In this provocative study, Robert Harrison provides new insight into grassroots reconstruction after the Civil War and into the lives of those most deeply affected, the newly emancipated African ...Americans. Harrison argues that the District of Columbia, far from being marginal to the Reconstruction story, was central to Republican efforts to reshape civil and political relations, with the capital a testing ground for Congressional policy makers. The study describes the ways in which federal agencies such as the Army and the Freedmen's Bureau attempted to assist Washington's freed population and shows how officials struggled to address the social problems resulting from large-scale African-American migration. It also sheds new light on the political processes that led to the abandonment of Reconstruction and the onset of black disfranchisement.
Building on the lessons of early labor leaders, civil rights volunteers, and political activists, Jim Diers has developed his own models and successful strategies for community development. Neighbor ...Power chronicles his involvement with Seattle s communities. This book not only gives hope that participatory democracy is possible, but it offers practical applications and invaluable lessons for ordinary, caring citizens who want to make a difference. It also provides government officials with inspiring stories and proven programs to help them embrace citizen activists as true partners.
Diers s experience is extensive. He began as a community organizer in 1976, then moved on to help establish and staff a system of consumer-elected medical center councils. This led him to Seattle city government, where he served under three mayors as the first director of the Department of Neighborhoods, recognized as the national leader in such efforts.
In the 1990s, Jim Diers helped Seattle neighborhoods face challenges ranging from gang violence to urban growth. The Neighborhood Matching Fund grew to support over 400 community self-help projects each year while a community-driven planning process involved 30,000 people. Diers provides evidence that productive community life is thriving, not just in Seattle, Washington, but in towns and cities across the globe. Both practical and inspiring, Neighbor Power offers real-life examples of how to build active, creative neighborhoods and enjoy the rich results of community empowerment.
In 1790, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson set out to build a new capital for the United States of America in just ten years. The area they selected on the banks of the Potomac River, a spot ...halfway between the northern and southern states, had few resources or inhabitants. Almost everything needed to build the federal city would have to be brought in, including materials, skilled workers, architects, and engineers. It was a daunting task, and these American Founding Fathers intended to do it without congressional appropriation.
Robert J. Kapsch’s beautifully illustrated book chronicles the early planning and construction of our nation’s capital. It shows how Washington, DC, was meant to be not only a government center but a great commercial hub for the receipt and transshipment of goods arriving through the Potomac Canal, then under construction. Picturesque plans would not be enough; the endeavor would require extensive engineering and the work of skilled builders.
By studying an extensive library of original documents—from cost estimates to worker time logs to layout plans—Kapsch has assembled a detailed account of the hurdles that complicated this massive project. While there have been many books on the architecture and planning of this iconic city, Building Washington explains the engineering and construction behind it.
Smelting is an industrial process involving the extraction of metal from ore. During this process, impurities in ore-including arsenic, lead, and cadmium-may be released from smoke stacks, ...contaminating air, water, and soil with toxic-heavy metals.
The problem of public health harm from smelter emissions received little official attention for much for the twentieth century. Though people living near smelters periodically complained that their health was impaired by both sulfur dioxide and heavy metals, for much of the century there was strong deference to industry claims that smelter operations were a nuisance and not a serious threat to health. It was only when the majority of children living near the El Paso, Texas, smelter were discovered to be lead-exposed in the early 1970s that systematic, independent investigation of exposure to heavy metals in smelting communities began. Following El Paso, an even more serious led poisoning epidemic was discovered around the Bunker Hill smelter in northern Idaho. In Tacoma, Washington, a copper smelter exposed children to arsenic-a carcinogenic threat.
Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research,Tainted Earthtraces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. Marianne Sullivan documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters as well as the long road to protecting public health and the environment. Placing the environmental and public health aspects of smelting in historical context, the book connects local incidents to national stories on the regulation of airborne toxic metals.
