Psychological Distress Following Urban Earthquakes in California

2002 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda B. Bourque ◽  
Judith M. Siegel ◽  
Kimberley I. Shoaf

AbstractDuring and following a disaster caused by a natural event, human populations are thought to be at greater risk of psychological morbidity and mortality directly attributable to increased, disaster-induced stress. Drawing both on the research of others and that conducted at the Center for Public Health and Disaster Relief of the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) following California earthquakes, this paper examines the extent to which research evidence supports these assumptions. Following a brief history of disaster research in the United States, the response of persons at the time of an earthquake was examined with particular attention to psychological morbidity; the number of deaths that can be attributed to cardiovascular events and suicides; and the extent to which and by whom, health services are used following an earthquake. The implications of research findings for practitioners in the field are discussed.

Author(s):  
Ara H Rostomian ◽  
Daniel Sanchez ◽  
Jonathan Soverow

Background: Several studies have examined the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) among larger racial and ethnic groups such as Hispanics and African-Americans in the United States, but limited information is available on smaller subgroups such as Armenians. According to the World Health Organization, Armenia ranks eighth in CVD rates among all countries however it is unclear if Armenian immigrants living in the US have the same high rates of disease. This study examined whether being of Armenian descent increased the risk of having a positive exercise treadmill test (ETT) among patients treated at a safety net hospital in Los Angeles County. Methods: Data on patients who received an ETT from 2008-2011 were used to conduct a retrospective analysis of the relationship between Armenian ethnicity and ETT result as a surrogate measure for CVD. A multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to estimate the odds ratios (OR) for having a positive ETT among Armenians relative to non-Armenians, adjusting for the following pre-specified covariates: gender, age, diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, smoking, family history of coronary artery disease (CAD), and patient history of CAD. Results: A total of 5,297 patients, ages 18 to 89, were included. Of these, 13% were Armenian and 46% were male, with an average age of 53 years. Armenians had higher odds of having a positive ETT than non-Armenians (Crude OR=1.30, p=0.037, CI:1.02,1.66). After adjusting for CV risk factors, Armenians were still significantly more likely to have a positive ETT than non-Armenians (OR=1.33, p=0.029, CI:1.03,1.71). CAD (OR 2.02, p<0.001, CI:1.38,2.96), and hyperlipidemia (OR=1.31, p=0.008, CI:1.07,1.60) were also significantly associated with a positive ETT. Conclusion: Armenians have a higher likelihood of having a positive ETT than non-Armenians. This relationship appears to be independent of traditional CV risk factors and suggests a role for cultural and/or genetic influences.


Author(s):  
Terry L. Birdwhistell ◽  
Deirdre A. Scaggs

Since women first entered the University of Kentucky (UK) in 1880 they have sought, demanded, and struggled for equality within the university. The period between 1880 and 1945 at UK witnessed women’s suffrage, two world wars, and an economic depression. It was during this time that women at UK worked to take their rightful place in the university’s life prior to the modern women’s movement of the 1960s and beyond. The history of women at UK is not about women triumphant, and it remains an untidy story. After pushing for admission into a male-centric campus environment, women created women’s spaces, women’s organizations, and a women’s culture often patterned on those of men. At times, it seemed that a goal was to create a woman’s college within the larger university. However, coeducation meant that women, by necessity, competed with men academically while still navigating the evolving social norms of relationships between the sexes. Both of those paths created opportunities, challenges, and problems for women students and faculty. By taking a more women-centric view of the campus, this study shows more clearly the impact that women had over time on the culture and environment. It also allows a comparison, and perhaps a contrast, of the experiences of UK women with other public universities across the United States.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Sivak

