Celebrating the inventor of Basketball

Rob Rains, co-author with Hellen Carpenter of James Naismith: The Man Who Invented Basketball describes Naismith’s accomplishments on and off the basketball court.

The image that most sports fans have of James Naismith is that of an old man, standing next to a peach basket, holding a basketball. Naismith did invent the game of basketball, something he was very proud of, but reducing his life to that one accomplishment does the man a giant disservice.

Even the title of a new biography, in a way, is guilty of this same mistake. The book’s title calls Naismith “the inventor of basketball” as if everything else he accomplished in his life was not worthy of mention.

Hopefully, the contents of the book are not as confining, and have more opportunity to reward Naismith for what he personally considered were his accomplishments and contributions to society greater than the invention of basketball.

Naismith was a young instructor at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., when he invented basketball in 1891, responding to a challenge and direction from his boss to create a new game which would keep a class of rowdy students busy during the cold winter months between the football and baseball seasons.

Really, Naismith had no other goal in mind. He was not thinking beyond his assignment … and the fact that basketball caught on as quickly and spread as rapidly as it did was a big surprise. Make no mistake, Naismith was very proud and honored to be recognized for his invention because he did believe it fulfilled a need for society, but it was not as if that encaptured his entire life’s work.

Naismith trained to be a minister, then went to medical school … not really wanting to become a doctor but so he would know more about how the human body worked. He became a beloved teacher at the University of Kansas, mentoring students who never even picked up a basketball in their life. He was much more interested in the role physical education played in a young man and woman’s development than whether or not they were star athletes. He considered athletics a part of a student’s overall education, just as important as their educational and moral development, but not more important. To this day he remains the only coach in the school’s fabled history in the sport with a losing career record, maybe because in many of the games when he was supposed to be coaching, he also was working as the referee.

 At age 56, when the U.S. became involved in World War I, Naismith enlisted in the Army as a chaplain. He went to France and worked on the front lines of battle, counseling young soldiers far away from home. A lesser man would never have taken on that challenge, but Naismith thought it was his duty, something he had trained to do, and was a contribution he wanted to make.

It was near the end of that war that Naismith wrote a letter home to his wife Maude, expressing concern and worrying about what was going to happen to all of those young men when they returned home. He had an idea, he wrote, about what the U.S. government could do to help those men who had risked their lives for their country, and in a few simple handwritten pages, drafted a very similar plan to what would become the GI Bill – at the end of the next world war.

That was just one example of how progressive and ahead of his time Naismith was. Even in his sport of basketball, he suggested that if a goal was made from outside a certain distance it should count for more points than a goal closer to the basket … more than 40 years before the three-point shot came into existence.

Naismith often said he really only had one goal in life … “to leave the world a little better than he found it.” There is no doubt he did exactly that.

A Q&A with Nancy Heinzen, about Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square

Nancy Heinzen, author of The Perfect Square: A History of Rittenhouse Square discusses the history of Rittenhouse Square in this new video clip.

And, in this Q&A, Heinzen explains why she loves where she lives.

Why did you title your book The Perfect Square?

The title comes from an account of Rittenhouse Square from The American Scene written by Henry James. When he was in Philadelphia to lecture, James was standing in one of the “ample, tranquil” bay windows of what had been James Harper’s house [now the Rittenhouse Club] located on the north side of the Square, when he made the observation about the residential square being “perfect.”

What is the significance of the reflecting pool and the guard house on the cover?

These easily recognizable symbols lie in the heart of the Square. The mosaic on the reflecting pool represents Neptune and his sea garden. It was designed by Paul Cret and executed by Enfield Tile Co in 1913. The mural was removed in 1914 and restored in 1999 by Friends of Rittenhouse Square.

Can you reveal the story about the statue of the Duck Girl in the reflecting pool? 

The Duck Girl was created in 1911 by Paul Manship for another site. Manship would gain fame when he created another statue in the classical style–the Prometheus in Rockefeller Center. The Duck Girl was first exhibited in 1914 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was soon after recommended for purchase by the Fairmount Park Art Association’s Committee of Works of Art.  In 1916, it was placed in Cloverly Park in Germantown. Years later, in the 1940s, it made its first appearance in the square, where it was vandalized and moved into a Fairmount Park warehouse. In 1960 the statue was placed in the reflecting pool in the Square until a more suitable site could be found.

