Academic literature on the topic 'Old west newspapers'

We have no way of knowing when the first migrant from present-day Lebanon arrived in West Africa. Some amongst the Lebanese of Dakar still clung in the 1960s to tales ofa man, known only by his first name — 'Isa — who had landed in Senegal a century earlier (Cruise O'Brien 1975: 98). Others told ofa group of young men — Maronite Christians from the craggy escarpments of Mount Lebanon — who had found their way to West Africa some time between 1876 and 1880 (Winder 1962:30()). The Lebanese journalist 'Abdallah Hushaimah, travelling through the region in the 1930s, met in Nigeria one Elias al-Khuri, who claimed to have arrived in the colony in 1890 (Hushaimah 1931:332). The Dutch scholar Laurens van der Laan, combing in the late 1960s through old newspapers in the reading rooms of Fourah Bay College in Freetown, found the first mention of the Lebanese in the Creole press of Sierra Leone in 1895 (van der Laan 1975: l).

In May 1955, the local Ulm newspapers reported on a curious lawsuit brought before the labor court. Earlier that year, authorities had forced the director of the nearby refugee camp to resign upon learning that he had been an SS officer under the Nazi regime. Now the former Nazi, Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, felt he had been unfairly victimized by the regional government and was suing to be reinstated to his post. Far from solving this perceived injustice, the lawsuit instead signaled the end of Fischer-Schweder's postwar rise from door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman to prominent director of a displaced persons camp. In the coming weeks, he lost his lawsuit and, more seriously, allegations regarding his Nazi past surfaced. Once authorities began to investigate, they uncovered a broader web of entanglement, and three years later the case culminated in Fischer-Schweder's conviction along with nine other defendants in one of the largest Nazi trials put before West German courts, the so-called Ulm Einsatzkommando trial of 1958. Although most scholarship has focused on the legacy of this trial, this article looks at the unusual origins and escalation of the case in order to draw attention to the trial's complex but overlooked relationship with postwar political and social attitudes toward the Nazi past.

West African countries especially Senegal, have a very rich history of written and oral communication based on their culture and traditions. Today, Senegal is inescapable about the adoption and use of new technologies in Africa. Senegal experienced a boom of cell phones users over the past 5 years in 2012 for example, we noticed “88% mobile subscriptions” compared with “46% mobile subscriptions in 2008” {world bank,2013}. That explains mobile phones are no more to make a call or to send a text message but also to interact with people around and entertain. In fact, digital communication is expanding in all Senegalese spheres like the workplace, school, universities... in the latter half of the 20th century before the explosion of social media, people only depended on old media like TV, Radio, Newspapers… to get informed. For this study, we are going to focus on how social media are impacting economically and politically on Senegalese society and how young people are managing the transition between traditional media and new media.

Moringa leaf (moringa oleivera) is a multi-nutrient plant, especially Fe, As. Folat, Ca, phosphorus, but not yet used maximally in West Sulawesi, most of it is only used as a barrier to the yard of the house or garden. The purpose of this study was to determine differences in nutrient content (Protein, Ca, Fe, Posfor and Zn) in moringa leaf flour based on different drying methods. The research sample is Moringa leaves taken in 3 groups namely Moringa leaves based on the age of the leaves (shoots, young leaves, old leaves), each leaf group is divided into three based on the drying method, namely blanching, withering (aerated), and drying by drying. The research method uses true experiment, analysis of nutrient content by laboratory tests, protein content in moringa leaves is analyzed by the kjeldahl method, Fe, Ca, and Zn content is analyzed by atomic absorption spectrophotometer (AAS) method, phosphorus content is determined by UV-VIS spectrophotometer method. The tools used are oven blowers, containers (trays), kitchen tissue, rh meters, analytical scales, baskets, newspapers, gas stoves, basins, and pans. Hypothesis testing uses Two Way Anova to see differences in the nutritional content of Moringa leaves based on different drying methods. The results showed that the content of Protein (28.66), Zn (2.32) and Posfor (715.32), which is highest in drying by blancing method with p-value > 0.05. The content of Fe (11.41), and Ca (1014.81), the highest in moringa leaf flour with a drying method that is only aerated with p-value < 0.05. There is no difference in the content of Protein, Ca and Phosphorus and there are differences in the content of Fe and Zn based on the type of drying method. Prevention and prevention of stunting is recommended to use old moringa leaf flour with the method of drying withering to be used on PMT Toddler and Pregnant Women.

