Oxford University Press's Blog, page 980
February 5, 2013
Why does “Ol’ Man River” still stop Show Boat?
Show Boat is back on the boards, visiting four major opera companies in a new production of yet another new version. Originally debuted on Broadway in 1927, apparently Show Boat will never stop being remade. The new production, directed by Francesca Zambello, had its premiere at the Chicago Lyric Opera a year ago, an appropriate starting place as much of the second act takes place in the Windy City. A run at Houston Grand Opera is wrapping up this week. Washington National Opera follows in May, with a final stop at the San Francisco Opera in June.
The Houston Grand Opera’s Show Boat. (c) Houston Grand Opera. houstongrandopera.org
I saw the production in Chicago and by casual reckoning—I don’t have a copy of the script—upwards of thirty percent of the dialogue is new. Several tried-and-true Show Boat laugh lines are gone: some new attempts at humor are in. Parthy’s repeated complaints about going to Chicago for New Year’s Eve (i.e. in the middle of winter) got a laugh in Chicago but might fall flat elsewhere. In general, this version isn’t as funny as some others, but opera house Show Boats—the first dates back to 1954—have typically emphasized singing over comedy.
Some things didn’t change in Chicago, in particular, the audience reaction to “Ol’ Man River.” At the performance I saw, applause stepped on the long held note that ends the song and resounded long and loud in the Lyric’s golden-walled theater. Morris Robinson in the role of Joe and the men of the black chorus held their final pose and soaked up the ovation for “Ol’ Man River” while the remainder of the cast waited for the show to resume. This moment—predictably—stopped Show Boat cold, and it’s been working that way since 1927. Why? Given that February is Black History Month, a look into the past might help explain why “Ol’ Man River” still stops Show Boat.
In September 1926, Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat was published to great fanfare. By December it was among the best-selling books of the year. Broadway songwriter Jerome Kern read Show Boat and immediately recognized it as a compelling basis for a musical show with the capacity to feature a black star of the moment singing music the white audiences of midtown, Jazz Age Manhattan were already cheering. Kern brought lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II onto the project. Among the first songs the pair wrote was “Ol’ Man River,” which Kern remembered was inspired not by Ferber’s book but rather by the sound of Paul Robeson’s voice.
Robeson—a black dramatic actor who had recently begun singing recitals of Negro spirituals—was at the height of his 1920s fame and it made sense to Kern, Hammerstein, and their producer Florenz Ziegfeld to feature Robeson as much as possible in Show Boat. Initially, they wanted Robeson to not only play Joe and sing “Ol’ Man River” but to also perform a set of Negro spirituals as himself in act two, accompanied by his regular pianist, the accomplished African American musician Lawrence Brown. Robeson and Brown’s all-spirituals concerts—the first was in April 1925 in Greenwich Village—were hugely successful with New York audiences. Crowds—predominantly white—reportedly lined up in the snow to buy tickets. Audiences cheered and wept, demanding encore after encore. Critics hailed the duo and regularly described what they offered as more than just a concert but an experience. Robeson was praised for expressing “all the plaintiveness of the colored race” with “a haunting tenderness, a wistful longing, an indescribable seeking for something just beyond, to be found in the voice of the Negro, and in no other voice.” Part of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, the Robeson-Brown recital experience captured contemporary white fascination with black music and performers in a tremendously attractive package.
Kern, Hammerstein, and Ziegfeld wanted to make the Robeson-Brown experience part of Show Boat. While Robeson resisted their plan and refused to play Joe in the original Broadway production, Kern and Hammerstein succeeded in bringing a black male voice before the white Broadway audience simply by way of “Ol’ Man River.” This spiritual-like Broadway song—with its soaring tune that echoes folk melodies and lyrics expressing the predicament of black Americans in ways the white audience could accept without feeling threatened—quickly became Show Boat‘s signature moment. Ferber remembered the reaction to Robeson as Joe in 1932—the first time he played the part on Broadway—this way: “I witnessed a New York first-night audience, after Paul Robeson’s singing of Ol’ Man River, shout and cheer and behave generally as I’ve never seen an audience behave in any theatre in all my years of playgoing.” Robeson sang Joe for the first time in London in 1928, where one reviewer noted “his performance is worth all the money you will pay for admission.” More than one review in the show’s long performance history echoes this astonishing claim that a single song sung by a character with no role in the plot was sufficient reason to sit through the entire show.
Is this reaction of a white audience to a black male singer still happening when contemporary audiences applaud “Ol’ Man River”? Morris Robinson, the Chicago Lyric Opera’s Joe, answered the question with some self-aware humor in a live interview posted online by the Chicago Tribune.
Watch the full interview and hear Robinson sing “Ol’ Man River”.
