonian women transformed gender roles, struggled against new forms of discrimination, and altered lines of difference among themselves.
The Ahiara Declaration
Authors: Daly Samuel Fury Childs
Published: November 2020

The Ahiara Declaration was a speech made by Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the head of state of the secessionist Republic of Biafra, on June 1, 1969, in the town of Ahiara. It was issued in the final year of the war between Nigeria and Biafra, also known as the Nigerian Civil War. The Eastern Region of Nigeria seceded from Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra in May 1967 following a series of mass killings of easterners, especially members of the Igbo ethnic group, in northern Nigeria the previous year. In his address, Ojukwu gave a partisan account of the war and the events leading up to it, rallied Biafrans to continue the fight, and set out a political philosophy that would guide Biafra from that point on. It was written by a committee of Biafran intellectuals, most notably the novelist and poet Chinua Achebe. The declaration had multiple meanings: it was both ideology and propaganda, and it served both proscriptive and descriptive purposes. Its influences included the broader intellectual currents of black internationalism, a novel theory of radical anticolonialism, and the idea of “African Socialism”—a communitarian philosophy that emerged in distinction to socialist thought in other regions of the world. The Ahiara Declaration was not meaningfully implemented, both due to limited resources and to the fact that Biafra was defeated six months later. Nonetheless, the declaration is an important source for Nigeria’s history, and for the broader study of political philosophy in postcolonial Africa.
Amílcar Lopes Cabral, 1924–1973
Authors: Amado Abel Djassi
Published: November 2020

Amílcar Cabral, the founding father of Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau, was one of the African political leaders who masterfully exercised key and decisive roles in the twin realms of political action and theoretical development. As the founding leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, Cabral wore several hats: he was the chief diplomat and the commander in chief of the liberation movement; he was also the master organizer of the party and of the incipient state in the liberated areas. Yet, Cabral was far from solely a man of action; he developed a complex and sophisticated political theory of national liberation that gave substance and meaning to political action.
Planetary Aurorae
Authors: Miller Steve
Published: November 2020

Planetary aurorae are some of the most iconic and brilliant (in all senses of that word) indicators not only of the interconnections on Planet Earth, but that these interconnections pertain throughout the entire Solar System as well. They are testimony to the centrality of the Sun, not just in providing the essential sunlight that drives weather systems and makes habitability possible, but also in generating a high velocity wind of electrically charged particles—known as the Solar Wind—that buffets each of the planets in turn as it streams outward through interplanetary space. Aurorae are created when electrically charged particles—predominantly negatively charged electrons or positive ions such as protons, the nuclei of hydrogen—crash into the atoms and molecules of a planetary or lunar atmosphere. Such particles can excite the electrons in atoms and molecules from their ground state to higher levels. The atoms and molecules that have been excited by these high-energy collisions can then relax; the emitted radiation is at certain well-defined wavelengths, giving characteristic colors to the aurorae. Just how many particles, how much atmosphere, and what strength of magnetic field are required to create aurorae is an open question. But giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn have aurorae, as does Earth. Some moons also show these emissions. Overall, the aurorae of the Solar System are very varied, variable, and exciting.
The English School and Institutions: British Institutionalists?
Authors: Schouenborg Laust
Published: November 2020

The argument can be made, and has in fact been made, that the English School is primarily concerned with the study of institutions. The institutions of international society are social in a fundamental sense. That is, they are something above and beyond what one usually associates with an international institution. There are three dominant perspectives on what the primary institutions of international society are: functional, historical/descriptive, and typological. Hedley Bull was the major proponent of the functional perspective, and he identified five primary institutions of international society: the balance of power, international law, diplomacy, war, and the great powers. However, the historical/descriptive perspective appears to be the prevailing one. Nevertheless, various authors have started to think about the institutions of international society typologically. This has certain implications for how one views the cognitive objectives of the English School. The adherence to functional, historical/descriptive, or typological perspectives involves a positioning in relation to where international relations (IR), as a discipline, and the English School, as an approach to it, should locate itself in wider academia.
The British Committee and International Society: History and Theory
Authors: Vigezzi Brunello
Published: November 2020

