Internal Improvements (1838–41)

2020 ◽  
pp. 135-163
Author(s):  
Richard Haw

John left farming in the wake of the panic of 1837 and found work as a surveyor, eventually working on a series of canal projects around western Pennsylvania, where he met Charles Schlatter. Despite his evident ability and expertise, John was doing little more than grubbing around for piecemeal surveying work before linking up with Schlatter. In 1838, Pennsylvania placed Schlatter in charge of surveying three potential railroad routes across the state, and he immediately drafted John to help. While submitting his survey report to the state authorities in Harrisburg, John got embroiled with Charles Ellet in a competition to build the first long span suspension bridge in the United States, over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Ellet won the contract, instituting a rivalry that would last much of the next twenty years.

2020 ◽  
pp. 344-395
Author(s):  
Richard Haw

The Niagara contract was a fitting judgment on John’s career to date, and the bridge itself was a triumph, eliciting praise and admiration from all over the globe, for both its handsome Egyptian architecture and the soundness of its design. It took four years to build and was the world’s first railroad suspension bridge, or at least the first successful one, fully demonstrating the strength and effectiveness of the suspension plan for heavy-going freight. It also compared very favorably with Robert Stephenson’s recently completed Britannia Tubular Bridge, the British engineer’s rival solution to the problem of long-span railroad bridges. A lifelong, committed abolitionist who wrote extensively about the evils of slavery, John also appreciated the impact his bridge had (somewhat incidentally) on the institution of slavery. Harriet Tubman (among others) used John’s bridge numerous times in the late 1850s to lead runaway slaves out of the United States and into British Canada.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lazer ◽  
Mauricio Santillana ◽  
Roy H. Perlis ◽  
Katherine Ognyanova ◽  
Matthew Baum ◽  
...  

Rapid turnaround of testing for COVID-19 infection is essential to containing the pandemic. Ideally, test results would be available the same day. Our findings indicate that the United States is not currently performing testing with nearly enough speed. In our large (19,058 respondents) national survey, conducted between July 10 and 26, we asked whether respondents had been tested for COVID-19 and how long they had waited to get results. Our finding: 37% of those who had been tested by nasal swab received results within 2 days, and the average wait time was 4.1 days; with 31% of tests taking more than 4 days, and 10% 10 days or more. Further, there are few signs that turnaround times are diminishing. For individuals who responded that their last test had been in April, they had waited on average 4.2 days to get results; and for individuals tested in July, 4.1 days.


Commonwealth ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennie Sweet-Cushman ◽  
Ashley Harden

For many families across Pennsylvania, child care is an ever-present concern. Since the 1970s, when Richard Nixon vetoed a national childcare program, child care has received little time in the policy spotlight. Instead, funding for child care in the United States now comes from a mixture of federal, state, and local programs that do not help all families. This article explores childcare options available to families in the state of Pennsylvania and highlights gaps in the current system. Specifically, we examine the state of child care available to families in the Commonwealth in terms of quality, accessibility, flexibility, and affordability. We also incorporate survey data from a nonrepresentative sample of registered Pennsylvania voters conducted by the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics. As these results support the need for improvements in the current childcare system, we discuss recommendations for the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-74
Author(s):  
Hristov Manush

AbstractThe main objective of the study is to trace the perceptions of the task of an aviation component to provide direct aviation support to both ground and naval forces. Part of the study is devoted to tracing the combat experience gained during the assignment by the Bulgarian Air Force in the final combat operations against the Wehrmacht during the Second World War 1944-1945. The state of the conceptions at the present stage regarding the accomplishment of the task in conducting defensive and offensive battles and operations is also considered. Emphasis is also placed on the development of the perceptions of the task in the armies of the United States and Russia.


1994 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-70
Author(s):  
Florence Eid

IntroductionThis paper is a report on the state of research in two areas of Islamicstudies: Islam and economics and Islam and governance. I researched andwrote it as part of my internship at the Ford Foundation during the summerof 1992. On Discourse. The study of Islam in the United States has moved far beyondthe traditional historical and philological methods. This is perhapsbest explained by the development of analytically rigorous social sciencemethods that have contributed to a better balance between the humanisticconcerns of the more traditional approaches and efforts at systematizingthe study of Islam and classifying it across boundaries of communities,religions, even epochs. This is said to have s t a d with the developmentof irenic attitudes towards Islam, which changed the direction of westemorientalist writings from indifference (at best) and often open hostility toand contempt of Islamic values (however they were understood) to phenomenologicalworks by scholars who saw the study of Islam as somethingto be taken seriously and for its own sake, which is best exemplifiedby Clifford Geertz's Islam Observed.The work of Edward Said contested this evolution, and the publicationof his Orientalism has been described as "a stick of dynamite"' that,despite its impact in mobilizing a reevaluation of the field, was unwarrantedin its pessimism. In any case, the field has continued to evolve,with the most powerful force moving it being the subject itself. Thephenomenological/orientalist approach, if we can point to one today, ...


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