Tag Archives: Top News

Lion and Leopard, a novel

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Nathaniel Popkin

Nathaniel Popkin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“The pleasure is in my hand as I draw his features. I particularly like this silent stirring, the swelling of the air between my hands and my eyes and my eyes and my subject, and I savor it much as the captain lingers over a fiery red pepper, which he eats in judicious little bites right down to the stem.” John Lewis Krimmel on board the Sumatra, sailing from Rotterdam, August 11, 1818  [from Lion and Leopard]

“It took me some time to to digest the deception. Nay, it should be called a thievery. Whatever Krimmel’s point, whether to denigrate me or my Museum, or perhaps, the practice of democracy as some foreigners are inclined to do, I realized my son had been right to warn me about the German.” Charles Willson Peale outside the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 10th and Chestnut Streets, September 25, 1818  [from Lion and Leopard]

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John Lewis Krimmel drowned in a Millpond near Germantown, not far from the farm of Charles Willson Peale, on July 15, 1821 at the age of 35. A genre painter, he was at the height of his artistic powers at the time of his death. His life and death served as the inspiration for Nathaniel Popkin’s new book Lion and Leopard, a novel that illuminates the world of early 19th century Philadelphia.

America’s first city at the time, Philadelphia was also the epicenter of its art world and a place that witnessed debates, controversies, and rivalries that contributed to the birth of an American culture. Sandwiched between the revolutionary generation and the coming of the industrial revolution, Popkin’s Philadelphia is a rich brew of men and women, family strife, youthful passion, foreign emigres, and institutional intrigue.

It was a time in which the young United States was still in a very fluid state and anything was possible, it was time when three youths from the small town of Easton, Pennsylvania set off for big city Philadelphia, with dreams of writing a book on the American masters and seeing the world.

On the 193rd anniversary of John Lewis Krimmel’s untimely death, I spoke to Nathaniel Popkin about his novelistic debut, LIon and Leopard.

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—Fred Rowland

Remaking women’s magazines

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Newspapers and magazines are struggling in the 21st century. Twenty years after the launch of the World Wide Web, many influential publications of the previous century have folded. Readers have many more choices and advertisers have found new channels to reach them. Advertising revenues from traditional print publications have plunged.

For her new book Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age, Brooke Erin Duffy interviewed over thirty industry professionals, engaged in participant observation, and paid close attention to the industry trade literature. She focused her attention on the production side, attempting to understand how the digital environment is influencing professional and organizational identities.

The routines developed around producing a glossy monthly magazine have shifted towards the urgent, ephemeral 24/7 digital cycle. The magazine is no longer an object but a brand. In addition to the traditional print magazine and its online surrogates, some magazines now have YouTube channels, TV shows, and retail products. Journalistic writing is increasingly being sidelined for prose that is more amenable to search engine optimization and advertisers. Whither the magazine from here?

I spoke to Brooke Erin Duffy about her new book Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age on July 9, 2014.

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—Fred Rowland

What is spirituality?

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Do a search for spirituality in Google’s NGRAM Viewer, an online tool that graphs the incidence of words from the Google Book corpus, and you will find that in and around 1980 this word spiked. The rise is more or less consistent with the increasing appearance of the word spirituality in book and journal titles (pre-1980 books / post-1980 books; pre-1980 journals / post-1980 journals) in Temple University’s collection. The pattern appears in both popular and scholarly publications. About this time the category of “spiritual but not religious” became familiar to pollsters of religious attitudes and trends. What explains this sudden emergence of spirituality? Did anything really emerge, or was this just a definitional shift? Was spirituality colonizing new territory? Or is spirituality a “glow” word that makes everyone feel good but signifies, well, very little?

In her new book, The Ecology of Spirituality: Meanings, Virtues, and Practices in a Post-Religious Age, Lucy Bregman investigates this phenomenon. She looks at the broad changes in religion and intellectual culture that preceeded the blossoming (or metastasizing) of spirituality, and then describes spirituality’s career over the past three decades. I interviewed Lucy Bregman on July 3, 2014.

[This is the second interview I have done with Lucy Bregman. Listen to our discussion on her previous book: Preaching Death.]

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—Fred Rowland

Library Prize Interviews, 2014

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Here are the interviews with this year’s two winners of the Library Prize for Undergraduate Research. Take some time to listen to these two accomplished undergraduate scholars discussing their research. Congratulations to both of them!