The nonferrous smelting industry has left a toxic legacy in the United States and around the world. Unless these toxic metals are cleaned up, they will persist in the environment and may sicken people-children in particular-for generations to come. The twentieth-century struggle to control smelter pollution shares many similarities with public health battles with such industries as tobacco and asbestos where industry supported science created doubt about harm, and reluctant government regulators did not take decisive action to protect the public's health.
While soil liquefaction is common in earthquakes, the case-history data required to train and test state-of-practice prediction models remains comparatively scarce, owing to the breadth and expense ...of data that comprise a single case history. The 2001 Nisqually, Washington, earthquake, for example, occurred in a metropolitan region and induced damaging liquefaction in the urban cores of Seattle and Olympia, yet case-history data have not previously been published. Accordingly, this article compiles 24 cone-penetration-test (CPT) case histories from free-field locations. The many methods used to obtain and process the data are detailed herein, as is the structure of the digital data set. The case histories are then analyzed by 18 existing liquefaction response models to determine whether any is better, and to compare model performance in Nisqually against global observations. While differences are measured, both between models and against prior global case histories, these differences are often statistically insignificant considering finite-sample uncertainty. This alludes to the general inappropriateness of championing models based on individual earthquakes or otherwise small data sets, and to the ongoing needs for additional case-history data and more rigorous adherence to best practices in model training and testing.
Seattle's first black resident was a sailor named Manuel Lopes
who arrived in 1858 and became the small community's first barber.
He left in the early 1870s to seek economic prosperity elsewhere,
but ...as Seattle transformed from a stopover town to a full-fledged
city, African Americans began to stay and build a community. By the
early twentieth century, black life in Seattle coalesced in the
Central District, a four-square-mile section east of downtown.
Black Seattle, however, was never a monolith. Through world wars,
economic booms and busts, and the civil rights movement, black
residents and leaders negotiated intragroup conflicts and had
varied approaches to challenging racial inequity. Despite these
differences, they nurtured a distinct African American culture and
black urban community ethos. With a new foreword and afterword,
this second edition of The Forging of a Black Community is
essential to understanding the history and present of the largest
black community in the Pacific Northwest.
University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 134
This volume examines an almost purely lithic record known in the Puget Sound region as the Olcott Complex. Only loosely described off and on ...since the early 1960s by a series of researchers, none of whom used the same analytical approach, the Olcott record has never been systematically analyzed until now. As a result, this book fills in enormous gaps in our knowledge regarding the age, mode of subsistence, and adaptive strategy of the Olcott Complex. Chatters and colleagues describe the intensive excavation of three Olcott sites that were threatened by highway construction. The book concludes by pulling those findings together to place the Olcott Complex into its proper place in regional prehistory. An exemplary model of how to conduct archaeological research, the volume demonstrates how important research issues can be addressed in a cultural resource management context.
Extensive appendices available online.
George Washington’s childhood is famously the most elusive part of his life story. For centuries biographers have struggled with a lack of period documentation and an absence of late-in-life ...reflection in trying to imagine Washington’s formative years.
In George Washington Written upon the Land , Philip Levy explores this most famous of American childhoods through its relationship to the Virginia farm where much of it took place. Using approaches from biography, archaeology, folklore, and studies of landscape and material culture, Levy focuses on how different ideas about Washington’s childhood functioned—what sorts of lessons they sought to teach and how different epochs and writers understood the man and the past itself.
In a suggestive and far-reaching final chapter, Levy argues that Washington was present at the onset of the Anthropocene—the geologic era when human activity began to have a significant impact on world ecosystems. Interpreting Washington’s childhood farm through the lens of “big” history, he encourages scholars to break down boundaries between science and social science and between human and nonhuman.
The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty,
nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepot of urban
slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave
...trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city's Black
women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by
race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty reveals how
these women--enslaved, fugitive, and free--imagined new identities
and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent
them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power.
Consulting newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist
records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Y. Nunley traces how
Black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop
their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery,
initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued
education, and participated in political work. In telling these
stories, Nunley places Black women at the vanguard of the history
of Washington, D.C., and the momentous transformations of
nineteenth-century America.
