Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

Nanomedicine is yielding new and improved treatments and diagnostics for a range of diseases and disorders. Nanomedicine applications incorporate materials and components with nanoscale dimensions where novel physiochemical properties emerge as a result of size-dependent phenomena and high surface-to-mass ratio. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics are a subset of nanomedicine products that enter the human body. These include drugs, biological products, implantable medical devices, and combination products that are designed to function in the body in ways unachievable at larger scales. (...) Nanotherapeutics andin vivonanodiagnostics incorporate materials that are engineered at the nanoscale to express novel properties that are medicinally useful. These nanomedicine applications can also contain nanomaterials that are biologically active, producing interactions that depend on biological triggers. Examples include nanoscale formulations of insoluble drugs to improve bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, drugs encapsulated in hollow nanoparticles with the ability to target and cross cellular and tissue membranes and to release their payload at a specific time or location, imaging agents that demonstrate novel optical properties to aid in locating micrometastases, and antimicrobial and drug-eluting components or coatings of implantable medical devices such as stents. (shrink)

This is an entry of Frederick Douglass for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Through a series of provocative conversations, Frederick Luis Aldama and Herbert Lindenberger, who have written widely on literature, film, music, and art, locate a place for the discomforting and the often painfully unpleasant within aesthetics. The conversational format allows them to travel informally across many centuries and many art forms. They have much to tell one another about the arts since the advent of modernism soon after 1900—the nontonal music, for example, of the Second Vienna School, the chance-directed music (...) and dance of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, the in-your-faceness of such diverse visual artists as Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Egon Schiele, Otto Dix, and Damien Hirst. They demonstrate as well a long tradition of discomforting art stretching back many centuries, for example, in the Last Judgments of innumerable Renaissance painters, in Goya’s so-called “black” paintings, in Wagner’s Tristan chord, and in the subtexts of Shakespearean works such as King Lear and Othello. This book is addressed at once to scholars of literature, art history, musicology, and cinema. Although its conversational format eschews the standard conventions of scholarly argument, it provides original insights both into particular art forms and into individual works within these forms. Among other matters, it demonstrates how recent work in neuroscience may provide insights in the ways that consumers process difficult and discomforting works of art. The book also contributes to current aesthetic theory by charting the dialogue that goes on—especially in aesthetically challenging works—between creator, artifact, and consumer. (shrink)

Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) argued that newly emancipated black Americans should assimilate into Anglo-American society and culture. Social assimilation would then lead to the entire physical amalgamation of the two groups, and the emergence of a new intermediate group that would be fully American. He, like those who were to follow, was driven by a vision of universal human fraternity in the light of which the varieties of human difference were incidental and far less important than the ethical, religious, and (...) political idea of personhood. Douglass’s version of this vision was formed by natural law theories, and a Protestant Christian conception of universal human fraternity, as it was for much of the abolition movement in the US and Britain. His vision and his fierce commitment to abolitionism, moreover, were characterized by his own experience of slavery. His political and ethical vision, his moral universe, generated his conception of America, his interpretation of the US constitution, and his solution to the Nation’s race problem. Unpacking Douglass’s vision will help us understand those positions that follow his legacy. Just as those who argue that race ought to be conserved turn to the figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, those who disagree with the conservation of race need to consider Douglass’s arguments, and their relationship to Douglass’s assimilation-amalgamation solution. Moreover, those that work under the long shadow of Douglass would do well to carefully consider the historical reasons why Du Bois’s and Booker T. Washington’s strategies for racial justice eclipsed Douglass’s. This chapter reviews Douglass’s religious and political ideals, his application of them to the issues of race, black American identity, and constitutional interpretation, and how his ideals and positions developed into his projection about the future of race in the US. All of these matters are guiding features of the anti-race and racial nominalist positions in the contemporary conservation of race debate. Additionally, this paper asks that we consider the cognitive and emotional conflicts that arise within us as we reflect upon Douglass’s vision and this Nation’s contradictions and failures in its long racial history. Douglass, of course, frequently referenced this conflict; it was at the center of his experience of being American. In his first narrative, Douglass characterized this conflict as his “soul’s complaint.” As a slave he yearned for freedom, and came to understand the liberal political and religious ideals that surrounded him. God’s justice or the ideal of American justice were not immanent; this gave him much pain and caused in him a good measure of moral disorientation, yet he resolved to make up for the absence of divine and natural justice through his own and other subaltern resources. And as a freeman and abolitionist he yearned for a greater reconciliation of the Nation: between black and white, and between the Nation and its ideals. In both instances the obstacles to his desires, the enormity of the task, and the elusiveness of Justice often left him somewhere between madness and reconciliation to his misery. His turmoil, a reaction of moral indignation and disorientation, a reaction to bondage in the putative land of liberty, is ours as well. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFast food chains such as McDonald's, KFC, and Burger King are major players in the production, marketing, and consumption of animal‐derived food throughout the world. Animal rights activists are quick to point out the link between the highly efficient factory farms that supply these chains and extreme animal cruelty and environmental degradation. Strategically, fast food is well positioned to leverage change in the methods by which animals are raised and processed for human consumption. Although progress has been made as (...) the fast food industry has responded to pressure exerted by animal rights organizations, there is little indication of true collaborative efforts that would harness the power of the market to bring about substantive changes in the way the consuming public views the issue of animal welfare and food production. (shrink)

