Drivers and Consequences of Alternative Landscape Futures on Wildlife Distributions in New England, United States

This article illustrates American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ support of the “missionary matrimony”, mid-nineteenth-century New England women’s perceptions of the missionary career obtained through matrimony, and their impressions of the Oriental mission fields and non-Christian or non-Protestant women, who were depicted as victims to be saved. A brief introduction to New England women’s involvement in foreign missions will continue with the driving force that led these women to leave the United States for far mission fields in the second part of the paper. This context will be exemplified with the story of a New England missionary wife. The analysis consists of the journal entries and letters of Seraphina Haynes Everett of Ottoman mission field. The writings of this woman from New England give detailed information about the spiritual voyage she was taking in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman lands. In her letters to the United States, Everett described two Ottoman cities, Izmir (Smyrna) and Istanbul (Constantinople), and wrote about her impressions of Islam and Christianity as practiced in the Ottoman empire. Everett’s opinions of the Ottoman empire, which encouraged more American women to devote themselves to the education and to the evangelization of Armenian women of the Ottoman empire in the middle of the nineteenth century, conclude the paper.

Download Full-text

Seasonal and Ephemeral Snowpacks of the Conterminous United States

Hydrology ◽

10.3390/hydrology8010032 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 32

Author(s):

Benjamin J. Hatchett

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

At Risk ◽

New England ◽

Snow Cover ◽

Snow Water Equivalent ◽

Atlantic Coast ◽

Seasonal Snow ◽

Temperature And Precipitation ◽

Lower Elevation ◽

Precipitation Estimates

Snowpack seasonality in the conterminous United States (U.S.) is examined using a recently-released daily, 4 km spatial resolution gridded snow water equivalent and snow depth product developed by assimilating station-based observations and gridded temperature and precipitation estimates from PRISM. Seasonal snowpacks for the period spanning water years 1982–2017 were calculated using two established methods: (1) the classic Sturm approach that requires 60 days of snow cover with a peak depth >50 cm and (2) the snow seasonality metric (SSM) that only requires 60 days of continuous snow cover to define seasonal snow. The latter approach yields continuous values from −1 to +1, where −1 (+1) indicates an ephemeral (seasonal) snowpack. The SSM approach is novel in its ability to identify both seasonal and ephemeral snowpacks. Both approaches identify seasonal snowpacks in western U.S. mountains and the northern central and eastern U.S. The SSM approach identifies greater areas of seasonal snowpacks compared to the Sturm method, particularly in the Upper Midwest, New England, and the Intermountain West. This is a result of the relaxed depth constraint compared to the Sturm approach. Ephemeral snowpacks exist throughout lower elevation regions of the western U.S. and across a broad longitudinal swath centered near 35° N spanning the lee of the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic coast. Because it lacks a depth constraint, the SSM approach may inform the location of shallow but long-duration snowpacks at risk of transitioning to ephemeral snowpacks with climatic change. A case study in Oregon during an extreme snow drought year (2014/2015) highlights seasonal to ephemeral snowpack transitions. Aggregating seasonal and ephemeral snowpacks to the HUC-8 watershed level in the western U.S. demonstrates the majority of watersheds are at risk of losing seasonal snow.

Download Full-text

Should Screening Programs Be Perfect?

PEDIATRICS ◽

10.1542/peds.71.2.301 ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 71 (2) ◽

pp. 301-301

Author(s):

PHILIP R. WYATT

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Health Care ◽

Early Detection ◽

New England ◽

Health Care System ◽

The United States ◽

Neonatal Hypothyroidism ◽

Screening Programs ◽

Care System

To the Editor.— The report of the New England Regional Screening Program1 on neonatal hypothyroidism is a stunning illustration of the vulnerability of screening programs. It is unfortunate that this experience will probably be used as an argument to minimize the input of screening programs in the health care system in the United States. The report illustrates that, in addition to the 2% of the screened population that eluded the program, 14 infants with hypothyroidism escaped the full benefits of early detection and treatment.