The Perfect Square traces the growth and development of Rittenhouse Square through the ages. How do you think the square has evolved over time?

The era that gave the Square its cachet even today, was the Post Civil War period. This was when Philadelphia was the most important city in the U.S. thanks to coal, iron, and most importantly, the Pennsylvania Railroad. Great fortunes were made at that time—and where better to live than on Rittenhouse Square?

There are grand mansions and tony apartment buildings that line the perimeter of Rittenhouse Square. Do you have a favorite building, or a place  that particularly fascinates you?

I have always been fond of 1804 South Rittenhouse Square. This charming little house squeezed in between two high rises was the home of John  D. Lankenau, a renowned philanthropist. I like the house because it retains it architectural details, such as the iron railing at the entrance.

How did you come to research and write this book? How long have you been documenting the history of the square?

I have always been interested in the history of the area, and over the years I have read and collected stories of the people and happenings, I guess I began this about 15 years ago, by collecting photographs.

What has been your greatest pleasure about living on the square?

The change of seasons each with its own special magic and promise that one never grows tired of.

Women in the Electrical Labor Force

Francine Moccio, author of Live Wire, writes on the problems women face in the electrical labor force.

As a professor of labor studies at a public university, I faced the somewhat daunting task of teaching a class on the topic of “class, race and gender” to young, mostly white, male construction workers who were my students in an electrical apprenticeship program. Upon completion of their training sponsored by their union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Local Union #3, one of the most powerful unions in the country, these young men (many of whom were beneficiaries of “father to son” sponsorship) aspired to attain good paying highly skilled jobs as master electricians, jobs that did not necessarily require professional degrees. 

Minority men and women were for the most part viewed by my electrical apprentice students as encroaching on the industry because of “government interference” due to affirmative action goals.  According to some apprentices, “women were taking the place of a guy who really needed a job.” “Women are for after work,” indicated one young man, demonstrating how polarized gender relations are still extant among highly skilled electricians and tradesmen.      

I also encountered a paradox among unionized electricians. Despite the strong degree of racism in society, minority men are somewhat more accepted in the industry and craft trade while women despite nearly forty years of policy reform and advocacy, only still constitute 2% and women of color are even scarcer. I wrote Live Wire to better understand why after all these years of litigation, advocacy, and policy reforms, sex segregation in this occupation and trade have endured.  I wanted to point out how labor relations between the union and  its employers, the Electrical Contractors Association (ECA), factored into the degree to which women, as well as other new groups were accepted into the electricians’ trade.  I thought that perhaps unraveling the reasons for sex segregation in this industry and occupation, I could also contribute more broadly to facilitating women’s entrance into other predominantly male jobs and professions.

While women have made strides in other previously male dominated professions like medicine and law, highly skilled blue-collar occupations and industries, as well as professional fields of science and technology have remained fiercely segregated. In order to find out why, I felt compelled to ask the following questions: What are the organizational and subtle conditions that maintain this type of tenacious occupational segregation? Can strict economic explanations satisfy an answer to why this exclusion of women is so severe; or is it necessary to also examine the customs and traditions of the industry and occupation, the institutional structures and organizational behavior that shapes gender relationships among workers or employees on the ground.  In addition, I asked how do formal and informal cultural networks at work, as well as the interrelationship of gender relations at work and home influence the speed or slowness of integration.  

Throughout my research, I conducted in-depth interviews with the major stakeholders in the industry, that is, contractors, unionists, workers, and trainees. I always began these interviews with the same question:  Why is it such a big deal about a handful of women coming into this occupation?  I also felt compelled to find out whether or not every new work group experienced similar resistance as women, for example, African-Americans and Jews. Much to my surprise, responses to my inquiries required a book length explanation. 

How could I proceed to identify a method that would maximize my understanding? Thus, I examined the history of fraternal societies and the role they play in building union solidarity, the external influence of social movements of equality, the interconnectedness of workers’ masculine identity at work and home, and internal stratification among electricians and members of the union brotherhood along the lines of sex, race and occupational skill. 

