A Stacked Deck: Racial Minorities and the New American Political Economy

The 1960s brought the promise of a new era of social justice for all Americans. Indeed, the overturning of official, state-sanctioned racial structures was a watershed in national life. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, the earlier momentum of the civil rights period dissipated as the end of the postwar economic expansion ushered in a crisis of American culture and polity. Symbolic racism emerged as a powerful political and ideological instrument to buttress resistance to racial and ethnic equality. During the 1980s, a Reagan administration antagonistic to the aspirations of minorities and the working classes in general was able to impose an array of policies (and a discourse) on the nation which polarized ethnic groups and classes even more rigidly. In Reaganism, one sees the congruence and power of symbolic racism and class-targeted economic policy, the capacity of elite forces to carry out economic restructuring at the cost of minority equality. What the post-civil rights period has largely done is to stack the American deck against African Americans and Hispanics

Young Tom Wharton

This working paper is a draft of the first three chapters of a biography of Thomas, 5th Baron, 1st Earl, and 1st Marquess of Wharton (1648-1715). It traces the development of young Thomas (Tom to his family and eventually to the political world of England) from his birth until his return from France in 1666. The reader may be relieved to know that the formidable array of genealogical notes in Chapter I will eventually be reduced into an appendix on the Wharton family and that the table of abbreviations covers the whole book, not merely the first three chapters. Some of the notes, it should be added, are made necessary by the vast amount of misinformation that has accreted around the Whartons. Nice people will not bother to read them

[Review of] Susan A. Glenn. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation

In this meticulously researched and highly readable work, Susan A. Glenn examines the experiences of a particular group of Jewish immigrants, European-born daughters who, early in this century, went to work in the American garment industry. The author is attempting here no less than to make sense of the intersecting linkages between eastern European Jewish culture, the immigration experience, working class life, the labor movement, and gender identity

Aerodynamic calculations related to tethered sub-satellite experiments

The results are presented of four aerodynamic studies that were in support of a broader, preliminary inquiry concerning the potential use of downward-deployed tethered sub-satellites for in-flight aerothermodynamic research. There are a multitude of questions regarding the general tethered satellite concept and the present report addresses only a few of these. A method for estimating drag and local surface pressure and shear on orbiting or re-entereing bodies is described, and examples based on the planned TSS-2 (Tethered Satellite System) are given. The problem of pressure measurement are explored, taking into account thermal transpiration, lag time, and the disturbed flow field created by the satellite body. The performance of an aerodynamic stabilizer, a ring-tail design, is calculated and its influence on satellite motion is illustrated. A method for optimizing future satellite shapes for desired aerodynamic properties is transitional rarefied flow with given geometric constraints is proposed and examples are shown