The idea of a purgatorial journey to the Ten Kings of the Ten Hells is a distinctive feature of funerals and ancestral worship in Chinese Buddhism and Chinese popular religions. In Indian Buddhism ideas emerged of chief deities presiding over others in a few of many heavens and of various hells with different tortures governed by Yama and his messengers, yet the idea that each hell was governed by a ‘king’ is not found in early Indian Buddhist sources. This (...) article examines what is probably the earliest enumeration of hell-kings, in the S?tra on Questions on Hells. This very early example derives from an extraordinary story about how King Bimbis?ra and his eighteen ministers became Yama and kings of eighteen hells after a disastrous defeat in battle. My analysis will illustrate how this account was probably consciously formulated by an author familiar with two sources: the story of the Buddha’s concern about the fate of his followers in the Shenisha jing, and the popular Chinese belief in sacrificial cults of ‘defeated armies and dead generals’. (shrink)

The conventional history of the ancient Near East at large, including Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean basin, contains several “Dark Ages,” poorly documented transitional periods of uncertain length. James et al. 1991 have argued that the most significant of these Dark Ages—the transition from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age during the last two centuries of the second millennium BCE—is largely an artifact of an overly long reconstruction of the Egyptian Third Intermediate Period, and that this Dark Age presents (...) itself in every chronology linked to the Egyptian. A wide variety of often seemingly contradictory scientific, archaeological, art-historical, and philological evidence has been adduced to argue for the status quo, or to lengthen or to shorten by up to several centuries the relative chronology for this period. This review article comments on the papers presented at the Third BICANE Colloquium held at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, summarizing a variety of recent positions taken in the ongoing evaluation of James et al. 1991, testing the specific proposition that the tenth century BCE biblical Egyptian King Shishak is to be distinguished from the historical Egyptian King Shoshenq I, who is now to be situated about a century later in the latter half of the ninth century BCE. the wider historical implications of this proposed distinction are examined in new detail. (shrink)

