This article calls for increased dialogue between social and environmental historians through an examination of the unintended inequalities caused by New Deal relief efforts in the United States during the Great Depression era. It does so not by exploring those directly involved in New Deal relief programmes, but rather by analysing the impact of such programmes on residents of local communities situated near New Deal work project sites. In particular, it traces how a dozen Civilian Conservation Corps camps in a state park thirty miles from New York City transformed the local environment, and in turn influenced the economies and political relationships of nearby local communities. The article argues that while working-class residents were unable to benefit financially from nearby New Deal relief work, middle- and upper-class business owners proved more successful. As a result of such economic inequalities, while working-class locals became increasingly critical of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, middle- and upper-class residents became grudgingly supportive. The article concludes by urging both social and environmental historians to undertake ‘histories from the ground up’ that pay as much attention to nature as they do to race, class, ethnicity and gender.
The Val66Met, G196A (rs6265) polymorphism in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor gene, BDNF, located at 11p13, has been associated with a wide range of cognitive functions. Yet, the pattern of results is complex and conflicting. In this study, we conducted a meta-analysis that included 23 publications containing 31 independent samples comprised of 7095 individuals. The phenotypes that were examined in this analysis covered a wide variety of cognitive functions and included indicators of general cognitive ability, memory, executive function, visual processing skills and cognitive fluency. The meta-analysis did not establish significant genetic associations between the Val66Met polymorphism and any of the phenotypes that were included.
DAVID H. AUTOR
JOHN J. DONOHUE III
STEWART J. SCHWAB
Our reanalysis supports the conclusions of Autor et al. (2003) that the Dertouzos and Karoly (1992) paper signicantly overestimates the disemployment effects of wrongful- discharge laws while the Miles (2000) study underestimates these effects. Our study also of- fers two methodological points relevant to the growing body of work using panel data to eval- uate the effects of state legislative and judicial pronouncements. First, we caution that using two-stage estimation techniques to instrument for legal variation may be a cure worse than the disease. While it is always a concern that legal rules may in part be endogenous, instrumenting for legal changes with anything other than a discontinuous, exogenous forcing variable is hazardous. In addition to risking spurious infer- ence, this approach often discards usable dis- crete variation induced by unanticipated changes in the law. Second, our analysis reveals that detailed legal evaluation of the innovations in legal doctrine is essential to estimating their economic impacts. By the time the courts issue a decision that fully elaborates the reasoning behind a new common-law doctrine, employers may already have responded to the initial precedent-setting decision.
"He returned to the cellar, selected one of the volumes at random, opened it to be certain that it was one of the dangerous books. He glanced at the page and saw the word Communist. Then he ripped the back cover off. The pages were thick and heavy, a%nd while they ripped quite easily page by page they would not come loose in handfuls... So patiently he ripped the pages out, a few at a time...Hare opened the iron door and stuffed the paper bundle inside. The free edges caught fire and curled backin flame from the smoldering ashy remains of the mornings trash."(FN1) This passage from the soon to be blacklisted Hollywood Ten writer Abraham Polonskys novel, A Season of Fear, delves into the crippling paranoia of infiltration by theideological other that seized the world as the Cold War intensified in theyears following World War II. As stern-faced presidents and commissars confronted each other a kind of bomb-shelter mentality enveloped citizens across the world. Naturally, as this fear and suspicion spread into many all occupations and discourses, librarianship was not spared; neither was the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), the prime international organization of librarianship, spared the turbulence of the Cold War. Claiming, and for the most part maintaining, a stand of neutrality, IFLA still suffered from the verbal darts and political skirmishes of an international community undergoing tremendous postwar changes and of the stifling Cold War. From the 1917 October Revolution until the demise of the totalitarian manifestation of communism in at the end of the 1980s, the main struggle engaging the political powers of this 20th century has been the conflict between capitalism and communism. There was a brief interlude during World War II in which the natural enemies formed an uneasy alliance to defeat the common enemy of Axis fascism.