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Arab-American faces and voices : the origins of an immigrant community
As Arab Americans seek to claim their communal identity and rightful place in American society at a time of heightened tension between the United States and the Middle East, an understanding look back at more than one hundred years of the Arab-American community is especially timely. In this book, Elizabeth Boosahda, a third-generation Arab American, draws on over two hundred personal interviews, as well as photographs and historical documents that are contemporaneous with the first generation of Arab Americans (Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians), both Christians and Muslims, who immigrated to the Americas between 1880 and 1915, and their descendants. Boosahda focuses on the Arab-American community in Worcester, Massachusetts, a major northeastern center for Arab immigration, and Worcester’s links to and similarities with Arab-American communities throughout North and South America. Using the voices of Arab immigrants and their families, she explores their entire experience, from emigration at the turn of the twentieth century to the present-day lives of their descendants. This rich documentation sheds light on many aspects of Arab-American life, including the Arab entrepreneurial motivation and success, family life, education, religious and community organizations, and the role of women in initiating immigration and the economic success they achieved.
eBook
The dictionary wars : the American fight over the English language
Peter Martin recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. But what began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into a battle among lexicographers, authors, scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy and shattering forever the dream of a unified American language.
Book
Women and reform in a New England community, 1815-1860
Interpretations of women in the antebellum period have long dwelt upon the notion of public versus private gender spheres.As part of the ongoing reevaluation of the prehistory of the women's movement, Carolyn Lawes challenges this paradigm and the primacy of class motivation.
eBook
Arab-American Faces and Voices
As Arab Americans seek to claim their communal identity and rightful place in American society at a time of heightened tension between the United States and the Middle East, an understanding look back at more than one hundred years of the Arab-American community is especially timely. In this book, Elizabeth Boosahda, a third-generation Arab American, draws on over two hundred personal interviews, as well as photographs and historical documents that are contemporaneous with the first generation of Arab Americans (Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians), both Christians and Muslims, who immigrated to the Americas between 1880 and 1915, and their descendants. Boosahda focuses on the Arab-American community in Worcester, Massachusetts, a major northeastern center for Arab immigration, and Worcester's links to and similarities with Arab-American communities throughout North and South America. Using the voices of Arab immigrants and their families, she explores their entire experience, from emigration at the turn of the twentieth century to the present-day lives of their descendants. This rich documentation sheds light on many aspects of Arab-American life, including the Arab entrepreneurial motivation and success, family life, education, religious and community organizations, and the role of women in initiating immigration and the economic success they achieved.
eBook
Memories of Belonging: Descendants of Italian Migrants to the United Sates, 1884-Present
Memories of Belonging is a three-generation oral-history study of the offspring of southern Italians who migrated to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1913. Supplemented with the interviewees' private documents and working from U.S. and Italian archives, Christa Wirth documents a century of transatlantic migration, assimilation, and later-generation self-identification. Her research reveals how memories of migration, everyday life, and ethnicity are passed down through the generations, altered, and contested while constituting family identities. The fact that not all descendants of Italian migrants moved into the U.S. middle class, combined with their continued use of hyphenated identities, points to a history of lived ethnicity and societal exclusion. Moreover, this book demonstrates the extent of forgetting that is required in order to construct an ethnic identity.
eBook
First Fruits of Freedom
A moving narrative that offers a rare glimpse into the lives of African American men, women, and children on the cusp of freedom,First Fruits of Freedomchronicles one of the first collective migrations of blacks from the South to the North during and after the Civil War.Janette Thomas Greenwood relates the history of a network forged between Worcester County, Massachusetts, and eastern North Carolina as a result of Worcester regiments taking control of northeastern North Carolina during the war. White soldiers from Worcester, a hotbed of abolitionism, protected refugee slaves, set up schools for them, and led them north at war's end. White patrons and a supportive black community helped many migrants fulfill their aspirations for complete emancipation and facilitated the arrival of additional family members and friends. Migrants established a small black community in Worcester with a distinctive southern flavor.But even in the North, white sympathy did not continue after the Civil War. Despite their many efforts, black Worcesterites were generally disappointed in their hopes for full-fledged citizenship, reflecting the larger national trajectory of Reconstruction and its aftermath.
