Nursing in a Time and Place of Peril: Five North Carolina Nurses

Nurses are all around us. They attend our births and deaths, administer healing treatments when we are ill and help us promote well-being through public health and mental health programs. Almost every family can identify a nurse or two on its family tree. Nurses are members of and care for members of every racial, religious and cultural group. For over a century, nurses have worked in rural and urban areas, provided care in chrome trimmed surgical suites and tumble down cabins and have navigated legal, political and economic currents to improve the health of the public while continuously upgrading the profession. While much nursing history has been chronicled by scholars, the record of North Carolina military nurses is virtually unknown. Illuminating the stories of a select group of nurses who have cared for soldiers from the Civil War through the current war on terror can offer insights and increase understanding of development of professional nursing and the evolving role of women in our society. Historical inquiry involves studying primary and secondary sources to increase our understanding of the past. Evidenced based source material may include written documents, oral histories, artifacts, photographs and new media such as websites and even “tweets”. Nurse historians use all of these forms of evidence to discover and analyze our collective professional heritage. Historical findings may be disseminated through oral, written, audio-visual and electronic means. The best method to report historical findings depends on the subject of inquiry. Prosopography, frequently referred to as collective biography, is a useful historical tool to chronicle a group of individuals with shared characteristics and/or experiences. While biographies and case studies focus on the uniqueness of a single person, prosopography allows the researcher to analyze the changing roles and status of a cluster of individuals. Using a prosopographic approach, this article analyzes the progress of professional nursing through the contributions of five North Carolina military nurses over the course of one hundred and fifty years

Charlotte Rhone: Nurse, Welfare Worker, and Entrepreneur

Charlotte Rhone, a pioneering African American nurse born in Craven County, North Carolina, at the end of the post–Civil War Reconstruction era, grew up in a society shaped by the harshly discriminatory Jim Crow laws enacted in her home state and in others across the American South. Her choices in education and employment were severely limited because of these racist policies, but Rhone's tenacity, flexibility, and intelligence overcame many obstacles that oppressed poverty-stricken African American women in turn-of-the-century rural North Carolina. She went on to use her education and skills for the good of her community well into the 1950s

With Or Without Your Blessing: Elizabeth Grimball and the Struggle of a Southern Teacher

Driven by financial difficulties within the households of southern families during the Civil War, women entered the workforce on an economic basis, which unintentionally instigated a social transformation of traditional gender roles. For example, John and Meta Grimball’s eldest daughter Elizabeth entered into the public sphere as a teacher due to the family’s economic and personal losses. By doing so she defied her parents’ wishes, and independently took control of her financial wellbeing. She became an independent thinker who no longer needed the financial stability of her father. Elizabeth Grimball is an example of a shift toward young American women taking an independent stand in professions made possible by the Civil War. Instead of conceding to follow the strict moral code of a “Southern Belle,” Elizabeth forged her own path. Her courage to enter a male dominated workforce is commendable, and her struggle resonates with today’s society

Semantic MARC, MARC21 and the Semantic Web

The MARC standard for exchanging bibliographic data has been in use for several decades and is used by major libraries worldwide. This paper discusses the possibilities of representing the most prevalent form of MARC, MARC21, as RDF for the Semantic Web, and aims to understand the tradeoffs, if any, resulting from transforming the data. Critically our approach goes beyond a simple transliteration of the MARC21 record syntax to develop rich semantic descriptions of the varied things which may be described using bibliographic records. We present an algorithmic approach for consistently generating URIs from textual data, discuss the algorithmic matching of author names and suggest how RDF generated from MARC records may be linked to other data sources on the Web

On-Site Bioremediation: A Solution To Treatment Of Greywater

Treating wastewater on site via bioremediation and mechanical methods can save energy by reducing the stress on a large central water treatment facility to process greywater. Development of such systems will depend on characterization of this wastewater in order to properly design the system and test its performance. The purpose of this research was to develop and test a greywater system to be used for cleaning greywater from a hair salon. The system that was tested uses bioremediation, the process of using organisms to consume and break down pollutants. The experimental apparatus is a constructed greywater system using readily available parts. It is unique in that it is exclusively gravity fed with exception of the sump pump to provide the initial input. It is a three-trough system that flows from a top-center trough, then down to two adjacent troughs via aeration siphons. The study included two phases, a short-term study consisting of four variations, and a 16-day “batch” study. These four variations included (1) a baseline assessment, (2) no plants with only a biofilter, (3) no biofilter with plants only, and (4) a complete system incorporating both plants and biofilter

“The Animal, Whatever It Was”: Dogs, Multi-Species Subjectivity, And The Signifier Guide In Go Down, Moses, And The Call Of The Wild

Whom or what do we write about when we write about dogs? This thesis attempts to answer this question in part by analyzing the ways in which dogs have been reductively represented in literature, particularly in wilderness narratives that tend to mistake nature and culture as separate spaces. The two narratives I focus on to demonstrate this argument are William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942), and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903). I begin with establishing the opposite poles that various texts seem to gravitate toward when portraying animals. On one end, we often read texts that sentimentalize, mythologize, or anthropomorphize animals. On the opposite end, texts err on the side of stressing scientific observation to the point that the human is detached from nonhuman animals. Faulkner’s text seems to emulate the former and London’s the latter. In both cases, the narratives deny the subjectivity of animals and their lived experience

From National Negro Health Week to National Public Health Week

National Negro Health Week is a program that targeted the African-American population,and this precursor of National Public Health Week left a legacy of health awareness in the US. Theactive political participation of local and national National Negro Health Week groups led to pavedstreets, safer foods and drugs, clean water and more training and employment of African-Americanhealth workers

ACRL: the learning community for excellence in academic libraries: the presidential theme for the coming year

My purpose in writing this column is to share why I chose the presidential theme of "ACRL: The Learning Community for Excellence in Academic Libraries" and to explain why I think the learning community concept is such a powerful one. I also hope to set the stage for the coming year's columns, which will share this common theme

Listening to the Millennials: Thoughts for Literature Librarians

the author relates a panel discussion among literature librarianson the topic of the Millennial generation

Spatial Constraints on Women's Work in Tarija, Bolivia

This geography of women's work in the less-developed world is set in Tarija, Bolivia, a small city that has been dramatically changed by economic crisis and structural-adjustment programs. Explored is the spatial component of women's economic activities in a low-income barrio following the imposition of structural-adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s. Women who pursue employment away from home must rely on other women. In particular, households that include more than one woman who is capable of handling important daily chores are more likely to have a woman engaged in income-generating activities away from the home and the neighborhood. Women at home make it possible for other women to extend their economic activity into the broader community. These findings are important because they draw attention to women's reliance on other women, how women use space, and how they are constrained by spatial factors as they negotiate their daily lives. Keywords: Bolivia, employment, structural adjustment, women