Download Full-text

The Post-Deportation Human Rights Project: Participatory Action Research with Maya Transnational Families

Practicing Anthropology ◽

10.17730/praa.34.1.l20501884743h62t ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 22-26 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

M. Lykes ◽

Erin McDonald ◽

Cesar Boc

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Human Rights ◽

New England ◽

Well Being ◽

The United States ◽

Immigrant Parents ◽

Transnational Families ◽

Southern New England ◽

Immigrant Organizations ◽

The Right

As the number of immigrants in the United States has increased dramatically in recent decades, so has the number of human rights violations against immigrants in the form of arrests without warrants, detention and deportation of parents without consideration of the well-being of their children, and incarceration without bail or the right to a public attorney. The Post-Deportation Human Rights Project (PDHRP) at Boston College was developed to investigate and respond to the legal and psychological effects of deportation policies on migrants living in or deported from the United States. This unique multidisciplinary project involves lawyers, social science faculty, and graduate students—all of whom are bilingual, one of whom is trilingual, and many of whom are bicultural—working together in partnership with local immigrant organizations to address the psychosocial impact of deportation on Latino and Maya families and communities. Our work includes psycho-educational and rights education workshops with immigrant parents and their children in southern New England as well as a cross-national project based in the U.S. and Guatemala supporting transnational families through participatory research, educational workshops, and legal resources.

Download Full-text

Regional dialect perception across the lifespan: Identification and discrimination

Language and Speech ◽

10.1177/0023830917743277 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 62 (1) ◽

pp. 115-136 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Elizabeth A. McCullough ◽

Cynthia G. Clopper ◽

Laura Wagner

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Young Children ◽

New England ◽

American English ◽

Region Of Origin ◽

Midwestern United States ◽

Regional Dialects ◽

Cognitive Difficulty ◽

Regional Dialect

Although adult listeners can often identify a talker’s region of origin based on his or her speech, young children typically fail in dialect perception tasks, and little is known about the development of regional dialect representations from childhood into adulthood. This study explored listeners’ understanding of the indexical importance of American English regional dialects across the lifespan. Listeners between 4 and 79 years old in the Midwestern United States heard talkers from the Midland, Northern, Southern, and New England regions in two regional dialect perception tasks: identification and discrimination. The results showed that listeners as young as 4–5 years old understand the identity-marking significance of some regional dialects, although adult-like performance was not achieved until adolescence. Further, the findings suggest that regional dialect perception is simultaneously impacted by the specific dialects involved and the cognitive difficulty of the task.

Download Full-text

An Evaluation of Forest Health Insect and Disease Survey Data and Satellite-Based Remote Sensing Forest Change Detection Methods: Case Studies in the United States

10.20944/preprints201805.0360.v1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Ian Housman ◽

Robert Chastain ◽

Mark Finco

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Remote Sensing ◽

New England ◽

Forest Disturbance ◽

Forest Health ◽

Rio Grande ◽

National Forest ◽

Forest Change ◽

Southern New England ◽

Disease Survey

The Operational Remote Sensing (ORS) program leverages Landsat and MODIS data to detect forest disturbances across the conterminous United States (CONUS). The ORS program was initiated in 2014 as a collaboration between the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service Geospatial Technology and Applications Center (GTAC) and the Forest Health Assessment and Applied Sciences Team (FHAAST). The goal of the ORS program is to supplement the Insect and Disease Survey (IDS) and MODIS Real-Time Forest Disturbance (RTFD) programs with imagery-derived forest disturbance data that can be used to augment traditional IDS data. We developed three algorithms and produced ORS forest change products using both Landsat and MODIS data. These were assessed over Southern New England and the Rio Grande National Forest. Reference data were acquired using TimeSync to conduct an independent accuracy assessment of IDS, RTFD, and ORS products. Overall accuracy for all products ranged from 77.64% to 93.51% (kappa 0.09–0.59) in the Southern New England study area and 59.57% to 79.57% (kappa 0.09–0.45) in the Rio Grande National Forest study area. In general, ORS products met or exceeded the overall accuracy and kappa of IDS and RTFD products. This demonstrates the current implementation of ORS is sufficient to provide data to augment IDS data.

Download Full-text

Cosmopolitanism, Translocality, Astronoetics: A Multi-Local Vantage Point

Review of International American Studies ◽

10.31261/rias.9804 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 29-38

Author(s):

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina ◽

Manpreet Kaur Kang

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Sixteenth Century ◽

New England ◽

Human Life ◽

The United States ◽

Vantage Point ◽

Special Volume ◽

Multiple Flows ◽

The World ◽

Shed Light

The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space.

Download Full-text