The life of Howard Johnson, nicknamed "Stretch" because of his height (6'5"), epitomizes the cultural and political odyssey of a generation of African Americans who transformed the United States from ...a closed society to a multiracial democracy. Johnson's long-awaited memoir traces his path from firstborn of a multiclass/multiethnic" family in New Jersey to dancer in Harlem's Cotton Club to communist youth leader and, later, professor of Black studies. A Dancer in the Revolution is a powerful statement about Black resilience and triumph amid subtle and explicit racism in the United States. Johnson's engaging, beautifully written memoir provides a window into everyday life in Harlem--neighborhood life, arts and culture, and politics--from the 1930s to the 1970s, when the contemporary Black community was being formed. A Dancer in the Revolution explores Johnson's twenty-plus years in the Communist Party and illuminates in compelling detail how the Harlem branch functioned and flourished in the 1930s and '40s. Johnson thrived as a charismatic leader, using the connections he built up as an athlete and dancer to create alliances between communist organizations and a cross-section of the Black community. In his memoir, Johnson also exposes the homoerotic tourism that was a feature of Harlem's nightlife in the 1930s. Some of America's leading white literary, musical, and artistic figures were attracted to Harlem not only for the community's artistic creativity but to engage in illicit sex--gay and straight--with their Black counterparts. A Dancer in the Revolution is an invaluable contribution to the literature on Black political thought and pragmatism. It reveals the unique place that Black dancers and artists hold in civil rights pursuits and anti-racism campaigns in the United States and beyond. Moreover, the life of "Stretch" Johnson illustrates how political activism engenders not only social change but also personal fulfillment, a realization of dreams not deferred but rather pursued and achieved. Johnson's journey bears witness to critical periods and events that shaped the Black condition and American society in the process.
Incarceration and Health Massoglia, Michael; Pridemore, William Alex
Annual review of sociology,
01/2015, Volume:
41, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The expansion of the penal system has been one of the most dramatic trends in contemporary American society. A wealth of research has examined the impact of incarceration on a range of later life ...outcomes and has considered how the penal system has emerged as a mechanism of stratification and inequality in the United States. In this article, we review the literature from a comparatively new vein of this research: the impact of incarceration on health outcomes. We first consider the impact of incarceration on a range of individual outcomes, from chronic health conditions to mortality. We then consider outcomes beyond the individual, including the health of family members and community health outcomes. Next, we discuss mechanisms linking incarceration and health outcomes before closing with a consideration of limitations in the field and directions for future research.
Seasonal influenza vaccination rates are below the recommended targets, contributing to significant preventable harms. Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), a widely applied model of motivation to ...respond to threats, may provide some insights into strategies to increase the rate of vaccine uptake. Yet, previous research has omitted some of the proposed predictors of intention when applying this model to vaccination.
The aim of the study is to assess the utility of the PMT in predicting intention to obtain the seasonal influenza vaccine. This study will be the first to examine the role of all six PMT constructs in predicting intention to receive the seasonal influenza vaccine.
A cross-sectional study of 547 US residents was conducted using Amazon MTurk.
All constructs show significant bivariate correlations in the direction expected from the prior literature. Further examination of the theory within a linear regression model, however, found that perceived costs of vaccinating (i.e., response costs) did not uniquely account for variance in intention. All other components, perceived severity of and susceptibility to influenza, the perceived benefits of not vaccinating (i.e., maladaptive response rewards), the self-efficacy to vaccinate, and the perceived efficacy of vaccinating in preventing influenza (i.e., response efficacy) were unique predictors of intention. Overall, the PMT accounted for 62% of the variance in intention to vaccinate.
The study is the first to investigate influenza vaccination using all six theorised predictors of intention from the PMT. The findings highlight the importance of the simultaneous inclusion of all components of the model in assessing their potential utility as targets for intervention. Importantly, the results identify under-utilised constructs in the promotion of vaccine uptake, such as maladaptive response rewards, which should be considered targets for future intervention.
•We examine intention to receive a seasonal flu vaccination among US adults.•Protection motivation theory constructs accounted for 62% of variance in intention.•Response efficacy is the strongest predictor of intention to vaccinate.•Response costs are not a predictor of intention to receive an influenza vaccination.•Studies should consider maladaptive response rewards involved with not vaccinating.
Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Hainmueller, Jens; Hopkins, Daniel J
Annual review of political science,
01/2014, Volume:
17
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Immigrant populations in many developed democracies have grown rapidly, and so too has an extensive literature on natives' attitudes toward immigration. This research has developed from two ...theoretical foundations, one grounded in political economy, the other in political psychology. These two literatures have developed largely in isolation from one another, yet the conclusions that emerge from each are strikingly similar. Consistently, immigration attitudes show little evidence of being strongly correlated with personal economic circumstances. Instead, research finds that immigration attitudes are shaped by sociotropic concerns about its cultural impacts-and to a lesser extent its economic impacts-on the nation as a whole. This pattern of results has held up as scholars have increasingly turned to experimental tests, and it holds for the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Still, more work is needed to strengthen the causal identification of sociotropic concerns and to isolate precisely how, when, and why they matter for attitude formation. Adapted from the source document.