Frederick Douglass (1817?–1875) is a monumental American figure. As a runaway slave and leading black thinker, speaker, and writer in the abolitionist movement and during Reconstruction and its tragic collapse, his legacy in American history is singular. His ideals and scorching criticisms have marked American political thought about democracy, religion, race, racism, liberty, and equality. American political parties claim him, especially the Republican Party, with which he has an early connection and which has used his figure as cover for (...) their less than egalitarian projects, as do different ideological camps. One can find accounts of Douglass as an existentialist, revolutionary, proto-libertarian, liberal, civic republican thinker. His North Star continues to guide those who welcome its light, although it may lead them down different political-ideological paths.In all of this, one can imagine that those not familiar with the details of Douglass’s narratives and deeds might, in the context of all of that national hagiography, lose track of the fact that he was a black man. Frederick Douglass was a black man born into slavery, survived that brutal regime for twenty-one years, and then escaped and became a principal leader of the American abolition movement and leading black political thinker. Shortly after escaping slavery, he wrote his first famous autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and subsequently two more, in addition to volumes of speeches, articles, and a novel. It is as if his monumentality, like marble, alabaster, or bronze—the stuff of civic memorials—would obscure that irreducible fact in its grand monotones.Nick Brommell’s The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass reminds readers that that irreducible fact is a nontrivial, essential element of Douglass’s life and work. Bromell argues that this includes the political theory, a product of Douglass’s black political philosophy that runs through it all. He contends that Douglass argued for an inclusive conception of personhood and active citizenship, which America’s founding public philosophy, distorted by white supremacy, purposefully did not. Its elements include a defense of the moral personhood of blacks and their full and equal citizenship and a view of political community enlivened by group solidarities and active citizenship in defense of justice.In the course of his analysis, Bromell, a literary theorist, draws on an assortment of contemporary philosophical, rhetorical, and political theories, all of which have a critical theoretical bent, to explicate Douglass’s ideas. This method bears fruit in an instructive analysis of the rhetorical structure of Douglass’ his arguments. Brommell’s analysis of Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom usefully explains how it stands out, not only in terms of updated autobiographical details, but also style and analytical and argumentative intent. This is a reading that other scholars have pioneered, but his rhetorical analysis fleshes out, for example, the role of moral sentiments, care, and intimate and social relations in Douglass’s narrative.A central feature of Bromell’s analysis is that Douglass employs what he and others call a “fugitive rhetoric” that comprises an emphasis on the perspective of his and other black Americans’ standpoints, the holding of opposite ideas in tension, and the use of the rhetorical technique “chiasmus,” where a statement is repeated in reverse order in successive phrases or clauses. It is an illuminating analysis, but Bromell goes further by claiming that Douglass was committed to the tenets of contemporary standpoint epistemology. Douglass certainly referenced and employed his experience and viewpoint as a black man and former slave in his work, just as he directly addressed the viewpoints and interests of black Americans. However, whether this means that Douglass was committed to the set of ideas that we now call standpoint epistemology is another matter. This concern applies to Bromell’s reading of Douglass’s method of holding seemingly contrasting ideas in tension and his use of chiasmus. Contemporary philosophical theories of chiasmus carry particular metaphysical and epistemological implications, and those theories might shed light on Douglass’s political projects. However, their incidental utility does not mean they definitively describe Douglass’s intent or public philosophy. This is a specifically important point because those theories lead to subjective conceptions of truth, especially relating to ethics and politics, while Douglass, as Bromell recognizes, repeatedly and emphatically endorsed what he took to be universal normative truths.In the same vein, Bromell makes several additional claims regarding the conceptual distinctiveness of Douglass’s view of power, dignity, rights, and citizenship. Douglass employed conceptions of each and other important ideas specific to his style, approach, and ends. As other black political thinkers did before him, he used these concepts to condemn slavery, racism, and the hypocrisy of American Republicanism and Christianity to assert the equal moral personhood and dignity of blacks and demand equal rights and citizenship. Bromell rightly emphasizes the role of “power,“ as an individual capability, in Douglass’s view of natural rights, moral dignity, and citizenship. It is an emphasis that is in keeping with both Douglass’s personal narrative and his national political projects. Douglass did not think that Americans—that Black Americans or abolitionists—should passively wait for deliverance from either God or national political leadership. Likewise, Bromell is correct to push back on reductions of Douglass’s views to Lockean, Rousseauian, or Kantian interpretations. Douglass is more than an incarnation of standard deontological, liberal, or civic republican philosophy. As a nineteenth-century black radical thinker, he stood in relation and contributed to those moral and political philosophical traditions. However, Bromell’s claim that Douglass’s conceptions of power, natural rights, and citizenship are conceptually distinct from the large host of major philosophical, theological, and political theoretical accounts that preceded him and influenced those ideas in his time is suggestive but not decisive.Like other writers and theorists before him, Bromell offers us another Douglass—as a black critical political theorist. This is a testament to the fecundity of Douglass’s black political-philosophical legacy. It is a legacy that leads to competing interpretations of him; all the same and for all their differences, his scorching prophetic vision of liberty, equality, citizenship, and progress unites them all. (shrink)

This essay supplies an historical review of black thought (from the Civil War forward) in the American South. Its emphasis is upon the biography of figures born in the region, whether resident or exile, concentrating on three foundational actors: Booker Washington, Frederick Douglass and Ida Wells. Significant strands of later thought are seen as largely derived from the latter two. The thematic anchor of this review is ‘resistance and nonviolence’, involving (1) a primary focus on equal rights, (2) a (...) derivative focus on emancipation and desegregation, (3) exploration of nonviolence as a mode of resistance to oppression, (4) exploration of liberative violence, and (5) a larger concern with the appropriate type and degree of integration/separation implicit in or consistent with an equal rights regime. Douglass and Wells are cast as attending to sub‐themes (1) and (2).This essay is designed to fit within the larger framework of the collection, in which the religious leaders Howard Thurman and Martin King are allocated to sub‐theme (3), the novelist Richard Wright to (4), and the lawyers Thurgood Marshall, Barbara Jordan and Fred Gray to (5). The future challenge to black thought is assumed to lie in deeper reflection on (5), with a view to locating an ever more perfect balance between ‘nation’ (the ethnic community of Afro‐America) and ‘state’ (the US federal government). (shrink)

Introduction -- Tales of dominion -- The plow and the gun -- Picturing the West, 1883-1893 -- American idol, 1898 -- The end of nature -- African romance -- The dark continent -- When cowboys go to heaven -- Transplanting Africa -- Of ape-men, sex, and cannibal kings -- Adventures in monkeyland -- Nature, the film -- The world scrubbed clean.

