[Review of] Robert J. Norrell. Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee

Reaping the Whirlwind is a case study of the black American struggle for civil rights and racial democracy in a unique community of the Black Belt South. It is a story of Tuskegee\u27s white political hegemony and the black elite\u27s early cooperation with and later mild challenge to that dominance. In 1880, as a result of collaboration between white politicians and Tuskegee\u27s black leadership, the Democrats secured political control of the Alabama state legislature. The following year, as pay-off for the deal, Tuskegee Institute was established with Booker T. Washington at the helm, and the goal became one of making Tuskegee a model community for safeguarding racial cooperation through black political subordination. Tuskegee\u27s white merchants, former slaveowners, and educators alike encouraged black educational opportunities ( separate and unequal )

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead