scholarly journals Michael Vinson. Bluffing Texas Style: The Arsons, Forgeries, and High-Stakes Poker Capers of Rare Book Dealer Johnny Jenkins.

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Brian Shetler

The story of Johnny Jenkins, rare book dealer, forger, gambler, and misterioso, has haunted me since my days in library school nearly a decade ago. I first encountered Jenkins through his publication Rare Books and Manuscript Thefts: A Security System for Librarians, Booksellers, and Collectors, which was printed in 1982 while Jenkins served as president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA). I was doing research related to the history of book theft in the United States and found Jenkins’s short text (only 27 pages) to be a helpful insight into how the ABAA viewed book theft and security. Pursuing Jenkins a bit further, I quickly came upon Calvin Trillin’s fascinating 1989 New Yorker article that chronicled Jenkins’s demise. The details of Jenkins’s secret life of forgeries, gambling, and arson were fascinating; the details of his death (shot in the back of the head, no weapon found, ruled a suicide?) were macabre and confounding. A few years later, while on break at a conference in Austin, TX, I walked into a used bookstore and found a copy of Jenkins’s Audubon and Other Capers (1976), which told the tale of his exploits in helping the FBI track down book thieves in the early 1970s. The completely contradictory life that Jenkins led, coupled with his untimely and odd death, stuck in my brain in the form of unanswered questions, unclear details, and an unresolved murder or suicide. While it was not up to me to put the pieces together and offer a clear picture of Johnny Jenkins’s life, career, and death, it had to be done by someone. That someone, it turns out, was another rare book dealer specializing in Texas and the West, Michael Vinson.

Author(s):  
Helen Halbert

This paper examines the history of clinical librarianship in Canada from 1970 to 2013 as seen through the lens of practitioner narratives and published literature. While no reviews of clinical librarianship in Canada were found in the literature search, there were many project descriptions in articles and published reports that have provided insight into the field during its formative period in Canada from the 1970s. In addition to tracing narrative histories from 1970 to 2013, the author has continued to wonder why these important stories have never properly been told. Was it because the scope of clinical librarianship, its expected and embodied professional duties, was not regulated (as it is in the United States and United Kingdom)? Is it because the American Library Association accredited library schools in Canada do not offer appropriate curricula and professional training? It seems clear that some librarians in Canada were pioneers in the way that Gertrude Lamb was in the United States, but they did not call themselves clinical librarians. Consequently, they opted for more generic job titles such as medical librarian and health librarian. Whatever the reasons for this, it is within this framework that the author begins an exploration of clinical librarianship in Canada. The paper's aim is to provide a view into clinical librarianship in Canada back to the 1970s to ensure the story is properly told.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Sinn

This chapter takes a broad look at the Pacific Ocean in relation to Chinese migration. As trade, consumption and capital flows followed migrants, powerful networks were woven and sustained; in time, the networks fanned across the Pacific from British Columbia along the West Coast of the United States to New Zealand and Australia. The overlapping personal, family, financial and commercial interests of Chinese in California and those in Hong Kong, which provide the focus of this study, energized the connections and kept the Pacific busy and dynamic while shaping the development of regions far beyond its shores. The ocean turned into a highway for Chinese seeking Gold Mountain, marking a new era in the history of South China, California, and the Pacific Ocean itself.


Author(s):  
Andrew Denson

This book began with tourism. In the summer of 1994, a friend and I drove from Bloomington, Indiana, where I attended graduate school, to Florida for a short vacation. As we sped along Interstate 75 through northern Georgia, I spotted a brown roadside sign announcing that, at the next exit, we would find New Echota, a state historic site interpreting the history of the Cherokee Nation. For a brief time in the early nineteenth century, New Echota was the Cherokee capital, the seat of the national government created by tribal leaders in the 1820s. The Cherokee National Council met at New Echota in the years prior to removal, and it was the site of the Cherokee Supreme Court. During a time when the United States and the state of Georgia pressured Cherokees to emigrate to the West, the new capital represented the Cherokees’ determination to remain in their homeland. It was also the place where, in late 1835, a small group of tribal leaders signed the treaty under which the United States forced the Cherokee Nation to remove. I had recently become interested in the history of Cherokee sovereignty and nationhood, and I concluded that I should prob ably know about this heritage attraction. We pulled off the highway and followed the signs to the site....


Author(s):  
Fadi Saleh

This first-person activist reflection discusses the author’s experience immigrating to Canada as a queer AIDS activist. The author situates his experience navigating HIV-positive-exclusionary immigration policies where the only avenue for immigrating while HIV-positive is through gay marriage. Canada maintains a draconian set of discriminatory laws regarding the so-called “excessive demand” HIV-positive immigrants put on the publicly funded health care system in Canada. This piece briefly looks at the history of HIV travel and immigration bans as well as proposed HIV quarantine legislation across Canada. While Canada is often regarded as more progressive than the United States in many ways, its HIV immigration ban and high prosecution and conviction rate for HIV nondisclosure make Canada one of the most legally precarious countries for HIV-positive people in the west.


