Businessmen dominate this story because their loss of money and manhood drove legislative, commercial, and cultural solutions that redefined failure: from the lost capital of a bankruptcy to the lost chances of a wasted life. This shift from ordeal to identity expanded the constituency of failure. Women, workers, and African Americans were put on notice: ruin was no longer just for white businessmen. As the twentieth century dawned, popular magazines were enlivened by "Frank Confessions from Men and Women who Missed Success." The Cosmopolitan named "The Fear of Failure" as the bane of "many a young man and woman." Correspondence schools taunted laborers to escape "the treadmill positions of life." Upon founding the National Negro Business League, Booker T. Washington urged that "more attention . . . be directed to [Negroes] who have succeeded, and less to those who have failed." By 1900, anybody could end up "a 'Nobody,'" plodding down the "many paths leading to the Land of 'Nowhere.'" Failure had become what it remains in the new millennium: the most damning incarnation of the connection between achievement and personal identity. "I feel like a failure." The expression comes so naturally that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul.
Nearly 2 million acres of forest and farmland in North Carolina will disappear over the next 20 years if development continues at the current rate, says a new report by Environment North Carolina, a conservation advocacy group.In the Triangle alone, since 1987 the amount of developed land has more than doubled, with no end in sight. There's a proposal in the General Assembly for a bond referendum to allocate $1 million over the next five years to purchase and protect open space, particularly around watersheds. Read more about it at Land for Tomorrow, an organization the Town of Chapel Hill is happy to support."North Carolina's signature woodlands, farmlands and open spaces are disappearing at an alarming rate," said Elizabeth Outz, state director of Environment North Carolina.
The institution believes this is the first such resolution passed by a university governing board. In 2004, the University of Alabama’s faculty apologized for its historical role during slavery, and last year Brown University released a report summarizing several years of research into its ties to the slave trade. In recent months, other state legislatures have passed or begun debate on resolutions similar to Virginia’s, leading to what Alfred L. Brophy, a professor of law at the University of Alabama who led the apology effort in the faculty senate there, called a “domino effect.
In 1958, Katharine White published an essay in The New Yorker about gardening catalogs. Among other things, she wrote that she believed the writers of each were as distinctive “as any Faulkner or Hemingway.” In 1959 she reviewed the catalogs again, and now, having warmed to the topic, she confessed, “Reading this literature is unlike any other reading experience. Too much goes on at once. I read for news, for driblets of knowledge, for aesthetic pleasure, and at the same time I am planning the future, and so I read in dream.” . . .
At night, men, mostly immigrants, lined up outside to wait their turn with young Latino women held as sex slaves. A typical session lasted 15 minutes, police say, and cost each customer about $30. Some women had sex with dozens of men a night.
Police shut down the brothel in July 2004. But authorities say many more dot the city.
In neighborhoods along North Tryon Street, The Plaza and South Boulevard, criminals have turned small, unassuming homes into illegal houses of prostitution, holding women against their will. Police shut down two last week, but declined to give details because of ongoing investigations.
Hundreds of Latina women are brought in and out of Charlotte every week to work at more than a dozen brothels connected to sex-trafficking rings on the East Coast, according to FBI and Charlotte-Mecklenburg police investigators.
Most of the women are in the country illegally and are reluctant to report the crimes. Often locked in rooms with few clothes and no telephone, they fear being beaten if they try to escape.
"No one thinks of Charlotte and human trafficking," said Capt. Bruce Bellamy, head of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police vice and narcotics unit. "But it's a far greater issue than people realize."
The federal government estimates 14,500 to 17,500 victims are brought into the United States for forced labor each year, many of whom are sexually exploited women and children. They come, or are brought here, from Asia, Central America, South America, Russia and Eastern Europe.Men are victimized in North Carolina too.
It is often a fine line that distinguishes sex trafficking from prostitution. Trafficking victims are coerced into their roles, literally sold like pieces of equipment. (Average price, according to the U.S. State Department: $2,500.) Most victims have no idea they are entering the sex trade.
Many are lured out of poverty by wily operators who promise them lucrative jobs in factories, department stores and hotels.
When the women arrive, their passports or travel documents are taken, and they are soon forced into having sex for pay, sometimes with as many as 50 men a night.
At another brothel busted in Raleigh last fall, women and young teenagers were allegedly held under lock and key.
Many can't speak English. They are often afraid of the police. Sometimes they don't even know where they are.
For some of you, the tragedy strikes especially close. Many of you know students in Blacksburg. Some of you earned degrees there. And although we do not yet know the names of all of the victims, we do know that one of them, Christopher James "Jamie" Bishop, Virginia Tech instructor of German, worked here at Carolina from 2000 to 2005. His wife, Stefanie Hofer, obtained her Ph.D. in Germanic languages from Carolina and also is on the faculty at Virginia Tech. Our hearts go out to her and to all of you who worked with Jamie while he was here.