Cassandra Emmons, “Ambiguous Attacks on Democracy in Europe and the Americas: What Can Intergovernmental Organizations Do?”
Political Science 4891: Senior Honors Scholar Project, Fall 2013
Faculty Sponsors: Andrew Pollack and Hillel Soifer

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Evan Hoskins, “Pigs in the Promised Land: The Russian Great Aliyah and non-kosher meat as a secular symbol against Orthodox Rabbinical hegemony in Israel”
History 4997: Honors History Seminar, Spring 2014
Faculty Sponsors: Beth Bailey and Elliot Ratzmann

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—Fred Rowland

 

April Glaser talks about civil liberties in the digital world

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Organized in 1990, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a nonprofit organization committed to defending civil liberties in the digital environment. EFF engages in litigation, advocacy, and technology development to help secure individual rights online. Whether legal protections simply have not caught up to rapidly changing technologies or governments and corporations overreach in pursuing their goals, EFF stands ready to put the public first in digital policy debates and legal proceedings. Perusing the EFF web site offers a quick entree into the most important legal and policy issues concerning digital communications and technology: free speech, fair use, innovation, privacy, and transparency. Just recently EFF sued the NSA, in First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA, for First Amendment violations of freedom of association based on revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden. EFF also develops digital tools and recommendations for enhancing online privacy (see Surveillance Self-Defense).

2012 Temple graduate April Glaser joined EFF in the fall of 2013. From her home in San Francisco, she frequently travels around the country giving talks and participating in discussions on the work of EFF. Before studying at Temple, April worked at the Prometheus Radio Project as an advocate for community radio. She testified on several occassions before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and her work contributed to the passage of the Local Community Radio Act of 2010.

On a recent swing through the Keystone State, April stopped by my office to speak about her work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We spoke on March 27, 2014.

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—Fred Rowland

 

 

Jesus, Jobs, and Justice

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As Bettye Collier-Thomas explains, there were female African American preachers in the nineteenth century who could pack a church or revival meeting with their inspirational Gospel sermons. At the same time, they were excluded from leadership positions. Bishops, pastors, and other leaders of African American churches and denominations recognized that women preachers were good for business. After all, females frequently accounted for a supermajority of church membership and were the most active fund raisers and organizers. The work of these women preachers and church organizers left traces in the historical record, but given the twin barriers of race and gender their contributions often went unrecognized.

In Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion, Temple University professor Bettye Collier-Thomas rescues these women – and many of their sisters in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – from history’s slumber. Working within and outside their churches, cooperating across racial and gender lines, African American Women of faith have worked tirelessly for abolitionism, suffragism, anti-lynching legislation, civil rights, and women’s rights.

Although there are many books about the historic sweep of the Black Church, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice – in the words of reviewer M. Shawn Copeland writing in the Women’s Review of Books – “is the first [book] to comprehensively research and analyze the interplay of gender, race, and religion in the lives of African American women from the period of enslavement to the present…”

I spoke with Bettye Collier-Thomas on March 14, 2014.

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—Fred Rowland

Detroit, then and now

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Heather Ann Thompson

 

 

 

 

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When you hear the word “Detroit”, it’s a little like watching a pebble thrown into a pond. First you see the pebble hit the water and then you see the waves echoing from a rapidly disappearing center. Detroit serves as a euphemism for race relations gone bad, or the failure of liberalism, or the wreckage of surburbanization and globalization, or the mismanagement of the auto industry, or the problems of urban America, or the decline of unions. Take your pick. Though always freighted by heavy symbolism, the exact meaning of Detroit depends on your political persuasion.

When Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013, the news reporting of this weighty event was very superficial, lacking in historical context and social and racial complexity.  Perhaps when a city is a euphemism for so much else, a review of its history seems redundant. In order to correct some of this reporting, I thought I’d invite African American Studies Professor Heather Ann Thompson, author of  Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Cornell University Press, 2001), to discuss the history of Detroit. Professor Thompson moved to Detroit as a teenager and developed a lasting love and fascination for the Motor City. Still a focus of her research, she is moving back to Detroit and starting a new position at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the fall of 2015.

I spoke to Heather Ann Thompson on Tuesday, February 25, 2014.