Robinson told the audience, ““Just in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a six-foot-three black guy, so “Ol’ Man River” is what they’re wanting to hear at the end of my concerts. And I make them wait.” Earlier in the interview, Robinson—like Robeson, an all-American college football player—described an encounter at the start of his singing career with the black bass Todd Duncan. (The original Porgy in Porgy and Bess, Duncan played Joe onstage in 1944.) Duncan vocalized Robinson a bit, then played a few notes from “Ol’ Man River” and told the young singer—who didn’t recognize the tune—that he’d be singing it many, many times. Robinson’s anecdote suggests the extent to which race is still destiny for African American singers on the musical and concert stage. For all the progress made in race relations in the more than eighty years since Show Boat first played to packed houses, white audiences still respond to a powerful black bass singing “Ol’ Man River,” making this famous song one reason Show Boat itself keeps sailing on.
Todd Decker is Assistant Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical and Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz, winner of the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies
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February 4, 2013
Psychological adaptive mechanism assessment and cancer survival
Psychological treatment studies that did not measure the maturity of psychological adaptive mechanisms in cancer patients have reported conflicting cancer survival results. Widely publicized studies noted increased survival rates among cancer patients who underwent psychotherapeutic treatment. However, more recent multicenter study could not replicate improved survival after behavioral treatment, and other studies have reported similarly conflicting results. Since published reports suggest that patients likely to benefit from psychotherapies are generally those with the most psychological maturity, it seems possible that the underlying health of psychological adaptive mechanisms may be related to cancer survival.
To our knowledge, prior to our 2006 report, psychological adaptive mechanism maturity had not been considered as affecting cancer survival either in behavioral-treatment studies or in trials of antidepressants. In that report we used measures of both depression symptom frequency and psychological adaptive mechanism maturity to assess what, if any, relationship each bore on survival probability in cancer patients. On the basis of previous studies of depression and ego-adaptation, we believed that “Immature” adaptive styles and frequent depression symptoms would independently predict lower survival rates. Then we studied 86 consecutive, mostly late-stage, cancer outpatients for up to 5 years; their survival data were analyzed in relation to the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ) scores at study entry. Cumulative survival probability curves contrasted the extreme cases: the most (N = 15) to the least (N = 21) depressed, and the “immature” (N = 14) to the “mature” (N = 16) adaptors. Depression did not separate the groups until 30 months after diagnosis. (Figure 1)
Figure 1: Five-Year Cumulative Survival Probability by Maturity of Adaptive Styles
Psychological adaptive mechanism (ego defense) style separated them at 8 months; by 18 months, the Immature survival probability had dropped to 50%, versus 87% for the Mature. At 36 months, survival probabilities were 19% and 57%, respectively. This study suggested further clinical attention toward psychological adaptive mechanism maturity and immaturity as a potentially strong indicator of distress and lowered survival in cancer patients. It also indicated that the maturity of adaptive mechanisms must be taken into account in both medicinal and behavioral treatment trials of cancer patients since underlying difficulty may be more related to poor adaptation rather than traditional psychopathological constructs like depression.
Figure 2: Algorithm for the Assessment of Psychological Adaptive Mechanisms
While human psychological adaptation has been studied in various forms, including such terms as coping or ego defense mechanisms, this concept has yet to reach clinical use owing largely to the absence of a replicable clinical format that can allow reliable recognition of psychological adaptive mechanisms in the clinical, one-on-one setting. The Principal Investigator (PI) has developed a decision tree recognition algorithm for the purpose of assessing individual adaptive behaviors in the diagnostic and treatment settings. (Figure 2)While previous methods, such as the DSQ, offer a relative convenience, they are crude measures of these complex phenomena and can only be used in studies that compare groups of individuals in contrast to each other. The recognition algorithm approach aims at a specific assessment of respective individuals in a here-and-now setting. This approach can be used both in clinical assessment and treatment as well as in research studies that seek to characterize groups of patients, such as those presenting with use of Immature adaptive mechanisms who present with much lower likelihoods of cancer survival.
Other research indicates that psychological adaptive mechanisms occur naturally in graded steps that reflect increasing brain development from birth through early adulthood. Conversely, however, complex behaviors of this kind that utilize many brain tracts, including frontal lobe functions, may theoretically be lost when brain function decreases or when stress is overwhelming, as may be the case of the stress of cancer illness in the setting of the less flexible mechanisms. Neurodegenerative changes following radiation treatment of neoplasms in the brain, for example, may result in impaired functioning modulated by the fronto-subcortical tracts, including judgment, motivation, and executive planning functions. Alternatively, overwhelming stress reactions can result in lowered adaptive mechanism maturity, such as that seen in some cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Much remains to be learned in the interaction between humans and the illnesses that they encounter; the psychological adaptation model offers one new approach to both clinical and empirical understanding.
Dr. Thomas P. Beresford is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the author of Psychological Adaptive Mechanisms: Ego Defense Recognition in Practice and Research. Trained in psychiatry at The Cambridge Hospital/Harvard Medical School, he has focused his clinical and scientific career on the psychiatric problems that medical and surgical patients encounter, whether in adjusting to illness or in returning to normal brain functioning.
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And the winner is… George W. Bush
By Edward Zelinsky
The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 is widely understood as a victory for President Obama. However, the long-term story is more complicated than this. The Act in large measure confirms in bi-partisan fashion the tax-cutting priorities of George W. Bush.
