Duke University Press Log

Priscilla Wald on the Outbreak Narrative

The news that the first case of ebola in the United States has been diagnosed has the media in a frenzy and some people in Dallas panicking: taking their children out of school, calling for border closures and general quarantines. Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University, is not surprised by the reaction, which follows a narrative very similar to past epidemics, and she counsels in this Canada.com story that it is important to try to quell people's fears. In light of the epidemic, and the predictable reactions to it, we offer an excerpt from Wald's 2008 book Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative in which she explains her concept of "the outbreak narrative."

 

Contagion is more than an epidemiological fact. It is also a foundational concept in the study of religion and of society, with a long history of explaining how beliefs circulate in social interactions. The concept of contagion evolved throughout the twentieth century through the commingling of theories about microbes and attitudes about social change. Communicable disease compels attention—for scientists and the lay public alike—not only because of the devastation it can cause but also because the circulation of microbes materializes the transmission of ideas. The interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community. Disease emergence dramatizes the dilemma that inspires the most basic human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact.

The outbreak narrative—in its scientific, journalistic, and fictional incarnations—follows a formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment. As epidemiologists trace the routes of the microbes, they catalog the spaces and interactions of global modernity. Microbes, spaces, and interactions blend together as they animate the landscape and motivate the plot of the outbreak narrative: a contradictory but compelling story of the perils of human interdependence and the triumph of human connection and cooperation, scientific authority and the evolutionary advantages of the microbe, ecological balance and impending disaster.

The conventions of the paradigmatic story about newly emerging infections have evolved out of earlier accounts of epidemiological efforts to address widespread threats of communicable disease. While I use "the outbreak narrative" to refer to that paradigmatic story, which followed the identification of HIV, I use "outbreak narratives" broadly to designate those epidemiological stories. I return to the early years of bacteriology and public health in the United States to trace the impact of the discovery of the microbe on attitudes toward social interactions and collective identity that characterize the outbreak narrative of disease emergence.

Outbreak narratives and the outbreak narrative have consequences. As they disseminate information, they affect survival rates and contagion routes. They promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, populations, locales (regional and global), behaviors, and lifestyles, and they change economies. They also influence how both scientists and the lay public understand the nature and consequences of infection, how they imagine the threat, and why they react so fearfully to some disease outbreaks and not others at least as dangerous and pressing. It is therefore important to understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative and to consider how it shapes accounts of disease emergence across genres and media.

Read the entire introduction here. 

Copyright Duke University Press, 2008.

Call for Papers: French Historical Studies issue on Archives

The editors of French Historical Studies seek articles for a special issue on the theme of archives and archival practice in French history to appear in the spring 2017. Recent transnational scholarship on archives has alerted us to the ways in which archives are not neutral sites but ones where knowledge is constructed and negotiated. Discussions about whether or not cultural history has lured historians away from the archives have missed an underlying reality: historians of France and the French empire now use a wider range of public and private holdings beyond national, departmental, defense, and colonial archives. These archives often require different strategies for entry and use. To note only the most obvious differences: finding aids have not always been compiled by trained archivists and classificatory schemes vary considerably depending on organizations’ needs. Access to outsiders and the communication of documents may be limited or restricted. Technology is also transforming both the archive itself and access to the archive.

The editors invite articles that situate these issues in the context of French history and historiography. More than just tales from the archives, articles will reflect authors’ experiences in archives that illuminate both archival practice and ways of doing French history. Among the various types of non- traditional archives, we invite authors to consider church and missionary archives, corporate archives, associations’ archives, mayors’ offices and communal records, hospital archives and medical records, private papers, and colonial archives outside Aix. We also welcome articles on non-traditional ways of using traditional archives, on the impact of digitization and other technologies on archival practice, and on the encounter between historians and archivists.

Queries about submission and other matters regarding this special issue should be addressed to the guest editors, Sarah Curtis (scurtis[at]sfsu[dot]edu) and Stephen Harp (sharp[at]uakron[dot]edu).

To submit an article, please visit www.editorialmanager.com/fhs. After registering, follow the submission instructions under “Instructions for Authors” on the website. Articles may be either in English or in French but must conform to French Historical Studies style (for details, see www.dukepress.edu/fhs) and must be accompanied by titles and 150-word abstracts in both languages. Manuscripts should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words excluding notes and no longer than 10,000 words including notes. For the inclusion of illustrations, written permission must be obtained from the relevant persons or institutions for both print and online publication. The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2015.

