Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. InLynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for ...white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a variety of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema, all which encouraged the horrific violence and gave it social acceptability. However, she also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images ultimately fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and the decline of the practice. Using a wide range of sources, including photos, newspaper reports, pro- and antilynching pamphlets, early films, and local city and church records, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.Wood expounds on the critical role lynching spectacles played in establishing and affirming white supremacy at the turn of the century, particularly in towns and cities experiencing great social instability and change. She also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and ultimately led to the decline of lynching. By examining lynching spectacles alongside both traditional and modern practices and within both local and national contexts, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.
Policing, incarceration, capital punishment: these forms of crime control were crucial elements of Jim Crow regimes. White southerners relied on them to assert and maintain racial power, which led to ...the growth of modern state bureaucracies that eclipsed traditions of local sovereignty. Friction between the demands of white supremacy and white southern suspicions of state power created a distinctive criminal justice system in the South, elements of which are still apparent today across the United States. In this collection, Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring present nine groundbreaking essays about the carceral system and its development over time. Topics range from activism against police brutality to the peculiar path of southern prison reform to the fraught introduction of the electric chair. The essays tell nuanced stories of rapidly changing state institutions, political leaders who sought to manage them, and African Americans who appealed to the regulatory state to protect their rights. Contributors: Pippa Holloway, Tammy Ingram, Brandon T. Jett, Seth Kotch, Talitha LeFlouria, Vivien Miller, Silvan Niedermeier, K. Stephen Prince, and Amy Louise Wood
Introduction This paper reports on the findings of the Nursing and Midwifery Exchange Program, initiated to promote rural and remote nursing and midwifery, and to facilitate clinical skills ...development and clinical collaboration between health services in Queensland, Australia. The project was undertaken over an 18-month period in one state of Australia, offering structured, temporary exchange of personnel between metropolitan and rural health services. Background Globally, there is an increasing awareness of nursing shortages, and with it, the need to ensure that nurses and midwives are prepared for specialist roles and practice. This is particularly important in rural and remote areas, where there are pre-existing barriers to access to services, and difficulties in attracting suitably qualified, permanent staff. Methods A mixed methods approach to the evaluation was undertaken with two cohorts. One cohort was the nurses and midwives who participated in the exchange (n = 24) and the other cohort were managers of the participating health services (n = 10). The nurses and midwives who participated in the exchange were asked to complete a questionnaire that included questions related to embeddedness and job satisfaction. The managers participated in a Delphi series of interviews. Results Those who participated in exchange reporting a higher score on the reported degree of understanding of rural client, which was accompanied with a moderate-to-large effect size estimate (d = 0.61). Nurses/midwives in the exchange group reported higher scores on their perceptions of aspects of their home community that would be lost if they had to leave, which was accompanied with a large effect size (d = 0.83). Overall, NMEP was reported by the participants to be a positive way to improve professional development opportunities for nurses and midwives. The findings also show the program supported practical collaboration and raised the profile of nursing and midwifery in rural areas. Conclusion Exchange programs support clinical and professional development, raising the awareness of different contexts of practice and related skills requirements, and thereby supporting a greater understanding of different nursing roles. In the light of increasingly complex care required by patients with chronic conditions being managed in community-based services, programs such as NMEP provide the opportunity to build collaborative networks between referring and referral centres as well as contribute to the ongoing skills development.
From 1890s to the 1930s, white mobs tortured and killed thousands of African Americans across the South. These lynchings, even those committed by the smallest of mobs, were ritualistic and ...performative, enacting and reinforcing the core beliefs of white supremacy. The narratives and photographs produced after lynchings likewise created and circulated representations of white domination and black subordination. Lynching was thus more than a social or political form of violence; it was a cultural spectacle that conveyed meaning to its white participants and spectators. This article, adapted from the author's 2009 book, examines the forces that gave rise to lynching spectacles and the cultural work those spectacles performed. It argues that, although the spectacle was reinforced through modern technologies, such as photography, lynching ultimately arose as a reaction against the transformations that modern life had brought to the South. Industrialization and urbanization had destabilized the racial hierarchy and fueled white fears of a black crime wave. Lynching was a violent means to assert order in the face of potential disorder. As such, it was rooted in traditional practices, such as notions of popular justice and public executions, and white southerners interpreted lynching spectacles through local customs and beliefs. Over time, the dissemination of lynching spectacle nationally through modern media by anti-lynching activists contributed to the decline of mob violence.
This paper traces the history of one specific photograph and its exhibition over time from the 1930s through the 1980s: that of the lynching of ‘Bootjack’ McDaniels, tortured to death by a white mob ...in Duck Hill, Mississippi, in 1937. I use that history to reflect more broadly on how lynching photographs have shaped popular consciousness about racist violence at different moments in time. They are able to do so, in good part, because of their iconographic qualities. These photographs, like many historical photographs, tend to detach past events from historical specificity and, subsequently, render the past into symbolic form, which allows new meanings to be imposed on them through the text and context that surround them. Those new meanings can direct viewers’ emotional responses to the images. This process of recontextualization allows for a meaningful ethical engagement with both historical and present-day suffering. In these ways, lynching photographs have been crucial to the formation of black historical memories of violence and injustice in the United States. Through this same process of recontextualization, I argue, lynching photographs make it possible for white Americans to engage ethically with racist violence, in the past and the present, through what I call “sympathetic spectatorship,” – an emotionally empathic form of looking that also involves an awareness of social difference.
Objective: The following research protocol evaluates the Queensland Health Nursing and Midwifery Exchange Program (NMEP) and evaluates how exposure to diverse clinical settings, may impact the ...nursing and midwifery workforce on individual and organisational levels.
Design: This protocol details a mixed methodology allowing for both quantitative and qualitative data. The study is being undertaken in three stages; a survey of the participating nurses and midwives; a systematic review; and a Delphi study with an expert review group.
Setting: The study is a Queensland wide study across rural/remote, regional and metropolitan locations.
Subjects: This study will follow approximately 70 nurses and midwives employed by Queensland Health from diverse areas and streams at various stages within their clinical career.
Interventions: Nurses and Midwives participate in a three or six-month professional exchange to a rural/remote or metropolitan location.
Main outcome measure(s): This study will evaluate the impact and sustainability of the NMEP program through measurement of burnout, job embeddedness, job strain, job satisfaction and attrition through a series of surveys. In addition to this, a systematic review and Delphi with executive experts will be conducted to consider a future pathway/model for nursing and midwifery exchange.
Results: This study has commenced and will be completed September of 2019.
Conclusion: The NMEP program is one novel approach to nursing and midwifery workforce concerns and looks to present excellent opportunities for the crossover of skills and ideas related to clinical, professional and service integration between metropolitan and rural practice.
Much of the violence that has been associated with the United States has had particular salience for the South, from its high homicide rates, or its bloody history of racial conflict, to southerners' ...popular attachment to guns and traditional support for capital punishment. With over 95 entries, this volume ofThe New Encyclopedia of Southern Cultureexplores the most significant forms and many of the most harrowing incidences of violence that have plagued southern society over the past 300 years.Following a detailed overview by editor Amy Wood, the volume explores a wide range of topics, such as violence against and among American Indians, labor violence, arson, violence and memory, suicide, and anti-abortion violence. Taken together, these entries broaden our understanding of what has driven southerners of various classes and various ethnicities to commit acts of violence, while addressing the ways in which southerners have conceptualized that violence, responded to it, or resisted it. This volume enriches our understanding of the culture of violence and its impact on ideas about law and crime, about historical tradition and social change, and about race and gender--not only in the South but in the nation as a whole.
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