Publications

Reviewed by: Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America ed. by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield Pete Smith Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, edited by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 360pp. $24.95 paper. In the published research on the intersection of race and American journalism, there is valuable scholarship describing the role of the white mainstream press in stoking the fires of racial violence, particularly during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and using social and political influence to create a cultural ideology of suppression and discrimination. Likewise, there is scholarship dedicated to the Black press and its part, in the words of historian Carrie Teresa, in speaking "truth to power on the experience of racism" during those same time periods. In Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield skillfully bring together a collection of thoughtful, detailed essays that "[document] the struggle between two different journalisms"—white newspapers' efforts to create and maintain Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction New South and the Black press's valiant pushback to those efforts. The end result is a book that is necessary reading for any serious scholar of race and the American press, for it expands the scholarship on both topics by focusing on a time period, the late nineteenth century, and a geographic area, the American South, often overlooked by historians. Each of the ten essays stands on its own merits, with the book divided into four parts. Part one, "The Contested New South," examines the role that white supremacist and newspaper editor Henry W. Grady played as a vocal leader of the New South—as part owner of the Atlanta Constitution, Grady was "the most prominent New South spokesperson in the nation and the most influential newspaper editor in the South" (Forde 31). As such, he helped create and sustain the myth of white superiority in the post-Reconstruction South—from the election of white supremacists to political office to the "separate but equal" mindset [End Page 355] that shaped the state's social order. "Relatedly, he used his newspaper as a blunt weapon against the political, economic, and social interests of Black Georgians and Southerners," Forde says (33). The following essay examines a number of militant Black journalists who took on the political and social hegemonies that Grady and other white supremacists championed. As the legal rights that Black southerners gained during Reconstruction vanished, as both public opinion and discourse weighed heavy against them, and as racial violence surged, Black journalists, including T. Thomas Fortune and Garland Penn, were the architects of "a new tide of Black activism," argues historian D'Weston Haywood (58); to do so, they had to speak to the realities of racial violence and the social and legal discrimination that plagued freed men and women in the post-Reconstruction South. "Thus, Black journalists worked to expose the New South for what it really was and to raise public consciousness to the realities of racial injustice that proponents of the New South attempted to mask," Haywood writes (58). Part two, including the essays "The Press and Lynching" and "Mississippi Plan," explores the most common form of racial violence enacted against Black southerners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how white southerners used it, and other forms of physical violence, intimidation, and fraud to all but eliminate the Black vote. The press played a critical role here: as white editors used their newspapers to rationalize (and gloat about) the mass murder of Black southerners (mostly men), Black news editors and journalists responded by crafting a powerful counter-narrative, one that spoke melodramatically about the brutality and terror of what Black columnist John Edward Bruce labeled "A Southern Pastime" (Brundage 98). As white editors spread the word about the effectiveness of the Mississippi Plan—named after the blueprint that white Mississippi Democrats devised to violently roll back the political gains that Black Mississippians made during Reconstruction—to their readers, thus undermining any opportunity for racial...

Abstract There is growing international interest in better managing soils to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) content to contribute to climate change mitigation, to enhance resilience to climate change and to underpin food security, through initiatives such as international ‘4p1000’ initiative and the FAO's Global assessment of SOC sequestration potential (GSOCseq) programme. Since SOC content of soils cannot be easily measured, a key barrier to implementing programmes to increase SOC at large scale, is the need for credible and reliable measurement/monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) platforms, both for national reporting and for emissions trading. Without such platforms, investments could be considered risky. In this paper, we review methods and challenges of measuring SOC change directly in soils, before examining some recent novel developments that show promise for quantifying SOC. We describe how repeat soil surveys are used to estimate changes in SOC over time, and how long‐term experiments and space‐for‐time substitution sites can serve as sources of knowledge and can be used to test models, and as potential benchmark sites in global frameworks to estimate SOC change. We briefly consider models that can be used to simulate and project change in SOC and examine the MRV platforms for SOC change already in use in various countries/regions. In the final section, we bring together the various components described in this review, to describe a new vision for a global framework for MRV of SOC change, to support national and international initiatives seeking to effect change in the way we manage our soils.

Soils can be used as a biospheric sink for carbon under Article 3.4 of the Kyoto Protocol and parties are able to use agricultural soil carbon sinks to contribute towards carbon emission reduction targets. This should be done 'taking into account uncertainties, transparency in reporting, and verifiability'. Models are often tested against data sets of long-term changes in soil organic carbon (SOC), but most data sets have only mean SOC values available at each sample date, with no estimates of error about the mean. We show that when using data sets that do not include estimates of error about the mean, it is not possible to reduce the error (root mean squared error) between modelled and measured values below 6.8-8.5%, even with site-specific model calibration. Equivalent errors for model runs using regional default input values are 12-34%. Using error as an indicator of the certainty that can be attached to model projections, we show that a significant reduction in uncertainty is needed for Kyoto accounting. Uncertainties for modelling during the first Kyoto Commitment Period could be reduced by better replication of soil measurements at benchmark sites. This would allow model error to be separated from measurement error, which would allow more comprehensive model testing and, ultimately, more certainty to be attached to model predictions.

What factors do you consider when ordering an elastomer diaphragm? In many cases this critical component is seen perhaps as a commodity item, something that is to be sourced as cheaply as possible. If you were aware of the potential differences between components from different sources, more care would be taken in their selection. Peter Warren, head of materials engineering at James Walker & Co, and Pete Smith, business development manager at James Walker Keaflex, present some guidelines to make the selection process easier.