Tikkun Wins 2014 Magazine of the Year Award

Tikkun Managing Editor Alana Price accepts the RNA 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award. Credit: Dawn Cherie Araujo.

Congratulations to Tikkun, winner of the prestigious 2014 "Magazine of the Year: Overall Excellence in Religion Coverage" award from the Religion Newswriters Association! The Religion Newswriters Association's awards recognize journalism excellence by measuring a magazine's grasp on a diversity of religion issues.

Tikkun, published quarterly, offers analysis and commentary that strive to bridge the cultural divide between religious and secular progressives. By bringing together voices from many disparate religious and secular humanist communities to talk about social transformation, political change, and the evolution of our religious traditions, Tikkun creates space for the emergence of a religious Left to respond to the influence of the religious Right and the distortions of global capitalism, while simultaneously critiquing reductionist views that sometimes prevail in liberal and progressive circles.

The most recent issue of Tikkun is available online here. To subscribe to Tikkun, visit www.tikkun.org.

To learn more about the award, please visit www.tikkun.org/rna.

 

Call for Papers: Archives and Archiving, a special issue of TSQ

This issue of TSQ will investigate practical and theoretical dimensions of archiving transgender phenomena and will ask what constitutes “trans* archives” or “trans* archival practices.”

While transgender-related experiences have long been captured by archives to some extent, the last few decades have witnessed an increased commitment to collecting trans* materials. Consequently, sizable trans* collections can now be found in a range of institutional contexts including grassroots archives, nonprofit organizations, and university-based collections.

Given this trend, myriad practical considerations that trans* materials present for archiving warrant further attention. What should or should not be included in trans* archives? What are the best practices for acquiring, processing, preserving, and making transgender materials accessible? Given practical limitations of space and money, how do we decide what to prioritize? And who decides? What are the implications for history when archivists make such decisions? How should archives negotiate ethical concerns specific to trans* archives? What relationship—if any—do trans* materials have to broader LGBTQ collections? What cataloguing tools are available and how do they obscure, distort, or make meaning of the lived experiences of trans* people? What are the benefits and limitations of using “transgender” or “trans*” as umbrella terms in an archival context? How are archivists and archival practices changed by the challenges of dealing with trans* materials? What role can digital technologies play in collecting and accessing trans* materials, particularly born-digital materials?

These practical considerations would be incomplete without a closely related theoretical exploration of trans* archiving. How, for example, are bodies representable (or unrepresentable) through archival documents? How can embodiment itself be considered an archive of memory and feeling, a sedimentation of social practices, a living medium for the transmission of cultural forms? What power do archives have in shaping popular understandings of transgender phenomena? How are researchers affected by their encounters with archival materials? How do archives steer researchers in particular ways with metadata, organizational systems, and finding aids? Can archives help construct community and personal identity? Does digitization inherently change trans* historical artifacts?

We welcome submissions of full-length academic articles on a wide range of topics related to trans* archives and archiving. Such topics might include:

• practical and philosophical considerations for developing transgender collections independently or within broader archives
• how transgender archival materials intersect with and depart from LGBQ archival materials
• critical reflections on working in trans* archives and/or with trans* archival materials
• sex, desire, and pornographic collections
• considerations of the body within and as represented by archives
• understandings of embodiment itself as an archive of affects, memory, practices, and social forms
• capturing lived experiences with archival artifacts and ephemera
• recontextualizing historical materials within the context of the archive
• affective encounters
• ethics of historical representation
• archival temporality and considerations of time and timeliness
• the role of archivists
• institutionality of government, state, academic, non-profit, and grassroots collections
• processing and interpreting trans*-related materials
• hidden collections
• archival language practices, cataloguing, and classification
• digital technologies within archives, digital archiving, and archiving born-digital materials
• intersectional identities
• access and accessibility
• archival activism

We will also consider for publication shorter essays, opinion pieces, first-person accounts, practical advice, how-to guides, or interesting archival documents. We encourage contributions from a wide range of authors including academics, independent researchers, archivists, and activists.

Please send a complete manuscript by October 15, 2014 to tsqjournal[at]gmail[dot]com along with a brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 5,000 to 7,000 words, and 1,000 to 2,000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed by e-mail to both guest editors for the issue: Aaron Devor (ahdevor[at]uvic[dot]ca) and K.J. Rawson (kjrawson[at]holycross[dot]edu). We plan to respond to submissions by early January 2015. Final revisions will be due by March 1, 2015.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces.

