The American Yawp

The American Yawp constructs a coherent and accessible narrative from all the best of recent historical scholarship. Without losing sight of politics and power, it incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. Whitman’s America, like ours, cut across the narrow boundaries that strangle many narratives. Balancing academic rigor with popular readability, The American Yawp offers a multi-layered, democratic alternative to the American past

[Review of] John Bodnar. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America

The Transplanted is represented as a synthesis of the immigrant experience in urban America. Bodnar posits the confrontation with capitalism as sole explanation for migration, emigration and immigrant behavior in the new country. His stated intent is to rescue immigration history from older views of immigrants as hapless victims of circumstance

Law in numbers: the poiesis of the crowd

Having written on protest and its variant forms for some years now, whether in squats or on the streets, through law or otherwise1, it has become more and more apparent how the right to dissent is altering, with the definite feel there are diminishing spaces in which to resist

Radio Revolution: The Local Community Radio Act\u27s Expansion of Possibilities for Low-Power FM Stations

This Article explores the struggle to establish low-power FM radio stations on airwaves already crowded with full-power stations. Historically, urban markets have provided few opportunities for low-power stations due to third-adjacent channel protections—there are only so many frequencies available in a given city. The Local Community Radio Act of 2010 gives new stations an advantage in the debate by eroding these protections. In October of 2013, the FCC opened the application window for new low-power stations—only the second window since the inception of low-power FM in 2001. During the window, the FCC received 2,800 applications, including eighty-one from Washington State. In an industry dominated by only a few voices, community stations now have the chance to raise their own voices above the din. This Article also explores the technical and practical feasibility of removing second-adjacent channel protections. While such removal faces resistance from traditional broadcasters, the FCC has shown through its decisions that the prevailing trend is in favor of community radio

Finding Your Mate at a Cocktail Party: Frequency Separation Promotes Auditory Stream Segregation of Concurrent Voices in Multi-Species Frog Choruses

Vocal communication in crowded social environments is a difficult problem for both humans and nonhuman animals. Yet many important social behaviors require listeners to detect, recognize, and discriminate among signals in a complex acoustic milieu comprising the overlapping signals of multiple individuals, often of multiple species. Humans exploit a relatively small number of acoustic cues to segregate overlapping voices (as well as other mixtures of concurrent sounds, like polyphonic music). By comparison, we know little about how nonhuman animals are adapted to solve similar communication problems. One important cue enabling source segregation in human speech communication is that of frequency separation between concurrent voices: differences in frequency promote perceptual segregation of overlapping voices into separate “auditory streams” that can be followed through time. In this study, we show that frequency separation (ΔF) also enables frogs to segregate concurrent vocalizations, such as those routinely encountered in mixed-species breeding choruses. We presented female gray treefrogs (Hyla chrysoscelis) with a pulsed target signal (simulating an attractive conspecific call) in the presence of a continuous stream of distractor pulses (simulating an overlapping, unattractive heterospecific call). When the ΔF between target and distractor was small (e.g., ≤3 semitones), females exhibited low levels of responsiveness, indicating a failure to recognize the target as an attractive signal when the distractor had a similar frequency. Subjects became increasingly more responsive to the target, as indicated by shorter latencies for phonotaxis, as the ΔF between target and distractor increased (e.g., ΔF = 6–12 semitones). These results support the conclusion that gray treefrogs, like humans, can exploit frequency separation as a perceptual cue to segregate concurrent voices in noisy social environments. The ability of these frogs to segregate concurrent voices based on frequency separation may involve ancient hearing mechanisms for source segregation shared with humans and other vertebrates

Tiny Baby, Heavy Baby, Dark Baby

Tiny Baby, Heavy Baby, Dark Baby explores the construction of whiteness and the socialization of racial shame. Set in a grocery store, the fictional short story narrates a small moment between a toddler and her babysitter that has an immeasurable impact. My hope is that readers see themselves in the characters and are encouraged to self-reflect. The story intends to explore shame’s role in structural racism rather than to place blame

Morse at Enoshima and Tokyo

In which our hero sets up a marine laboratory at Enoshima in the summer of 1877 and then, in the fall, takes up his position as first professor of Zoology at the Imperial University in Tokyo. And how he excavates the kitchen middens at Omori and introduces archeology to Japan; and how he brings his family to live there for two years; and how he begins to collect pottery; and how he learns how to waste (enjoy?) time; and how he leaves in 1879 with many interests and ideas that were not his just three years before