The British Committee on the Theory of International Politics is generally considered the original core of the “English School.” Equally often, scholars have identified as one of its characteristic elements the importance it attributed to “international society” as a force aimed at enlivening and regulating, as far as possible, power relations between states. The attention it paid to international society is also seen as consistent with the importance the authors of the British Committee attributed to “history” and in particular to the “history of international society” as a means to understand and reconstruct international life in the past and the present. However, the internal history of the British Committee is all too often neglected. Studies concerned with the orientations of the English School have mainly sought to analyze the thinking of this or that author without considering the work of the British Committee as a whole. In other words, scholars have tended to pay little attention to the moment when the British Committee began to examine “international society” and the manner in which it did so. In particular, the achievement of the British Committee discussions during 1961–1962 was important, and it was the beginning of a development of great interest. The various texts, the debates, do not limit themselves to a sort of rich and varied list of the component parts of an “international society.” Instead, they paint an overall picture, and they guarantee an interconnection between the reflections of the individuals and the overall orientation of the Committee. Moreover, they are the critical point of departure for the future development of theory.
Mobility and Subsistence Patterns among Mid-Holocene Pastoralists in East Africa
Authors: Ndiema Emmanuel K
Published: November 2020

Pastoralism in eastern Africa was characterized by a form of niche broadening and diversification when viewed within the context of mobility and subsistence patterns. In East Africa, Pastoral Neolithic cultures entail those groups who herded domesticated animals and used stone tools and ceramics as part of their subsistence package. Climatic and demographic pressures after 6,000 bp pushed Neolithic pastoralists living in the Nile River Valley southward toward East Africa, where they encountered savanna habitats that were ideal for herding. Pastoralist mobility and subsistence patterns are reviewed from the perspective of how animal herders occupied distinct niches on the landscape. The development of the Pastoral Neolithic was lengthy and complex. The current state of archaeological evidence for early pastoral cultures in East Africa are examined to evaluate how prehistoric herders may have varied their mobility and subsistence patterns so as to opportunistically exploit specific ecological niches in the landscape. The exchange and mobility networks are also examined on how pastoralist groups in new lands exploited those networks with local foragers so as to acquire familiar resources in unfamiliar landscapes. The role of forgers as active participants in the inception and spread of pastoralism is reviewed. Finally, the social organization and groupings that necessitated these early herders to come together and build megalithic monuments is examined, highlighting how pastoralists had come together in times of severe aridity to build megalithic structures that served as a reminder of their shared identity. The early herders tended to have been less mobile, since resources were plenty and predictable. Later on, as aridity intensified, pastoralists adapted a broad-based subsistence pattern. When placed within the larger paleoenvironmental and cultural context, pastoralists adapted their mobility and subsistence to specific ecosystems based on the potential of the land to provide adequate sustenance for themselves and their livestock. Pastoralists also needed to adjust to several challenges specific to different ecological niches they occupied, such as livestock diseases, predation, as well as severe droughts. In understanding the prehistory of eastern Africa, pastoralism is fundamental: pastoralism formed the foundation of the transition to food production, spread widely, and has persisted as a primary subsistence system in the region over three millennia.
African Americans in the Great Depression and New Deal
Authors: Murphy Mary-Elizabeth B.
Published: November 2020

