The Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the scientific concept of racial nervous resistance

In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service began a study of untreated syphilis among black men in Macon County, Alabama. This project, later known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, became one of the most notorious ventures of twentieth-century medicine. Much has been written on it. Historians have suggested that scientific racism strongly influenced the study. But specific links between earlier racial science and the scientific conduct of the study have remained unexplored. The examination in this paper of the concept of a racially determined resistance to syphilis in the nervous system establishes such a link. Discussion of nervous resistance to syphilis appeared in the medical literature in the early twentieth century as a conjecture about the natural inferiority of blacks. White physicians used the concept to interpret racial differences in neurosyphilis as evidence of the rudimentary development of the brain. A small community of African American physicians joined other national experts in syphilis who chose to explain apparent racial differences through alternate mechanisms. But the scientific advisors to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study favored the concept of a racial resistance to neurosyphilis and steered the early design of the study to help to elucidate it. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was an examination of untreated syphilis, but it also became a demonstration of a putative racial characteristic of syphilis long considered evidence of the natural inferiority of blacks. An examination of the concept of racial nervous resistance and its influence on the research in Macon County helps to define the influence of scientific racism on this notorious medical study.     

Mapping ancient chinampa landscapes in the Basin of Mexico: a remote sensing and GIS approach

This paper uses remote sensing data to document a raised field, chinampa system adjacent to the Postclassic kingdom of Xaltocan in the northern Basin of Mexico. Various forms of landscape information; historic records and maps as well as remote sensing; are considered to understand the chinampa system. The remote sensing data examined include 1950s aerial photographs, Landsat 7 data, and Quickbird VHR, multi-spectral imagery. This article evaluates the utility of each of these forms of data to identify buried chinampa features and integrates them in a GIS to produce a map of Xaltocan's chinampa landscape. Canals of various sizes and hydrological positions comprised the chinampas and integrated the system together. Occupying at least 1500–2000 ha, Xaltocan's chinampa system represents the largest pre-Aztec, chinampa system in the Basin of Mexico.     

An experimental micromorphological investigation of bedding construction in the Middle Stone Age of Sibudu,South Africa

We conducted experiments to compare the micromorphological signatures of modern burnt sedge and grass bedding to laminated layers of carbonized material and phytoliths in Middle Stone Age deposits at the shelter, Sibudu. The experiments were designed to clarify the formation processes associated with the laminated layers and to investigate whether these previously identified layers of bedding were deliberately burned or not. The results indicate that the laminated layers were most likely produced by human activity related to the construction, maintenance and burning of bedding. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that large volumes of vegetal material could have produced the relatively thin, archaeological deposits of burnt bedding.     

Illegality at Work: Deportability and the Productive New Era of Immigration Enforcement

Abstract: Our goal in this paper is to identify how recent escalations in immigration enforcement and changes in migration practices affect the ability of the state to continue to serve two of its key “productive” functions: protecting capital accumulation within industry and ensuring the state's own political legitimacy in the eyes of the public. We draw on our ethnographic research on Latino migrant dairy farm workers in Wisconsin to examine the ways in which a group of migrant workers experiences the process of being enforced as “illegal” bodies. We find that migrant dairy workers’ palpable sense of “deportability” articulates with the specific structure of dairy work in ways that make the economically and politically “ideal” migrant: compliant at work and invisible otherwise.     

Making space for queer youth: adolescent and adult interactions in Toledo,Ohio

Queer youths and queer youth-related issues are under-researched in geography. I contribute to the existing literature by investigating how adultist practices can both constrain and empower queer youth within the context of schools. Issues involving adolescence and sexuality are complex, and these nuances become more pronounced with regard to nonnormative sexual identities and expressions. Using interviews with adult queer youth advocates in Toledo, Ohio, I look at the ways in which adults construct uncertain, anxious and contradictory ‘safe spaces’ that can work to constrain/restrict queer youth but also to empower and/or facilitate queer youths' negotiation and navigation of other, predominantly heterosexist social spaces.     