What light could be shed by this case study of women’s decade-long efforts to break into the electricians’ trade and union brotherhood on broader questions of discrimination at work and the role of women in unions? In addition, how can we better identify the factors that still cause such strong resistance of new work groups such as women into breaking into other predominantly male jobs and professions? Here is one lesson I learned from writing Live Wire: advocates, judges, legislators, unionists, educators and anyone concerned with efforts to advance workplace inclusion need to identify and address both the organizational and subtle forms of discrimination women encounter in any industry and occupation. In addition, it is critical to understand the history and nature of labor relations in an industry and occupation, including its organizational networks, the forms that occupational sex-typing take and the industry and union traditions among male employers, unionists and workers that can influence the reproduction of sex segregation.      

Writing from the Heart

Allison Carey, author of On the Margins of Citizenship, explains how her sister’s needs prompted her to write about disability rights.

In 1971, when my sister was born with Down Syndrome, the state did not yet recognize the right of children with disabilities to attend school, nor were there many services offered in the community for people with disabilities. During her lifetime, much has changed, but much has remained the same. Even after the passage of an assortment laws to secure rights for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, my sister still has difficulty finding integrated activities that will accommodate her disability; there is no public transportation where she lives to facilitate community integration; she has few friends of her age and little access to social recreation; her job options have largely been unfulfilling to her and her jobs have never lasted long; and, as someone who lives in the community with my father, she is not deemed to be in “emergency need” for services and therefore is largely ineligible for them. What then do her “rights” do to actually empower her or improve her quality of life?

On the Margins of Citizenship: Intellectual Disability and Civil Rights in Twentieth Century America emerged out of my growing interest in the Disability Rights Movement, and my awareness of its largely unrealized potential for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. In this work I examine how rights have been conceptualized for people with intellectual disabilities throughout the 20th century, and why particular groups have fought for or against specific rights. Throughout this century, many tensions arose as Americans considered issues of rights for this population. For example, American policy tends to stray away from the provision of social rights for adults, yet the absence of social rights diminishes the effective exercise of other rights such as the rights to vote and to assemble. The provision of social rights tends to be reserved for people defined as incompetent or “needy”, yet this conceptualization undermines their status as worthy and active citizens. The American system of rights tends to prioritize rights that offer freedom to citizens to act as they wish (e.g. to worship as one wishes, to assemble with whom one wishes), yet people with intellectual disabilities are often deemed incompetent and dependent and therefore unable to exercise rights based on freedom.

This analysis draws upon a relational-practice approach to citizenship to argue that rights do not offer clear guarantees. Instead, rights offer potential resources to be claimed and negotiated, and the outcomes of the dynamic process of trying to exercise rights are highly dependent upon the immediate social context and the larger system of social stratification. For people with intellectual disabilities, who so often occupy a social position with little power, their “rights” are often undercut as they are defined by other citizens and by the courts as biologically or intellectually unable to exercise rights, as a threat to the rights of others, and as undeserving of the privilege and influence that are bestowed through the exercise of rights.

Therefore, it is unfortunately not surprising that the 10^th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Olmstead v. L.C. – a decision which found that unnecessary isolation and institutionalization constituted discrimination on the basis of disability – is marked with little success towards deinstitutionalization and instead the filing of a court case in Pennsylvania, charging that the state has yet to comply with the Olmstead decision. People with developmental and intellectual disabilities find that even after their rights are formally established, these rights are undermined and must be fought for again and again.

What Susan Bell thinks of ‘what i thought i knew’

In this blog entry, Susan Bell, author of DES Daughters, now available from Temple University Press reviews the new book, what i thought i knew by Alice Eve Cohen.

Alice Cohen is a DES daughter. what i thought i knew is a memoir about Cohen’s experiences of becoming a mother after DES. Although Cohen decenters DES, its effects are everywhere in this book. Cohen was exposed to the synthetic estrogen DES (diethylstilbestrol) before she was born when her mother took it during pregnancy. Alice’s mother told her she was a DES daughter when she was a college student; her mother took Alice to her own gynecologist for the exam. After Alice had trouble conceiving and consulted with a fertility doctor, the doctor told her that although she could get pregnant with fertility drugs, he strongly advised against it. Alice followed this advice and adopted a daughter. Years later – when she was 44 – she became pregnant, a condition that was missed (and misdiagnosed) by her physicians. They thought she had a malignant tumor in her uterus.

