Month: December 2012

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More or Less: Behind the Stats - WS MoreOrLess: What is “rare”?

This week: What is ?rare?? When we say something is rare what do we mean? Lightning strikes which typically kill three people a year in the UK are often described as rare but how do we square that with a condition like motor neurone disease which is also described as rare yet kills 1500 people a year in the UK. Also we speak to Nassim Taleb about his book Anti-fragile.

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Start the Week - Science Special

On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to Peter Wothers about modern day alchemy, as we enter a new era of chemistry. In the past some scientists dismissed the vast majority of the human genome as 'junk DNA', Ewan Birney argues for renaming it 'enigmatic DNA'. And curiosity gets the better of Sanjeev Gupta as he explores the terrain on Mars. But science doesn't have all the answers as Helen Bynum charts the history of tuberculosis, from the medieval period to the present day, and looks at how this killer disease continues to spread and evolve. Producer: Katy Hickman.

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New Books in Native American Studies - Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, “Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after Civil War” (UNC Press, 2012)

Despite what you may have learned in undergraduate surveys or high school textbooks, the nineteenth century was not one long and inexorable march toward Indian dispossession — the real story is far more tragic. As historian Joseph Genetin-Pilawa masterfully relates in his new book Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Native and non-Native reformers developed a host of viable policy alternatives to allotment and forced assimilation in the post-Civil War years.

Seizing the ferment of Reconstruction, dynamic figures like Ely Parker — briefly featured in Speilberg’s Lincoln — attempted to harness the power of a growing federal government to protect indigenous nations from rapacious land loss and cultural genocide, only to be outmaneuvered by elite “humanitarian” forces who equated dispossession with progress. Adeptly synthesizing the study of American political development with post-colonial thought, and demonstrating an keen attentiveness to human agency within the limitations of larger structures, Genetin-Pilawa excavates the “repressed alternatives” of late nineteenth century Indian policy, destabilizing a narrative too often presented as inevitable.

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