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—Fred Rowland

Ain’t No Trust

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The official name of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act makes the legislators’ motivations very clear: The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. On signing it, President Clinton fulfilled his campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Clearly fronting personal responsibility and work, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 came right as the country’s economy was entering an unprecedented boom. The dot.com bubble was in its most expansive stage, with employment tight and wages rising. The “new economy” offered a bright horizon as Internet entrepreneurs would transform the economy and lift all boats on a turbulent but exciting sea.

The intent and the rhetoric surrounding the 1996 Welfare Reform Act was consistent with an American tradition of individualism. Looking at low-income individuals from this perspective, they simply lacked either the motivation or the personal characteristics necessary to thrive in our economy. The plan was to establish a program of carrots and sticks to encourage changes in personal behavior.

Judith Levine brings a different perspective to this debate in her new book Ain’t No Trust: How Bosses, Boyfriends and Bureaucrats Fail Low-Income Mothers and Why It Matters (University of California Press, 2013). Consistent with an alternative tradition that “no man [or woman] is an island, she is interested in social factors that influence personal behaviors, in this case trust and distrust. Looking at two different cohorts of interviews with low-income women in the Chicago area, one before and one after the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, she studied how trust and distrust emerge and shape low-income mothers approach and response to life events. She feels that this is a perspective lacking from the 1996 Act.

I spoke to Judith Levine on February 20, 2014.

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—Fred Rowland

Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith

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Originally, enslaved Africans in Saint Domingue (renamed Haiti) brought with them religious practices and traditions that blended with the Catholicism of French colonists to form Vodou. Later, Protestantism was introduced and spread by white and black missionaries. Today, all three religions are practiced in Haiti. According to Terry Rey, co-author of Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith: Haitian Religion in Miami, Haitians share a similar religious orientation influenced by Vodou and the alleged spiritual power of Haiti, whether they self-identify as Catholic, Protestant, or Vodouist. The heavy denigration and stereotyping of Vodou in large measure began during the U.S. occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934, as soldiers and administrators misunderstood and misinterpreted the religious and social practices they witnessed on Haiti. (Popular usage of the word “zombie” spiked during this period.) These distortions, so entrenched in Hollywood films and popular literature, must be overcome in order to gain a real understanding of Haitian religion.

Temple religion professor Terry Rey and Alex Stepick, director of the Immigration and Ethnicity Institute at Florida International University, have produced a history and ethnography of Haitian religion in Miami. By surveying the religious institutions in Miami’s Little Haiti and surrounding areas, interviewing community members, and investigating the primary and secondary literatures, Rey and Stepick explain what happened to Haitian religion when it “crossed the water” to the shores of Florida. They describe Notre Dame de Haiti Catholic Church, the epicenter of support for Haitian immigrants, the shrines in and around Miami that Haitians visit for spiritual sustainance, and the annual festivals that bring the Haitian community together in celebration.  Protestant churches small and large, both storefront operations and established denominations, have filled in around Notre Dame de Haiti, along with the less prevalent Vodou botanicas, to create a religious marketplace for Haitian Americans in search of salvation goods.

Unlike the Africans who originally came to Saint Domingue, Miami’s Haitian residents stay in frequent contact with their place of birth, through modern communications and transportation technologies. I spoke with Terry Rey on January 13, 2014.

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—Fred Rowland

The Digital Rights Movement

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Hector Postigo is the author of The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright, in which he presents three case studies of a broad group of loosely knit organizations and individuals that address issues concerning fair use, free speech, privacy, and innovation in the digital environment. None of these concerns are new but the digital medium has changed the social, legal, and economic configuration in which the stakeholders operate. Users are no longer simply passive receivers of content but producers as well. Anyone with a computer can generate new and original online content, or can reuse and remix content in creative ways. This is a real watershed for creation and innovation and the digital rights movement is motivated by a vision of culture as shared and participatory. Expanded conceptions of fair use and free speech are essential to facilitate this vision. Individuals, organizations, and businesses that “own” content through government-granted copyrights have an interest in maintaining control in their works, for commercial and other reasons. The lines dividing users, creators, and content owners are very fluid, so much of this story is about the evolution of legal rules – government regulation – with regards to copyright and digital technology.

By looking at three different cases in which the nascent digital rights movement struggled with the owners and producers of technology and commercial media over the meaning of fair use, free speech, and cultural production, Hector Postigo provides a unique perspective on the profound changes that digital technology has set in motion for cultures, economies, and polities.

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—Fred Rowland