From the Beginning: The 40 Year History of NOAA’s Emergency Response Division

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (1) ◽  
pp. 2408-2431
Author(s):  
Mark Dix ◽  
Alan Mearns

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Emergency Response Division’s success over 40 years draws on the nascent and sustained vision of its founders and the people that dedicated themselves to providing state of the art science in combatting oil spills and hazardous material releases. Lessons in research, development, partnership, reinvention, reorganization, and adaptation season the story that describes what is now the scientific touchstone in the United States’ maritime spill response vanguard. But the voyage to present day was (and is) not all smooth sailing. The scientists who built the unit and staffed it for decades recall the best, worst, and in between history of a small but highly influential division in the Federal government that helped pioneer spill science in the United States and internationally by responding to over 4,000 incidents. This retrospective highlights the genesis and growth of the 1970’s Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program (OCSEAP) and its evolution through Hazardous Materials Response Division (HMRD) to the now Emergency Response Division (ERD). The paper concludes with the vision of what growth areas lie ahead for the Division and oil spill response.

Author(s):  
Peggy Cooper Davis

In chapter 6, Peggy Cooper Davis notes that in a democratic republic, the people are sovereign and must be free and educated to exercise that sovereignty. She contends that the history of chattel slavery’s denial of human sovereignty in the United States, slavery’s overthrow in the Civil War, and the Constitution’s reconstruction to restore human sovereignty provide a basis for recognizing that the personal rights protected by the United States Constitution, as amended on the demise of slavery, include a fundamental right to education that is adequate to enable every person to participate meaningfully as one among equal and sovereign people.


CNS Spectrums ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 638-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel A. Dvoskin ◽  
James L. Knoll ◽  
Mollie Silva

This article traces the history of the way in which mental disorders were viewed and treated, from before the birth of Christ to the present day. Special attention is paid to the process of deinstitutionalization in the United States and the failure to create an adequately robust community mental health system to care for the people who, in a previous era, might have experienced lifelong hospitalization. As a result, far too many people with serious mental illnesses are living in jails and prisons that are ill-suited and unprepared to meet their needs.


1945 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-103
Author(s):  
J. Orin Oliphant

Slowly during the years just preceding our War of 1812, and rapidly during the decade that followed the Peace of Ghent, the vast reaches of Latin America swam within the ken of the people of the United States. Of this “discovery” of our southern neighbors and of our relations with Latin America before 1830, we have learned much from a volume recently brought out by a distinguished historian of the United States, Professor Arthur P. Whitaker. Professor Whitaker's informing study was intended to be nothing less than a well-rounded history of the impact of Latin America upon the United States to 1830; and such it has proved to be—with one exception. Professor Whitaker completely overlooked the religious phase of the subject he otherwise treated so skillfully. Upon this neglected part of the history of our early relations with Latin America this paper will endeavor to throw some light.


1964 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Geoffrey T. Blodgett ◽  
Oscar Handlin

1958 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 340-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Scott Latourette

The Great Seal of the United States, designed in the early days of the Republic, has on it symbolism whose significance is often overlooked. On one side is an eagle which grasps with one talon a branch and with the other a sheaf of arrows. Above its head are “E Pluribus Unum” and thirteen stars for the original states bound together in one nation. The other side has on it an unfinished pyramid. The foundation bears the number MDCCLXXVI. Above the pyramid is the eye of God flanked by the words “Annuit Coeptis,” namely, “He smiles on the undertakings.” Underneath is the phrase “Novus Ordo Seculorum,” meaning “New Order of the Ages.” Here succinctly is the vision which inspired the founding fathers of the new nation. The thirteen colonies had become one, prepared to face together the exigencies of the future, whether for preservation in self-defense or for cooperation in the arts of peace. Here was an attempt at building something novel in the history of mankind—a new and ordered structure. That structure, as yet incomplete, was based upon the Declaration of Independence, with its best-remembered phrases: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Here is “the American dream.” As “four score and seven years” later Abraham Lincoln even more briefly described it, the new nation was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and its success or failure was a test whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people” could “long endure.” To that dream faith in God, in His creative activity, and in His sovereignty was basic.


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