Davis seeks to present a balanced view of terrorism vs. martyrdom, moderatevs. radical, the Muslim world vs. the West, and why 9/11 happened.The author is deputy foreign editor at Knight Ridder newspapers and is aregular contributor to her company’s 32 newspapers.In chapter 1, “A Minister’s Question,” Davis, an African-Americanpracticing Christian, wonders why African-Americans mainly have chosennon-violence, while the self-professed Muslims held responsible for 9/11chose violence. As both groups ground their struggle for justice in theirrespective religions, this gives rise to a paradox: Can God provide “superior”and “inferior” revelations? Muslims are told to “fight injustice” (e.g.,8:39, 22:39), while Christians are called upon to “turn the other cheek”(Matthew 5:39). Matthew 10:34-37, about Jesus “bringing a sword” is alsoinstructive. Moreover, if “Jesus Christ [is] the same yesterday, and today,and forever” (Hebrews 13:8) and Jesus is God, what is one to make of theOld Testament’s record of divinely sanctioned slaughter?She defines martyr according to the religion’s general view(Christianity: “generally a pacifist who suffers and dies but not kill” [p. 8];Islam: “everyone who dies in the midst of battle defending his homelandor fighting evil” [p. 9]), but does not define militant, extremist, terrorist,or moderate – a curious omission, since there are no agreed-upon meaningsfor them.Chapter 2, “The Innocents,” discusses the deaths of Palestinian andIsraeli children, how both sides exploit their martyrs (“anyone who diesin the midst of battle” [p. 27]), and mutual charges of deliberate childendangerment. She interviews parents and surviving siblings, and statesthat this has become a vicious circle of revenge, and relates the variouspsychological impacts as charges of western indifference to Palestiniandeaths, and Israel’s continued defiance of UN resolutions.Chapter 3, “The Child as Soldier-Martyr,” opens with her visit to Iran’sMartyrs Museum. She wonders if Iran might turn this “ultimate” weaponon itself as “stridently” conservative mullahs and the “freedom-hungry andangry” youths move closer to violence. After explaining Shi’ism’s originsand key events, she mentions the martyrdom of a 12-year-old boy who ...

In May 1951, the Hamburger Freie Presse published an article on the alleged experiences of Hans Schmidt, an East German police officer (Volkspolizist) who had sought to register earlier that year for political asylum in West Berlin. The newspaper profile followed the twenty-one-year-old Schmidt from his unit's barracks in the northern city of Rostock, across the still undefended border between Brandenburg and West Berlin, to a police station in the northwestern district of Spandau, where he announced his intention to flee to West Germany.

During the postwar period, the Flemish press-scene changed fundamentally. Alongside further commercialization and concentration, a process of structural depoliticization or depillarization took place: (financial) links betweenparties and trade unions on the one hand and newspapers on the other disappeared. This article examines the impact ofthese structural transformations on the newspapers' content. We emphasize marks of (de)pillarization in Flemish newspapers during cabinet formations. In 1958, the press took undeniably sides in the battle between the pillars: information about the formation of the new cabinet formed the background for these fights. In 1981 most attention went to the cabinet formation itself. The pillarization ofthe content was however on a more latent level not neglectable. Compared to 1958 and 1981 the old alliances between press and ideological institutions were far less visible in the content of 1995's newspapers. Apparently the depillarization ofthe Flemish press-content is an ongoing, longlasting process.

On 28 May 1914, the Viennese press reported that a young man from the sixteenth district in Vienna had attempted suicide. Sitting on a bench at the Pezzlpark, twenty-one-year-old laborer Karl P. shot himself in the head with a revolver. “The motive,” one newspaper reported, “was said to be unrequited love.” By chance, the same park bench would see more action later that day. Pregnant twenty-three-year-old laborer Marie B. was on her way to a birthing clinic when she went into labor. Sitting on what the newspaper now deemed the Selbstmörderbankerl, with the help of two nearby watchmen, she gave birth to a girl. The headline “Death and Life on a Bench” highlighted one extraordinary coincidence in an otherwise ordinary day in the city.