For African Americans, the Great Depression and the New Deal (1929–1940) marked a transformative era and laid the groundwork for the postwar black freedom struggle in the United States. The outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929 caused widespread suffering and despair in black communities across the country as women and men faced staggering rates of unemployment and poverty. Once Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), a Democrat, was inaugurated as president in 1933, he launched a “New Deal” of ambitious government programs to lift the United States out of the economic crisis. Most African Americans were skeptical about benefiting from the New Deal, and racial discrimination remained rampant. However, a cohort of black advisors and activists critiqued these government programs for excluding African Americans and enacted some reforms. At the grassroots level, black workers pressed for expanded employment opportunities and joined new labor unions to fight for economic rights. As the New Deal progressed a sea change swept over black politics. Many black voters switched their allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic Party, waged more militant campaigns for racial justice, and joined interracial and leftist coalitions. African Americans also challenged entrenched cultural stereotypes through photography, theater, and oral histories to illuminate the realities of black life in the United States. By 1940, African Americans now wielded an arsenal of protest tactics and were marching on a path toward full citizenship rights, which remains an always evolving process.
Agriculture and Rural Life in the South, 1900–1945
Authors: Okie William Thomas
Published: November 2020

The period from 1900 to 1945 was characterized by both surprising continuity and dramatic change in southern agriculture. Unlike the rest of the nation, which urbanized and industrialized at a rapid pace in the late nineteenth century, the South remained overwhelmingly rural and poor, from the 1880s through the 1930s. But by 1945, the region was beginning to urbanize and industrialize into a recognizably modern South, with a population concentrated in urban centers, industries taking hold, and agriculture following the larger-scale, mechanized trend common in other farming regions of the country. Three overlapping factors explain this long lag followed by rapid transformation. First, the cumulative effects of two centuries of land-extensive, staple crop agriculture and white supremacy had sapped the region of much of its fertility and limited its options for prosperity. Second, in response to this “problem South,” generations of reformers sought to modernize the South, along with other rural areas around the world. These piecemeal efforts became the foundation for the South’s dramatic transformation by federal policy known as the New Deal. Third, poor rural southerners, both black and white, left the countryside in increasing numbers. Coupled with the labor demands created by two major military conflicts, World War I and World War II, this movement aided and abetted the mechanization of agriculture and the depopulation of the rural South.
The Huguenots in America
Authors: Van Ruymbeke Bertrand
Published: November 2020

The Protestant Reformation took root in France in the middle of the 16th century under the distant leadership of Jean (John) Calvin who settled in Geneva in 1541. In the 1560s, France was devastated by a series of religious and civil wars. These wars ended in 1598 when Henry IV, a former Huguenot who converted to Catholicism to access the throne, signed the Edict of Nantes. This edict protected the Huguenots. In the 17th century, however, its provisions were abrogated one by one. Daily life for the Huguenots was more and more limited and many Huguenots, especially in Northern France, converted to Catholicism. After a decade or so of legal harassment, and at times military violence, Louis XIV, whose objective was to achieve a religious reunification of his kingdom, revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Huguenots could then either convert or resist. Resistance led to imprisonment and being sent to the galleys and, for women, to convents. At least 150,000—of a population of nearly 800,000—left France, forming what has been labeled by French historians as the Refuge. Huguenots fled first to neighboring countries, the Netherlands, the Swiss cantons, England, and some German states, and a few thousand of them farther away to Russia, Scandinavia, British North America, and the Dutch Cape colony in southern Africa.

About 2,000 Huguenots settled in New York, South Carolina, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island in the mid-1680s and in 1700 in Virginia. They settled in port cities, Charleston, New York, and Boston, or founded rural communities (New Paltz and New Rochelle, New York, Orange Quarter and French Santee, South Carolina, and Manakintown, Virginia). The Huguenots originally attempted to live together and founded French Reformed churches. But with time they married English settlers, were naturalized, were elected to colonial assemblies and to political offices, and joined other churches, especially the Church of England. In South Carolina and New York, they acquired slaves, a sign of their economic prosperity. By the 1720s and 1730s most Huguenots were fully integrated into colonial societies while maintaining for a decade or so the use of the French language in the private sphere and keeping ties to their original French church. In the 18th century, a new wave of Huguenot refugees mixed with French- and German-speaking Swiss formed rural communities in South Carolina (Purrysburgh, New Bordeaux) under the leadership of a colonial entrepreneur or a pastor. These communities quickly disappeared as Huguenots gradually acquired land elsewhere or moved to Savannah and Charleston.

