Marine debris is a persistent problem in many coastal areas of the United States. There are a variety of potential economic losses associated with marine debris, including effects on commercial ...fisheries, effects on waterfront property values, costs incurred by local governments and volunteer organizations to remove and dispose of marine debris, and more general "existence" values reflecting the public's preference for a clean environment. This book discusses marine debris and steps to mitigate its effects.
Even in the midst of the Civil War, its battlefields were being dedicated as hallowed ground. Today, those sites are among the most visited places in the United States. In contrast, the battlegrounds ...of the Revolutionary War had seemingly been forgotten in the aftermath of the conflict in which the nation forged its independence. Decades after the signing of the Constitution, the battlefields of Yorktown, Saratoga, Fort Moultrie, Ticonderoga, Guilford Courthouse, Kings Mountain, and Cowpens, among others, were unmarked except for crumbling forts and overgrown ramparts. Not until the late 1820s did Americans begin to recognize the importance of these places.
InMemories of War, Thomas A. Chambers recounts America's rediscovery of its early national history through the rise of battlefield tourism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Travelers in this period, Chambers finds, wanted more than recitations of regimental movements when they visited battlefields; they desired experiences that evoked strong emotions and leant meaning to the bleached bones and decaying fortifications of a past age. Chambers traces this impulse through efforts to commemorate Braddock's Field and Ticonderoga, the cultivated landscapes masking the violent past of the Hudson River valley, the overgrown ramparts of Southern war sites, and the scenic vistas at War of 1812 battlefields along the Niagara River. Describing a progression from neglect to the Romantic embrace of the landscape and then to ritualized remembrance, Chambers brings his narrative up to the beginning of the Civil War, during and after which the memorialization of such sites became routine, assuming significant political and cultural power in the American imagination.
Behavioral health and substance use disorders affect approximately 20 percent of the U.S. population. Of those with a substance use disorder, approximately 60 percent also have a mental health ...disorder. Together, these disorders account for a substantial burden of disability, have been associated with an increased risk of morbidity and mortality from other chronic illnesses, and can be risk factors for incarceration, homelessness, and death by suicide. In addition, they can compromise a person's ability to seek out and afford health care and adhere to treatment recommendations.
To explore data, policies, practices, and systems that affect the diagnosis and provision of care for mental health and substance use disorders, the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine created the Forum on Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders. The forum activities are expected to advance the discussion and generate potential ideas on ways to address many of the most persistent problems in delivering mental health and substance use services. The inaugural workshop, held October 15-16, 2019, in Washington, DC, explored the key policy challenges that impede efforts to improve care for those individuals with mental health and substance use disorders. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop.
The Limits of Libertychronicles the formation of the U.S.-Mexico border from the perspective of the "mobile peoples" who assisted in determining the international boundary from both sides in the ...mid-nineteenth century. In this historic and timely study, James David Nichols argues against the many top-down connotations that borders carry, noting that the state cannot entirely dominate the process of boundary marking. Even though there were many efforts on the part of the United States and Mexico to define the new international border as a limit, mobile peoples continued to transgress the border and cross it with impunity.Transborder migrants reimagined the dividing line as a gateway to opportunity rather than as a fence limiting their movement. Runaway slaves, Mexican debtpeones, and seminomadic Native Americans saw liberty on the other side of the line and crossed in search of greater opportunity. In doing so they devised their own border epistemology that clashed with official understandings of the boundary. These divergent understandings resulted in violence with the crossing of vigilantes, soldiers, and militias in search of fugitives and runaways.The Limits of Libertyexplores how the border attracted migrants from both sides and considers border-crossers together, whereas most treatments thus far have considered discrete social groups along the border. Mining Mexican archival sources, Nichols is one of the first scholars to explore the nuance of negotiation that took place between the state and mobile peoples in the formation of borders.
A highly engaging account of the developments-not only legal, but also socioeconomic, political, and cultural-that gave rise to Americans' distinctively lawyer-driven legal cultureWhen Americans ...imagine their legal system, it is the adversarial trial-dominated by dueling larger-than-life lawyers undertaking grand public performances-that first comes to mind. But as award-winning author Amalia Kessler reveals in this engrossing history, it was only in the turbulent decades before the Civil War that adversarialism became a defining American practice and ideology, displacing alternative, more judge-driven approaches to procedure. By drawing on a broad range of methods and sources-and by recovering neglected influences (including from Europe)-the author shows how the emergence of the American adversarial legal culture was a product not only of developments internal to law, but also of wider socioeconomic, political, and cultural debates over whether and how to undertake market regulation and pursue racial equality. As a result, adversarialism came to play a key role in defining American legal institutions and practices, as well as national identity.
