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Standstill: A Research Study on the Prime Factors Associated with the Slow Growth Rate and Stagnation of the Black Population in America
No full textBlacks have been the forefront of many evolutionary landmark decisions that stimulated equal opportunity for various types of minorities across the United States. This has resulted in employment and economic growth for minority businesses, as well as the establishment of many black artists, entrepreneurs and political leaders. Over the course of time, however, those numbers have stagnated, and subsequently, declined.
This thesis examines the slow growth and stagnation of the black race in America. To fully understand this social issue, it is important to acknowledge its potential leading causes, which are (1) black imprisonment, (2) black on black crime, and (3) high abortion rates among black women. In addition, I examine the following subsidiary concepts throughout this research: national births for blacks, national deaths for blacks, trends in the black American population, as well as the number of foreign-born blacks living in America.
Although they make up just roughly 13% of the U.S. population, the black population is not developing as fast as other racial groups in America. As long as blacks continue to be imprisoned at higher rates than prisoners of other races, as long as the crime and homicide ratio among blacks remain high, and as long as black women continue to have the highest abortion rates compared to women of other races in the U.S., the black population will continue to experience a slow progression. And this research aims to prove just that.Thesi
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Texas Slave Narratives Expose Effectiveness of "General Order No. 3": The Fragmentation of Juneteenth's Emancipated
No full textThe language of General Order No. 3, “the Juneteenth Order,” exposes the complexities of freedom for roughly two hundred fifty thousand enslaved black Texans; therein, archival slave narratives challenge how its constructs impacted emancipation. Using the slave narratives of Texas, this thesis argues that on June 19, 1865, or soon after, the language of General Order No. 3 requires looking with nuance at the realities of the process of emancipation. Thereby black Texans were active agents in determining how the interpretant of the Juneteenth Order and subsequent manumission varied for those enslaved. Rather than responding sensibly to the South’s historical loss, the master class continued leveraging slavery to limit the efficacy of the Order. After June 19, scores of formerly enslaved people asserted their rights for “absolute equality,” as declared in the Order, and to consider testimony that is often inverse, is a shortcoming this thesis addresses. The case study juxtaposes a qualitative-quantitative approach with a qualitative data analysis platform to expose how enslaved Texans are indeed agents of General Order No. 3. They not only echoed the emancipated language but also represented themselves as its reciters. Albeit the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was not officiated in Texas for another two and a half years after its issuance, introducing a methodological focus on oral histories hitherto deficient, June 19 informs our empirical understanding of emancipation and freedom for America’s black ancestors who descended from slavery lineages
On Juneteenth: The Essential Story of “Freedom Day” and Its Importance to American History
No full textOn January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared more than three million enslaved people living in the Confederate States to be free. It was not until June 19, 1865, however, that Union Army General Gordon Granger arrived in Texas with the news. Since then Juneteenth has been celebrated on June 19 in Texas and many other states to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people, but it was not until 2021 that Congress recognized Juneteenth as a federal holiday. In this talk, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed will discuss her recent book, On Juneteenth, a blend of memoir and history that explores the violence and oppression that preceded and followed this celebration, what it means to us now, and how it relates to our larger fight for equality.
Annette Gordon-Reed is a Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School, and the award-winning author of six books. Her latest book, On Juneteenth, sets out to capture the integral importance of the holiday to American history.
Professor Gordon-Reed is also the author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history and the National Book Award for nonfiction—along with fourteen other awards. It explores the inconsistencies of Jefferson’s stance on slavery and his relationship with enslaved woman Sally Hemings, and has been called “the best study of a slave family ever written” by noted Jefferson scholar Joseph Ellis. Her other books include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy—a rich examination of scholarly writing on the relationships between Jefferson and Hemings, which exposes the possibility that scholars were misguided by their own biases and may even have contorted evidence to preserve their preexisting opinions of Jefferson. Her other book, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination, presents a provocative character study of Jefferson that challenges much of the scholarly status quo on his portrayal throughout history. Her upcoming title, A Jefferson Reader on Race, is set to be published in 2022.
Professor Gordon-Reed’s honors include the National Humanities Medal (awarded by President Barack Obama), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019, she was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society.
Click here for photos of the 2021-22 Spring Humanities Festival
The Enlightenment in Early America
Full text linkThe founding of the United States of America is often said to have been the product of Enlightenment ideals that emphasized reason, individual liberty, and notions of progress. During this same era, however, racially based slavery, which confounded reason, denied individual liberty to millions, and challenged ideas about progress, existed in all of the colonies of North America.
The third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, embodied this seeming contradiction at the heart of the American founding. The principal author of the American Declaration of Independence enslaved hundreds of people over the course of his long life.
This Article argues that a bedrock verity of the Enlightenment influenced Jefferson’s thinking on these matters, specifically the tendency to emphasize the importance of categories. In the world of Enlightened science, everything had a place—scientific phenomena, plants, ideas, even people. In this view, human beings of African descent were placed at the bottom of what was seen as inevitable hierarchy, justifying treating them as an exception to the rules about the natural liberty of mankind. Whether this circumstance would continue indefinitely was an open question, though Jefferson posited that time might ameliorate the situation. As scholars have noted, there was a dark side to Enlightenment thinking
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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A History of the Person in America Before the Civil War
No full textThis dissertation excavates the intellectual origins of the legal idea of a person and traces its expression in American politics from the settlement of New England through the eve of the American Civil War. Using statutes, law books, sermons, records of debates, reports of cases, and works of political theory, this study argues that so far from distilling the highest hopes of freedom, the idea of a person admitted of—and was perhaps most ably characterized by—the idea of a slave. Chapter one revisits the writings of seventeenth-century Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and demonstrates that by 1641, both a voice in government and licit enslavement depended not on what was due to the governed, but on an inscrutable gift from the free to an elect. The second chapter, reaching back to pagan antiquity, places William Blackstone’s 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England in a new light, investigating the transmission of Roman renderings of persons (personas) into the free and the enslaved, and justice (iustitia) as “the constant and perpetual will to give to each his ius,” down to a thirteenth-century English law book known as Bracton. Blackstone, driving a wedge between his own work and Bracton, wrote not that persons were the reason for all rights, but that rights were the end of laws, which led him to divide his own commentaries into two books: Of the Rights of Persons and Of the Rights of Things. The notion of a “person,” however, did not make it into the Declaration of Independence in 1776 because delegates in General Congress swept it away with the clause in Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft specifying the Atlantic slave trade as a grievance against the king, and this remarkable excision is the focus of chapter three. Denied security in unalienable rights, the enslaved assumed the shape of what Blackstone had called “artificial persons” whose every need was the occasion for rulers to grant or withhold the object. Chapter four argues that in 1787, when the men who drafted the U.S. Constitution identified the enslaved as objects of governance and counted them for the purpose of political representation while denying them a share of sovereign power, they established a government shaped to abandon the enslaved to the caprice of the free, internalizing the violence required to keep property rights in persons safe. Ending the dissertation with a return to gifts to an elect, the final chapter examines Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Taney declared that “negroe[s], whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves” were “persons,” but not “people,” who had never been “supposed to possess any political rights which the dominant race might not withhold or grant at their pleasure.” Rightly maligned as the most repugnant Supreme Court decision in American history, Taney’s opinion nevertheless rested on the centuries-long endurance of a division of persons into the free and the enslaved, and, in turn, bore compelling witness to a heritage in which it was not security in rights, but the profound vulnerability wrought by their distribution, that captured what it was to be a person in America before the Civil War.Histor
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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