To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, click here. For information about subscriptions, click here.

Linda Williams on The Wire

In today's guest post, Linda Williams, Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, writes about why she loves the HBO series The Wire. Her new book is On The Wire, the latest installment in our Spin Offs series.

In the fall of 2007, I was laid up in bed. For the first time in my life since childhood I had time to watch television. A friend had brought me an inspired gift: bootlegs of the first three seasons of The Wire. I proceeded to watch an episode each evening until I ran out. As soon as I could I purchased the last two seasons and continued to steadily feed a growing habit. The series ran on HBO from 2002 to 2008, but ran in a more concentrated time on my bedroom TV from 2007 to 2008. By the time I finished watching I was more than a fan, I was a convert. The project of my book, On The Wire, has been to understand to what I had been converted.

Through the microcosm of one decaying American city, The Wire reveals the interconnected truths of many institutional failures: a rampant drug trade that police cannot curtail, the devaluation of work measured in declining unions, a cynical city government that raises and then crushes the hope of reform, the poignant waste of schools and the failure of education and, finally, a media that cannot report on the truth of any of the above, let alone see the connections among them, although The Wire itself does. The series digs deeply into character without making private virtue or evil the final cause of narrative outcomes, thus putting an unusual spin on melodramatic conventions. I have never seen anything so absorbing, so complex, so simultaneously challenging and gratifying coming from either the big or little screen.

Subtle nuances of race, class and language are made possible by a locale in which blacks are the majority of the citizens, yet fixing things is not a matter of simply electing more black politicians. The usual racial melodramas of black vs. white are thus not the crude affairs they have tended to be in most movies and television. Race, for example, cannot be reduced to a problem of “racism.” It is inseparable from class, the plague of drugs, the decline of work and the failures of government, education and media. Nevertheless, the series tantalizingly holds out the hope of change, the hope of a better social justice. Indeed, it is simultaneously animated by the quest for this justice and deeply cynical about its achievement. A profound understanding of education both in and out of school makes learning, as it should be, the key to change while a distinctive rootedness in the specific locality of Baltimore gives the series a social solidity lacking in any other work on television.

Journalist Joe Klein claims in the DVD features on the final episode that “The Wire should win the Nobel Prize for literature!” Simon himself calls the work a “visual novel” (though sometimes also a Greek tragedy). Literary critics, such as Walter Benn Michaels, have followed suit. In a lament about the failure of the American novel to tell stories that matter to the neoliberal present, Michaels has claimed that The Wire is the “most serious and ambitious fictional narrative of the twenty-first century.” Sociologists Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson also see the series as literature, arguing that it “is part of a long line of literary works that are often able to capture the complexity of urban life in ways that have eluded many social scientists.”

The series has the ability, like Dickens, Wright, Zola and Dreiser, to give dramatic resonance to a wide range of interconnected social strata, and the different behaviors and speech of these strata over broad swaths of world and time. Yet at the same time it seems feeble to describe The Wire as our greatest novel (never written), or, as Fredric Jameson does, to extol its “refusal to be ‘realist’ in the traditional mimetic and replicative sense.” Like the comparison to Greek tragedy, much of this praise borrows a literary prestige that corresponds to the series’ excellence but not closely enough to its actual serial television cultural form. Instead, I argue that we should attend to how The Wire grew and what it grew out of—first as a form of journalism, then out of the conventional melodrama of crime genre. In seeking to articulate what is so exceptional about The Wire, I believe it is first necessary to appreciate what is conventional about it: seriality, televisuality and melodrama.

Considering Theory

Today's guest post is by Jason Potts and Daniel Stout, editors of Theory Aside. Jason Potts is Assistant Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and Daniel Stout is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. Here, they discuss the recent launch of The CI Review, and the history—and future—of theory.

 

“Sometimes there is an idea whose time has come, and come again,” writes W.J.T. Mitchell in his editorial note accompanying the June 2014 launch of The CI Review, the new online-only forum from Critical Inquiry. We couldn’t agree more--and, as the editors of Theory Aside, we are happy to see Critical Inquiry putting its considerable weight behind a project that sounds a lot like ours. The goal, in Theory Aside, is to think about some of the thinkers and lines of inquiry that got lost during the canonization of critical theory. In particular, we were concerned that the very dynamics that had made the age of Theory so exciting were also contributing to the speediness of its much-discussed death. Once it began to understand itself as the purveyor of radical newness and to promise the wholesale repeal of outdated methodologies, theory began to treat ideas as especially perishable things, as if they arrived with best-before dates after which they needed to be discarded and replaced. Radical innovation, or nothing: Theory, we argued, both rose (fast) and fell (steeply) because it made “the paradigm shift” the model of intellectual progress.