Like many other DES daughters, Cohen’s story is harrowing, filled with unexpected twists and turns, and she has had to make decisions without a map. These “facts” set the tone and form the basis for understanding the shape and outcome of her story.

This DES daughter story begins on Friday, the eve of the Jewish New Year, September 10, 1999, when after an emergency CAT scan Alice learned she had been pregnant for six months and it ends on Yom Kippur 2006 which she marks with her daughter – “just the two of us” in Central Park. The last words in the book are the English translation of her daughter’s name: “My god has answered me.”

Alice Eve Cohen is a story-teller, performer, and teacher. All of these identities combine here, where she deftly intertwines the discourses of theater and religion into a gripping account, divided into acts and scenes. Cohen chooses to write instead of perform her story because “In a book I am just as naked, lit under as unforgiving a spotlight, but I’m willing to divulge these secrets for one reader at a time…” A solo theater course she continued to teach at the New School during her pregnancy comprises several chapters, providing a metacommentary about autobiographical story writing and storytelling.

The lower case letters in the title (what i thought i knew) beg readers to think about knowing, not knowing, and the humbling experience of finding out just how much uncertainty there is in both embodied knowing and in biomedicine. Cohen interweaves multiple topics, including the consequences of prenatal exposure to synthetic estrogens, motherhood, adoption, unwanted pregnancy and abortion, low birth weight, parenting children with a disability, mothers and daughters, Jewish women, and access to medical care. The details are unique, but the storyline is hauntingly familiar to anyone knowledgeable about DES. Cohen writes her spellbinding story ironically, angrily, and humorously. Although readers engage with it one by one, they are drawn into its shared discourse of mothering, worries about producing less-than-perfect babies, and the ethic of protecting our daughters whatever it costs us.

Those who haven’t heard of DES will want to look elsewhere to fill in the details. Readers looking for an academic study of medicalized reproduction will be disappointed. But anyone interested in losing themselves in a compelling story will be thoroughly satisfied and deeply moved.

Susan E. Bell is the A. Myrick Freeman Professor of Social Sciences Department of Sociology and Anthropology Bowdoin College.

Sizing it up

Garrett Delavan, author of The Teacher’s Attention, explains what prompted him to write a book about class size—and why smaller is better.

When I set out to write The Teacher’s Attention I’d been teaching for about six years in a second-chance high school. I was always amazed when teachers from other schools said how difficult that must be and how they admired me. I loved my job and couldn’t believe I got paid to hang out with these amazing young people.

But that got me thinking about why some classes were harder than others and why these other teachers thought my job was so much harder. I figured out that the difference was class size, which varied immensely in my school. These were frustrating (and frustrated) kids when my classes were large, which is the only size the teachers at the traditional schools ever got.

So I started out looking to read a book—not write one—about why small classes are better than big, and to explain why most everyone you talk to finds this obvious. It might also be a book that would then try to change the reader’s mind about the other thing most everyone thinks needs no further discussion: They’re too expensive. It turned out the books out there on class size focused primarily on test scores (and grades K-3) and not the positive relationships that make teaching more enjoyable and compulsory schooling more ethical.

Eventually my research led me to include school size and the length of time teachers and students stay together as just as important factors for cultivating mentoring relationships. I decided to opt out of the myth that our schools are academic failures (on average) and focus instead on school’s participation in American childrearing and racial injustice. What the book became was a school reform proposal that disputes the need for better average test scores and argues instead for a straightforward path to raising better-mentored kids and equalizing achievement.

While the book was in its final edits, I moved to a traditional middle school to gain more perspective on the system I’m criticizing. Yesterday I was at work getting set up in our new building and several teachers remarked with laughter that the new computer lab had only 30 computers. “What do we do with the rest of the class?” Last year I had to add two more desks to the thirty-six I started with. I asked the counselor my numbers this year and none was over thirty. I breathed a sigh of relief. He told me not to sigh yet because there was still a registration day coming up.

I may be ranting and raving this year on A Small Class Size Blog at www.classsize.org/blog.

