Nebraska and rural electrification through 1940

Since Nebraska is primarily an agricultural state, the struggle to bring electricity to its rural areas played an important role in the long-standing battle to decrease the disparity between living standards in rural and urban America. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, telephones and automobiles lessened rural isolation while increased utilization of tractors and other technological innovations rendered farm labor less tedious. Nevertheless, without electricity, the one modern innovation that more than any other brought comfort and convenience within the reach of the urban masses, living and working conditions on the farm remained comparatively primitive. Farm families performed backbreaking drudgery as had their forebearers for centuries without aid from electrical conveniences. Modern bathrooms were rare on farms not equiped with electric water pumps. Candles, lantern or gas lamps provided inadequate and dangerous lighting in houses and barns while only the moon illuminated country lanes and yards

Nebraska and rural electrification through 1940

Since Nebraska is primarily an agricultural state, the struggle to bring electricity to its rural areas played an important role in the long-standing battle to decrease the disparity between living standards in rural and urban America. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, telephones and automobiles lessened rural isolation while increased utilization of tractors and other technological innovations rendered farm labor less tedious. Nevertheless, without electricity, the one modern innovation that more than any other brought comfort and convenience within the reach of the urban masses, living and working conditions on the farm remained comparatively primitive. Farm families performed backbreaking drudgery as had their forebearers for centuries without aid from electrical conveniences. Modern bathrooms were rare on farms not equiped with electric water pumps. Candles, lantern or gas lamps provided inadequate and dangerous lighting in houses and barns while only the moon illuminated country lanes and yards

Molecular Genetics of T Cell Development

T cell development is guided by a complex set of transcription factors that act recursively, in different combinations, at each of the developmental choice points from T-lineage specification to peripheral T cell specialization. This review describes the modes of action of the major T-lineage-defining transcription factors and the signal pathways that activate them during intrathymic differentiation from pluripotent precursors. Roles of Notch and its effector RBPSuh (CSL), GATA-3, E2A/HEB and Id proteins, c-Myb, TCF-1, and members of the Runx, Ets, and Ikaros families are critical. Less known transcription factors that are newly recognized as being required for T cell development at particular checkpoints are also described. The transcriptional regulation of T cell development is contrasted with that of B cell development, in terms of their different degrees of overlap with the stem-cell program and the different roles of key transcription factors in gene regulatory networks leading to lineage commitment

Tightrope walkers and solidarity sisters: critical workplace educators in the garment industry

Abstract: This article focuses on the complex negotiations of critical workplace educators positioned amongst contradictory agendas and discourses in the workplace. While philosophically aligned with critical pedagogical agendas of transformation and collective action for workplace change, these educators perform an array of pedagogic articulations in everyday practice to secure their continued presence in the workplace. What becomes evident in these seemingly opposing articulations are various strategic political positionings of educators alongside their juggling of demands, attachments and inter-identifications with both learners and managers. The pedagogy that emerges challenges conventional binaries of ‘transformative’ and ‘reproductive’ learning. Dynamics of transformation and liberation as well as reproduction and subjugation appear to be interlinked, along with expanding nets of social relations that blur power hierarchies and spatial boundaries, in a pedagogy that ultimately appears to mobilise hope and agency among workers. The workplace educator works a delicate balance of these dynamics to survive. The argument is based on a case study of a garment factory in Canada in which an adult education programme managed to thrive for 17 years: both workers and educators were interviewed in depth

Indigenous identity, natural resources, and contentious politics in Bolivia: a disaggregated conflict analysis; 2000-2011

How do natural resources and ethnic identity interact to incite or to mitigate social conflict? This article argues that high-value natural resources can act as an important catalyst for the politicization of ethnic, specifically indigenous identity, and contribute to social conflict as they limit the malleability of identity frames and raise the stakes of confrontations. We test this argument using unique subnational data from Bolivian provinces. Drawing on Bolivian newspaper reports, we code conflict events for all of the 112 provinces from 2000 to 2011. We join this conflict data with information on local ethnic composition from the census, the political representation of ethnic groups at the national level, as well as geo-spatial information on gas deposits. Using time-series cross-sectional count models, we show a significant conflict-promoting effect of the share of indigenous people in provinces with gas reserves, but not without