'This may be the most dangerous thing Donald Trump believes’: eugenic populism and the American body politic

The 2016 election of a self-declared eugenicist to the most powerful political role in the world signified a widespread and worrying forgetting of America’s eugenic past. This essay shows how America’s current president employs similar rhetorical and fictive devices to those employed by eugenicists and politicians in the 1920s and 1930s, strategies that he now uses to fuel his supremacist fantasies. By linking up Trump’s lifelong belief in his genetic superiority (and thereby the apparent “truth” of eugenics more broadly) with earlier eugenic beliefs of the 1920s and 1930s, this paper explores how, despite being scientifically discredited, eugenics steadfastly remained a popular ideological staple of American meritocratic and supremacist belief

Clinical outcomes resulting from telemedicine interventions: a systematic review

BACKGROUND: The use of telemedicine is growing, but its efficacy for achieving comparable or improved clinical outcomes has not been established in many medical specialties. The objective of this systematic review was to evaluate the efficacy of telemedicine interventions for health outcomes in two classes of application: home-based and office/hospital-based. METHODS: Data sources for the study included deports of studies from the MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and HealthSTAR databases; searching of bibliographies of review and other articles; and consultation of printed resources as well as investigators in the field. We included studies that were relevant to at least one of the two classes of telemedicine and addressed the assessment of efficacy for clinical outcomes with data of reported results. We excluded studies where the service did not historically require face-to-face encounters (e.g., radiology or pathology diagnosis). All included articles were abstracted and graded for quality and direction of the evidence. RESULTS: A total of 25 articles met inclusion criteria and were assessed. The strongest evidence for the efficacy of telemedicine in clinical outcomes comes from home-based telemedicine in the areas of chronic disease management, hypertension, and AIDS. The value of home glucose monitoring in diabetes mellitus is conflicting. There is also reasonable evidence that telemedicine is comparable to face-to-face care in emergency medicine and is beneficial in surgical and neonatal intensive care units as well as patient transfer in neurosurgery. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the widespread use of telemedicine in virtually all major areas of health care, evidence concerning the benefits of its use exists in only a small number of them. Further randomized controlled trials must be done to determine where its use is most effective

ISSN exercise & sport nutrition review: research & recommendations

Sports nutrition is a constantly evolving field with hundreds of research papers published annually. For this reason, keeping up to date with the literature is often difficult. This paper is a five year update of the sports nutrition review article published as the lead paper to launch the JISSN in 2004 and presents a well-referenced overview of the current state of the science related to how to optimize training and athletic performance through nutrition. More specifically, this paper provides an overview of: 1.) The definitional category of ergogenic aids and dietary supplements; 2.) How dietary supplements are legally regulated; 3.) How to evaluate the scientific merit of nutritional supplements; 4.) General nutritional strategies to optimize performance and enhance recovery; and, 5.) An overview of our current understanding of the ergogenic value of nutrition and dietary supplementation in regards to weight gain, weight loss, and performance enhancement. Our hope is that ISSN members and individuals interested in sports nutrition find this review useful in their daily practice and consultation with their clients

“Wall Street lays an egg": financial drama and the 1933 banking collapse in Archibald MacLeish’s Panic: a drama of industrial crisis (1935)

Asserting that the Wall Street Crash was a drama staged in the public arena of the early 1930s, this essay examines the context and performance history of the poet Archibald MacLeish’s verse-drama about the suicide of a banker, Panic: A Drama of Industrial Crisis (1935). The play is one of very few representations on stage of the banking crash of 1933 and marks a turning point in the politics of both the writer and his audience. Looking through the prism of contemporary reviews, letters and memoirs from the era, this essay pieces together historical fragments about this play and its performances to explain how a liberal pro-capitalist writer, such as MacLeish, came together with the Marxist critics of New Masses magazine, to create a historic final-night performance of his now-forgotten play

The march of spare time: the problem and promise of leisure in the Great Depression

In The March of Spare Time, Susan Currell explores how and why leisure became an object of such intense interest, concern, and surveillance during the Great Depression. As Americans experienced record high levels of unemployment, leisure was thought by reformers, policy makers, social scientists, medical doctors, labor unions, and even artists to be both a cause of and a solution to society's most entrenched ills. Of all the problems that faced America in the 1930s, only leisure seemed to offer a panacea for the rest. The problem centered on divided opinions over what constituted proper versus improper use of leisure time. On the one hand, sociologists and reformers excoriated as improper such leisure activities as gambling, loafing, and drinking. On the other, the Works Progress Administration and the newly professionalized recreation experts promoted proper leisure activities such as reading, sports, and arts and crafts. Such attention gave rise to new ideas about how Americans should spend their free time to better themselves and their nation. These ideas were propagated in social science publications and proliferated into the wider cultural sphere. Films, fiction, and radio also engaged with new ideas about leisure more extensively than has previously been recognized. In examining this wide spectrum of opinion, Currell offers the first full-scale account of the fears and hopes surrounding leisure in the 1930s, one that will be an important addition to the cultural history of the period

[Review] Nathaniel Deutsch (2009) Inventing America's 'worst' family: eugenics, Islam, and the fall and rise of the tribe of Ishmael

Review of: Deutsch, N., 'Inventing America's "Worst" Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael'. Berkeley: University of California Press

[Review] Morris Dickstein (2009) Dancing in the dark: a cultural history of the Great Depression

Review of: Dickstein, M., 2009. 'Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression'. New York: W.W. Norton

Setting up and teaching a new module integrating print, film and web-based teaching materials

Case study

American culture in the 1920s

No description supplie

Modernisms

This chapter examines work published on modernism in 2007 and 2008 and looks at the social, institutional, historical and gendered formations of modernism in books which offer historiographical reconsiderations of the field through new definitions, arguments about origins or new matrices. It discusses books which address the appearance of the networks and maps of modernism as they emerge in geo-spatial, socio-historical and psychological arenas. The chapter is divided into two sections: 1. Modernism, War and Gender, which looks at ideas around origins, the Great War and gender in modernism; 2. Mind and Body: Mapping Modernism, examines books that map the way in which the matrices of modernity emerge in concepts concerning the body and racial identity, as well as within modernisms¿ psychological aesthetics