115 research outputs found
Standing By: Police Paralysis, Race, and the 1964 Philadelphia Riot
Although considerable scholarship has explored the riots of the 1960s as the culmination of tensions simmering throughout the tumultuous decade, this article examines Philadelphiaâs 1964 riot and the ways that local newspapers attempted to frame the violence. By urging Philadelphians to view the riot as the outcome of an ineffectual police department, which was ill-equipped to confront black âhoodlums,â journalists privileged frames of police paralysis and marginalization. The circulation of these two frames alone, however, cannot explain the eventual demise of the cityâs Police Advisory Board. This study argues that the imagery of police standing idly by while the streets of Philadelphia dissolved into chaos proved invaluable ammunition for opponents of the Board, who found in the news coverage further evidence of postwar liberalismâs failure to protect the populace
[Introduction to] Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century
Along with Confederate flags, the men and women who recently gathered before the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts carried signs proclaiming âHeritage Not Hate.â Theirs, they said, was an âopen and visible protest against those who attacked us, ours flags, our ancestors, or our Heritage.â How, Nicole Maurantonio wondered, did ânot hateâ square with a âheritageâ grounded in slavery? How do so-called neo-Confederates distance themselves from the actions and beliefs of white supremacists while clinging to the very symbols and narratives that tether the Confederacy to the history of racism and oppression in America? The answer, Maurantonio discovers, is bound up in the myth of Confederate exceptionalismâa myth whose components, proponents, and meaning this timely and provocative book explores.
The narrative of Confederate exceptionalism, in this analysis, updates two uniquely American mythologiesâthe Lost Cause and American exceptionalismâblending their elements with discourses of racial neoliberalism to create a seeming separation between the Confederacy and racist systems. Incorporating several methods and drawing from a range of sourcesâincluding ethnographic observations, interviews, and archival documentsâMaurantonio examines the various people, objects, and rituals that contribute to this cultural balancing act. Her investigation takes in âofficialâ modes of remembering the Confederacy, such as the monuments and building names that drive the discussion today, but it also pays attention to the more mundane and often subtle ways in which the Confederacy is recalled. Linking the different modes of commemoration, her work bridges the distance that believers in Confederate exceptionalism maintain; while situated in history from the Civil War through the civil rights era, the book brings much-needed clarity to the constitution, persistence, and significance of this divisive myth in the context of our time.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1350/thumbnail.jp
The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock \u27n\u27 Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950\u27s Philadelphia (Book Review)
More than fifty years have elapsed since the popular television program American Bandstand first appeared in homes across the United States, and still mere mention of the show continues to conjure images of teenagers, black and white, boppinâ to the sounds of emerging musical talents from Jackie Wilson to Dusty Springfield. This very image, and the potent memory of a racially integrated youth demographic dancing together in harmony, Matthew F. D elmont argues in The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ânâ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia, is precisely the problem. Contrary to the recollections of Bandstandâs celebrated host, Dick Clark, whose praise of the show as a powerful force resisting segregationist pressures is often cited in popular histories of the program, Delmont argues that the reality of 1950s Philadelphia was considerably more complex. As Delmont states, âRather than being a fully integrated program that welcomed black youth, American Bandstand continued to discriminate against black teens throughout the showâs Philadelphia yearsâ (2). Simply, American Bandstand was hardly the bastion of racial integration Clark purported it to be
Imaging Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (Book Review)
Time capsules are artifacts that at face value appear antithetical to the enterprise of history. Capturing frozen moments in time, time capsules flatten the dynamic and contingent nature of the past. Yet, as the contributors to Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City argue, the artifact is simply an entry point opening up larger questions of the complex relationships between past, present, and future. In this case, the âtime capsuleâ is a single text, famed city planner Edmund Baconâs 1959 essay, âPhiladelphia in the Year 2009.â When read with the benefit of twenty-first- century hindsight, Baconâs essay, chapter 1 of the volume, seems romantically utopian at best and naively simplistic at worst. Bacon appears at once eerily prescient and hopelessly out of touch. Fortunately, the contributors to Imagining Philadelphia conceived of this project as more than simply a catalogue of Baconâs forecasting successes and failures. Imagining Philadelphia encourages readers, in the words of editor and contributor Scott Gabriel Knowles, to interpret Baconâs essay as âless a prophecy than a gamble, a hope that big ideas could win the day, while achieving some serious and useful results along the wayâ (110)
The Politics of Memory
This chapter considers the definitional and disciplinary politics surrounding the study of memory, exploring the various sites of memory study that have emerged within the field of communication. Specifically, this chapter reviews sites of memory and commemoration, ranging from places such as museums, monuments, and memorials, to textual forms, including journalism and consumer culture. Within each context, this chapter examines the ways in which these sites have interpreted and reinterpreted traumatic pasts bearing great consequence for national identity. It concludes with a discussion of the challenges set forth by new media for scholars engaging in studies of the politics of memory and identifies areas worthy of future research
Foundations, Properties, and Security Applications of Puzzles: A Survey
Cryptographic algorithms have been used not only to create robust ciphertexts
but also to generate cryptograms that, contrary to the classic goal of
cryptography, are meant to be broken. These cryptograms, generally called
puzzles, require the use of a certain amount of resources to be solved, hence
introducing a cost that is often regarded as a time delay---though it could
involve other metrics as well, such as bandwidth. These powerful features have
made puzzles the core of many security protocols, acquiring increasing
importance in the IT security landscape. The concept of a puzzle has
subsequently been extended to other types of schemes that do not use
cryptographic functions, such as CAPTCHAs, which are used to discriminate
humans from machines. Overall, puzzles have experienced a renewed interest with
the advent of Bitcoin, which uses a CPU-intensive puzzle as proof of work. In
this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of the most important puzzle
construction schemes available in the literature, categorizing them according
to several attributes, such as resource type, verification type, and
applications. We have redefined the term puzzle by collecting and integrating
the scattered notions used in different works, to cover all the existing
applications. Moreover, we provide an overview of the possible applications,
identifying key requirements and different design approaches. Finally, we
highlight the features and limitations of each approach, providing a useful
guide for the future development of new puzzle schemes.Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in ACM Computing
Survey
Characterizing the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian Conflict Through the Lenses of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: Dataset, Methodology, and Preliminary Findings
Online social networks (OSNs) play a crucial role in today's world. On the
one hand, they allow free speech, information sharing, and social-movements
organization, to cite a few. On the other hand, they are the tool of choice to
spread disinformation, hate speech, and to support propaganda. For these
reasons, OSNs data mining and analysis aimed at detecting disinformation
campaigns that may arm the society and, more in general, poison the democratic
posture of states, are essential activities during key events such as
elections, pandemics, and conflicts. In this paper, we studied the 2022
Russo-Ukrainian conflict on Twitter, one of the most used OSNs. We
quantitatively and qualitatively analyze a dataset of more than 5.5+ million
tweets related to the subject, generated by 1.8+ million unique users. By
leveraging statistical analysis techniques and aspect-based sentiment analysis
(ABSA), we discover hidden insights in the collected data and abnormal patterns
in the users' sentiment that in some cases confirm while in other cases
disprove common beliefs on the conflict. In particular, based on our findings
and contrary to what suggested in some mainstream media, there is no evidence
of massive disinformation campaigns. However, we have identified several
anomalies in the behavior of particular accounts and in the sentiment trend for
some subjects that represent a starting point for further analysis in the
field. The adopted techniques, the availability of the data, the replicability
of the experiments, and the preliminary findings, other than being interesting
on their own, also pave the way to further research in the domain
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