The Manhattan Yankees? Planning Objectives,City Policy,and Sports Stadium Location in New York City

The owners of the New York Yankees professional baseball team have claimed that they are dissatisfied with the location of the team's current ballpark in the economically depressed South Bronx. To appease them, Mayor Giuliani proposed constructing a new stadium for the Yankees in Manhattan, prompting a city-wide debate over whether the team should stay in the Bronx or move to Manhattan. This article outlines the two competing proposals and evaluates their claims. The Manhattan site is linked to the image creation of New York's downtown while the Bronx site sees the stadium as part of a broader regeneration scheme for a deprived part of the city. This article discourages a blind acceptance of Manhattan-centric planning, and presents the argument that the Bronx site is in the best interests of New York.     

Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920 by Anne Stiles (ed.)

Abstract

Research from many perspectives has been made on the work of the French neurologist, J.‐M. Charcot (1825–1893) with particular reference to his fame for his studies and “construction”; of hysteria. What has not been demonstrated so far is the extent to which Charcot's construction can be explained by the perceived relationship between hysteria and epilepsy and Charcot's access to epileptic patients at La Salpêtrière. From the confusion that reigned concerning hysteria and epilepsy, both separately and in relation to each other, Charcot claimed to have isolated hysteria as a distinctive and universal pathology. This claim was partly based on the “grande attaque”;, representing the most intense degree of hysteria. A comparison with Gowers, the contemporary English neurologist suggests that diagnosis was the function of the practitioners’ preferences; and a linguistic analysis pinpoints Charcot's problems in describing an isolated pathology in terms of its relation to its neighbour, epilepsy.     

Séances in the City: The “Operational Aesthetic” and “Modern Spiritualism” in the Popular Culture of New York City, 1865–1870

This paper will demonstrate that spiritualism became a significant element of popular culture in New York City between 1865 and 1870 because it catered to the “operational aesthetic” so prevalent in urban entertainments. The historian Neil Harris invented the term “operational aesthetic” to denote the spirit of playful inquiry common to the urban culture of mid-nineteenth-century America. By the 1860s, urbanization had undermined the social transparency so integral to the American Republic, causing cultural anxiety about the fraud and deceit, which was thought to thrive on urban anonymity. Several cultural genres, including detective fiction and urban guides, not only reflected, but also invited the investigation into, the divorce between the “superficialities” of the city and the “processes” driving criminal behavior. Spiritualism featured regularly in these genres, particularly the urban guides, as it was appealing to people eager to uncover another instance of urban deceit. Similarly, spiritualists attracted skeptical and agnostic audiences who shared this interest in investigation. Apparent “exposés” of spiritualism, therefore, as well as the mediums themselves, reached out to skeptical audiences, drawn to the “operational aesthetic” inherent in spiritualist demonstrations.     

Cooperation networks and actors in semi‐colonial China, 1860–1911

This paper focuses on “cooperation networks” for the provision of public goods and services as a specific form of governance in late imperial China. While concentrating on differing forms of local self‐regulation at the end of the Qing dynasty, the article pinpoints several actors involved in the cooperation networks and (re)classifies them along the continuum of “public” and “private.” In addition to state and non‐state actors, the players included semi‐state or hybrid actors with profound network advantages who played a crucial role in the provision of governance services, as well as colonial and transnational actors who occasionally took part in this cooperation. To contextualize these actors and illustrate their modes of interaction, this paper will describe cooperation networks established for the provision of disaster relief and education in local society in late Qing China. In so doing, this paper also will question participants' motives and describe their personal gains, as well as the accumulation of symbolic capital as major incentives.