eBook
War in Worcester
The South African government gave no quarter to young people who joined the struggle against the apartheid state; indeed, it targeted them. Security forces meted out cruel treatment to youth who rebelled, incarcerated even the very young under dreadful conditions, and used torture frequently, sometimes over long periods of time. Little is known, however, from the perspective of young fighters themselves about the efforts they made to sustain the momentum of struggle, how that affected and was affected by their other social bonds, and what they achieved in terms of growth and paid in terms of harm. War in Worcester combines a study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)'s findings on the stand taken by South African youth with extended fieldwork undertaken with fourteen young men who, starting in their schooldays, were involved in the struggle in a small town in the Western Cape. Filling a gap in the ethnographic analysis of the role of youth in armed conflict, the book describes, from the perspective of the young fighters themselves, the tactics that young local leaders used and how the state retaliated, young peoples' experiences of pain and loss, the effect on fighters of the extensive use of informers by the state as a weapon of war, and the search for an ethic of survival. The testimony of these young fighters reveals some limitations of the processes used by the TRC in its search to document the truth. War in Worcester problematizes the use of the term \"victim\" for the political engagement of young people and calls for attention to patterns of documenting the past and thus to the nature of the archive in recording the character of political forces and the uses of violence. It encourages a fresh analysis of the kinds of revolt being enacted by the young elsewhere in the world, such as North Africa and the Middle East.
eBook
White Matter Anisotropy for Impact Simulation and Response Sampling in Traumatic Brain Injury
Advanced neuroimaging provides new opportunities to enhance head injury models, including the incorporation of white matter (WM) structural anisotropy. Information from high-resolution neuroimaging, however, usually has to be “down-sampled” to match a typically coarse brain mesh. To understand how this mesh-image resolution mismatch affects impact simulation and subsequent response sampling, we compared three competing anisotropy implementations (using either voxels, tractography, or a multiscale submodeling) and two response sampling strategies (element-wise or tractography-based, using brain mesh or neuroimaging for region segmentation, respectively). Using the combination of high resolution options as a baseline, we studied how the choice in each individual category affected the resulting injury metrics. By simulating a recorded loss of consciousness head impact, we found that injury metrics including peak strain and injury susceptibility in the deep WM regions based on fiber strain, but not on maximum principal strain, were sensitive to the anisotropy implementation, response sampling, and region segmentation. Overall, it was recommended to use tractography for anisotropy implementation and response sampling, and to employ neuroimaging for region segmentation, because they led to more accurate injury metrics. Further refining mesh locally via submodeling was unnecessary. Brain strain responses were also parametrically found to be closer to that from minimum fiber reinforcement, consistent with the fact that the majority of WM had a rather high degree of fiber dispersion. Finally, the upgraded Worcester Head Injury Model incorporating WM anisotropy was successfully re-validated against cadaveric impacts and an in vivo head rotation (“good” to “excellent” validation with an average Correlation Analysis score of 0.437 and 0.509, respectively). These investigations may facilitate further continual development of head injury models to better study traumatic brain injury.
Journal Article
Incorporation of vasculature in a head injury model lowers local mechanical strains in dynamic impact
Cerebral vasculature is several orders of magnitude stiffer than the brain tissue. However, only a handful of studies have investigated its potential stiffening effect on dynamic brain strains; yet, they report contradictory findings. Here, we reanalyze the cerebrovascular stiffening effect by incorporating vasculature derived from the latest neuroimaging atlases into a re-meshed Worcester Head Injury Model using an embedded element method. Regional brain strains with and without vasculature were simulated using a reconstructed, predominantly sagittal head impact. Using the two previously adopted linear or non-linear vessel material models, we reproduced the earlier conflicting results (~40% vs. ~1–6% in regional strain reductions). Nevertheless, with refitted non-linear material models chosen to represent the average dynamic tension behaviors of arteries and veins, respectively, inclusion of vasculature reduced regional brain strains by ~13–36% relative to the baselines without vasculature. Compared to the whole brain baseline response, inclusion of vasculature led to an element-wise linear regression slope of 0.8 and a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.8. The vascular stiffening effect appears mild for the whole brain but more significant locally, which should not be ignored in head injury models. Nevertheless, more work is necessary to investigate the cerebrovascular mechanical behaviors and loading environment to allow for more biofidelic modeling of the brain in the future.
Journal Article