Author(s):  
W. J. Rorabaugh

‘Drinking and temperance’ describes the history of alcohol consumption in the United States and the introduction of the temperance movement. From the earliest European settlers to the fighters of the Revolution, Americans were among the world’s heartiest drinkers, producing their own corn beer and importing rum from the West Indies. The British blockades during the war meant access to rum was lost. Americans began to distill whiskey from corn instead, which became the country’s patriotic drink. Problems associated with heavy drinking resulted in reformers creating the temperance movement, a cause that was then taken up by Protestant preachers. In the 1850s, evangelicals lobbied for statewide prohibition laws, but there was no viable system of enforcement.


1956 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-507
Author(s):  
Francis Dvornik

Interest in Slavic and mid-European studies,* so long neglected, is growing considerably in the United States. Unfortunately it concentrates mostly on modern history. In Slavic studies, too much time is often devoted to the history of Russia since the Revolution, and to the analysis of the new social and political order established in that country under the influence of non-Slavic social ideas which had originated in the West, and especially in Germany (K. Marx and Lasalle) in the nineteenth century. The earlier evolution of Russia, other Slav nations, and their mid-European neighbors, is still undeservedly neglected. It is a mistake. In the Middle Ages, the Slavic nations, the Hungarians, and the Rumanians played a prominent role in the civilizing of Europe. The memories of their glorious past helped the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Serbs, Bulgars, Magyars, Rumanians and also the small Albanian nation to survive the difficult period of oppression by foreign rulers and inspired their national leaders in their fight for independence and freedom.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 198-211
Author(s):  
Bohdan YAKYMOVYCH

Assessing the Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1921, and the proclaiming of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic (ZUNR) as the second most crucial phenomenon in the history of the Ukrainian people after the establishment of the Cossack State under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi in the 18th century, the author of this study pays special attention to the mistakes of the political and army leadership of the Galicians, which caused the demise of the state in the Galicia-Bukovyna-Zakarpattia region. The author identifies three periods, during which it was possible to send the Polish occupiers away from the territory of the Eastern Galicia. It was the wasted time, disorientation in the Polish domestic contradictions, disarrangement of the rear, failure to enforce the Act of Unification of the ZUNR, and the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR), as well as the developments in the Dnieper region, caused the demise of the ZUNR. The latter found itself face to face with the might of the revived Polish state already in the second quarter of 1919. Just at that time, the Entente, with a neutral position of the United States, supplied the Poles with considerable forces and means throwing the Ukrainians at the paws of Poland, Romania, and White and Red Russia. Keywords West Ukrainian People’s Republic (ZUNR), Lviv, Peremyshl (Przemysl), Dmytro Vitovskyi, Hnat Stefaniv, Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara Hagan

Screendance finds its roots in the traditions of concert dance, museum culture, and film festivals. Film festivals - from which we borrow the structure for programming screendance - boast a history of discrimination towards bodies of color, varied gender expressions, bodies of different abilities, and more. Through an exploration of the history and socio-cultural context of film festivals in the west and dialogue with curators and directors from a handful of screendance festivals across the United States, this piece will present a set of curatorial challenges particular to our field, the creative solutions being explored by presenters and champions of screendance, and a consideration of where the field falls short, so we can better mitigate issues of underrepresentation of marginalized groups in screendance spaces.


1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-118
Author(s):  
Omar Altalib

This book, which is a collection of 22 articles by 25 authors, is appropriatefor undergraduate courses on religion in the United States, religiousminorities, immigrant communities, the history of religion, and the sociologyof Islam and Muslims. The first part contains five articles on religiouscommunities, the second part has nine articles on the mosaic of Islamiccommunities in major American metropolitan centers, and the third partconsists of eight articles on ethnic communities in metropolitan settings.Each part should have been a separate book, as this would have made thebook less bulky and more accessible to those who are interested in onlyone of the areas covered.Reading this book makes it clear that there is great need for Muslimscholars to study and analyze their own communities, which have a richhistory and have only been studied recently. Books such as this are animportant contribution to the understanding of Muslims in the West andalso serve to clear up many misconceptions about Muslims, a developmentthat makes interfaith and intercommunity dialogue easier.Part 1 begins with an article on the Shi'ah communities in NorthAmerica by Abdulaziz Sachedina (professor of religious studies, University ...


Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
A. G. Hopkins

Globalisation is now a fashionable topic of historical research. Books and articles routinely use the term, though often in a loose manner that has yet to realise the full potential of the subject. The question arises as to whether globalisation, as currently applied by historians, is sufficiently robust to resist inevitable changes in historiographical fashion. The fact that globalisation is a process and not a single theory opens the way, not only to over-general applications of the term, but also to rich research possibilities derived in particular from other social sciences. One such prospect, which ought to be at the centre of all historians’ interests, is how to categorise the evolution of the process. This question, which has yet to stimulate the lively debate it needs, is explored here by identifying three successive phases or sequences between the eighteenth century and the present, and joining them to the history of the empires that were their principal agents. These phases, termed proto-globalisation, modern globalisation, and postcolonial globalisation provide the context for reviewing the history of the West, including the United States, and in principle of the wider world too.


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