In the 1880s, Huguenot Societies were formed to commemorate the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in England, Germany, New York, and South Carolina. The memory of the Huguenot diaspora was maintained by these genealogical, historical, and patriotic societies until professional historians started to study the Refuge a century later.
Women’s History and Movements in 20th-Century Brazil
Authors: Quartim de Moraes Maria Lygia
Published: November 2020

In the early twentieth century, Brazil depended on coffee exports, its slave regime had just been abolished, and most of its inhabitants lived in the countryside. The Catholic Church exercised the moral direction of society, and White landowners virtually established the rules of sociability and controlled economic and political life. A woman’s social position was fundamentally determined according to their social class. Wealthy and White middle-class women had access to some form of education, and when they left the family home, it was to marry and raise a family, being completely dependent on their husbands, with no political rights, and only allowed to work upon marital authorization.

With rapid urbanization, wretched working conditions, as either a domestic servant or a textile worker (the two female labor niches), worsened the lives of poor women in the city. Access to education, the struggle for labor rights, and the right to vote were the pillars of the long women’s emancipation process that was in progress.

In 1964 a military coup plunged Brazil into a long dictatorship that only ended in 1985 with the return of democratic institutions and the election of a civil president. The conquest of democracy was made with the broad participation of the various women’s groups and movements, especially the feminist movements.
Changepoint inference in the presence of missing covariates for principal surrogate evaluation in vaccine trials
Authors: Yang Tao , Huang Ying , Fong Youyi
Published: November 2020

We consider the use of threshold-based regression models to evaluate immune response biomarkers as principal surrogate markers of a vaccine’s protective effect. Threshold-based regression models, which allow the relationship between a clinical outcome and a covariate to change dramatically across a threshold value in the covariate, have been studied by various authors under fully observed data. Limited research, however, has examined these models in the presence of missing covariates, such as the counterfactual potential immune responses of a participant in the placebo arm of a standard vaccine trial had they been assigned to the vaccine arm instead. Based on a hinge model for a threshold effect of the principal surrogate on vaccine efficacy, we develop a regression method that consists of two components: (i) an estimated likelihood method for handling missing potential outcomes, and (ii) a penalty imposed on the estimated likelihood to ensure satisfactory finite-sample performance. We develop a method that allows joint estimation of all model parameters, as well as a two-step method that separates estimation of the threshold parameter from the rest of the parameters. Stable iterative algorithms are developed to implement the two methods, and the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators are established. In simulation studies, the proposed estimators are shown to have satisfactory finite-sample performance. The proposed methods are applied to real data collected from dengue vaccine efficacy trials to predict how vaccine efficacy varies with an individual’s potential immune response if receiving the vaccine.
Switching from Infliximab to Biosimilar in Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Review of Existing Literature and Best Practices
Authors: Bhat Shubha , Qazi Taha
Published: November 2020

Biosimilars are highly similar but nonidentical biologic agents with no differences in clinical efficacy and safety when compared to bio-originator products. Considering the long-term costs of managing inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), biosimilars, through economic competition, provide an opportunity for cost savings to payors, may increase access to IBD medications, and could decrease health care spending in the long run. Studies investigating the use of biosimilars in IBD have shown a comparable clinical efficacy and safety profile compared to originator products. Moreover, studies have also suggested that solitary switches between bio-originators and biosimilars are acceptable and do not lead to worsening disease burden or increased immunogenicity or safety concerns. Despite available data and proposed benefits of biosimilars, skepticism about the widespread adoption of biosimilars throughout the United States continues to be present and creates many barriers. Herein, we detail the real-world, nonmedical switching experiences of 2 IBD centers in the United States and review best practices, which can be used as a potential roadmap for successful biosimilar adoption in other institutions.
D-glucose overflow metabolism in an evolutionary engineered high-performance D-xylose consuming Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain
Authors: Nijland Jeroen G , Shin Hyun Yong , Dore Eleonora , Rudinatha Donny , de Waal Paul P , Driessen Arnold J M
Published: November 2020