In the Act, President Obama achieved his proclaimed goal of increasing income taxes on the country’s most affluent taxpayers through higher income tax rates and reduced deductions. The Act creates a new 39.5% income tax bracket for individuals with taxable incomes above $400,000 and for married couples filing jointly with taxable incomes above $450,000. It phases out personal exemptions for individuals with adjusted gross incomes over $250,000 and for married couples with adjusted gross incomes over $300,000. It also reduces itemized deductions for these affluent taxpayers.
For high income taxpayers, the Act increases the maximum capital gains tax rate from 15% to 20%. When combined with the new Medicare tax on investment income, this results in a combined tax of 23.8 % on capital gains for the highest income taxpayers.
It is thus unsurprising that the Act has been heralded as a triumph for Mr. Obama and his vision of a more progressive income tax law.
However, the reality is more complex than this. For the long run, the winner under the Act was Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush. The Act, as it gave Mr. Obama some of what he wanted, also made permanent much of what Mr. Bush desired as a matter of tax policy. Indeed, as a result of the Act, federal taxes are in important measure now permanently at the lower levels where President Bush wanted them.
The vast majority of Americans are not affected by the Act’s changes for the highest income taxpayers. For most taxpayers, the Act thus permanently ratifies the lower federal income tax rates championed by Mr. Bush in 2001. Moreover, the Act confirms that corporate dividends will be taxed at lower capital gains rates rather than as ordinary income. True: capital gains rates are now higher for the most affluent of taxpayers as a result of the Act. However, even at these higher rates, taxing dividends as capital gains, rather than as regular income, significantly reduces the tax burden on such dividends.
Consider, moreover, the federal estate tax. When President Bush took office in 2001, the federal estate tax applied to estates over $675,000. That floor was scheduled to increase in stages to $1,000,000. The maximum federal estate tax rate was then 55%.
While President Bush did not succeed in abolishing the federal estate tax, the Act provides that federal estate taxation will only apply to estates over $5,000,000 adjusted for increases in the cost of living. For 2013, an estate must be over $5,250,000 to trigger federal estate taxation. When it applies, the estate tax will be levied at a flat rate of 40%.
In the area of tax policy, President Bush did not achieve all he sought. No president does. If we define success more realistically, the 2012 Act confirms President Bush’s triumph in permanently lowering federal income tax rates for most Americans, reducing the effective tax burden on corporate dividends, and significantly reducing the reach of the federal estate tax.
To some, these tax reductions are welcome restraints on the federal leviathan. To others, the Bush tax reductions, now permanent, regrettably hamper the federal fisc. What cannot be doubted is that the Internal Revenue Code we have today in large measure reflects the tax-cutting priorities of George W. Bush. In adopting the Act, a Democratic President and Senate, along with a Republican House, permanently confirmed much of these tax-reducing priorities.
Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears on the OUPblog.
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Growing up going to bed with The Tonight Show
If you remember a time when there was no Tonight Show, then you probably remember a time when there was no American television industry. In 1954, NBC took Steve Allen’s local New York TV show, broadcast it nationally five days a week, and called it Tonight. The show did not become an institution until Johnny Carson became its host exactly fifty years ago in October 2012. But it all began with Steve Allen, whose breed is now extinct. He was a true television intellectual, capable of writing pop tunes like “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” and jazz tunes with inimitable titles like “The Gravy Waltz.” He wasn’t a bad jazz pianist either. Lenny Bruce, who made several appearances on Allen’s show, said that Allen was one of the most “hip” comedians as well as one of the most “moral.”
After watching Allen build Tonight for three years, NBC decided to move him to early Sunday evenings in hopes that he could compete with Ed Sullivan. I was too young to watch Allen on Tonight, but I once watched the kinescope of an amazing episode in which Allen took live TV cameras down the steps of the jazz club Birdland, where the Count Basie band was in full cry.
I vividly remember those rare occasions when my parents let me stay up and watch Jack Paar, that great feline of a man who purred Americans through the last minutes of their evenings between 1957 until 1962. If you want to know how far we’ve come since the early 1960s, consider the joke that the NBC censors would not let Paar deliver on air. It was based on the confusion between two meanings of the term WC, “water closet” and “wayside chapel.” That was all there was to it, but Paar, who always seemed so affable, actually walked off the show for several days in protest.
Johnny Carson, who took over in 1962, has always been an enigma. Like many stand-up comedians of his generation, Carson emerged from a vaudeville aesthetic. In spite of a dapper demeanor that suggested refinement and wit, his humor was mostly of the pie-in-the-face variety. Nevertheless, he prided himself on bringing the occasional public intellectual or politician onto the show. Of course, anyone with anything serious to say was confined to the last minutes of the program. As an adolescent, I was extremely impressed one night during the waning moments of the show when the anthropologist Ashley Montagu told Carson that the American family was an institution devoted primarily to fostering the neuroses of its members.