-Selwyn R. Cudjoe, John Thieme, The web of tradition: uses of allusion in V.S. Naipaul's fiction,-A. James Arnold, Josaphat B. Kubayanda, The poet's Africa: Africanness in the poetry of Nicolás Guillèn and Aimé Césaire. Westport CT: Greenwood, 1990. xiv + 176 pp.-Peter Mason, Robin F.A. Fabel, Shipwreck and adventures of Monsieur Pierre Viaud, translated by Robin F.A. Fabel. Pensacola: University of West Florida Press, 1990. viii + 141 pp.-Alma H. Young, Robert B. Potter, Urbanization, planning and development in the Caribbean, London: Mansell Publishing, 1989. vi + 327 pp.-Hymie Rubinstein, Raymond T. Smith, Kinship and class in the West Indies: a genealogical study of Jamaica and Guyana, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. xiv + 205 pp.-Shepard Krech III, Richard Price, Alabi's world, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. xx + 445 pp.-Graham Hodges, Sandra T. Barnes, Africa's Ogun: Old world and new, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. xi + 274 pp.-Pamela Wright, Philippe I. Bourgois, Ethnicity at work: divided labor on a Central American banana plantation, Baltimore MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1989. xviii + 311 pp.-Idsa E. Alegría-Ortega, Andrés Serbin, El Caribe zona de paz? geopolítica, integración, y seguridad, Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1989. 188 pp. (Paper n.p.) [Editor's note. This book is also available in English: Caribbean geopolitics: towards security through peace? Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 1990.-Gary R. Mormino, C. Neale Ronning, José Martí and the émigré colony in Key West: leadership and state formation, New York; Praeger, 1990. 175 pp.-Gary R. Mormino, Gerald E. Poyo, 'With all, and for the good of all': the emergence of popular nationalism in the Cuban communities of the United States, 1848-1898, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1989. xvii + 182 pp.-Fernando Picó, Raul Gomez Treto, The church and socialism in Cuba, translated from the Spanish by Phillip Berryman. Maryknoll NY: Orbis, 1988. xii + 151 pp.-Fernando Picó, John M. Kirk, Between God and the party: religion and politics in revolutionary Cuba. Tampa FL: University of South Florida Press, 1989. xxi + 231 pp.-Andrés Serbin, Carmen Gautier Mayoral ,Puerto Rico en la economía política del Caribe, Río Piedras PR; Ediciones Huracán, 1990. 204 pp., Angel I. Rivera Ortiz, Idsa E. Alegría Ortega (eds)-Andrés Serbin, Carmen Gautier Mayoral ,Puerto Rico en las relaciones internacionales del Caribe, Río Piedras PR: Ediciones Huracán, 1990. 195 pp., Angel I. Rivera Ortiz, Idsa E. Alegría Ortega (eds)-Jay R. Mandle, Jorge Heine, A revolution aborted : the lessons of Grenada, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. x + 351 pp.-Douglas Midgett, Rhoda Reddock, Elma Francois: the NWCSA and the workers' struggle for change in the Caribbean in the 1930's, London: New Beacon Books, 1988. vii + 60 pp.-Douglas Midgett, Susan Craig, Smiles and blood: the ruling class response to the workers' rebellion of 1937 in Trinidad and Tobago, London: New Beacon Books, 1988. vii + 70 pp.-Ken Post, Carlene J. Edie, Democracy by default: dependency and clientelism in Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, and Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991. xiv + 170 pp.-Ken Post, Trevor Munroe, Jamaican politics: a Marxist perspective in transition, Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann Publishers (Caribbean) and Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991. 322 pp.-Wendell Bell, Darrell E. Levi, Michael Manley: the making of a leader, Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990, 349 pp.-Wim Hoogbergen, Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: a history of resistance, collaboration and betrayal, Granby MA Bergin & Garvey, 1988. vi + 296 pp.-Kenneth M. Bilby, Rebekah Michele Mulvaney, Rastafari and reggae: a dictionary and sourcebook, Westport CT: Greenwood, 1990. xvi + 253 pp.-Robert Dirks, Jerome S. Handler ,Searching for a slave cemetery in Barbados, West Indies: a bioarcheological and ethnohistorical investigation, Carbondale IL: Center for archaeological investigations, Southern Illinois University, 1989. xviii + 125 pp., Michael D. Conner, Keith P. Jacobi (eds)-Gert Oostindie, Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in Surinam 1791/1942, Assen, Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1990. xii + 812 pp.-Rosemarijn Hoefte, Alfons Martinus Gerardus Rutten, Apothekers en chirurgijns: gezondheidszorg op de Benedenwindse eilanden van de Nederlandse Antillen in de negentiende eeuw, Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1989. xx + 330 pp.-Rene A. Römer, Luc Alofs ,Ken ta Arubiano? sociale integratie en natievorming op Aruba, Leiden: Department of Caribbean studies, Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology, 1990. xi + 232 pp., Leontine Merkies (eds)-Michiel van Kempen, Benny Ooft et al., De nacht op de Courage - Caraïbische vertellingen, Vreeland, the Netherlands: Basispers, 1990.-M. Stevens, F.E.R. Derveld ,Winti-religie: een Afro-Surinaamse godsdienst in Nederland, Amersfoort, the Netherlands: Academische Uitgeverij Amersfoort, 1988. 188 pp., H. Noordegraaf (eds)-Dirk H. van der Elst, H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen ,The great Father and the danger: religious cults, material forces, and collective fantasies in the world of the Surinamese Maroons, Dordrecht, the Netherlands and Providence RI: Foris Publications, 1988. xiv + 451 pp. [Second printing, Leiden: KITLV Press, 1991], W. van Wetering (eds)-Johannes M. Postma, Gert Oostindie, Roosenburg en Mon Bijou: twee Surinaamse plantages, 1720-1870, Dordrecht, Netherlands: Foris Publications, 1989. x + 548 pp.-Elizabeth Ann Schneider, John W. Nunley ,Caribbean festival arts: each and every bit of difference, Seattle/St. Louis: University of Washington Press / Saint Louis Art Museum, 1989. 217 pp., Judith Bettelheim (eds)-Bridget Brereton, Howard S. Pactor, Colonial British Caribbean newspapers: a bibliography and directory, Westport CT: Greenwood, 1990. xiii + 144 pp.-Marian Goslinga, Annotated bibliography of Puerto Rican bibliographies, compiled by Fay Fowlie-Flores. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. xxvi + 167 pp.

