The “Ideological Offensive” in Education: the Portrayal of the United States in Secondary Curricula and Textbooks in Poland during the Stalinist Period (1948–1956)

During the period of the People’s Republic of Poland (1952–1989), schools played a decisive role in transmitting the official ideology of the ruling Communist regime and cultivating young supporters. One of the most important aspects of indoctrination was constructing in students’ hearts and minds a particular image and disposition towards the United States. While existing research has examined the high level of political propaganda in the content of textbooks and curricula during the Communist period in Poland, no one has specifically analysed how these materials depicted the United States during the critical Stalinist years (1948–1956). Analysis of official curricula and textbooks for civics and history courses in secondary schools indicates that over this period, school materials increasingly depicted the United States as ‘predatory,’ ‘imperialist,’ and ‘exploitative.’ This study illustrates how curricular materials aligned with the foreign policy objectives of the Polish United Workers’ Party and the Soviet Union.     

SPREAD AND BACKWASH EFFECTS FOR NONMETROPOLITAN COMMUNITIES IN THE U.S.

Few studies empirically estimate the effects of metropolitan growth on nonmetropolitan communities at a national scale. This paper estimates the growth effects of 276 MSAs on population in 1,988 nonmetropolitan communities in the United States from 2000 to 2007. We estimate the distance for growth spillovers from MSAs to nonmetropolitan communities and test the assumption that a single MSA influences growth. We compare three methods of weighting cities’ influence: nearest city only, inverse‐distance, and relative commuting flow to multiple cities. We find the inverse‐distance approach provides slightly more reliable and theoretically supportable results than the traditional nearest city approach.     

Consuming campus: geographies of encounter at a British university

In this paper, we extend recent discussions on the geographies of encounter to examine how students and staff narrate their experiences of cross-cultural contact on a British university campus. In theory, the campus environment offers opportunities for more intense and prolonged forms of contact than the ephemeral micro-scale forms of interaction that have dominated much of the literature on encounters. In practice, however, our interviews suggest that many respondents tend to self-segregate, or in some instances are prevented from mixing with ‘others’ through institutional arrangements. As we also illustrate, the pressures posed by commercial forces on campus orientate certain students towards lifestyle choices and expectations which exclude others.     

The art of science at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory: The rhetoric of aesthetics and humanism in the national laboratory system in the late 1960s

This paper examines how rhetoric shaped the early history of the National Accelerator Laboratory. In a situation defined by a contentious site search and shrinking budgets for research, Robert Wilson crafted an institutional identity for the NAL that emphasized both aesthetic and scientific experience. The paper addresses the circumstances of the laboratory's founding, the "audiences" important to its success, and the ways in which the physical environment and management structure--framed by Wilson's vision of a scientific utopia--reorganized existing perceptions of physics within a humanistic framework intended to distinguish the NAL from its predecessors in the National Laboratory system.