Co-consumption of D-xylose and D-glucose by Saccharomyces cerevisiae is essential for cost-efficient cellulosic bioethanol production. There is a need for improved sugar conversion rates to minimize fermentation times. Previously, we have employed evolutionary engineering to enhance D-xylose transport and metabolism in the presence of D-glucose in a xylose-fermenting S. cerevisiae strain devoid of hexokinases. Re-introduction of Hxk2 in the high performance xylose-consuming strains restored D-glucose utilization during D-xylose/D-glucose co-metabolism, but at rates lower than the non-evolved strain. In the absence of D-xylose, D-glucose consumption was similar to the parental strain. The evolved strains accumulated trehalose-6-phosphate during sugar co-metabolism, and showed an increased expression of trehalose pathway genes. Upon the deletion of TSL1, trehalose-6-phosphate levels were decreased and D-glucose consumption and growth on mixed sugars was improved. The data suggest that D-glucose/D-xylose co-consumption in high-performance D-xylose consuming strains causes the glycolytic flux to saturate. Excess D-glucose is phosphorylated enters the trehalose pathway resulting in glucose recycling and energy dissipation, accumulation of trehalose-6-phosphate which inhibits the hexokinase activity, and release of trehalose into the medium.
Assessing skeleton and microbiome responses of a calcareous sponge under thermal and pH stresses
Authors: Ribeiro Bárbara , Padua André , Barno Adam , Villela Helena , Duarte Gustavo , Rossi André , Fernandes Flávio da Costa , Peixoto Raquel , Klautau Michelle
Published: November 2020

Ocean higher temperature and acidity levels affect its carbonate chemistry, and calcifying organisms that depend on the calcium carbonate saturation state (ΩCaCO3) to build their skeleton may be vulnerable to these changes. Despite their important roles in the marine environment, little is known about the vulnerability of calcareous sponges under these stressors. We performed an acute short-term experiment (9 days) with thermal and pH stresses to explore their effects on the skeleton and microbiome of the calcareous sponge Sycettusa hastifera. We observed that sponge spicules showed no corrosion and no Mg/Ca ratio variation when exposed to stress conditions. However, the outermost spicules were smaller in low pH treatment, although these effects were often diminished when higher temperatures were also applied. In general, the sponges synthesized normally shaped spicules under stress conditions, but the proportion of deformed spicules increased significantly in elevated temperature. In addition, we observed a stable host–microbiome association in which there is microbiome flexibility under thermal and pH stresses with a significantly increase in abundance of some associated bacteria. Our results suggest that S. hastifera has low vulnerability under the future ocean conditions here designed, since it showed indications of resistance that could help them adapt and survive.
Stronger convergence results for deep residual networks: network width scales linearly with training data size
Authors: Gulcu Talha Cihad
Published: November 2020

Deep neural networks are highly expressive machine learning models with the ability to interpolate arbitrary datasets. Deep nets are typically optimized via first-order methods, and the optimization process crucially depends on the characteristics of the network as well as the dataset. This work sheds light on the relation between the network size and the properties of the dataset with an emphasis on deep residual networks (ResNets). Our contribution is that if the network Jacobian is full rank, gradient descent for the quadratic loss and smooth activation converges to the global minima even if the network width $m$ of the ResNet scales linearly with the sample size $n$ and logarithmically with the network depth $H$. Consequently, our work is able to provide a theoretical guarantee for the convergence of deep neural networks in the $m=\varOmega (n,\log H)$ regime.