This article analyses the characteristics of a considerable part of the foreign and travel journalism on West Papua that was published in Swedish press during the period 1959-2009. The analysed material comprises press items, articles, and reports on West Papua published in 27 different Swedish newspapers and periodicals. The comprehensive frame identified in the material is West Papua viewed as a primitive country. Four frames, characteristic of this general frame, are found in the foreign and travel journalism: 1) the primitive Others as dangerous and destructive; 2) the primitive Others as victims; 3) the primitive Others as admirable; and 4) the primitive Others as timeless and unchangeable. In the foreign and news material, a clear élite and big power perspective is apparent, which has been fundamental for when the conflict in West Papua is brought up on the journalistic agenda, and when it is not. A power fortifying integration between the frame of West Papua as a primitive country, and the élite and big power perspective exist in the material that during the entire time period covered by this investigation, has resulted in the Papuans being made invisible, and/or maintaining the Papuans and the conflict in West Papua as something odd, not holding a high value.

Around six o’clock on the evening of September 22, 1943, John F. Noxon Jr., a prominent attorney in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and a “crippled” polio survivor, telephoned his family’s pediatrician to come at once. His six-month-old son, Lawrence, who had Down syndrome, had apparently entangled himself in wires and had received a terrible electrical shock. When the doctor arrived, he found the dead “mongoloid” baby dressed in a wet diaper, lying on a silver platter. A few days later authorities arrested “crippled” Noxon for the murder of “mongoloid” Lawrence. For the next five years, the citizens of Massachusetts and the nation followed in their newspapers the trials, verdict, death sentence, appeals, pardon, and parole of this “mercy killing.” The Noxon murder trials of 1944 highlighted the interconnections of disabilities, masculinity, and “mercy killing” in World War II North America.