At some point during his second decade as host, Carson became sick of The Tonight Show. He surely would have quit had not NBC kept on raising his salary and giving him more and more time off. He was undoubtedly the first host of any TV program to have “permanent” guest-hosts. One of the reasons Carson spent less and less time actually appearing on his show was his contempt for his audience. (His disdain for second-banana Ed McMahon was palpable.) Carson would tell a joke that he knew wasn’t very good — he surely held his joke-writers in contempt as well — and then take on a look of veiled disappointment when the audience laughed heartily. Perhaps because he imagined himself above it all, Carson was known to many as “The Prince.” And it may have been that edge that made him so intriguing and so watchable for all those years.
With Jay Leno, now in his twentieth year as host of The Tonight Show, NBC has gone straight down the middle with a dependably safe comedian who carries just the right amount of working-class charm. Leno now regularly wins the ratings war with David Letterman, the only television host to build up a serious, long-term challenge to The Tonight Show’s hegemony. (Remember the shows hosted by David Brenner, Alan Thicke, and Les Crane? I can recall them, but very vaguely.) Nevertheless, I do not know anyone who watches Leno. Conservatives can watch the hysterics on Fox News, lefties have rebroadcasts of The Rachel Maddow Show, and ironists have Steven Colbert. And those are just a few of the choices available to people who do not have DVRs. The Tonight Show will surely go on presenting conventional humor and high-profile guests. But the time when it, or any other television program, could occupy the central role in American life that Carson’s Tonight Show once sustained, has definitively come and gone.
Krin Gabbard is Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University. In addition to four single-authored books, he has published three edited books and a large collection of articles. He has served on the Executive Council of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and has lectured nationally and internationally on cinema and related subjects.
Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.
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February 3, 2013
Five facts about Thomas Bodley
This week marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Sir Thomas Bodley, diplomat and founder of the Bodleian Library. After retiring from public life in 1597, Bodley decided to “set up my staff at the library door in Oxon; being thoroughly persuaded, that in my solitude, and surcease from the Commonwealth affairs, I could not busy myself to better purpose, than by reducing that place (which then in every part lay ruined and waste) to the public use of students.” Thanks to his work, the Bodleian Library opened to readers in 1602.
On the anniversary of his death, we thought we’d share five facts about the Bodley and the Bodleian that you may not have known:
Thomas Bodley was not a fan of “almanackes, plaies, & an infinit number” of other “unworthy matters” — what he called “baggage bookes.” Fortunately, these still made it in to the Library, and included items such as Shakespeare’s First Folio.
In 1610, Bodley set up the precursor to today’s legal deposit agreements when he arranged for the Stationers’ Company in London to send the Bodleian a copy of every new book printed.
Bodley’s effort to restore the University library in Oxford saw him send agents all over Europe as well as appeal to the generosity of friends around the nation. He insisted upon acquiring books in non-European languages, including Hebrew and Asian languages. Hundreds of years later, the Libraries’ collections of Hebrew, Islamic, South Asian and Far Eastern studies are some of the best in the world.
The Bodleian Libraries hold more than just books. Over the years, they have acquired everything from popular ephemera to objects such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s baby rattle. As more and more material is ‘born digital’, the Libraries’ e-resources and e-journals have expanded to include the digital archives of authors and politicians — such as Barbara Castle and Isaiah Berlin — as well as web archives.
A far cry from the Bodley’s restoration of Duke Humfrey’s Library, our Book Storage Facility in Swindon holds over 153 miles of shelving — that’s shelving space equivalent to over 16 football pitches.
For more information on the life of Thomas Bodley, read the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article. For information on the Bodleian Libraries, see www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
Liz McCarthy is the Communications & Social Media Officer for the Bodleian Libraries, as well as an assistant in the Library’s Conservative Party Archive. When not tweeting or writing about archives, she can be found researching digital humanities & 17th-century bookbindings, working on the Journal of Information Literacy or teaching Irish dance. Follow her on Twitter at @mccarthy_liz.
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Image credit: Thomas Bodley, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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February 2, 2013
“Third Nation” along the US-Mexico border
Not long ago, I passed a roadside sign in New Mexico which read: “Es una frontera, no una barrera / It’s a border, not a barrier.” This got me thinking about the nature of the international boundary line separating the US from Mexico. The sign’s message seemed accurate, but what exactly did it mean?
On 2 February 1848, a ‘Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement’ was signed at Guadalupe Hidalgo, thus terminating the Mexican-American War. The conflict was ostensibly about securing the boundary of the recently-annexed state of Texas, but it was clear from the outset that US President Polk’s ambition was territorial expansion. As consequences of the Treaty, Mexico gained peace and $15 million, but eventually lost one-half of its territory; the US achieved the largest land grab in its history through a war that many (including Ulysses S. Grant) regarded as dishonorable.
In recent years, I’ve traveled the entire length of the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border many times, on both sides. There are so many unexpected and inspiring places! Mutual interdependence has always been the hallmark of cross-border communities. Border people are staunchly independent and composed of many cultures with mixed loyalties. They get along perfectly well with people on the other side, but remain distrustful of far-distant national capitals. The border states are among the fastest-growing regions in both countries — places of economic dynamism, teeming contradiction, and vibrant political and cultural change.
