States’ Rights, Southern Hypocrisy, and the Crisis of the Union

This article explores the arguments used by southern secessionists to explain why they left the Union. The article demonstrates that support for states\u27 rights was not the main reason for secession, and that on the contrary, most of the slave states left the Union because the free states were exercising their states\u27 rights in opposing slavery. The main reason for secession, as this essay shows, was the desire to protect slavery and to create a new nation, self-consciously based on slavery and white supremacy. This article began as part of an AALS legal history section program in 2010 and is part of a symposium based on the papers given at that session

Enhanced reality live role playing

Live role-playing is a form of improvisational theatre played for the experience of the performers and without an audience. These games form a challenging application domain for ubiquitous technology. We discuss the design options for enhanced reality live role-playing and the role of technology in live role-playing games

Unfolding spinor wavefunctions and expectation values of general operators: Introducing the unfolding-density operator

We show that the spectral weights $W_{m\vec K}(\vec k)$ used for the unfolding of two-component spinor eigenstates $| {\psi_{m\vec K}^\mathrm{SC}} > = | \alpha > | {\psi_{m\vec{K}}^\mathrm{SC, \alpha}} > + | \beta > | {\psi_{m\vec{K}}^\mathrm{SC, \beta}} >$ can be decomposed as the sum of the partial spectral weights $W_{m\vec{K}}^{\mu}(\vec k)$ calculated for each component $\mu = \alpha, \beta$ independently, effortlessly turning a possibly complicated problem involving two coupled quantities into two independent problems of easy solution. Furthermore, we define the unfolding-density operator $\hat{\rho}_{\vec{K}}(\vec{k}_{i}; \, \varepsilon)$, which unfolds the primitive cell expectation values $\varphi^{pc}(\vec{k}; \varepsilon)$ of any arbitrary operator $\mathbf{\hat\varphi}$ according to $\varphi^{pc}(\vec{k}_{i}; \varepsilon) = \mathit{Tr}(\hat{\rho}_{\vec{K}}(\vec{k}_{i}; \, \varepsilon)\,\,\hat{\varphi})$. As a proof of concept, we apply the method to obtain the unfolded band structures, as well as the expectation values of the Pauli spin matrices, for prototypical physical systems described by two-component spinor eigenfunctions

Social capital and self-rated health – a study of temporal (causal) relationships

Despite the vast amount of research over the past fifteen years, there is still lively debate surrounding the role of social capital on individual health outcomes. This seems to stem from a lack of consistency regarding the definition, measurement and plausible theories linking this contextual phenomenon to health. We have further identified a knowledge gap within this field - a distinct lack of research investigating temporal relationships between social capital and health outcomes. To remedy this shortfall, we use four waves of the British Household Panel Survey to follow the same individuals (N = 8114) between years 2000 and 2007. We investigate temporal relationships and association between our outcome variable self-rated health (SRH) and time-lagged explanatory variables, including three individual-level social capital proxies and other well-known health determinants. Our results suggest that levels of the social capital proxy ‘generalised trust’ at time point (t-1) are positively associated with SRH at subsequent time point (t), even after taking into consideration levels of other well-known health determinants (such as smoking status) at time point (t-1). That we investigate temporal relationships at four separate occasions over the seven year period lends considerable weight to our results and the argument that generalised trust is an independent predictor of individual health. However, lack of consensus across a variety of disciplines as to what generalised trust is believed to measure creates ambiguity when attempting to identify possible pathways from higher trust to better health

“Far Darker than the IKEA Paradise of Sensible Volvos”: American Perceptions of Sweden Filtered Through Crime Fiction

This study looks at references made to Sweden in U.S. newspaper and magazine articles discussing Swedish crime fiction. Books by authors such as Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell have enjoyed a great deal of popularity in the United States in recent years, and institutions such as the Swedsh Institute in Stockholm have expressed the hope that this popularity will result in greater interest in and knowledge about Sweden. The findings of the study, however, suggest that such is not necessarily the case. U.S. media references to the home country of Larsson and Mankell tend to follow stereotypes and focus on the country’s cold climate, or to see Sweden solely as the origin of products and pop-culture phenomena already familiar to Americans, such as IKEA, Volvo and ABBA. The study considers this view of Sweden part of a larger trend in U.S. mass media away from politics and social issues and toward consumer-oriented news

Tricky Film: The Critical and Legal Reception of I Am Curious (Yellow) in America

This study examines the reception of the Swedish film I am Curious (Yellow) in America. As a mixture of political satire and a chronicle of a sexual affair, with fictional and documentary material, the film was referred to by a U.S. government official as “the most explicit movie ever imported” when it arrived in America in 1968 and was released only after a federal appeals court reversed a lower-court verdict that had found it legally obscene. Although cleared for importation, I am Curious (Yellow) continued to be dogged by whether its sex scenes violated local and state obscenity laws. While the legal actions at times impeded distribution of the film, they also generated publicity for it, eventually making it one of the most profitable foreign-language films in U.S. motionpicture history. This paper discusses several court cases where the film’s social value—or lack thereof—was the factor deciding whether it could be shown, and it also looks at critical reaction to the film. Noting that all popular-culture products are products of the societies they spring from, the paper also looks at how the film was received in Sweden

Race War Flares Up: Chicago’s Swedish Press, the Great Migration, and the 1919 Riots

This study of the three large Swedish-language weeklies in Chicago examines how they covered the city’s African-American community during the latter half of the 1910s, a time when blacks migrated to the North in huge numbers. In Chicago, the result was that the African-American population almost tripled between 1910 and 1920. Little of that was visible in the columns of the weeklies, however, with only a handful of items telling readers that blacks were arriving in record numbers. What news there was about African-Americans, moreover, tended to portray them as criminals. Consequently, the riots that shook Chicago in late July 1919 seemed to take the editors of the weeklies by surprise. A major explanation for the Swedish weeklies’ coverage was that they relied almost exclusively on the city’s English-language dailies for news that did not concern their own ethnic group and thus mirrored the negative way the dailies portrayed African-Americans