[Review of] George Anthony Peffer. If They Don\u27t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion

If They Don\u27t Bnng [Bring] Their Women Here by George Peffer is another significant addition to the skimpy repertory of books on the history of Chinese American women, which includes Judy Yung\u27s Chinese Women of America (1986) and Unbounded Feet (1995), Benson Tong\u27s Unsubmissive Women (1994), and Huping Ling\u27s Surviving on the Gold Mountain (1999). Unlike the other volumes, Peffer\u27s book focuses on the debarment of Chinese women from immigration to the United States before the 1882 general exclusion of Chinese laborers. He argues that the cultural constraints imposed by the traditional Chinese joint family structure and the male sojourner mentality did not suffice to induce the protracted shortage of Chinese female immigrants and that the Page Law of 1875 and its enforcement played a more pivotal role in restricting the immigration of Chinese women. Using data from U.S. government documents, court records, and newspapers, he documents with some measure of success that although the Page Law literally forbade only the entry of prostitutes (including Chinese ones), the broader applicationof this law resulted in a de facto exclusion of Chinese female immigrants during the seven years prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Peffer also demonstrates how California\u27s anti-Chinese press shaped and intensified the expanded application of the Page Law, how the anti-Chinese sentiment led to the possible overcounting of Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco in the 1870 and 1880 censuses, and how the de facto Chinese female exclusion engendered the lopsided development of the Chinese community. By piecing the scattered information together, this book enhances our understanding of the causes of the Chinese bachelor\u27s society\u27 as well as the experiences of Chinese female immigrants before the Chinese exclusion

[Review of] Evelyn Nakano Glenn. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor

Evelyn Glenn is among the pioneers who laid the groundwork for an intersective approach of race, class, and gender to the analysis of social inequality. This new book carries on and extends her well-established intellectual project along this line of inquiry in both depth and breadth. In Unequal Freedom, Glenn offers an exemplary historical and comparative analysis of how race and gender as fundamental organizing principles of social institutions shaped American citizenship and labor system from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. She begins with a brief introduction to the book project in the introductory chapter. In the next three chapters, she lays out a conceptual framework for her analysis, devoting one chapter to each of the three twisted threads: race and gender, citizenship, and labor. Glenn also provides historical backdrops at the national level for her analyses of citizenship and labor. The following three chapters shift to regional-level analysis with three case studies: Blacks and whites in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Japanese and haoles in Hawaii. The final chapter epitomizes the common themes across chapters and compares the three regional cases in citizenship and labor systems

Detection of Striped Superconductors Using Magnetic Field Modulated Josephson Effect

In a very interesting recent Letter\cite{berg}, the authors suggested that a novel form of superconducting state is realized in La$_{2-x}$Ba$_x$CuO$_4$ with $x$ close to 1/8. This suggestion was based on experiments\cite{li} on this compound which found predominantly two-dimensional (2D) characters of the superconducting state, with extremely weak interplane coupling. Later this specific form of superconducting state was termed striped superconductors\cite{berg08}. The purpose of this note is to point out that the suggested form\cite{berg} of the superconducting order parameter can be detected directly using magnetic field modulated Josephson effect.Comment: Expanded version as appeared in prin

Trends in Black-White Church Integration

Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that eleven o\u27clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King\u27s statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King\u27s classic Letter from a Birmingham Jail was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002])

Social Distances of Whites to Racial or Ethnic Minorities

Prior research on social distance between racial or ethnic groups in the United States has focused mainly on attitudes of white Americans toward African Americans. Extending previous research, this study analyzes social distances of whites to racial or ethnic minority groups by investigating how whites feel about blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. The main hypothesis is that whites feel coolest toward blacks, warmest toward Asians, and somewhat in between toward Hispanics. The 2002 General Social Survey and ordinary least squares regression are used to test the hypothesis. The results indicate that contrary to our hypothesis, whites feel coolest toward Asians, warmest toward Hispanics, and somewhat in between toward blacks. Nativity, religious similarity/ dissimilarity, racial hierarchy and tension, proximity of the country of origin, and group diversity may offer plausible explanations for the unexpected result. This study also examines which types of whites are more likely to maintain a greater or smaller social distance with the three minority groups. Implications of the findings for race and ethnic relations today are addressed

Construction of mammary gland specific expression plasmid pIN and its expression in vitro and in vivo

The aim of this study was to construct a mammary gland specific expression plasmid pIN and validate its function in expressing goat insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). The backbone plasmid pBC1 contained goat β-casein 5′ arm and β-casein 3′ arm, to target mammary gland-specific gene expression. First, the igf-1 gene was cloned from liver tissue harvested from a Saanen dairy goat and inserted downstream of the β-casein 5' arm. Then the neo gene was amplified from plasmid pCDNA3.1 and placed downstream of the β-casein 3' arm as a positive selection marker. In order to analyze the bioactivity of plasmid pIN, it was transfected into the Bcap-37 cell line and injected into goat mammary gland. Western-blotting and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) results confirmed the expression of IGF-1 protein and mRNA in transfected Bcap-37 cells. Further studies (RIA) demonstrated that the expression of IGF-1 protein in transfected group was much higher than that in control group (p < 0.05). In vivo results showed that the expression of IGF-1 in injected group was significantly higher than that in control group. All our results provide evidence that pIN is a mammary gland specific expression plasmids that can target expression of IGF-1 to mammary tissue, with the goal of increasing milk production.Key words: IGF-1, pIN, Bcap-37 cell line, goat mammary, milk production