[image error]
A small fence separates densely populated Tijuana, Mexico, right, from the United States in the Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector.
Yet the border is also a place of enormous tension associated with undocumented migration and drug wars. Neither of these problems has its source in the borderlands, but border communities are where the burdens of enforcement are geographically concentrated. It’s because of our country’s obsession with security, immigration, and drugs that after 9/11 the US built massive fortifications between the two nations, and in so doing, threatened the well-being of cross-border communities.
I call the spaces between Mexico and the US a ‘third nation.’ It’s not a sovereign state, I realize, but it contains many of the elements that would otherwise warrant that title, such as a shared identity, common history, and joint traditions. Border dwellers on both sides readily assert that they have more in common with each other than with their host nations. People describe themselves as ‘transborder citizens.’ One man who crossed daily, living and working on both sides, told me: “I forget which side of the border I’m on.” The boundary line is a connective membrane, not a separation. It’s easy to reimagine these bi-national communities as a ‘third nation’ slotted snugly in the space between two countries. (The existing Tohono O’Odham Indian Nation already extends across the borderline in the states of Arizona and Sonora.)
But there is more to the third nation than a cognitive awareness. Both sides are also deeply connected through trade, family, leisure, shopping, culture, and legal connections. Border-dwellers’ lives are intimately connected by their everyday material lives, and buttressed by innumerable formal and informal institutional arrangements (NAFTA, for example, as well as water and environmental conservation agreements). Continuity and connectivity across the border line existed for centuries before the border was put in place, even back to the Spanish colonial era and prehistoric Mesoamerican times.
Do the new fortifications built by the US government since 9/11 pose a threat to the well-being of borderland communities? Certainly there’s been interruptions to cross-border lives: crossing times have increased; the number of US Border Patrol ‘boots on ground’ has doubled; and a new ‘gulag’ of detention centers has been instituted to apprehend, prosecute and deport all undocumented migrants. But trade has continued to increase, and cross-border lives are undiminished. US governments are opening up new and expanded border crossing facilities (known as ports of entry) at record levels. Gas prices in Mexican border towns are tied to the cost of gasoline on the other side. The third nation is essential to the prosperity of both countries.
So yes, the roadside sign in New Mexico was correct. The line between Mexico and the US is a border in the geopolitical sense, but it is submerged by communities that do not regard it as a barrier to centuries-old cross-border intercourse. The international boundary line is only just over a century-and-a-half old. Historically, there was no barrier; and the border is not a barrier nowadays.
The walls between Mexico and the US will come down. Walls always do. The Berlin Wall was torn down virtually overnight, its fragments sold as souvenirs of a calamitous Cold War. The Great Wall of China was transformed into a global tourist attraction. Left untended, the US-Mexico Wall will collapse under the combined assault of avid recyclers, souvenir hunters, and local residents offended by its mere presence.
As the US prepares once again to consider immigration reform, let the focus this time be on immigration and integration. The framers of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were charged with making the US-Mexico border, but on this anniversary of the Treaty’s signing, we may best honor the past by exploring a future when the border no longer exists. Learning from the lives of cross-border communities in the third nation would be an appropriate place to begin.
Michael Dear is a professor in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Why Walls Won’t Work: Repairing the US-Mexico Divide (Oxford University Press).
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Burrowing into Punxsutawney Phil’s hometown data
In the United States, a German belief about the badger (applied in Switzerland to the wolf) has been transferred to the woodchuck, better known as the groundhog: on Candlemas he breaks his hibernation in order to observe the weather; if he can see his shadow he returns to his slumbers for six weeks, but if it rains he stays up and about, since winter will soon be over. This has earned Candlemas the name of ‘Groundhog Day’. In Quarryville, Lancaster County, Pa., a Slumbering Groundhog Lodge was formed, whose members, wearing silk hats and carrying canes, went out in search of a groundhog burrow; on finding one they watched its inhabitant’s conduct and reported back. Of twenty observations recorded, eight prognostications proved true, seven false, and five were indeterminate. The ritual is now carried on at Punxsutawney, Pa., where the weather prophet has been named Punxsutawney Phil. (The Oxford Companion to the Year)
By Sydney Beveridge
Every February Second, people across Pennsylvania and the world look to a famous rodent to answer the question—when will spring come?
For over 120 years, Punxsutawney Phil Soweby (Punxsutawney Phil for short) has offered his predictions, based on whether he sees his shadow (more winter) or not (an early spring).
The first official Groundhog Day celebration took place in 1887 and Phil has gone on to star in a blockbuster film, dominate the early February news cycle, and even appear on Oprah. (He also has his own Beanie Baby and .)
In addition to weather predictions, Phil also loves data, and while people think he is hibernating, he is actually conducting demographic analysis. As a Social Explorer subscriber, he used the site’s mapping and reporting tools to look at the composition of his hometown.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Punxsutawney, PA, located outside of Pittsburgh, is part of Jefferson County. Examining Census data from 1890, Phil learned that the population was 44,405 around the time of his first predictions. While the rest of the nation was becoming more urban, Jefferson County remained more rural with only one eighth of the population living in places with 2,500 people or more (compared to nearly half statewide and more than a third in the US).
