scholarly journals Cover and Table of Contents for Volume 68: Special Issue on Rutgers' 250th Anniversary Part Two

Author(s):  
Robert G. Sewell

The cover image is a New York dollar, 1780, co-signed by Henry Rutgers. Source: R-Memorabilia (53/DO/132)

Author(s):  
Peter J. Marcotullio ◽  
William D. Solecki

During early 2020, the world encountered an extreme event in the form of a new and deadly disease, COVID-19. Over the next two years, the pandemic brought sickness and death to countries and their cities around the globe. One of the first and initially the hardest hit location was New York City, USA. This article is an introduction to the Special Issue in this journal that highlights the impacts from and responses to COVID-19 as an extreme event in the New York City metropolitan region. We overview the aspects of COVID-19 that make it an important global extreme event, provide brief background to the conditions in the world, and the US before describing the 10 articles in the issue that focus on conditions, events and dynamics in New York City during the initial phases of the pandemic.


PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1886-1895 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Taylor

On 27 February 2009, The Essays for this PMLA issue on war were coming in, against a background of various wars. The Iraq War had claimed over 100,000 civilian lives. The newly elected Obama administration vowed to amp up efforts in Afghanistan. The rubble in Gaza still smoldered from the recent Israeli attacks. The ongoing conflict in Darfur had already left 300,000 people dead, not to mention the 2.5 million displaced. When President George W. Bush left office, his boundless war on terror had exacted more lives, money, civil-liberty concessions, and international goodwill than one could even begin to tally. These were just the newsworthy wars that happened to be featured that month in the New York Times. Other, “low-intensity” wars—the devastating fighting in East Congo, the ongoing Zapatista uprising, Colombia's fifty-year-old armed conflict, Sri Lanka's civil war, and similar struggles—simmered on the back burner. The topic of war seemed as urgent that February morning as it had two years earlier, when the editors proposed this special issue. Ironically, that morning's Times showcased “Weekend at War” in its Escapes section (Sokol). The oversize image showed a crowded ballroom full of happy dancers in World War II outfits swinging to a big band orchestra—the uniforms, insignia, hats, hairdos all conjured up another time. The caption read, “It's winter 2009, but for hundreds of reenactors, it's December 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (S28) ◽  
pp. 225-236
Author(s):  
Ana Lucia Araujo

AbstractThis afterword engages with the theme of this Special Issue by discussing the significance of urban slavery in slave societies and societies where chattel slavery existed in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It discusses how, despite the omnipresence of slavery in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, New York, and Charleston, the tangible traces of the inhuman institution were gradually erased from the public space. It also emphasizes that, despite this annihilation, over the last three decades, black social actors have made significant interventions to make the slavery past of Atlantic cities visible again.


1998 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-489
Author(s):  
Kimberly S. Hanger

The genesis for this special issue on "Words and Deeds" was a panel discussion held in conjunction with the January 1997 joint meeting of the Conference on Latin American History and the American Historical Association in New York City. Participants Richard Boyer, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Kimberly Hanger, and Jane Landers presented the papers included in this volume. The essays all flowed together so nicely and initiated such a lively exchange among panelists and the audience that the editors of The Americas asked us to prepare them for publication, incorporating some of the commentary offered at the session. What you read in the following pages is a result of that process, although we still think it rather ironic that a journal produced by the Academy of American Franciscan History should want to include articles with so many off-color words and references to sexual conduct and violence!The fact that these essays generated such interest as conference papers and appear in this special issue of The Americas confirms the value cultural historians are placing on the study of insults, conflicts, and other confrontational behavior to reconstruct societal norms and worldviews and assess challenges to them. What constituted an insult or defined anti-social behavior reveals much about what the community considered each person's position in it; resistance to one's assigned role and identity or objection to someone else misconstruing this identity unmasked a sense of injustice that community members, especially its leaders, had to rectify in order to maintain social order.


1988 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Jordan

Progressive teachers often face the problem of making education in the schools relevant to life outside of the schools. They are confronted regularly with the challenge of introducing controversial subject matter that often forces students to examine critically their values and world views, and their positions in this society. In this essay, June Jordan describes the experiences in her undergraduate course on Black English in which both she and her students mounted the charge of making education and schooling truly relevant and useful when they decided to mobilize themselves on behalf of a Black classmate whose unarmed brother had been killed by White police officers in Brooklyn, New York. The Editors have decided to reprint this essay because of its particular relevance to the theme of this Special Issue. We wish to thank June Jordan for granting us permission to reprint her essay in our pages.


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