"Ready to shoot and do shoot": black working-class self-defense and community politics in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, black people in New York City encountered white violence, especially police brutality in Manhattan. The black community used various strategies to curtail white mob violence and police brutality, one of which was self-defense. This article examines blacks’ response to violence, specifically the debate concerning police brutality and self-defense in Harlem during the 1920s. While historians have examined race riots, blacks’ everyday encounters with police violence in the North have received inadequate treatment. By approaching everyday violence and black responses—self-defense, legal redress, and journalists’ remonstrations—as a process of political development, this article argues that the systematic violence perpetrated by the police both mobilized and politicized blacks individually and collectively to defend their community, but also contributed to a community consciousness that established police brutality as a legitimate issue for black protest.     

Hannah Arendt's Mythology: The Political Nature of History and Its Tales of Antiheroes

Current scholarship has focused on analyzing how Arendt's storytelling corresponds to her political arguments. In following up this discussion, I offer a closer examination of the unusual myth Arendt uses to explain the condition of the modern age, a myth she refers to as the “political nature of history.” I employ literary terms along with the standard vocabulary of political theory in shaping this reading of Arendt. Following Robert C. Pirro, I also consider Arendt's story as a tragedy, but in the broadest sense, that of a collision of two goods, freedom and security. By describing Arendt's thought in this manner, I hope to reveal another way in which Arendt represents the call to action that she believes so crucial to humanity, as a summons to we flawed antiheroes through the device of a heroic myth.     

Ancient olive DNA in pits: preservation,amplification and sequence analysis

The olive tree (Olea europaea) was domesticated by vegetative propagation of selected wild individuals with superior fruit. Later, new cultivars were established repeatedly from feral trees or from crosses between wild, feral, and domesticated trees. Thus the genetic background of many contemporary domesticated lines is a mixture of ancient cultivars and local wild trees. Ancient DNA may illuminate the complicated process of olive domestication because such DNA sequences provide data about ancient genomes that existed closer to the domestication events. Well preserved DNA must be available for such studies, even though in the Mediterranean region, where olive cultivation took place, the climatic conditions are not favorable for DNA preservation. To select for well preserved pits we measured their proportions of lignin by IR spectroscopy, and correlated this with parameters of DNA quality such as template length in an olive-specific repeat array, and template quantity as determined by real-time PCR amplification. Archaeological pits that passed these tests did contain high quality ancient DNA. We present the first ancient olive DNA sequences and compare them to modern wild, feral and domesticated lines.     

Youth transitions: mobility and the travel intentions of 12–20 year olds,Reading, UK

ABSTRACT

Whilst Western societies may have reached ‘peak car’, young people are arguably the most significant group whose levels of car ownership, use and driving licence acquisition have declined. Against this backdrop, the paper discusses qualitative research conducted in Reading, UK, considering young people’s (aged 12–20) views about bus travel. Whilst current pricing structures (both in Reading and across the UK) often offer under 18s discounted travel, the paper explores young people’s intentions about future travel as young adults. Drawing upon theorisations around youth transitions, we discuss how young people expect their mobility patterns to change as young adults in complex, shifting, fluid ways, and to involve multi-modal travel. Young people construct complex choice biographies through which they plan pathways to navigate these mobility transitions. Although a small-scale study, this paper also offers some insights into the challenges, complexities and limitations of researching mobility intention.     

From shell to glass: how beads reflect the changing cultural landscape of the seventeenth-century lower Potomac River valley

ABSTRACT

This article examines over 7,500 beads from eight Native archaeological sites located in the lower Potomac River valley in order to understand how changes in bead assemblages between AD 1300 and 1712 expressed an ever-evolving Chesapeake cultural landscape. This analysis demonstrates clear differences in the types and distributions of beads from mortuary and domestic/nonmortuary contexts. Ossuary contexts contained the highest frequency of beads with the number of beads increasing over time. Following the arrival of English settlers in the 1620s, glass beads begin to appear in ossuary contexts. Beads from domestic or nonmortuary contexts are fewer in number, and those present were manufactured using local materials, including bone and clay, as well as shell. However, after 1680, there is a shift from shell beads being predominate on Native sites, to sites containing exclusively glass beads, red and black glass beads in particular. Post-1680 sites appear to reflect Piscataway displacement and the disruption of indigenous trade routes, leading Natives to obtain beads from colonial vendors. The distribution of bead color, an important attribute for communicating Native states of being, also shifts after 1680, with assemblages once dominated by white shell beads now dominated by black and red glass beads.