Many Jefferson residents worked in the farming industry. Back then, there were 3.2 families for every farm in Jefferson County — higher than the rest of the state with 5.0 families per farm.
Less than three decades after the Civil War, the county (located in a northern state) was 99.9 percent white, which was a little higher than statewide (97.9 percent) and also higher than nationwide 87.8 percent. (The Census also noted that there was one Chinese resident of Jefferson County in 1890.)
Groundhog Day was originally called Candlemas, a day that Germans said the hibernating groundhog took a break from slumbering to check the weather. (According to the Oxford Companion to the Year.) If the creature sees its shadow, and is frightened, winter will hold on and hibernating will continue, but if not, the groundhog will stay awake and spring will come early. Back in 1890, there were 703 Germans living in Jefferson County (representing 1.6 percent of the county population and 11.3 percent of the foreign born), making Germany the fourth most common foreign born place of birth behind England, Scotland, and Austria. Groundhog Day is also said to be Celtic in its roots, so perhaps the 623 Irish residents (representing 1.4 percent of the county population and 10.1 percent of the foreign born) helped to establish the tradition in Pennsylvania.
Looking to today’s numbers, Phil was astonished to learn from the 2010 Census that Jefferson County has just 795 more people than it did 120 years ago. While Jefferson grew by 1.8 percent, the state grew by 141.6 percent and the nation grew by 393.0 percent.
2010 Census Jefferson County, PA, Population Density (click to explore)
Phil dug deeper. The 2008-10 American Community Survey data reveal that the once-prominent farming industry had shrunk considerably. (Because it is a small group, “agriculture” is now grouped with other industries including forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining.) While Jefferson residents are more likely to work in the industry than other Pennsylvanians, that share represents just 4.4 percent of the employed civilian workforce.
According to the Census, Jefferson is still predominately white (98.3 percent), while the rest of the state and nation have become somewhat more diverse (81.9 percent white in Pennsylvania and 72.4 percent nationwide). Today there are 24 Chinese residents (out of a total of 92 Asian residents).
As Phil rises from his burrow this February second, he will survey the shadows with new insight into his community and audience. To learn more about Punxsutawney Phil’s hometown burrow (and your own borough), please visit our mapping and reporting tools.
Sydney Beveridge is the Media and Content Editor for Social Explorer, where she works on the blog, curriculum materials, how-to-videos, social media outreach, presentations and strategic planning. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A version of this article originally appeared on the Social Explorer blog. You can use Social Explorer’s mapping and reporting tools to investigate dreams, freedoms, and equality further.
Social Explorer is an online research tool designed to provide quick and easy access to current and historical census data and demographic information. The easy-to-use web interface lets users create maps and reports to better illustrate, analyze and understand demography and social change. From research libraries to classrooms to the front page of the New York Times, Social Explorer is helping people engage with society and science.
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James Joyce and birthdays
By Finn Fordham
Joyce was obsessed with birthdays. Today, February 2nd, is his. An emerging secular saint’s day, it will be remembered and alluded to round the world – especially in Dublin — in the corners of newspapers and pubs, in blogs (like this one), tweets and the odd talk. Born in 1882, Joyce’s cake — if he could have one, let alone eat it — would have a hundred and thirty one candles; a hundred years ago, therefore, he would have been celebrating his 31st birthday. The image of candles is suitable, since Joyce’s birthday fell on ‘Candlemas’, a holy day which commemorates Christ’s first appearance in a synagogue with his mother, forty days after his birth, in part by the lighting of candles. Mary was following the Mosaic law which says that, after giving birth, a mother is not clean for forty days, at which point she is to be purified through sacrifice.
‘Celebrating’, however, might be too strong a word: in 1913, Joyce was, artistically, in something of a lull, and life might well have been frustrating. He was teaching English in Trieste, with two small children, aged 5 and 7. He was struggling to get Dubliners past timid publishers and printers; A Portrait…, begun some nine years before, was unfinished; Ulysses was not yet begun. He was writing the odd bit of journalism, but the high artistic ambitions he had cherished as a young man had taken a battering. He’d spent his twenty-first in Paris, receiving a letter written by his father John Joyce, which he would carefully keep wherever he went:
My dear Jim, May I be permitted to offer you my best wishes for your future which I, at one time, fancied may have been more rosey on your attaining your majority [i.e becoming 21]… I hope you will beleive [sic] me that I am only now, under I may tell you, very trying times, endeavouring to do my little best, but Jim you are my eldest Son I have always looked up to your being a fitting representative of our family one that my father would be proud of. I now only hope that you may carry out his ideas through your life and if you do, you may be sure you will not do anything unbecoming a gentleman.