How encouraging, then, to have The CI Review, a venue in which thoughts whose time has come again might be revisited. And encouraging, too, to see things like the new volume from the University Press of Kentucky, Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory, a collection devoted to “reinterpreting canonical and current texts [in order] to demonstrate fresh interpretations and narratives.” What should be saluted about efforts like these is their acknowledgement of the need for sustained self-reflection about the boundaries of humanistic attention. Theoretical inquiry, Mitchell implies, has construed itself too narrowly, has been for too long “cloistered around a fixed canon of literary and artistic masterpieces.” What’s needed is the extension of our critical energies outward into what he calls “Humanities in the expanded field.”

The encounters that might be generated by putting theoretical texts into conversations about “climate change and techno-science” will be exciting. But we also hope that The CI Review, in its desire to present work that is “conceptually ambitious” and “important, challenging, and innovative,” will manage not only to extend older ideas into new terrains but to reserve some space for considering ways we might expand the canon of theory itself. As essays from Eve Sedgwick, Anne-Lise Francois, Natalie Melas, and Elizabeth Povinelli reveal, theory might have had a different chronology; as Simon Jarvis, Pheng Cheah, Irene Tucker, Jordan Stein, and Karen Beckman demonstrate, whole approaches and methodologies have been left outside of what we commonly recognize as theory; and as William Flesch, Mark Hansen, Heather Love, and Frances Ferguson show, there is much to be learned by revisiting thinkers whose moment seems to have passed (e.g., I.A. Richards, Irving Goffman, Alfred North Whitehead) as well those many of us have yet to meet (e.g. George Ainslie, A.N. Veselovsky). As Ian Balfour argues, our prosecutions of the theoretical canon might demand that we write theory in a new way.

We have, we’re suggesting, more options than we’ve tended to acknowledge. “Sometimes there is an idea whose time has come, and come again.” But there are also theoretical ideas that never registered as important. We should give our attention to those, too.

Duke University Press at the 2014 IFLA World Library and Information Congress

L to R: IFLA Attendees Elizabeth Chapman (University of Sheffield) and Lauren Smith (University of Strathclyde) with Library Relations & Sales Manager Kim Steinle at the Duke Univesrity Press booth at IFLA.

Last week we attended the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Lyon, France. This year's IFLA Congress was the best attended in the last several years, with 3,900 delegates from all over the world, including France, Korea, Kazakhstan, China, Japan, Uzbekistan, Uganda, Nigeria, Russia, Trinidad & Tobago, Scandinavia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

We attend this conference in order to meet librarians from around the world, learn about issues that affect or are important to the global library community, and to promote our Press internationally. Next year's Congress will be held in Cape Town, South Africa and the 2016 Congress will be held in Columbus, Ohio.

Frances Pinter, Executive Director of Knowledge Unlatched, accepting the 2014 IFLA/Brill Open Access Award at IFLA

IFLA/Brill Open Access Award
Congratulations to Knowledge Unlatched for winning the IFLA/Brill Open Access Award! Knowledge Unlatched "depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust... The Title Fee represents the basic cost of publishing a book. Because the Title Fee is a fixed amount, as more libraries participate in Knowledge Unlatched, the per-library cost of ‘unlatching’ each title declines." Knowledge Unlatched was chosen as the most outstanding and game-changing initiative in the field. Read the full press release here.

Duke University Press is very excited to be a part of this program! We've included four books in the Knowledge Unlatched pilot program: Bilogical Relatives by Sarah Franklin, In Search of the Amazon by Seth Garfield, My Voice is My Weapon by David McDonald, and Ever Faithful by David Sartorius. 

Volcanic Eruptions and Environmental Disasters in Literature and History

Cataclysmic events, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which happened on this day, have fascinated people for thousands of years. Individuals have attempted to express this captivation in various ways from Pliny the Younger, who survived the Vesuvius eruption and subsequently wrote in detail about his experience, to the leaders of the French Revolution, who invoked the powerful symbolism of a natural, unstoppable force that volcanoes represent. Writing about natural disasters helps people move on, but not forget, these catastrophes. As these experiences are immortalized over time, they come to symbolize hope, survival, power and destruction. Poetics Today and French Historical Studies delve further into these instances of expression and demonstrate the link between why people write about natural disasters such as Mount Vesuvius’ eruption and how that calamity empowers and embodies events long after.