Little known outside a small community of insiders, the United Nations Association-USA has had an impact on both the UN and the US-UN relationship far greater than its size would suggest. James Wurst ...explores that impact as he traces the sometimes tortuous history of the UNA-USA from its earliest days to the present. Beginning with efforts in support of the creation of the United Nations--and covering the decades-long campaign to promote the UN to the US public, the role of Eleanor Roosevelt, the decline of popular support, Track II diplomacy with Iran and the Soviet Union, and much more--Wurst draws on a wealth of archival material and personal interviews to tell an honest, and long overdue, story of the UNA-USA's persistence, problems, and achievements.
Social Capital and Community Resilience Aldrich, Daniel P.; Meyer, Michelle A.
The American behavioral scientist (Beverly Hills),
02/2015, Volume:
59, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Despite the ubiquity of disaster and the increasing toll in human lives and financial costs, much research and policy remain focused on physical infrastructure–centered approaches to such events. ...Governmental organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security, United States Federal Emergency Management Agency, United States Agency for International Development, and United Kingdom’s Department for International Development continue to spend heavily on hardening levees, raising existing homes, and repairing damaged facilities despite evidence that social, not physical, infrastructure drives resilience. This article highlights the critical role of social capital and networks in disaster survival and recovery and lays out recent literature and evidence on the topic. We look at definitions of social capital, measurement and proxies, types of social capital, and mechanisms and application. The article concludes with concrete policy recommendations for disaster managers, government decision makers, and nongovernmental organizations for increasing resilience to catastrophe through strengthening social infrastructure at the community level.
Weather and climate extremes have been varying and changing on many different time scales. In recent decades, heat waves have generally become more frequent across the United States, while cold waves ...have been decreasing. While this is in keeping with expectations in a warming climate, it turns out that decadal variations in the number of U.S. heat and cold waves do not correlate well with the observed U.S. warming during the last century. Annual peak flow data reveal that river flooding trends on the century scale do not show uniform changes across the country. While flood magnitudes in the Southwest have been decreasing, flood magnitudes in the Northeast and north-central United States have been increasing. Confounding the analysis of trends in river flooding is multiyear and even multidecadal variability likely caused by both large-scale atmospheric circulation changes and basin-scale “memory” in the form of soil moisture. Droughts also have long-term trends as well as multiyear and decadal variability. Instrumental data indicate that the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the drought in the 1950s were the most significant twentieth-century droughts in the United States, while tree ring data indicate that the megadroughts over the twelfth century exceeded anything in the twentieth century in both spatial extent and duration. The state of knowledge of the factors that cause heat waves, cold waves, floods, and drought to change is fairly good with heat waves being the best understood.
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to understand the business relationships among the tourism industry stakeholders in conducting collaborative destination marketing activities.Design methodology ...approach - This research takes a case study approach by focusing on the investigation of the business relationships among tourism industry stakeholders in Elkhart County, Indiana. Interviews with five staff members from the Elkhart County Convention and Visitors Bureau as well as 32 tourism industry representatives were conducted in order to answer the research questions.Findings - The interview results indicate that different relationships of cooperation, competition and coopetition coexist among the tourism stakeholders. Four cooperative relationships with various degrees of formalization, integration, and structural complexity are involved. In addition, four factors have been identified as affecting this relationship configuration. The perceived relationship between cooperation and competition was also found to be vital with reference to the marketing of a destination.Research limitations implications - Given the exploratory nature and case study approach of the research, caution is required in interpreting the results of the study, particularly in generalizing the study results to other destinations.Originality value - The paper provides practical implications to tourism businesses in their efforts to collectively market their destination, particularly in relation to how they balance the relationship between cooperation and competition, individual benefits and common benefits in order to achieve success for both the destination and their individual businesses.
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have laid the foundation for investigations into the biology of complex traits, drug development and clinical guidelines. However, the majority of discovery ...efforts are based on data from populations of European ancestry
. In light of the differential genetic architecture that is known to exist between populations, bias in representation can exacerbate existing disease and healthcare disparities. Critical variants may be missed if they have a low frequency or are completely absent in European populations, especially as the field shifts its attention towards rare variants, which are more likely to be population-specific
. Additionally, effect sizes and their derived risk prediction scores derived in one population may not accurately extrapolate to other populations
. Here we demonstrate the value of diverse, multi-ethnic participants in large-scale genomic studies. The Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) study conducted a GWAS of 26 clinical and behavioural phenotypes in 49,839 non-European individuals. Using strategies tailored for analysis of multi-ethnic and admixed populations, we describe a framework for analysing diverse populations, identify 27 novel loci and 38 secondary signals at known loci, as well as replicate 1,444 GWAS catalogue associations across these traits. Our data show evidence of effect-size heterogeneity across ancestries for published GWAS associations, substantial benefits for fine-mapping using diverse cohorts and insights into clinical implications. In the United States-where minority populations have a disproportionately higher burden of chronic conditions
-the lack of representation of diverse populations in genetic research will result in inequitable access to precision medicine for those with the highest burden of disease. We strongly advocate for continued, large genome-wide efforts in diverse populations to maximize genetic discovery and reduce health disparities.
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