A Splendid Idea in China Turned Sour in Florida: The Rise and Fall of the Florida Splendid China

Although Florida had been promoted as a tropical paradise to people with health concerns since the granting of statehood in 1845, the Sunshine State did not become a top vacation destination for thrill-seeking Americans until Disney World opened its doors in the early 1970s. Disney\u27s appearance spawned several other major theme parks, including Sea World and Universal Studios, and some smaller attractions such as Wet and Wild. Florida Splendid China joined the ranks of Central Florida\u27s regional theme parks in 1993. A high profile project, it represented one of the first and largest joint investment ventures between the United States and the People\u27s Republic of China. The theme park, optimistically conceived yet poorly researched, wellexecuted but improperly managed, never took off in the competitive market of Central Florida. Political controversies and demonstrations plagued the park during its ten-year history, and it finally fell victim to the region\u27s struggling tourism business following the 2001 terrorist attacks

Learning by Doing in the Segregated South: The Robert Hungerford Normal and Industrial School for African Americans in Central Florida

The development of the Robert Hungerford Normal and Industrial School is an important chapter in the history of African American education in Florida. Through careful examinations of the school publications, records, archival correspondence, and newspaper clippings, the article seeks to document the history of the Hungerford School from its founding in the late nineteenth century until it became a public school in the Orange County, Florida in the early 1950s. Following Booker T. Washington’s ideals, the school was established with a great emphasis on economic self-help and individual advancement for African Americans. Its mission was to teach vocational skills to Black youths in addition to a good work ethic, sound morals, and fundamental human values. By focusing on its curriculum development, student work, personnel, facilities, school operations, financial struggles, and community support, this research also sheds lights on the challenges and endeavors of African Americans and the race relations in the Jim Crow era. For over fifty years in the segregated South, Hungerford had become a cornerstone of the community and served the educational needs of African American youths in Central Florida and beyond. Even today, the school still remains an emblem of Black pride and hope in the historic African American community of Eatonville, Florida

Standing Up Against Racial Discrimination: Progressive Americans and the Chinese Exclusion Act in the Late Nineteenth Century

The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act is a dark chapter in the immigration history of the United States. In contrast to the overwhelming “Yellow Peril” literature of the time, the outcries of mistreated Chinese were few and far between, as they had little recourse against their accusers. This article attempts to identify the rare voices of Chinese Americans and recognizes the bold vision and noble endeavors of some progressive Americans during the Exclusion Era of the late nineteenth century. Throughout the national debates on the Chinese Exclusion Act, a minority of Americans stood up in support of Chinese immigrants, while sturdily condemning injustice against them. They argued that such a discriminatory measure was a direct violation of America’s moral principles of freedom, liberty, and equity for all. Although their calls for justice were engulfed by the anti-Chinese hysteria of the time, they stood on the right side of history, and their brave acts inspired those marginalized people in their continuing march for civil rights advancement in the United States

An effective quasi-one-dimensional description of a spin-1 atomic condensate

Within the mean field theory we extend the effective quasi-1D non-polynomial Schr\"{o}dinger equation (NPSE) approach to the description of a spin-1 atomic condensate in a tight radial confinement geometry for both weak and strong atom-atom interactions. Detailed comparisons with full time dependent 3D numerical simulations show excellent agreement as in the case of a single component scalar condensate, demonstrating our result as an efficient and effective tool for the understanding of spin-1 condensate dynamics observed in several recent experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 3 eps figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. A. Small typoes corrections. Updated Reference

Efficient generation of many-body singlet states of spin-1 bosons in optical superlattices

We propose an efficient stepwise adiabatic merging (SAM) method to generate many-body singlet states in antiferromagnetic spin-1 bosons in concatenated optical superlattices with isolated double-well arrays, by adiabatically ramping up the double-well bias. With an appropriate choice of bias sweeping rate and magnetic field, the SAM protocol predicts a fidelity as high as 90% for a sixteen-body singlet state and even higher fidelities for smaller even-body singlet states. During their evolution, the spin-1 bosons exhibit interesting squeezing dynamics, manifested by an odd-even oscillation of the experimentally observable squeezing parameter. The generated many-body singlet states may find practical applications in precision measurement of magnetic field gradient and in quantum information processing.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.