Chapter One discusses the rural roots of the men most responsible for Zev's racing career: oil tycoon Harry F. Sinclair, the owner; cantankerous trainer Sam Hildreth; and jockey Earl Sande, a budding national celebrity. Profiles in American newspapers during the buildup to the Race of the Century described the three men's rise from humble, rural roots in the American heartland using language that evoked romantic visions of the mythical American frontier and Old West. These stories of the achievement of the American Dream affirmed the notion of the United States as a place where anyone could succeed through hard work and fair play, even as the environment that had produced their ascent had, by the 1920s, become a distant memory for many, amid an increasingly bureaucratized, industrial postwar modernity in which the United States was a global superpower, trending toward oligarchy, and the world's greatest consumer of mass spectacle.

For decades, Carl Leopold had watched rafts of pine logs swaddled together like organ pipes, from a block to a half-mile in length, float down the Mississippi from the northern forests of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. By the turn of the century, these rafts had dwindled in frequency and length. Most of the two-to five-hundred-year-old white pine forests that had surrounded the Great Lakes and the eastern seaboard had been sliced to stubble, and logging companies were abandoning these leavings for the untouched forests of the West. Carl couldn’t help but notice. His business was built on wood, and if wood supplies ran out, so would his source of income. Greed and waste were the razors of the lumber trade, and Carl knew well that the forests of the West would fall to their blades if the public did not protest. Just as he monitored the number of ducks and geese he hunted, Carl believed in guarding the number of trees cut. So, despite his longing for Aldo to follow him in the family business, he unintentionally primed his eldest for a very different profession. Carl scanned newspapers and outdoors magazines seeking forest news, expounding on his findings to his eldest. Edwin Hunger tagged along on some of Carl’s outings with his sons and described them as “lectures on the move” in which the boys learned “much about the woods in general and how they should be managed and preserved.” While Aldo was in elementary school, Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland set aside millions of acres out West in forest reserves. Members of the lumber, mining, and ranching industries responded with outrage; they wanted no limits on their use of public lands. But increasingly, concerned citizens were pushing for national laws to protect the remaining forests. One prophet in the fray was John Muir. He preached a gospel of preservation: Stop the wasteful destruction and let the forests manage themselves. Cut only populous common trees, and then only sparingly and carefully, “for every right use.”

The widow stopped at a jeweller’s window in the famous street called the Zeil. The only person in the shop was a simple-looking old man, sitting behind the counter, reading a newspaper. She went in. ‘I have something to show you, sir,’ she said, in...

On the morning of Monday, October 12, 1931, early risers in northern Portland noticed a strange creature with smooth black skin in Columbia Slough, right next to the Jantzen Beach Amusement Park. Locals debated its identity. Some argued it was a sturgeon, others a sei whale all the way from Japan. Finally, an old salt tagged it as a small “blackfish.” News of the novelty spread like wildfire, drawing thousands of spectators and causing gridlock on the interstate bridge between Portland and Vancouver, Washington. A local newspaper warned that killer whales were one of the ocean’s “most vicious” creatures, but this one promptly stole Portland’s heart. “From the looks of things,” declared Deputy Sheriff Martin T. Pratt, “nearly everyone in the city is determined to see the visitor,” and when some locals began shooting at the animal, Pratt and his men arrested them. The number of sightseers grew each day, and that weekend, tens of thousands crowded into Jantzen Beach to catch a glimpse of the whale, while enterprising fishermen charged twenty-five cents for whale-watching rides. By that time, someone had dubbed the orca Ethelbert, and the name stuck. Why the little whale had arrived there, a hundred miles up the Columbia, remains a mystery. It had probably become separated from its mother and lost its bearings, wandering up the great river that divides western Oregon from Washington State. But Columbia Slough was no place for an orca. In addition to lacking salt water, it was the main outlet for Portland’s sewage. In summer, the waterway grew so foul that workers refused to handle timber passing through it. As the days passed, observers grew worried. The whale seemed sluggish, and its skin began to show unsightly blotches. The owner of Jantzen Beach proposed capturing the animal with a net and placing it in a saltwater tank. It would have been an extraordinary attraction for his amusement park—already known as the Coney Island of the West. But members of the Oregon Humane Society denounced the scheme as rank cruelty. Instead, they proposed blowing the young orca up with dynamite.

