Fear of a Multilingual America? Language and National Identity in the United States

In the contemporary debate on language and national identity in the US, those who are in favor of a constitutional amendment declaring English the offi cial language of the country believe that speaking the same tongue is crucial for the political and cultural unity of the nation. Those who are against the amendment claim that dictating by law the linguistic Americanization of immigrants is incompatible with American multiculturalism. Both sides ground their ideas in the language ideology and politics of the Founders and interpret in opposing ways the absence of a statement on language in the Constitution. What Americans believed about the importance of a national language for the new nation at the turn of the eighteenth century still infl uences what Americans think now and can explain why, for example, the language divide does not simply run along party lines. Yet the Founders\u2019 attitudes towards language were contradictory, as they combined descriptivism and prescriptivism . This article investigates writings by intellectuals and politicians who were instrumental in the nation-making process of the early American Republic, such as Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster. These writings show the complexity of the ideas coalescing in the mythology of American English which formed after the American Revolution and spread in nineteenth-century United States

On the Virtual Element Method for Topology Optimization on polygonal meshes: a numerical study

It is well known that the solution of topology optimization problems may be affected both by the geometric properties of the computational mesh, which can steer the minimization process towards local (and non-physical) minima, and by the accuracy of the method employed to discretize the underlying differential problem, which may not be able to correctly capture the physics of the problem. In light of the above remarks, in this paper we consider polygonal meshes and employ the virtual element method (VEM) to solve two classes of paradigmatic topology optimization problems, one governed by nearly-incompressible and compressible linear elasticity and the other by Stokes equations. Several numerical results show the virtues of our polygonal VEM based approach with respect to more standard methods

Dynamical density functional theory analysis of the laning instability in sheared soft matter

Using dynamical density functional theory (DDFT) methods we investigate the laning instability of a sheared colloidal suspension. The nonequilibrium ordering at the laning transition is driven by non-affine particle motion arising from interparticle interactions. Starting from a DDFT which incorporates the non-affine motion, we perform a linear stability analysis that enables identification of the regions of parameter space where lanes form. We illustrate our general approach by applying it to a simple one-component fluid of soft penetrable particles

Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity

The intersection of visual culture studies and African American studies, an expanding field of research, has produced brilliant investigations of the scopic regime of race and the representation of blackness in US popular culture. The complicity of photography with white suprematism has been unveiled and its alleged objectivity questioned, but, as the editors of this collected volume write in their introduction, “we know more about Louis Agassiz’s dehumanizing scientific daguerreotypes of ens..

Presidents and the U.S. Constitution: The Executive’s Role in Interpreting the Supreme Law of the Land

In 1832, President Andrew Jackson issued a veto message claiming the same duty as the Supreme Court to interpret the U.S. Constitution. Do modern presidents exercise the principal role in interpreting the U.S. Constitution that President Jackson claimed was their duty, and, if so, in what ways do they choose to articulate their interpretations? The hypothesis is that modern presidents have exercised a principal role in interpreting the U.S. Constitution similar to the interpretative duty expressed by President Jackson, and they perform this duty, in part, through the issuance of veto messages and signing statements. After a content analysis of veto messages and signing statements issued from Presidents Roosevelt to Trump, the hypothesis was supported. Modern presidents have used veto messages and signing statements to articulate their constitutional interpretations of numerous constitutional topics – a practice that has been increasing throughout the modern presidency overall. Modern presidents have exercised a principal role in interpreting the Constitution similar to that expressed by President Jackson

A PRESIDENT’S BEST FRIEND: U.S. PRESIDENTS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH INS V. CHADHA (1983)

The legislative veto – a device by which Congress approves or disapproves executive action on a particular matter – has been one of Congress’s favorite tools for keeping the executive branch, and all of its departments and agencies wielding increased regulatory and policymaking power, in check. Since 1983, when the Supreme Court ruled in INS v. Chadha that the legislative veto was unconstitutional, presidents have been warding off attempts by Congress to include the device in its legislation, relying principally on their signing statements to voice their objections. In doing so, presidents invoke Chadha extensively, with no other Court case comparable in terms of the sheer number of mentions in constitutional signing statements. Neither the presence of divided government nor each president’s relations with Congress are correlated with mentions of Chadha. Rather, this phenomenon is an institutionalized practice characterized by increasing returns and path dependency. As is their inherent desire, successive presidents have been intent on protecting the constitutional powers of the presidency