John Joyce, here and in general, was, like Simon Dedalus in Ulysses, strong and open in his expression of emotion. He is not the stereotypical cold and detached Victorian father. On the other hand, the complexity of his warmth borders on ambiguity, and its intensity must have brought some pressure to the young and, by all accounts, lonely Joyce: the father feels responsible for failing his son, but implies that his son was failing, or in danger of doing so; he seeks forgiveness while sending his son on a guilt trip; he says he looks up to him, while also establishing a role model in his own father, thus reaffirming the patriarchal hierarchy of genealogy. Self-pityingly unable to help materially, he adopts the role of civic mentor — urging him to behave like a gentleman, as Polonius did to Laertes when the latter was about to go to Paris (and its fleshpots). Larkin’s term for such ambivalence was ‘sloppy-stern’.
Birthdays may be a universal convention, but they are not universally liked. One pressure that birthdays bring is the inevitability, almost the duty, of self-reflection — a pressure which the Joyces, father and son, must have been aware of in 1903. The attention of others — fathers, mothers, friends, colleagues, wishing us well, presenting a gift, raising a glass — may exacerbate processes of self-examination and even pernicious comparison. Relative to where we were, or where we hoped to be, relative to our peers, or where our role models once were — where have we got to, or to what have we sunk? Birthdays are ciphers that multiply whatever condition we’re in. The potential trauma of birthdays repeats, perhaps compulsively, the trauma of the day of birth. The twitching nervous checking during labour of the condition of mother and child – how are they doing, what are their heart rates? — becomes a twitching nervous checking on birthdays of whether one has yet become oneself.
For an ambitious person, for someone intent on establishing a mythology of themselves, for someone superstitious, birthdays, especially their own, and other anniversaries are crucial. And so they were for Joyce, for these very reasons. He habitually made awkward deadlines for himself and his publishers, by wanting his books to appear on his birthday or, failing that, his father’s. The day on which Ulysses is set (itself the day of the troubled birth, though fictional, of Mortimer Edward Purefoy), is supposed to be the day of Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle, though their encounter is not in fact recorded in the fiction.
Through the cyclical repetition of dates, days become haunted, charged with the meaning of the events of the past, implicit in their dates: Armistice Day, Guy Fawkes, the Battle of the Boyne. The different calendars of the global village, now shared in multi-cultural societies, show the space of the year as an environment that is densely built up with official anniversaries which are the signs and the foundations of institutions, of nations, states, religions, organisations, movements.
Anniversaries seem inevitable because of the cycle of the year, but they are not guaranteed: different anniversaries can coincide on the same day, so that one feast day ousts another; secular festivals push out saints’ days. Joyce cheekily engineered such a coincidence in the birthday of Molly Bloom, which was September the 8th, the same day as the Virgin Mary’s birthday. Joyce’s love of birthdays is in part a wish to appropriate this map, a symptom of an eternal struggle he identified between the individual and society: ‘the state is concentric; man is concentric. Thence arise an eternal struggle.’
We have a Bloomsday, on which the institution of Joyce studies (and Joycolatry) are built. But there is no Wake-day: Finnegans Wake does not seem to happen on a single day, though for one critic it is a dream dreamt on 28 March 1938. For others the events of the Wake happen everyday and anyday. Unlike Ulysses, it has not been so easily institutionalised. Either way, it is certainly worth celebrating and lighting candles for: and Joyce’s birthday is as good as any to do so.
Dr Finn Fordham is Reader in 20th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Along with Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet, he has edited the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Finnegans Wake is a book that reinvents the novel and plays fantastic games with the language to tell the story of one man’s fall and resurrection; in the intimate drama of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and his wife Anna Livia, the character of Ireland itself takes form. Joyce called time and the river and the mountains the real heroes of his book, and its organic structure and extraordinary musicality embody his vision. It is both an outrageous epic and a wildly inventive comedy that rewards its readers with never-ending layers of meaning.
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Image credit: By Paweł Cieśla Staszek_Szybki_Jest (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons
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February 1, 2013
Friday procrastination: mysterious jetsetting edition
Friday procrastination is back! Apologies for the absence loyal followers but this blog editor has been jetsetting, mysterious, and then trapped in an email prison as a result of the mysterious jetsetting. What did I miss? Well here are some things you may have missed:
A brief history of taxi words.
Underground NYPL is now on Google Plus.
Textscapes in airports. The words, the words!
If you like it [the libary], then you should have put a pin on it [your coat]. (h/t LJ)
How Facebook engineers grapple with how people actually speak versus how computers speak.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Dude, you can ride waves in the sky.
Conspiracy theories in literature.
A Future of Libraries infographic.
Websites can be creepy. (And I should stop saying ‘Howdy!’ in emails.)
Dali controversy. Art claims. Confusion.
Septuagenarian Akutagawa Prize Winner. (h/t The Millions)
William Blake work rediscovered.
Newark Library’s painting is on display once again.
Tweet! Tweet! World’s largest natural sound archive now fully digital and fully online.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Granta is going to produce its next once-a-decade list of British novelists under 40.
Harvard should admit more poets.
The Guardian’s higher ed chat tackled the role of university librarians in access to research.
A Town Like Alice and the Australian vernacular.
