Search

The decision of the New York Court of Appeals in Riggs v. Palmer (1889) is remarkable for the mass of discussion about a variety of fundamental issues that it has generated. Elmer Palmer was convicted of murdering his grandfather Francis, and the court refused to let him inherit under Francis’s will despite the absence of any explicit statutory grounds for voiding the legacy. An exercise in legal archaeology uncovering details that are stated only obliquely (or not at all) in the majority and dissenting opinions corrects a number of errors often made about the case. More speculatively, it suggests a new explanation of the result, one supported by a review of similar cases in other states in the same era and of the composition of the Court of Appeals in 1889: that the decision in Riggs is best understood as an ad hominem one, provoked by the unusually light punishment that Elmer had received for his crime and rationalized by an appeal to legal principles. If it was, much of what has been written about the decision and its significance is called into question.

The phenomenon of urban primacy has been much studied in the social sciences since Mark Jefferson introduced the term in 1939. It is less well recognized that many European and American writers of ...

Background The QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus (QFT-Plus) test is an assay for detecting a cell-mediated immune response to M. tuberculosis (MTB). The assay measures the in vitro quantitative IFN-γ responses to MTB or control antigens in an incubated blood sample. There are 2 options for QFT-Plus blood collection. One option is a lithium-heparin transport tube with sample aliquots subsequently transferred to 4 QFT-Plus Blood Collection Tubes (1-tube QFT-Plus); the 2nd option is to directly collect the blood sample in 4 QFT-Plus collection tubes (4-tube QFT-Plus). In this study, we compared the indeterminate (IND) rates by the 2 blood collection methods to assess which method was superior. Methods For both blood collection methods, QFT-Plus ELISA testing was performed at various Quest Diagnostics sites as specified in the assay’s package insert. A retrospective data analysis of results for the above 2 blood processing methods was conducted. Also, we evaluated the rates of IND results in follow up blood collections. Statistical analyses were performed by the proportion test. Results In 2019, the IND result rate for greater than an 1.8 million 1-tube QFT-Plus draws was less than 1% whereas, the IND result rate for 0.3 million 4-tube draws was 4% This difference was significant. The overall MTB positive rate was 7% for the 1-tube method and 6% for the 4-tube method. Within a one-month interval following an initial blood collection event, 464 patients with an original IND result had a 2nd blood sample collected and tested. Only 35% of the 2nd blood collection events produced an IND result, with 52% of the 2nd sample results reporting as negative and 13% were positive. Conclusion This study found that the 1-tube QFT-Plus collection method reduces the IND rates by 4-fold compared to the observed rate in the 4-tube process. Additionally, two thirds of patients with an initial IND result resolved to either a positive or a negative result when retested within 1 month. Disclosures All Authors: No reported disclosures

Geographers have long found a distinction between two sets of factors in location a useful one to draw (Hanson 1999). The labels used for them have varied--they include situation and site, horizontal and vertical factors, location and locale, and space and place--and have not always exactly coincided in meaning. All the same, they correspond sufficiently for the two kinds of variables to be distinguished, labeled, and contrasted. The former term in each pair denotes the elements of an area's location vis-a-vis the world beyond it; the latter, the characteristics that occur in the area itself. One thesis that has often been drawn from the distinction is that when travel and transportation become easier, faster, and cheaper, the relative importance of horizontal or situation factors in location should decline and that of vertical or site factors, at least of more or less immobile ones, should increase. "With the diminution in transport costs and the consequent reduction in spatial barriers to movement of goods, people, money, and information, the significance of the qualities of place has been enhanced" (Harvey 1989, 10). Edward Ullman applied the thesis to patterns of intraurban land use, proposing that increased mobility, particularly through the rise of mass automobile ownership, had transformed the relative advantages for residence of different districts within cities ([1962] 1980, 192-94). It favored the development of attractive but once difficult-to-reach sites "on the basis of their intrinsic natural and cultural characteristics," and it reduced the importance of "close-in urban locations" whose advantages of what Ullman termed "location or situation" had previously made them the most highly valued ones. To test the assertion, and through it the broader thesis on which it rests, we compare the familiar patterns of the twentieth-century American city with those, to date less systematically documented, that prevailed in what has been called the walking city just prior to the transportation revolution brought about by the electric trolley and then the automobile (Warner 1962). SITUATION, SITE, AND AMERICAN CITY FORM The categories of situation and site mark out sets of different, and often diametrically opposed, residential advantages and disadvantages for particular locations within an urban area. Proximity to the urban center, as the point of maximum generalized accessibility, is a classic example of a situation advantage. At least in the United States, with its antiurban tradition, however, locations close to the center will also, all else being equal, be unattractive on the score of site, and more remote areas will be regarded as more desirable for residence, with the privacy they offer a particularly valued feature (Johnson 2008). As early as 1815, well-to-do Pittsburghers whose independent means freed them of the need to travel daily to the city center preferred marginal over core locations for residence (Swauger 1978). The same inverse relation between the two qualities appears in respect to vertical as to horizontal distance. Areas high above the city center possess a disadvantageously remote situation, but an advantageous site possessing the amenities of views and breezes (as do upper floors within buildings). Lots located on the main streets enjoy high accessibility and its correlate, greater visibility, but suffer, compared with more-secluded sites, from the disamenities of heavy traffic. (1) If the association of wealth with each of these variables changed in sign between the walking and the automobile-age city, it would bear out Ullman's conjecture. A wealth of studies in the postwar decades based on block-group or census-tract-level census data supports the hypothesized present-day preeminence of site qualities in American cities. Drawing on the data of the 1980 census, Michael White documented "a steady increase in average income with distance from the center of the city . …