Elizabeth Spencer has been named the winner of the 20th annual PEN/Malamud Award. The accolade recognizes a body of work that demonstrates excellence in short fiction. Ms. Spencer, who teaches writing at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, is the author of seven collections of short fiction, nine novels, a memoir and a play. Reviewing Ms. Spencer’s 2001 collection “The Southern Woman,” Molly Haskell wrote: “Her light touch, cool ironies and subtle class distinctions have enough in common with Henry James or British writers like Elizabeth Bowen and Muriel Spark to unsettle readers expecting the danker moss-laden landscape of deep-Southern fiction. Eudora Welty once compared her to Katherine Mansfield, and the great Canadian short story writer Alice Munro is perhaps a sister under the skin.” The PEN/Malamud Award includes a reading in the PEN/Faulkner reading series at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington and $5,000.
The Committee[CFA] requests the [United States] Government to promote the establishment of a collective bargaining framework in the public sector in North Carolina – with the participation of representatives of the state and local administration and public employees’ trade unions, and the technical assistance of the [ILO] Office if so desired – and to take steps aimed at bringing the state legislation, in particular through the repeal of NCGS §95-98, into conformity with the freedom of association principles, thus ensuring the effective recognition of the right of collective bargaining throughout the country’s territory. The Committee requests to be kept informed of developments in this respect.
Some may contend these statements are empty gestures with no tangible actions or policies behind them. But there's still something to be said for a collective statement of conscience -- an official acknowledgment that this state, as an enduring institution, protected, preserved and profited from a practice that was morally indefensible.
The Senate resolution, introduced by Majority Leader Tony Rand, a Fayetteville Democrat, issues an "apology for the practice of slavery in North Carolina and expresses its profound contrition for the official acts that sanctioned and perpetuated the denial of basic human rights and dignity to fellow humans."
The House resolution uses similar language, formally apologizing "for the injustice, cruelty and brutality of slavery."
However, the House version goes one step further and mentions "the many hardships suffered, past and present, on account of slavery."
North Carolina was not a home to as many plantations as other slaveholding states, but as Rand's bill notes, fully one-third of the state's population, or 330,000 of its residents, were slaves at the time of the Civil War.
Significantly, both the House and Senate resolutions rightly reach beyond the abolition of slavery and cite the harsh and repressive segregationist practices in the decades that followed.
Both bills also specifically mention state laws that barred black people from learning to read or write and that denied black residents the right to vote.
In April 2002, CCR [the Center for Constitutional Rights] filed a civil rights lawsuit against Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, former INS Commissioner James Ziglar, and officials of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York, on behalf of a class of male Muslim non-citizens from Arab and South Asian countries who were swept up by the INS and FBI in the dragnet that followed the September 11th attacks. The suit, Turkmen v. Ashcroft, charges that on the pretext of minor immigration violations, the INS held them in detention for the weeks and months that the FBI took to clear them of terrorism. Instead of being presumed innocent until proven guilty, hundreds of post-9/11 detainees were presumed guilty of terrorism until proven innocent to the satisfaction of law enforcement authorities.
[. . .]
The Turkmen complaint has been amended as more and more details about the "special interest" detentions have emerged. The Third Amended Complaint, filed on June 18, 2003, incorporates disturbing revelations in two reports of the U.S. Justice Department Office of the Inspector General (OIG) reports entitled, The first OIG report describes the government's secret round up of more than 700 Muslim and Arab non-citizens after September 11 on the pretext of immigration violations, its application of a blanket policy of denying them release on bond, even when the government lacked evidence that they posed a danger or a flight risk, and of blanket policy of continuing to hold them for criminal investigatory purposes even after they could have been deported. The second OIG Report documents in graphic detail the physical and verbal abuse that INS detainees held at the MDC suffered at the hands of MDC officials and the inhumane conditions in which they were confined.
Their interest in the Turkmen appeal is in avoiding the repetition of a tragic episode in American history that is also, for them, painful family history. That history is not the ordeal suffered by their famous fathers and other American citizens of Japanese ancestry, but rather that suffered by their grandparents Japanese aliens in the United States at the outbreak of war in December 1941.
Their claim is that the district court's broad endorsement of an executive power to single out aliens for prolonged detention on the basis of race, religion, and national origin is a revival of the long-discredited legal theory that supported the mass and prolonged detention of Japanese aliens during World War II.
The Bush Administration is becoming increasingly isolated in its refusal to take action to prevent global warming. The scientific consensus on global warming is rock solid. The House and Senate are moving ahead. The Administration insisted that the Environmental Protection Agency’s hands were tied, but the Supreme Court today debunked that argument. It’s time for the Administration to join the search for solutions to climate change.