This chapter turns to the “grand old man” of West German journalism—Paul Sethe (1901–1967)—who was one of the best-known journalists during the founding years of the Federal Republic. Sethe also poses a considerable challenge to the historian who tries to evaluate his professional record because of his work as an editor of the Ohligser Anzeiger und Tageblatt (OA) until December 1933 and of Frankfurter Zeitung (FZ) between 1934 and 1943. After all, whereas in the OA he expressed views that were critical of Hitler before 1933, the FZ's journalism occupied a rather more ambiguous position in the Third Reich. There is also the question of whether deep down in his heart he was more of a scholar of serious history than a journalist writing in the daily hustle and bustle of the newspaper business. As this chapter shows, he wrote several big books on historical themes after 1945 and, judging from his output, putting pen to paper certainly seems to have come to him with ease.

Some places are just a place. Some places are a journey. Three days out of Vladivostok, the westbound Number One train lumbers across the Siberian outback like a team of driven oxen. The train’s nineteen hulking, crimson and blue cars creak and groan as they throw themselves forward at speeds not much different than when this track was hacked through half a continent of nearly impenetrable forest and bog in the days of the last tsars a hundred years ago. Three days aboard this beast-machine has gotten us deep into Russia, beyond a hundred ragged towns with names like Obluche, Zilovo, Spassk-Dalny, and Shimanovskaia, nearly every one of which, it seems, was established as a gateway to the mines and prisons of the tsars’ exile system or of the Soviet Gulag, and which generations later still seem more outposts than towns. Clusters of log homes and cabbage patches line the tracks, ashen concrete apartment blocks rise beyond, and doleful bands of kerchiefed women at each station peddle pirozhki and salted fish, unshelled pine nuts in newspaper cones, and hard-boiled eggs cradled in baby carriages. All are thinly tethered to Mother Russia by the lace curtains and flowers in every window, the stubbornly proud train stations, and these two thin steel rails. We’re three days deep into Siberia and, it seems, no place at all. Brown fields spread from the outskirts of the settlements, blotted at random intervals by abandoned and half-collapsed factories, and through the emptiness between passes an almost unchanging plain coursed by wandering rivers and deep thickets of dark pine and fir, wispy white birches, and larches glowing a brazen yellow. Dawn this morning revealed the regional capital of Ulan-Ude, the latest in a string of sullen cities of cinder blocks and smokestacks. This afternoon will bring us to the tarnished old imperial city of Irkutsk, first settled in the seventeenth century and later the destination of some of the luckier of the tsars’ exiles. We’re 3,700 kilometers west of the Pacific, 5,500 kilometers east of Moscow, 250 kilometers north of Mongolia, and south of nowhere.

The Coincidence Of Litigation aimed at eliminating the constitu­tional justification of state-sponsored racial segregation and the nation’s need to strengthen its argument that democratic government was superior to its communist alternative was more than just a happy coincidence. It was, as indicated in the previous chapter, a helpful and necessary prerequisite to racial reform. Early in my teaching career, I devised a sardonic formula for what I had come to understand as the basic social physics of racial progress and retrenchment. The formula went something like this:… Justice for blacks vs. racism = racism Racism vs. obvious perceptions of white self-interest = justice for blacks… Students both black and white got the point, and the Brown decision provided a definitive example of it. Again and again, perceived self-interest by whites rather than the racial injustices suffered by blacks has been the major motivation in racial-remediation policies. We may regret but can hardly deny the pattern. This was certainly the case in the school de­segregation cases. While blacks had been petitioning the courts for decades to find segregation unconstitutional, by 1954 a fortuitous symmetry existed between what blacks sought and what the nation needed. I do not intend by this conclusion to belittle the NAACP lawyers’ long years of hard work and their carefully planned strategies that brought the cases consolidated in Brown v. Board of Education to the Supreme Court. Indeed, the long crusade for racial justice has been marked by campaigns undertaken against great odds with the faith, as the old hymn puts it, that “the Lord will make a way somehow.” I agree with the legal writers who maintain that post–World War II civil rights progress would have come without Brown. None of us can deny that the Court had the NAACP school litigation as a legal canvas on which to paint its views. The motivation for what became the Brown portrait, as well as other post–World War II government policies supporting civil rights, were Cold War concerns. My views on this are impres­sively substantiated by the historian Mary Dudziak’s book, Cold War Civil Rights, based on her untiring searches through literally thou­sands of official government documents as well as international newspapers and news releases.

