The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

‘Lives of living death’: The reproductive lives of slave women in the cane world of Louisiana

This paper examines the seasonality of childbirth among slave women and addresses the relationship between seasonal workloads, nutrition, and pregnancy on large sugar plantations in nineteenth-century Louisiana. Unlike the rest of the American South, where the slave population grew, bondspeople in southern Louisiana experienced natural population decrease. This derived in part from imbalanced sex ratios, but as this article shows, conceptions peaked during the annual harvest season but fell away at other times due to nutritional stress, overwork, heat, and exhaustion. By combining plantation sources with contemporary scholarship on reproductive physiology, the article places Louisiana's reproductive history in contest and establishes the limits sugar production imposed on the slave women's capacity for childbirth