In Francoise Lavocat’s “Narratives of Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period: Awareness of Historicity and the Emergence of Interpretative Viewpoints,” he discusses the reasons and ways people write about natural disasters:

Braccini’s narrative of the Naples volcanic eruption illustrates the narrator-witness’s need to explain his personal, intellectual, and even emotional perception of a given event. The 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius gave rise to many narratives that emphasized the contrast between “the curiosity” of the witness-narrator and the credulity of Neapolitans nurtured by legends. This contrast was inspired by Pliny the Younger’s attitude toward the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. It is also by reference to Pliny that the taste for observation, even close to the eruption site, is asserted and staged, as can be seen in Braccini’s writing. Another priest, Angelo Eugenii da Perugia, compares his “experience” of the “natural effects” of the eruption to the “extravagant exaggerations” of his contemporaries, who interpret the phenomenon as the beginning of the Apocalypse. No one denies the existence of divine causes, but nor does this prevent the consideration of secondary causes. Braccini goes to a library in Naples and does a public reading of Pliny’s letter about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, declaring to his fellow citizens: “Here is a description,58 1550 years old, that corresponds exactly to what you have before your eyes today”. In the case of the eruption of Vesuvius, the repetition of this catastrophe and the comparison it invites between AD 79 and 1629 beg for demystification: at least, the repetition suggests that this eruption, similar to a previous one in antiquity, is not the last and so very unlikely to be the Apocalypse. Braccini’s rational point of view thus partly secularizes the interpretation. The historical dimension is fundamental to this new approach to catastrophe, expressed several times around 1630, regarding the eruption of Vesuvius and the plague in northern Italy. Most narratives include an appendix that lists previous catastrophes in chronological order,60 focusing on disasters that occurred in the recent past (especially the sixteenth century) while ignoring biblical and mythical accounts. Catastrophes are no longer prophetic of other catastrophes.

Read more from “Narratives of Catastrophe” here.

In “Mountain, Become a Volcano: The Image of the Volcano in the Rhetoric of the French Revolution,” Mary Ashburn Miller establishes a relationship between the language of natural history and the political rhetoric of the French Revolution by tracing the iconography of the volcano throughout the revolutionary period:

Le jugement dernier des rois, a play written by Sylvain Maréchal, opened to enthusiastic reviews at the Theater of the Republic in Vendémiaire of Year II. Maréchal subtitled his play ‘a prophecy in one act.’ The journalist Prudhomme also embraced the future foreseen by the playwright and hoped for by the supportive Committee of Public Safety. ‘The theatrical fiction will soon become historical fact,’ he wrote. The overthrow of Europe’s kings, their return to an ‘uncivilized’ state, and their ultimate destruction by natural forces was fiction presented to, and patronized by, a broad French public, playing in Beauvais, Compiègne, Grenoble, Le Mans, Lille, Metz, and Rouen. And the volcano, symbol of revolutionary fervor and destruction, became the ultimate demonstration of nature’s justice, annihilating the monarchs in a single, terrifying, and glorious moment described in the play’s liner notes: ‘The explosion takes place: the fire attacks the kings from all sides; they fall, consumed in the innards of the opened earth.’ The quite literal fall of the monarchs, although enabled by the French Revolution itself, was portrayed as the work of natural forces.

Read more from “Mountain, Become a Volcano” here.

The 100th Anniversary of the Opening of the Panama Canal

Today we have a guest post by Michael E. Donoghue, Associate Professor of History at Marquette University and author of Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone. He discusses the history of the building of the Panama Canal, and its continued impact on US foreign relations and the world.

      

The opening of the Panama Canal on August 15, 1914 marked a monumental event in U.S., Panamanian, Latin American, and global history.  The opening confirmed the ascension of the United States to the first rank of world powers, a process that had begun years earlier with Washington’s victory in the 1898 Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War. While other European and Latin American nations had dreamt of its excavation and France had failed in its recent attempt, only the United States had succeeded, affirming its technological and moral superiority in the minds of many of its citizens.  (Though, Americans were irked that the outbreak of World War I relegated the story to page two).  In global terms, the completion of this strategic waterway made the world a much smaller place, saving cargo and passenger carriers thousands of miles of travel and millions in costs with its shorter route between the Atlantic and Pacific, ending the necessity of rounding the horn of South America to traverse from one ocean to the other.  As such, the Canal’s opening facilitated the process of interconnecting the entire world in networks of trade and culture, what we now call globalization. And the workers from all over the world who helped build the channel in a brutal ten-year struggle (1904-1914) of man versus tropical nature, accentuated the Canal’s globalized character.  The conquest of yellow fever, mudslides, cave-ins, and dynamite explosions during construction took a terrible human toll especially on the non-U.S. workforce.