In memoriam: Eunice Kennedy Shriver

Edward Shorter, author of The Kennedy Family and the Story of Mental Retardation was interviewed on CBS Evening News August 11 about the work and achievements of the late Eunice Kennedy Shriver. The interview appears at the end of the broadcast.

http://www.cbs.com/cbs_evening_news/video.php?cid=CBS%20Evening%20News&pid=Ksee4K1Ufpb2gGnKNENNuCLwJ3luJ_fi&play=true

The Kennedy Family and the Story of Mental Retardation was also mentioned in the obituary for Eunice Kennedy Shriver that appeared in the August 11 New York Times.

Recognized for Rappin’

Hip Hop Underground author Anthony Kwame Harrison reflects upon being an emcee in the Bay Area music scene

It was a magical feeling the first time I was recognized outside the scene as an emcee. “Wasn’t that you rappin’ at the Justice League the other night?” a guy in a yellow jacket yelled to me at the corner of Fifteenth Street and Church.  Then there was the time I managed to talk my way into a deejay booth freestyle cypher going on at a Lower Haight Street hip hop club.  All the other emcees on the mic that night were much more club-hit oriented in their deliveries.  They certainly weren’t fans of more avant-garde rapping styles like mine.  The moment I got on the mic, the deejay, who had had his back to me the entire time, turned around like “who the hell is that?!” After a minute or so some of the other emcees started tapping me on the shoulder to get off.  I got off and immediately exited the booth. Outside one of the regular emcees from the weekly open mic I took part in was waiting. “Thank You!” he said with a clasp of my hand and a quick embrace, “for bringing some flavor to the mic.” In the book these types of stories are kept to a minimum.

Participating in a scene so saturated with racial symbolism and meaning teaches a person a lot about race and ethnicity in the multiracial metropoles of the new America – especially when you pay attention. I’ve always paid attention, and been a little daring in testing race’s boundaries. Hip Hop Underground captures this, and shares the stories from the clubs, house-parties, open mics, record stores, curbsides, and recording studios of an important period in one of the great underground music scenes in America.

For video of emcee Mad Squirrel (aka Anthony Kwame Harrison, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–QT6aE6CJY

For more information about Hip Hop Underground, visit: http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1987_reg.html

In memoriam: Jim Johnson, Eagles defensive coordinator

By Micah Kleit, Executive Editor, Temple University Press

One of Philly’s greatest sports heroes died last week.  He wasn’t a player on the field, but he made the Eagles one of the best teams in the NFL.  I had the pleasure of meeting Jim Johnson while the Press was putting together The Eagles Encyclopedia, and it was a thrill to talk — however briefly — with the architect of the Eagles’ dominating defense.  Ray Didinger, co-author of The Eagles Encyclopedia, knew Johnson well, and wrote of his passing — and his genius as a defensive coordinator — in his “View from the Hall” column at CSN Philly’s web site.

Taking a “Rashomon” approach to studying Pacific Rim politics

In this blog entry, Christian Collet, co-editor (with Pei-te Lien) of The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans, describes his approach to understanding contemporary dynamics of racial and ethnic politics.

Gaining perspective is perhaps the biggest challenge of writing — trying to find a point in time and a place in space in which one has enough clarity, confidence and judgment to articulate an idea.  As Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant Rashomon reminds us, even the simplest of events can have completely different meanings.  “Facts” are often dependent, literally, on where one is sitting.

I draw upon the experience of living in Saigon and near Little Saigon in Orange County, and the questions I have asked myself as an American political scientist living in the Asian Pacific, as a way to introduce the challenges of understanding the contemporary dynamics of racial and ethnic politics.  Pei-te Lien and I designed The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans not only to exorcise our own nagging questions, but to inspire others, particularly in political science, to think more about these problems of method – and how we can come to grips with the excitement and uncertainty of globalization.  Our concern is to not only shed light on the “foreign acts” we see in the news, but to put them in perspective – and bring students closer to them through perspectives that they may have yet to experience.

The challenge, as we describe in the introductory chapter, comes not just from being able to perceive transnational politics, but to capture it accurately and, once contained, to interpret its significance – to think about why it matters and the role it may be playing in Asian American incorporation.  That the volume attempts to marry 20th century history to 21st century anthropology, area studies to ethnic studies, surveys to participant observation should, if nothing else, convey our sense that politics is, in essence, a dynamic, Rashomon-like puzzle. Democracy in the Pacific Rim, we believe, may be open to many interpretations, but Asian Americans remain central players in the unfolding drama.

For more information about The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans, visit http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1980_reg.html