Stanford University Press Blog

How Photography Saved Yosemite

Yosemite celebrates the 150th anniversary of the law designed to protect its natural beauty.

150 years ago today, the national parks system was effectively inaugurated with the Yosemite Grant Act. Signed by Lincoln in the midst of the civil war, this far-sighted legislation was the first-ever law to expressly prohibit private development of wild land; the first-ever law to acknowledge that the sublime of the American landscape was not solely an inheritance, but a responsibility.

Instrumental in the passing of this law were a series of photographs by an intrepid frontiersman named Carleton Watkins. Leading mules laden with camera equipment and noxious chemicals up steep rocky promontories and across sprawling valleys, Watkins documented the natural splendor of Yosemite. What he captured through his lens was submitted to Congress as testimony of the land’s untrammeled beauty and contributed to the cultural pressure on Congress to preserve the land for public use in 1864.

At the time of Watkins’ career, photography as a medium was nearly as untrodden as the Western frontier that was his subject. In today’s world of point-and-shoot and instantaneous preview screens, it baffles the mind to imagine Watkins hauling his cumbersome equipment over crags and streams, propping up makeshift darkrooms as he traveled, and using the force of natural sunlight to filter his negatives into final photographs. 

Separate and Unequal Suburban Schools

Decades after Brown v. Board of Education inequality is still a pervasive problem in our schools.

Would it stun you to learn that today, decades after Brown v. Board of Education, some of our nation’s schools are now more segregated than they were in the late 60s? UCLA’s Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles yields this and other alarming findings in a report released last month, a report that lucidly illustrates the backwards-trajectory of educational equality in American schools. 

What the report highlights is the pervasiveness of the achievement gap—a catchall term that describes the disparities we see in test scores and post-school outcomes for White and non-White students. This problem and its magnitude should haunt our collective consciousness just as it haunts the daily realities of Black and minority families. But ignorance on the issue abounds, ranging from sheer obliviousness, to misconceptions about where and how education is segregated today. 

Chief among those misconceptions are these: many assume that as schools become increasingly racially integrated, equality of opportunity within individual schools is a natural given; similarly common is the assumption that educational inequality is a uniquely urban issue. After years of studying the achievement gap in a suburban city, it is with confidence that I endeavor to dispel both of these myths.

This problem and its magnitude should haunt our collective consciousness just as it haunts the daily realities of Black and minority families.

Though the suburbs were once thought to be an ideal place for raising children and living out the American Dream, long gone are the economically uniform, racially homogenous, ostensibly idyllic Leave-It-To-Beaver suburbs of yore. Today, while the suburbs are still the common roost for well-off, predominantly White families, the Brookings Institution (using recent census data) reports one-third of the nation’s poor reside in suburbs, and notes that there are now more poor people living in suburban areas than in cities. Further, more than 50 percent of the urban Black population lives in the suburbs.

This demographic shift means that suburban schools, which have almost exclusively educated middle- and upper middle-class children for decades, are now faced with the challenge of educating children across the socioeconomic and racial spectrum. As a consequence they have become prime proving ground to see if the education of children across race and class fulfills the dream of the Brown decision.

ISIL and the Perils of Quasi-Statehood

From the outset, ISIL intended to be more than simply a franchisee of the al-Qaeda organization or yet another radical Islamic movement.

by ARIEL AHRAM

The Islamic State today consists of an arc of towns and cities spanning the Syrian and Jazeera deserts, an archipelago coming increasingly and perilously close to Baghdad (as shown in the map below). Moving from its base in Fallujah and in eastern Syria, in the last few days ISIL has stormed Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and taken Tikrit, midway on the highway to Baghdad. Meanwhile, Iraq’s security forces have crumbled. ISIL fighters looted hundreds of millions of bank deposits and seized untold quantities of weapons and supplies, including U.S.-supplied HUMVEES. Government troops, supplemented by the paramilitary wings of the major Shi’i parties, are trying to re-muster a defense at Samarra, just 70 miles outside of Baghdad, and are appealing to the U.S. for air support.

Iraqi and Syrian towns and cities seized by the Islamic State of the Levant (as of June 12, 2014) developed by Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal

ISIL is probably the scariest of the many radical Islamist groups to surface in Iraq since 2003. First under the leadership of the Jordanian Abu Musab az-Zarqawi, the group was so violently anti-Shi’i that even al-Qaeda’s central command deemed them over zealous. Changing the organization’s name to Islamic State of Iraq did little to dampen its penchant for brutality. When the Syrian civil war erupted, ISI turned eastward, adding the Levant to its moniker and mandate.  After a public spat with Ayman az-Zawahiri over its well-deserved reputation for abusing civilians, though, ISIL formally severed ties with al-Qaeda in 2013. Since then it has fought pitched battles with other rebel factions, including the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s new designee for the Syrian region.

Deconstructing Frankenstein

Celebrated literary critic, Barbara Johnson dissects Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to discover Shelley's "proto-feminist" message.

 

Now a shoe-in for any self-respecting English curriculum from high school through graduate studies, the 1818 novel, Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley, has been ascribed as the archetypal text of the horror genre, adapted innumerable times for print and TV, and has become a vigorous source of discussion in contemporary critical circles.

Though Mary Shelley is now a mainstay of multiple literary genres—including Romanticism, British, and Gothic literature, Science Fiction, and even the eponymous discipline of Mary Shelley Studies—her ascendance to canon-hood was far from inevitable. Daughter to a philosopher-novelist and a famous feminist, and wife of the poet de résistance of the 19th century, Shelley’s career may have been doomed to wilt under these formidable shadows were it not for the ministrations of the celebrated literary critic and professor, Barbara Johnson.

Johnson was among the first, if not the first, to link feminism and deconstruction and one of her favorite vehicles for this project, was the analysis of the works and life of Mary Shelley. In 1979 when five star critics of the “Yale School” (also coined by Johnson as the Male School) published Deconstruction and Criticism, Johnson and her colleagues imagined a critical rejoinder:

At the time of the publication of . . . Deconstruction and Criticism, several of us—Shoshana Felman, Gayatri Spivak, Margaret Ferguson, and I—discussed the possibility of writing a companion volume inscribing female deconstructive protest and affirmation centering not on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’ (as the existing volume was originally slated to do) but on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (28)