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859, was a revolutionary attempt “to overthrow the dogma of separate creations,” a declaration that provoked different reactions among the religious, ranging from mild enthusiasm to anger. Christians sympathetic to Darwin's effort sought to make Darwinism appear compatible with their religious beliefs. Two of Darwin's most prominent defenders in the United States were the Calvinists Asa Gray, a Harvard botanist, and George Frederick Wright, a cleric-geologist. Gray, who long favored a “special origination” (...) in connection with the evolution of humans and questioned whether natural selection can account for the formation of organs, the making of eyes, etc., embraced natural selection as the primary mechanism underlying the production of most species. He also went so far as to invoke divine providence, rather than randomness, to explain the variations on which natural selection acted. This chapter discusses creationism, intelligent design, and modern biology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Frederick J. Streng Book Award:An Interview with Paul Ingram and Sallie KingSallie B. King and Paul O. IngramSallie King and Paul Ingram have been named winners of the 2003 Frederick J. Streng Book Award for their edited collection The Sound of Liberating Truth: Buddhist-Christian Dialogues in Honor of Frederick J. Streng (Curzon, 1999). Sallie King is professor of philosophy and religion at (...) James Madison University in Harrisonburg,Virginia. Paul Ingram is professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma,Washington. Both are past presidents of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. There is some irony that they have won this award named after Fred Streng, one of the founders of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, for a volume that is a essentially a festschrift honoring the work of Fred Streng. Following is an edited interview with both of the winners.Buddhist-Christian Studies: What made each of you want to put together this collection of essays?Paul Ingram: Before I met Fred at the first "East-West Religions in Encounter" meeting organized by David Chappell in 1980 in Hawai'i, I was well acquainted with his work in history of religions. Fred by this time was recognized as one of the most important scholars in the field, and I deeply admired his work, particularly his book on Nagarjuna. As it turns out, he had read some of my work on Pure Land Buddhism and was as interested in meeting me as I was in meeting him. We became friends and colleagues. Because of our mutual interest in interreligious dialogue in general and in Buddhism in particular, he suggested that we should co-edit a volume of selected papers from the 1980 conference. This volume, Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: Mutual Renewal and Transformation, was subsequentlypublishedby the Universityof Hawai'i Press in 1986 and is still in print.Sallie King: I had long admired Fred's book on Nagarjuna, which uniquely and powerfullyopenedup the religiousmeaningof Nagarjuna'swork.I later metFred through the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies and discovered that this admirable scholar was also a most admirable human being. We had lengthy, in-depth conversations when our paths crossed at various conferences. After Fred died, David Chappell, who had become the president of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, suggested to Paul and me that we edit a volume of this kind in honor of Fred. Neither Paul nor I hesitated. For my part, I felt such a loss when Fred died that I was very happy [End Page 313] and honored to have this opportunity to make a gesture of respect and gratitude toFred.Besides his obvious scholarly achievements, what were Fred Streng's other gifts?PI: Fred was always generous in his support of colleagues. Many of us in the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies are where we are professionally because of Fred's celebration of our work in all its diversity. He was one of the founding members of the Society, and he worked long and hard to make it a place for not only scholarly Buddhist-Christian encounter, but also a venue for nonspecialists to engage in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. All of us have been creatively transformed by Fred's work. After Fred's death in 1993, David Chappell invited Sallie and me to co-edit a volume of essays to honor Fred's memory and celebrate his work. We did so gladly and without reservation.SK: Fred was a very balanced person who had seriously engaged with all the important areas of human life. He was profoundly spiritual, seriously concerned about social issues, unfailingly kind and generous to others. Though he was at the top of his field, he remained straightforward and natural and always met even far-junior scholars as equals; he could not have been more encouraging and supportive. His spirituality, his scholarship, his engagement with social issues and his caring for others were all interdependent, mutually constructive of who he was and of his various projects.Were assignments for the book difficult to make?PI: The most difficult problem was selecting who to invite. Sallie and I identified five themes in Fred's scholarship, and we needed... (shrink)