Regarding pollutants from power plants and factories, the Administration has used the regulatory process as a backdoor way to rewrite clean air laws so that the President’s corporate allies don’t have to upgrade their air pollution controls when they upgrade their plants. The Supreme Court put a stop to this practice today. We will all breathe more freely—literally—as a result.
This decision puts the wind at our back. It takes away the excuse the administration has been using for not taking action to deal with global warming pollution. We will be calling the EPA before the committee later this month to ask them how they plan to use their authority under the Clean Air Act to begin to address the challenge of global warming. We now have a two-track process for addressing global warming – comprehensive legislation and administrative action.
That's right: just holding your body in the right position means you'll have faster, more accurate access to certain memories. If you stand as if holding a golf club, you're quicker to remember an event that happened while you were golfing than if you position your body in a non-golfing pose.
I realize now that the worries I had about the difference between me and the women I met are not as serious as I'd thought, in large part because there aren't actually too many differences to speak of.
None grew up expecting to find themselves in their current situation; when I keep that in mind that it's not far-fetched to think that I, or someone I'm close to, could find themselves in similar need sometime in the future.
I know that much of life comes down to choice and decision-making, but a lot of our choices are limited by where we start out, which is left up to chance. No one chooses where or to whom they're born, and none of us are able to control the amount of money or education our parents have, the health concerns we're likely to inherit, or the prejudices and discrimination we will or won't face because of race, sex, or socio-economic status.
While I probably can't go back and work at [Homestart] this semester - some of the same women will be there - I plan on going back and helping next year, and telling everyone I know interested in that type of work about the shelter and how to get involved. It's not that I think the women need me, specifically, or that I can make more of a difference than anyone else could. I'll do it with the hope someone else will do the same for me if I ever need it.
The University of Maryland is debating whether to apologize for slavery. An only slight exaggeration of the state of the debate is that the University will apologize if the evidence demonstrates more than one-hundred slaves toiled on campus, are undecided about an apology if the number was between ten and a hundred, and will not apologize if the number was less than ten.
I do not know whether all of this warrants an apology or reparations. On the one hand, neither resolves an extraordinarily deeply rooted problem. On the other hand, no better immediate solution exists. Perhaps the best we can do is convert demands for apologies for slavery and investigations into the direct presence of slavery into investigations of the pervasive influence of slavery and race on all aspects of American social, political, and life. Slavery and race were not the sort of warts on the American polity that could be easily excised by the 13th Amendment or Civil Rights Act of 1964. They are cancers that are so entwined with normal practices as to resist almost all efforts at social, legal and political eradication. Our students need to be aware of just how pervasive slavery and racism were and are, and this knowledge cannot be gained by limiting the debate to whether or not a specified number of slaves worked in specific places in specific times.
It's one of the eeriest moments we've seen this year. Two young girls (Allison Reeves and Georgia Southern), dressed identically alike, are relating the gruesome details of another girl's partially interrupted dive into sheer madness—and they are doing so with all the matter-of-factness of a discussion of tomorrow's weather.
Whether or not director Trezana Beverley actually saw The Shining is immaterial at this point. When her taut production of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye puts the unspeakable in the mouths of babes, the chills flow from the Playmakers Rep stage like an electric current. The cruelty of distance in Morrison's ground-breaking novel and this production underlines our inability to intervene. So we watch, as the thin props keeping Danika Williams' poignant Pecola just above the waves of darkness are slowly pulled away, one by one.
We had just started elementary school. She said she wanted blue eyes. I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what I imagined she would look like if she had her wish. The sorrow in her voice seemed to call for sympathy, and I faked it for her, but, astonished by the desecration she proposed, I "got mad" at her instead.
What is perhaps most amazing about this story is how it has been overlooked so consistently, not just by filmmakers and popular audiences but by almost every historian of slavery. Now a nonprofessional historian--J.B. Bird, an administrator at the University of Texas--has written and produced an engrossing multimedia Web documentary, Rebellion: John Horse and the Black Seminoles, the First Black Rebels to Beat American Slavery. (To see it for yourself, go to johnhorse.com.) In the process, Bird has illustrated not just an important part of the American past but also one of the ways cyberspace is changing how history is studied and taught.
The facts themselves do not disturb me any more than might be expected. The difficult thing is to see them in print--unburied, so to speak, from the realm of secrets and turned into a public event. There are more than twenty articles, most of them long, all of them from the Kenosha Evening News. Even in this barely legible state, almost totally obscured by age and the hazards of photocopying, they still have the ability to shock.