Lewis, J. P. Black Cat Bone: the Life of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Illus. Gary Kelley. Mankato: Creative Editions, 2006. Print.Although this book is designed as a large-format picture book, Black Cat Bone is more likely to appeal to older children (middle school and adolescents) as a poetic text, with its rich illustrations and unusual narrative flow. The foreword of the book addresses a reader who knows some about blues musicians, as well as has some hint of the history of blues music in the United States. The language of the text is not trying to tell a linear story, but to be more evocative of a time, and of some of the historical context. The book actually has several texts: the address of the historical context that bookends the work, the bluesy poems which make up the majority of the text, excerpts from Johnson's own lyrics, and a footer running throughout the book, which provides aphoristic summaries of Johnson's story: “He was destined for legend not a field hand's work.” Each text tells a part of the interpretation of Johnson's story. With the images, it adds up to a faceted narrative of the man and his musical legacy. The illustrations alternate between impressionistic pastels in deep dark colours, reinforcing the air of mystery around Johnson's life as understood by popular culture. Kelley's other illustrative style is reminiscent of Indonesian shadow-puppets, dramatic and exaggerated in their execution. A particularly lovely example is show in full on the cover, a depiction of Johnson and the devil facing each other, each with a hand on the guitar. This image is reproduced in the text, split by the page turn in a clever design turn. Recommended: 3 stars out of 4Reviewer: Allison SivakAllison Sivak is the Assessment Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Library and Information Studies and Elementary Education, focusing on how the aesthetics of information design influence young people’s trust in the credibility of information content.


Author(s):  
Kelly Lytle Hernández

The third chapter is a western tale of national and global import. That tale, which sutures the split between the history of incarceration within the United States and the history of deportation from the United States, swirls around the passage of the 1892 Geary Act, a federal law that required all Chinese laborers in the United States to prove their legal residence and register with the federal government or be subject to up to one year of imprisonment at hard labor and, then, deportation. Chinese immigrants rebelled against the new law, refusing to be locked out, kicked out, or singled out for imprisonment. Launching the first mass civil disobedience campaign for immigrant rights in the history of the United States, Chinese immigrants forced the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a set of sweeping and enduring decisions regarding the future of U.S. immigration control. Buried in those decisions, which cut through Los Angeles during the summer of 1893, lay the invention of immigrant detention as a nonpunitive form of caging noncitizens within the United States. It was then an obscure and contested practice of indisputably racist origins. It is now one of the most dynamic sectors of the U.S. carceral landscape.


1997 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-177
Author(s):  
A. D. ROBERTS

This expensive little book, originally a thesis for the University of Illinois, is an artless but sometimes perceptive account of certain library endeavours in British East and West Africa, based on archival and library research in Britain and the United States. It is not a history of libraries per se so much as a study of instances of external aid to the development of libraries beyond the sphere of teaching institutions. In the 1930s, one such source – as in so much of the English-speaking world – was the Carnegie Corporation. Grants to Kenya underpinned a system of circulating libraries, the depot for which was housed in the McMillan Memorial Library, Nairobi; membership was confined to whites until 1958. In Lagos, Alan Burns, as chief secretary, secured a grant to start an unsegregated but fee-charging library: in 1934 just 43 of its 481 members were African. The grant ended in 1935, but the library was still going forty years later.


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
Gabriela Baeza Ventura ◽  
Lorena Gauthereau ◽  
Carolina Villarroel

AbstractThis article focuses on the work and efforts put forth by the University of Houston’s Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage program (Recovery) to create the first digital humanities center for US Latina/o Research: #usLdh. Recovery is a program to locate, preserve, and make available the written legacy of Latinas/os in the United States since colonial times until 1960. Through 27 years of successful work Recovery has not only been able to inscribe the excluded history of Latinas/os, but also has created an inclusive and vast digital repository that facilitates scholarship in this area of studies. This article focuses on the importance of recovery work in the writing, teaching, and understanding of history and considers how local personal archives have helped to fill in the gaps of mainstream history. We will detail the goals and challenges of this mission, as well as the importance of educating the community in digital methods that preserve and disseminate minority voices.


PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 505-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey T. Schnapp

The year 2008 was one of fruitful disjunctions. I spent the fall teaching at Stanford but commuting to the University of California, Los Angeles, to cochair the inaugural Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities. During the same period, I was curating—at the Canadian Center for Architecture, in Montreal—an exhibition devised to mark the centenary of the publication of “The Founding Manifesto of Futurism,” by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Whereas other centennial shows (at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, and at the Palazzo Reale, in Milan) sought to celebrate the accomplishments and legacies of Marinetti's avant-garde, the Canadian exhibition, Speed Limits, was critical and combative in spirit, more properly futurist (though thematically antifuturist). It probed the frayed edges of futurism's narrative of modernity as the era of speed to reflect on the social, environmental, and cultural costs. An exhibition about limits, it looked backward over the architectural history of the twentieth century to look forward beyond the era of automobility.


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