Sisters’ Retiring Room From the North Family Dwelling, Mount Lebanon, New York, Ca. 1845

The Sisters’ Retiring Room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is historically and architecturally significant, as it comes from the Mount Lebanon Shaker community, which served as the lead village for all of Shakerdom. The ministry, the head elders and eldresses, of Mount Lebanon created buildings, religious rituals, and social practices to serve as models for the other Shaker communities to follow. Furthermore, the room—one of only two that survive from the North Family Dwelling—offers a physical record not only of a nineteenth-century Shaker retiring room but also of the mid-twentieth-century interpretation of Shaker design

The Architecture of Control: Shaker Dwelling Houses and the Reform Movement in Early-Nineteenth-Century America

By comparing the development of Shaker dwelling houses with the Quaker-led reform of prisons and insane asylums during the Second Great Awakening, this article places Shaker architecture into a larger context of reform in early-nineteenth-century America. In it, I demonstrate how and why the Shakers incorporated ideas from the outside world and applied them to their own buildings as a means to shape and control behavior. An examination of specific structures and contemporary discourses on reform architecture reveals similarities between Shaker buildings and those of mainstream society. In all its villages, the sect reproduced architectural forms largely developed by Shaker leaders in New Lebanon, New York, albeit with regional variations. Dwelling houses, in particular, provide a good idea of what the Shakers hoped to accomplish through their architecture. As the focus of Shaker daily life and worship, the dwellings tell as much about how the Shakers used their buildings and the spaces created by them to try to construct a utopian environment in which all members strove for perfection and individuals subordinated themselves to the good of the whole

Art Out of Place: International Art Exhibits at the New York World\u27s Fair of 1964-1965

Set against the backdrop of the cold war, the New York World\u27s Fair of 19641965 emphasized capitalism and commercialization while it downplayed art as an element that should be elevated above other exhibits. This emphasis placed art in settings that seemed populist, even vulgar to some critics, in order to attract as many visitors as possible. Adding to this perception that the fair lacked high culture, officials did not sponsor any exhibits showcasing art despite the fact that most earlier fairs had at least one pavilion dedicated to art. The two most distinctive features of the 1964-1965 fair no separate fine arts pavilion and being the first to feature a number of newly independent nations emerging from colonialism provide an opportunity to examine the place of the arts in this new global commercial context. This article examines art displays found in selected official international pavilions to show that fair organizers sought out great works of art not simply to create a culturally edifying fair, but to use art as spectacle to enhance the commercial aspects of the event. The fair served as a venue where both exhibitors and fair officials used art, high and low, to serve multiple ends, among them economic development, religious proselytizing, and cultural prestige

Using a Pericentromeric Interspersed Repeat to Recapitulate the Phylogeny and Expansion of Human Centromeric Segmental Duplications

Despite considerable advances in sequencing of the human genome over the past few years, the organization and evolution of human pericentromeric regions have been difficult to resolve. This is due, in part, to the presence of large, complex blocks of duplicated genomic sequence at the boundary between centromeric satellite and unique euchromatic DNA. Here, we report the identification and characterization of an approximately 49-kb repeat sequence that exists in more than 40 copies within the human genome. This repeat is specific to highly duplicated pericentromeric regions with multiple copies distributed in an interspersed fashion among a subset of human chromosomes. Using this interspersed repeat (termed PIR4) as a marker of pericentromeric DNA, we recovered and sequence-tagged 3 Mb of pericentromeric DNA from a variety of human chromosomes as well as nonhuman primate genomes. A global evolutionary reconstruction of the dispersal of PIR4 sequence and analysis of flanking sequence supports a model in which pericentromeric duplications initiated before the separation of the great ape species (>12 MYA). Further, analyses of this duplication and associated flanking duplications narrow the major burst of pericentromeric duplication activity to a time just before the divergence of the African great ape and human species (5 to 7 MYA). These recent duplication exchange events substantially restructured the pericentromeric regions of hominoid chromosomes and created an architecture where large blocks of sequence are shared among nonhomologous chromosomes. This report provides the first global view of the series of historical events that have reshaped human pericentromeric regions over recent evolutionary time

Frontotemporal dementia and its subtypes: a genome-wide association study

SummaryBackground Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a complex disorder characterised by a broad range of clinical manifestations, differential pathological signatures, and genetic variability. Mutations in three genes—MAPT, GRN, and C9orf72—have been associated with FTD. We sought to identify novel genetic risk loci associated with the disorder. Methods We did a two-stage genome-wide association study on clinical FTD, analysing samples from 3526 patients with {FTD} and 9402 healthy controls. To reduce genetic heterogeneity, all participants were of European ancestry. In the discovery phase (samples from 2154 patients with {FTD} and 4308 controls), we did separate association analyses for each {FTD} subtype (behavioural variant FTD, semantic dementia, progressive non-fluent aphasia, and {FTD} overlapping with motor neuron disease FTD-MND), followed by a meta-analysis of the entire dataset. We carried forward replication of the novel suggestive loci in an independent sample series (samples from 1372 patients and 5094 controls) and then did joint phase and brain expression and methylation quantitative trait loci analyses for the associated (p<5 × 10−8) single-nucleotide polymorphisms. Findings We identified novel associations exceeding the genome-wide significance threshold (p<5 × 10−8). Combined (joint) analyses of discovery and replication phases showed genome-wide significant association at 6p21.3, \{HLA\} locus (immune system), for rs9268877 (p=1·05 × 10−8; odds ratio=1·204 95% \{CI\} 1·11–1·30), rs9268856 (p=5·51 × 10−9; 0·809 0·76–0·86) and rs1980493 (p value=1·57 × 10−8, 0·775 0·69–0·86) in the entire cohort. We also identified a potential novel locus at 11q14, encompassing RAB38/CTSC (the transcripts of which are related to lysosomal biology), for the behavioural \{FTD\} subtype for which joint analyses showed suggestive association for rs302668 (p=2·44 × 10−7; 0·814 0·71–0·92). Analysis of expression and methylation quantitative trait loci data suggested that these loci might affect expression and methylation in cis. Interpretation Our findings suggest that immune system processes (link to 6p21.3) and possibly lysosomal and autophagy pathways (link to 11q14) are potentially involved in FTD. Our findings need to be replicated to better define the association of the newly identified loci with disease and to shed light on the pathomechanisms contributing to FTD. Funding The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and National Institute on Aging, the Wellcome/MRC Centre on Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's Research UK, and Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center