In an example of what William Freudenburg and his colleagues called the “conjoint construction” of nature and society, hills may represent either assets or liabilities for urban settlement, dependi...

Carl Smith. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013. xii and 327 pp., illustrations, notes, index. $35.00 cloth (ISBN-13 978-0-226-02251-2).Carl Smith, professor of American Studies and Engl...

Features of the physical urban site merit more attention than they have traditionally received in models of city form, but in bestowing it the interrelation of social and natural features must be recognized and a neoenvironmental determinism avoided that would see the roles played by site features as always and everywhere the same. In American cities today, the affluence of residents, as a rule, increases with elevation. Yet in the “walking city” of the nineteenth century and earlier, high land's difficulty of access might have outweighed its attractions and made it the home of the poor and not the rich. The possibility is investigated through a study of upland residential patterns in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1891, just before the city's first electric trolley line was installed. Though a simple inversion of today's pattern did not appear, working-class residents indeed predominated on the highest land. They shared it with pockets of upper-class estates and with other land uses—such as parks,...

The last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth saw a great outpouring of utopian novels in the United States, much of it inspired by the extraordinary success of a single work, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 ([1888] 1967). Although the ideal societies they described varied greatly, in their attitudes toward the natural environment most of these novels' authors were in agreement. They envisioned the human reshaping of the earth no less than the reform of human institutions. Supposing, as one literary historian observed, "that man was duty-bound to adjust nature to his comfort rather than to conform man to the delicate balance of nature," one after another of them projected "schemes to alter massively the face of the earth and to change the climate" in particular (Burt 1981, 177-178). In the typical future they portrayed, "excessively hot regions have been cooled and excessively cold ones warmed; excessively wet ones have been made drier and excessively dry ones wetter.... Declares [one character]: 'We have absolute control of the weather'" (Segal 1985, 27). Such successful tinkering with the elements figured in many of the fringe and obscure visions of the future that made up the bulk of the period's output. It appeared too in the work of the foremost American man of letters to turn his hand to utopian fiction in Bellamy's wake. In three novels published between 1894 and 1907, William Dean Howells contrasted the United States of his day with an invented nation, Altruria, which occupied a continent in the Southern Hemisphere. American society as Howells portrayed it was plagued by innumerable evils arising from the unrestrained competition and the class and gender inequalities of the Gilded Age, dominated by corporate wealth. Altruria had removed the chief incentives to greed, selfishness, and crime by abolishing the private accumulation of property, maintaining peace with other countries, reforming the unequal relations of the sexes and the institution of marriage, making divisions of social rank a thing of the past, and rationalizing clothing, diet, architecture, and language in the interests of taste, comfort, and economy. In all of these respects Howells held Altruria up to the American reader as a fit model for emulation. He presented it as equally admirable in its activities of environmental reform, for it had reshaped nature as successfully as it had society. The land had been "cleared of all sorts of wild beasts," water resources were managed intensively, and, most impressive of all, the climate had been vastly improved. The new regime that the Altrurian "Evolution" had installed in power had made bringing the weather under control one of its first priorities. "We had a continent to reform and beautify," an Altrurian visiting America explains to his hosts. "We had climates to change, and seasons to modify, a whole system of meteorology to readjust," and money that had originally been appropriated for wars had been diverted to this purpose. A gigantic channel had been dug through a peninsula that blocked a warm ocean current from reaching the continent's southeastern coast. As a result, a region that in its natural state had been plagued with snow and ice enjoyed "the climate of Italy" and had become beautiful, comfortable, and richly productive (Howells 1968, 156-157, 389-390). To Howells and his contemporaries, the two sets of Altrurian achievements--reform of society and reform of the earth--seem to have gone naturally together. Today, by contrast, one is struck, as a recent reader was, by the apparent incongruity between the ideals of Howells' imagined land and its inhabitants' attitudes toward nature, between its advanced social arrangements and such massive enterprises of environmental engineering (Love 1994, 40). Both of the goals that Altruria had pursued--of making society less competitive and more egalitarian and of subduing nature to human purposes--have their proponents today, but one does not now expect them (or often find them) to be espoused by the same people. …

