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Henry David Thoreau, one of America’s most prominent environmental writers, supported himself as a land surveyor for much of his life, parceling land that would be sold off to loggers. In the ...only study of its kind, Patrick Chura analyzes this seeming contradiction to show how the best surveyor in Concord combined civil engineering with civil disobedience.
Placing Thoreau's surveying in historical context, Thoreau the Land Surveyor explains the cultural and ideological implications of surveying work in the mid-nineteenth century. Chura explains the ways that Thoreau's environmentalist disposition and philosophical convictions asserted themselves even as he reduced the land to measurable terms and acted as an agent for bringing it under proprietary control. He also describes in detail Thoreau's 1846 survey of Walden Pond. By identifying the origins of Walden in--of all places--surveying data, Chura re-creates a previously lost supporting manuscript of this American classic.
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The Kent State and Jackson State shootings of May 1970 were not directly related, yet the two atrocities have become “indelibly linked” in popular memory. This article draws from recent oral ...histories and ethnographic observations of commemorative events to shift the analytical frame toward attention to essential differences in the shooting contexts, arguing that Jackson State was not “the South's Kent State” but a “Mississippi phenomenon” best understood as a portent of ideologies at the core of the current Black Lives Matter movement.
The long overdue attention now being given antiblack police brutality offers a vocabulary for reinterpreting Jackson State, enabling new conclusions. First, Kent State did not cause Jackson state, but the killings in Ohio did prompt a false equating of events in Kent and Jackson as similar antiwar protests. Second, this process of collective remembering, furthered by some discourses emanating from Kent State University, obfuscates intrinsic truths about race in America. Finally, conversation surrounding Black Lives Matter offers the chance to reassess the tragedies and remember them in ways that bring clarity to political and cultural structures of the present day.
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