Twenty years ago, if someone had suggested that nutrition news would regularly make the “A” section of major newspapers—and often the front page—I probably would have laughed. Sure, through the years, the occasional nutrition or weight-related story has made it to the front page. In 1998, a committee convened by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute changed the definition of “overweight.” Twenty-nine million Americans went to sleep thinking they were fine and woke up to learn that the government now said they needed to shed 6 to 12 pounds to be at a healthy weight. That story, which I covered for the Washington Post, made it not to just to the front page but above the fold. The straight news story began this way: . . . The federal government plans to change its definition of what is a healthy weight, a controversial move that would classify millions more Americans as being overweight. . . . . . . Under the new guidelines, an estimated 29 million Americans now considered normal weight will be redefined as overweight and advised to do everything they can to prevent further weight gain. Those who are already experiencing health effects, such as high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol or diabetes, will be encouraged to lose small amounts of weight—about six to 12 pounds—to bring them back to safer weight levels. . . . But in a follow-up piece that I did for the Health section, I had a little more fun with the off-the-news lead and wrote this: . . . What do Olympic gold medal skier Picabo Street and Baltimore Orioles third baseman Cal Ripken Jr. have in common? . . . . . . According to new federal guidelines, they are both overweight. . . . . . . So what should they and the millions of other adults suddenly classified as overweight do about their extra pounds? Athletes like Street and Ripken may be special cases, but what about the rest of us? . . . In this follow-up story, I was able to offer a more in-depth explanation of the body mass index—a screening measure for determining a healthy weight that has replaced the old Metropolitan Life Insurance height and weight charts, which used body frame size, height, and gender to offer healthy body weight.

On the Last day there would be a potluck and a drawing for some free appliances and $100 in cash. It was clear, though, that those still around in September 2004 could hardly wait for this drawn-out shuttering finally to be over. Crews were taking down the lighting, removing tables and cabinets, and gathering screws and air gun bits to toss in the garbage. “I don’t know if they are going to start with fresh tools down there in Reynosa or what the deal is,” Tracy Warner said. The crews also asked workers to remove photographs and newspaper clippings from their workstations. “They are dismantling it all around us, like they can’t wait for us to get out of there.” The lawn outside, usually covered in pop cans, plastic wrappers, and cigarette butts, was cleaned up and sprayed green by Chem Lawn. Management was trying to sell the old place. Warner’s imminent layoff was part of a sea-change in Illinois in the first years of the new millennium. The pace of the hollowing out of manufacturing in the fourth-largest manufacturing state in the country had been unprecedented. From June 2000 to November 2003, Illinois lost more than 100 manufacturing jobs a day, or one out of every six. Gone were over 150,000 jobs in a state of 12,500,000. In Rockford, the machine-tool industry wilted, and unemployment spiked at over 11 percent. In Harvard, located near the Wisconsin border, Motorola closed its cellphone plant. Developers wanted to turn the site into the world’s largest indoor water park. In Peoria, Decatur, and Kankakee, laid-off workers applied for jobs at Walmarts and Home Depots that would pay them maybe half their former wage. In suburban Chicago, Winzeler Gear went from making 2 million gears a month with fifty-five workers to making 16 million a month with thirty-five employees. A robot the size of a minivan increased the factory’s output while also eliminating human labor. Even with the productivity boost, the owner doubted the company would be able to stay competitive.