Through the combined effort of elected officials, service providers, business leaders, government agencies, and the citizens of Orange County, chronic homelessness in Orange County will end within 10 years. Current and future efforts to serve the needs of all homeless individuals and homeless families will continue to be supported toward the goal of permanent housing.
was to document as concretely as possible, and thus lend a "heightened graphicness" to, the scene of revolutionary change that was the nineteenth century. At issue was what he called "the commodification of things." He was interested in the unsettling effects of incipient high capitalism on the most intimate areas of life and work--especially as reflected in the work of art (its composition, its dissemination, its reception). In this "projection of the historical into the intimate," it was a matter not of demonstrating any straightforward cultural "decline," but rather of bringing to light an uncanny sense of crisis and of security, of crisis in security. Particularly from the perspective of the nineteenth-century domestic interior, which Benjamin likens to the inside of a mollusk's shell, things were coming to seem more entirely material than ever and, at the same time, more spectral and estranged.
The period between 1865-1909 was a period marked as a time of incredible technological advances, rapid industrial growth, and imperialistic expansionism; of enflamed patriotism during and after the Spanish-American War; and a continuance of Jim Crow laws, the exploitation of the working class, and Tammany Hall-style politics. Perhaps it should come as little surprise that the predominately white, classically minded and university educated, upper-middle class generation of architects and engineers that built the Lincoln Memorial would stress the theme of National Unity over that of Social Justice.
While manifestations of violence against women and girls vary across social, economic, cultural and historical contexts, it is clear that violence against women and girls remains a devastating reality in all parts of the world. Existing research, data and testimonials from women and girls world-wide provide chilling evidence. It is a pervasive violation of human rights and a major impediment to achieving gender equality, development and peace.
While the De Bry engravings shown on this site represent the earliest published images of Native Americans, viewers should be careful not to interpret these as accurate depictions of the inhabitants of North Carolina in the late sixteenth century. The images shown here are twice removed from John White's original watercolors. In the engravings created by Theodore De Bry, there are many subtle but significant changes from White's originals: the facial structure of most of the people has been altered, resulting in portraits that look more like Europeans; the musculature on most of the people is much more defined in the De Bry engravings; and the poses of many of the subjects seem to reflect classical statuary. The colorist for this volume has contributed to the distortion of the original images by adding a pale skin tone and blonde hair to some of the people and decorating much of the vegetation in colors that are unlike anything that occurs naturally in this part of the world.
These are striking images, and they are important primary sources, if only because of their age. However, they are also significant cultural documents. By making the changes that they did, De Bry and the colorist for this volume demonstrated either an unwillingness or inability to understand the differences between European and Native American culture and physiognomy. This lack of understanding and appreciation for Native American culture, combined with a stubborn tendency to view the world and its inhabitants through a narrowly European perspective, were likely key factors in the widespread destruction of many of the indigenous peoples and cultures of North America.
More than 31,000 couples have already signed up with theknot.com, a wedding-planning Web site, saying they plan to marry that day, a figure that is roughly triple the number for any other Saturday that month — and nearly 20,000 more than the number of couples who got married on the corresponding weekend a year earlier.
When North Carolinians discuss barbeque, they are prone to swoon. Even the most urbane among them waxed ecstatic when given a forum for extolling smoked meat. People who have lived in New York--and one who lived in Istanbul--drawled like Daughters of the Confederacy about sweet tea 'n slaw.
But after much hand-wringing consensus emerged. The consensus seemed to be that Allen and Son, just north of Chapel Hill, should be my destination. In choosing Allen and Son, my thinking focused on several factors. First, I elected to eat barbeque that was (more or less) Eastern style. After all, with no tomato in the equation, there would be nothing between me and the meat--no filter or safety net. Second, after several interviews around Chapel Hill, and after reading many reviews it was clear the Keith Allen is a barbeque purist. By eating his fare, there really could be no regrets, as nobody disputed his skill and attention to tradition. Third, Allen and Son is a strong contender on the major variables that distinguish a barbeque restaurant: the meat, hush puppies, dessert, and ambience.
Finally, I chose Allen and Son because it is located near my house. North Carolina barbeque is special because it is a regional cuisine. Not unlike many vegetarians, barbeque purists are concerned with the authenticity of their product. This authenticity derives in large part from issues of place. Keith Allen is held in especially high regard because he splits his hickory on site and by hand, behind his restaurant, just up the road from my house.
The Kitchen Computer was featured in the 1969 Neiman Marcus catalogue as a $10,000 tool for housewives to store and retrieve recipes. Unfortunately, the user interface was only binary lights and switches. There is no evidence that any Kitchen Computer was ever sold. Inside was a standard Honeywell 316 minicomputer, billed as the first 16-bit machine at that price from a major computer manufacturer.