There are many myths of weight loss.
Chinese readers are crazy for crazy James Joyce.
The post-treatment health for cancer patients.
How are we doing on those Millenium development goals?
Alice Northover joined Oxford University Press as Social Media Manager in January 2012. She is editor of the OUPblog, constant tweeter @OUPAcademic, daily Facebooker at Oxford Academic, and Google Plus updater of Oxford Academic, amongst other things. You can learn more about her bizarre habits on the blog.
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Oral historians and online spaces
In November 2012, a thread appeared on the H-Net Oral history listserv with the enticing subject line “experimental uses of oral history.” Amid assorted student projects and artistic explorations, two projects in particular caught my eye: the VOCES Oral History Project and the Freedom Mosaic. As we work towards our upcoming special issue on Oral History in the Digital Age, I’ve been mulling over oral historians negotiate online spaces, and how the Internet and related advancing technologies can inspire, but also challenge the manner in which they share their scholarship. I believe the VOCES Oral History Project and the Freedom Mosaic offer two distinct paths historians may take in carving out online space, and raise an interesting issue regarding content versus aesthetics.
Based out of the University of Texas at Austin, the VOCES Oral History Project (previously the US Latino & Latina WWII Oral History Project) launched the spring of 1999 in response to the dearth of Latin@s experiences in WWII scholarship. Since its inception, the project has conducted over 500 interviews, which have spawned a variety of media, from mini-documentaries to the play Voices of Valor by James E. Garcia. My personal favorite is the Narratives Newspaper (1999-2004), a bi-annually printed collection of stories written by journalism students, based on interviews conducted with the WWII veterans. Thanks to a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, in 2009 VOCES expanded its project to include the Vietnam and Korean Wars — hence the name change.
VOCES does not have the most technologically innovative or visually attractive website; it relies on text and links much more than contemporary web design generally allows. However, it still serves as a strong, online base for the project, allowing the staff to maintain and occasionally expand the project, and facilitates greater access to the public. For instance, VOCES has transferred the Narratives Newspaper stories into an indexed, online archive, one which they continue to populate with new reports featuring personal photos. The website also helps to sustain the project by inviting the public to participate, encouraging them to sign up for VOCES’ volunteer database or conduct their own interviews. They continue to offer a print subscription to a biannual Narratives Newsletter, which speaks to the manner in which they straddle the line between print and digital. It’s understandable given their audience (i.e. war veterans), yet I wonder if it also hinders a full transition into the digital realm.
The second project that intrigued me was the Freedom Mosaic, a collaboration between the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, CNN and the Ford Foundation to share “individual stories that changed history” from major civil and human rights movements. The Freedom Mosaic is a professionally-designed “microsite” that opens with an attractive, interactive interface made up interviewees’ pictures, which viewers can click on to access multimedia profiles of civil and human rights participants. Each profile includes something like a player’s card for the interviewee on the left side of the page — imagine a title like, “Visionary”, a full body picture, an inspiring quote, personal photos, and perhaps a map. On the right side, viewers can click “Play Story” to watch a mini-documentary on the subject, including interview clips. Viewers can also click the tab “More” at the bottom to bring up a brief text biography, additional interviews and interview transcripts.
The Freedom Mosaic is not a standard oral history project. According to Dr. Clifford Kuhn, who served as the consulting historian and interviewer, and introduced the site to H-NetOralHist listserv, “The idea was to develop a dynamic web site that departed from many of the archivally-oriented civil rights-themes web sites, in an attempt to especially appeal to younger users, roughly 15-30 years old.” On one hand, I greatly approve of beautifully designed projects that trick the innocent Internet explorer into learning something — and I think the Freedom Mosaic could succeed. However, I’m bothered by the site’s dearth of… history. Especially when sharing contemporary stories like that of immigration activist Jessica Colotl, I would have liked a bit more background on immigration in the United States than her brief bio provides.
VOCES and the Freedom Mosaic are excellent examples of how historians may establish a space online, amid the cat memes and indie movie blogs, for academic research. While I have my concerns, I believe both sites succeed in fulfilling their projects’ respective goals, whether that be archiving or eye-catching. However, I would ask you, lovely readers: Is there a template between VOCES’ text heavy archive and the Freedom Mosaic’s dazzling pentagons that might better serve in sharing oral history? What would a rubric for “successful oral history sites” look like? Or should every site be tailor fit to each project?
To the comments! The more you share, the better the eventual OHR website will look.
Caitlin Tyler-Richards is the editorial/ media assistant at the Oral History Review. When not sharing profound witticisms at @OralHistReview, Caitlin pursues a PhD in African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research revolves around the intersection of West African history, literature and identity construction, as well as a fledgling interest in digital humanities. Before coming to Madison, Caitlin worked for the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview and like them on Facebook to preview the latest from the Review, learn about other oral history projects, connect with oral history centers across the world, and discover topics that you may have thought were even remotely connected to the study of oral history. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts on the OUPblog for addendum to past articles, interviews with scholars in oral history and related fields, and fieldnotes on conferences, workshops, etc.
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