For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses in search of cheap ...labor and almost no oversight. Imperial Food Products was one of those businesses. The company set up shop in Hamlet in the 1980s. Workers who complained about low pay and hazardous working conditions at the plant were silenced or fired. But jobs were scarce in town, so workers kept coming back, and the company continued to operate with impunity. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the never-inspected chicken-processing plant a stone's throw from Hamlet's city hall burst into flames. Twenty-five people perished that day behind the plant's locked and bolted doors. It remains one of the deadliest accidents ever in the history of the modern American food industry. Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past in the United States. However, as award-winning historian Bryant Simon shows, the pursuit of cheap food merged with economic decline in small towns across the South and the nation to devalue laborers and create perilous working conditions. The Hamlet fire and its aftermath reveal the social costs of antiunionism, lax regulations, and ongoing racial discrimination. Using oral histories, contemporary news coverage, and state records, Simon has constructed a vivid, potent, and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time that exposes how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was destined to result in tragedy.
Preparing for Future Products of Biotechnology National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division on Earth and Life Studies; Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology ...
06/2017
eBook
Open access
Between 1973 and 2016, the ways to manipulate DNA to endow new characteristics in an organism (that is, biotechnology) have advanced, enabling the development of products that were not previously ...possible. What will the likely future products of biotechnology be over the next 5?10 years? What scientific capabilities, tools, and/or expertise may be needed by the regulatory agencies to ensure they make efficient and sound evaluations of the likely future products of biotechnology?
Preparing for Future Products of Biotechnology analyzes the future landscape of biotechnology products and seeks to inform forthcoming policy making. This report identifies potential new risks and frameworks for risk assessment and areas in which the risks or lack of risks relating to the products of biotechnology are well understood.
Since the 2008 global economic crisis, historians have embraced the challenge of making visible the invisible hand of the market. This renewed interest in the politics of political economy makes it ...all the more timely to remind ourselves that debates over free trade and protection were just as controversial in the early United States as they have once again become, and that lobbying, then as now, played an important part in Lincoln’s government of the people, by the people, for the people. In Lobbyists and the Making of US Tariff Policy, 1816−1861 , Daniel Peart reveals how active lobbyists were in Washington throughout the antebellum era. He describes how they involved themselves at every stage of the making of tariff policy, from setting the congressional agenda, through the writing of legislation in committee, to the final vote. Considering policymaking as a process, Peart focuses on the importance of rules and timing, the critical roles played by individual lawmakers and lobbyists, and the high degree of uncertainty that characterized this formative period in American political development. The debate about tariff policy, Peart explains, is an unbroken thread that runs throughout the pre–Civil War era, connecting disparate individuals and events and shaping the development of the United States in myriad ways. Duties levied on imports provided the federal government with the major part of its revenue from the ratification of the Constitution to the close of the nineteenth century. More controversially, they also offered protection to domestic producers against foreign competition, at the expense of increased costs for consumers and the risk of retaliation from international trade partners. Ultimately, this book uses the tariff issue to illustrate the critical role that lobbying played within the antebellum policymaking process.
From the days of steamship travel to Palestine to today's evangelical Christian tours of Jesus's birthplace, the relationship between the United States and the Holy Land has become one of the world's ...most consequential international alliances. While the political side of U.S.-Israeli relations has long played out on the world stage, the relationship, as Shalom Goldman shows in this illuminating cultural history, has also played out on actual stages. Telling the stories of the American superstars of pop and high culture who journeyed to Israel to perform, lecture, and rivet fans, Goldman chronicles how the creative class has both expressed and influenced the American relationship with Israel. The galaxy of stars who have made headlines for their trips includes Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Leonard Bernstein, James Baldwin, Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, Madonna, and Scarlett Johansson. While diverse socially and politically, they all served as prisms for the evolution of U.S.-Israeli relations, as Israel, the darling of the political and cultural Left in the 1950s and early 1960s, turned into the darling of the political Right from the late 1970s. Today, as relations between the two nations have only intensified, stars must consider highly fraught issues, such as cultural boycotts, in planning their itineraries.