      While the Canal’s opening aided Latin American trade, it had more unfortunate consequences for
America’s southern neighbors by enhancing U.S. dominance of the hemisphere, particularly in the circum Caribbean region and on the isthmus of Central America where the Canal and its surrounding Zone bases established the United States as a hegemonic power.  Numerous U.S. interventions in the region would now be justified “to protect the Panama Canal.”  These interventions often occurred in the republic of Panama itself, where U.S. troops marched in to “establish order” and “protect U.S. interests” nine times between 1904 and 1925.  Indeed no nation was more intimately affected by the waterway than Panama, a small new country that seceded from Colombia in 1903 with U.S. prodding and military aid to avoid Colombian intransigence on negotiations and ensure a favorable treaty that granted nearly sovereign U.S. rights to build, maintain, and guard the Canal. The fifty-mile-long, ten-mile-wide zone around the Canal created by the 1903 treaty quickly coalesced into a state-within-a-state with a U.S. government, military bases, police force, law code, prison, and numerous clubhouses and commissaries for U.S. and foreign workers.  Within this Zone, foreign laborers, the overwhelming number of them imported West Indians, endured lower wages and segregated facilities on the “silver roll” versus American foremen and workers on the higher-paid “gold roll.”  West Indians carried out most of the dangerous and arduous work on the Canal with over 4,000 official deaths and perhaps three times more undocumented ones.  Their ancestors still lament their lack of recognition for these sacrifices and the racial discrimination they endured.

       After construction, the overwhelming U.S. presence in Panama eventually sparked local resistance and complaints about unequal treatment and an unfair sharing of the financial benefits of the Canal.  Racial discrimination in the Zone and the relatively privileged lifestyles of the U.S. workers and their families in comparison to impoverished Panamanians provoked frustration.  Access to the Zone was barred for most Panamanians and when crossing from one side of their country to the other, they faced questioning from a foreign police force speaking a foreign language threatening at times to send them to a foreign prison, Gamboa Penitentiary in the Zone.  In 1964 pent-up Panamanian anger exploded in an uprising that took the lives of twenty-one Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers.   In 1977 the Jimmy Carter administration negotiated new treaties that called for the end of the Canal Zone and the gradual transfer of the waterway to Panama which culminated on December 31, 1999 with complete local control. In recent years Panama has begun construction on a new set of wider locks to enlarge the Canal’s capacity and make it viable for the larger supertankers and cargo carriers.  These new locks are planned to open in 2015.  Today Panamanians celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the Canal’s opening and much of the bitterness over their colonial relationship with the United States has faded.   Both the old and the new Canals have and will greatly amplify global trade and the interconnected nature of our world.   The August 15, 1914 opening of this monumental triumph in engineering and human sacrifice (once hailed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”) forever altered the destiny of the United States, Panama, and the world.

Editor of Duke Mathematical Journal wins Chern Medal Award

Congratulations to Duke Mathematical Journal editor Phillip Griffiths! He was awarded the 2014 Chern Medal for his work in complex geometry, particularly his work in Hodge theory and periods of algebraic varieties. The prize is given at the International Congress of Mathematicians, which is being held currently in Seoul, South Korea.

To read the official press release, click here.

Several contributors to DMJ have also been awarded the Fields Medal, including Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the medal. Other winners include Artur Avila and Manjul Bhargava. See a list of their contributions to DMJ below. Congratulations to all!

For more information on Duke Mathematical Journal, visit dukeupress.edu/dmj.

Contributions to DMJ from Fields Medalists include:

Maryam Mirzakhani, co-author of "Lattice point asymptotics and volume growth on Teichmüller space," here; Artur Avila, co-author of "Cohomological equations and invariant distributions for minimal circle diffeomorphisms," here and "Generic Singular Spectrum For Ergodic Schrödinger Operators," here; and Manjul Bhargava, co-author of "Error estimates for the Davenport-Heilbronn theorems," here.