Linguistic Archaeology

This chapter addresses the essential issues in evaluating works that use linguistic evidence in reconstructing the past. Linguistics has its own well-developed body of theory and practice. Its evidence is subject to rigorous validation. Any work claiming to infer history from linguistics must validate its evidence against a systematic phonological reconstruction, and it must provide that validating apparatus or else direct the reader to where that apparatus is to be found. Scholars do not get to pick and choose among the archaeological data to support their ideas. Neither does one get to pick and choose or to engage in special pleading to make the linguistic evidence fit one’s prior notions. The chapter illustrates the requirements of linguistic reconstruction by laying out the system of the Eastern Cushitic language group and showing how to apply the system, step by step, to reconstruct the presence of a particular component of the proto-Eastern Cushitic economy.     

The Shuidonggou site complex: new excavations and implications for the earliest Late Paleolithic in North China

The initial Late Paleolithic, said to appear between 40 and 30 kya in eastern Asia, is defined by the appearance of many innovations. These archaeological indicators include the appearance of more refined stone tool making techniques (e.g., include the appearance of blade and microblade technology), complex hearth construction, use of pigments and personal ornamentation, as well as worked faunal implements such as bone and antler tools. We report here new findings from a multidisciplinary research project conducted at the Shuidonggou (Choei-tong-keou) site complex in northern China, a series of localities that date from the initial Late Paleolithic to the Neolithic.     

Cash Transfers and the Well‐being of Older People in Brazil

This article provides a comprehensive assessment of the effects of social protection interventions on material and subjective elements of well‐being. Drawing on a longitudinal survey located in two relatively deprived parts of Brazil, it assesses the effects of pensions and other cash transfers on the well‐being of older people and their households. This analysis is located within a dynamic economic and public policy context. The article finds that pension benefits significantly increase per capita income and that this is strongly associated with overall levels of satisfaction with household well‐being. Levels of reported subjective well‐being do not fall as respondents age, and the survey finds high levels of optimism about future well‐being. The positive effects of pension benefits were supported by upgraded health services and by more specific policies such as access to credit on favourable terms. Overall, the authors conclude that a combination of economic growth and effective public policies significantly boosted the well‐being of most households in their survey, and that Brazil can be taken as a model of good practice for other middle‐income countries.     

Gilded Ages and Gilded Archaeologies of American Exceptionalism

Archaeology’s ties to an interest in America’s natural and cultural resources, enshrined in the Antiquities Act of 1906, can be tied to the development of the presumed entitlements associated with gilded age-era conceptions of America’s cultural and racial exceptionalism. Archaeology, historic preservation, and related interests in the materiality of America’s past were in fact among the mechanisms used to legitimize America’s global emergence in the modern era. Considering elite ideas about race and a fear of “race suicide” as well as the rise of the environmental conservation and the historic house movement, this paper argues that archaeology and related pursuits of historic materiality have been regularly deployed to enforce Anglo-Saxon racial values. Explicitly formed in the historical context of mass-immigration, this dynamic is explored in a discussion of two archaeological sites in Jamaica, Queens connected to gilded-age discourse on Americanization.     

Too late to buy a home? School redistricting and the timing and extent of capitalization

In the past 50 years, a voluminous literature estimating the value of schools through capitalization in home prices has emerged. Prior research has identified capitalization using a variety of approaches including discontinuities caused by boundaries. Here, we use changes in school boundaries and the opening of a new school in Fayette County (Lexington), Kentucky to identify this capitalization. Critical to properly estimating the effect of redistricting is to account for when information on redistricting is available. We treat the information about the effects of zoning as occurring in three stages: announcement of the intent to open the new high school and redistricting, approval of the specific redistricting plan (map), and implementation (opening of the new high school and actual changes in boundaries). We find significant changes in values for homes redistricted from lower-performing schools and we find that this capitalization occurs well before implementation of the redistricting. As we show, failure to account for capitalization occurring before implementation will attenuate and even change the sign of capitalization.