Given the rising tide of violence and the mounting evidence of drug-related corruption at all levels of government, it is probably fair to say that, so far, the cartels have managed to take the lead in a psychological war against the Mexican state.
Twenty years after the end of the cold war, expectations run high on both sides of the Atlantic for another renewal of the Atlantic alliance and a relaunching of European integration.
Recent events have made Moscow's attempts to preserve its exclusive regional control seem no longer feasible or cost-effective.
Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that “eleven o'clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week” (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King's statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King's classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002]).
G rowing nationalist thinking and anti immigration legislation in American politics today cal ls for a critical historicizing of the continuing ambiguities of U . S . citizen ry and notions of what it is to be an American . The identity crisis of Nisei-second generation Japanese Americans resu lted from the complex intersection of America's racialized ideology toward immigrants, California 's vi rulent anti -Asian agitation , and the economic and political power struggles between the United States and Japan in gain ing dominance of the Pacific region . For many Nisei music served to reinforce thei r American identity during the tense years leading up to World War I I . Swing music , popu lar music of the day, sparked a dance craze during the 1 930s and 1 940s among young Americans . Because Nisei were coming of age during this period , I chose to study the i nfluence of popu lar m usic on the formation of thei r identity. I nterviews with West Coast Nisei about the role of music in thei r lives serve to test my premise .
In the 1850s, the American scientist and educator Frederick A. P. Barnard created a collection of scientific apparatus at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, of a size and expense that surpassed any collection in the United States at that time. The collection, which would come to include over three hundred instruments of both American and European manufacture, was the attempt by Barnard, born and educated in the North, to bring Big Science to the South and challenge the dominance of Northern schools in science education. In this respect it failed, and the collection became a forgotten footnote in the history of Southern science. This article examines the importance of the collection in understanding science at U.S. universities before the Civil War and what Barnard referred to as the "scientific atmosphere" of the South. The first section compares the collection to others of the period, highlighting its historical uniqueness and significance. The second section uses Barnard's correspondence to construct a narrative of the collection's assembly, providing insight into the international scientific instrument market of the period as well as the difficulties he faced working in the antebellum South. Finally, an examination of Barnard's perceptions regarding intellectual isolation and the failure of his endeavor highlights differences perceived by scientists of the day concerning the practice of science in the North versus in the South prior to the Civil War.
have long been seen as quintessentially American urban forms, symbolic of the nation that emerged in the nineteenth century. The powerful rectilinear grid— an informing idea made physical—was dedicated to making settlement and development convenient without regard to class or social status. Breathtaking in its scope, the grid predicted a giant future metropolis that would service a global marketplace. Central Park was equally ambitious, a universal open space designed for the use of all citizens, preserving some contact with the agrarian pastoral ideal on which the nation was founded. While these symbolic urban forms were not as different from European models as the rhetoric surrounding them often claimed, they were unique in their relentlessness expression of a particular political ideal: the American democracy.1 Although overshadowed by these enormous urban emblems of America’s ideals, Union Square, located at Fourteenth Street in New York City, has played a different but equally central role in symbolizing democracy, serving as a place for democratic action from the time of the Civil War until today. Although it is an anomaly in the grid and although the intentions and forms behind its original design were quite different from those of Central Park, throughout its history the square has held an unplanned but prominent place in the political life of the city and the nation. The Republican Urban Landscape