There has always been-and, modern environmentalism notwithstanding, there no doubt remains-much about the environment that people would willingly alter if they could. Visions of a perfect earthly future have routinely incorporated a reconstructed earth. Not least have they described the transformation of features so often and so stubbornly unsatisfactory in many ways as weather and climate. Writers in classical antiquity who tried to imagine a terrestrial paradise purged its weather of everything dangerous or merely disagreeable, from extreme temperatures and tempestuous winds to overcast skies. Early Christian representations of the Garden of Eden gave it the same mild and moderate climate as medieval Europeans ascribed to the "Land of Cockaigne": "There is no heat or cold, water or fire, wind or rain, snow or lightning, thunder or hail. Neither are there storms. Rather, there is eternally fine, clear weather ... It is always a wonderfully agreeable May." Two geographers who made a study of the utopian novel found that the genre characteristically presents the weather as "either an equable given or something totally under man's control.", But there is a second and quite different way in which meteorological utopia can be sought. It does not depend on the perfecting of the elements by divine or natural favor or by human effort. It tries to make the weather unobjectionable without altering it physically. What will be abolished in this kind of paradise is not the weather that people think bad, but their reasons for thinking it bad. The causes of complaint lie not in the weather itself, it is assumed, but in human beings, their attitudes, and their social and technological arrangements. If those attributes and arrangements are reformed, dissatisfaction with weather would disappear.. An unnamed character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) expresses this point of view. He and several companions are riding through a surprise April snowstorm to join a newly founded utopian community outside of Boston. He reproaches the narrator, Miles Coverdale, for grumbling about the weather. They can never consider themselves "regenerated men," he admonishes Coverdale, until they feel as thankful for "a February northeaster" as they do for "the softest breeze of June."2

The expertise and knowledge accumulated by geographers in this area are now in urgent demand by the international scientific and policy communities to illuminate key issues of global environmental change. Geographers interested in the use and transformation of the land today have the opportunity to apply their insights in novel and valuable ways. At the same time, they face the challenge of communicating with a new audience whose interests and criteria of significance may differ from the ones to which they are accustomed. In particular, geographer's fondness for stressing the complexity of patterns and processes and the distinctiveness of each study area can be most useful, but must come to terms with countervailing needs for abstraction and generalization.

Clarification of several issues in the human dimensions of global environmental change is essential to the creation of a balanced research agenda. Global environmental change includes both systemic changes that operate globally through the major systems of the geosphere-biosphere, and cumulative changes that represent the global accumulation of localized changes. An understanding of the human dimen sions of change requires attention to both types through research that integrates findings from spatial scales ranging from the global to the local. A regional or meso-scale focus represents a particularly promising avenue of approach.

The authors summarize the results of the international symposium “The Earth as Transformed by Human Action” held at Clark University, USA, in October 1987 with the purpose of inventorying human impact and environmental changes over the last three centuries. There are suggestions on the comparison of driving forces and environmental changes on the regional and global scales, and on the conceptualization of the human dimensions of global change. Some perspectives of the further development of the international and interdisciplinary “Earth Transformed” project are also discussed.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Global land-use and land-cover change: an overview Part II. Working Group Reports: 2. A wiring diagram for the study of land use/cover change: Report of Working Group A 3. Towards a typology and regionalization of land-cover and land-use change: Report of Working Group B 4. Land-use and land-cover projections: Report of Working Group C Part III. Changes in Land Use and Land Cover: 5. Forests and tree cover 6. Grasslands 7. Human settlements Part IV. Environmental Consequences: 8. Atmospheric chemistry and air quality 9. Soils 10. Hydrology and water quality Part V. Human Driving Forces: 11. Population and income 12. Technology 13. Political-economic institutions 14. Culture and cultural change Part VI. Issues In Data and Modeling: 15. Modeling land-atmosphere interactions: a short review 16. Modeling global change in an integrated framework: a view from the social sciences 17. Data on global land-cover change: acquisition, assessment, and analysis Appendices Index.