Blueprints: Falvey Library

Contents: April 2002
 

• "Peacebuilding" in Northern Ireland:   Joseph Thompson’s Faculty Book Talk at Falvey

• To find liberal, alternative life style or "underground" publications, try the Alternative Press Index

• Falvey Book Reviews:  Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

• What is a White Dwarf? Edward Sion, astronomy professor, is featured at the Falvey Faculty Research Talk

• Also contributing to this issue...

The inspiration for Dr. Joseph Thompson’s recent book, American Policy and Northern Ireland: A Saga of Peacebuilding, came from a request from his wife Susanne’s cousin Jim. Northern Ireland born, bred and committed to restoring equilibrium in the politically, socially and economically skewed capital city, Jim suggested to Thompson that he look at the situation in Belfast. Thus began Thompson’s new research interest.

He determined the three communities contributing to the crisis in Northern Ireland, the Celtic people, the Scotch Irish, and remnants of the English, and decided to conduct open-minded investigations among these people. Interviews with British officials, Irish political figures and Northern Irish _common folk provided the foundation, and he eventually decided to structure his book according to the term of the American president in office.

He began with Richard Nixon, president during Thompson’s initial sabbatical. The book chronicles the behind-the-scenes involvement of the Irish American population and its politicians who worked steadily and cleverly throughout the subsequent decades to bring the Northern Irish situation to the forefront of American politics in the 1990s.

The book concludes with the Clinton presidency and the appointment of Senator George Mitchell, the skillful negotiator and life force behind the Belfast Agreement, which is _commonly known as the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Although Thompson’s book is written primarily as a research text, he intends to publish a popular version of the book. The emphasis and structural outline against the American presidency does not supplant the emotion of religious, political, socioeconomic, and personal day-to-day accounts of violence, mistrust, and tense living between the two communities in working-class Belfast.

This book’s dedication summarizes the powerful feelings that involve both politicians and the ordinary citizen: "To those courageous peacemakers who put their careers on the line and gave of their precious time to help bring peace." Thompson gives special mention to Jim who provided the initial inspiration. In the preface, all are included in the peacemaking process of this beautiful, yet troubled, community through a simple blessing:

by David Burke

A growing number of media observers have leveled criticism against the mainstream media for the quality of its reporting (two recent examples are Bernard Goldberg’s Bias: a CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News and Leonard Downie and Robert G. Kaiser’s The News about the News). Frequently, the major news outlets, especially television news, will focus on celebrity scandals requiring little legwork on the part of the reporters (such as the O.J. Simpson trial).

For political events, the media often cluster around a "conventional wisdom" regarding an issue, excluding more than one or two points-of-view, and not especially extreme ones at that. To read about more radical opinions or learn about significant news events neglected by the mainstream media, one must go to alternative or "underground" news sources.

To meet this need, Falvey Library subscribes to the Alternative Press Index (API), now an OCLC FirstSearch database indexing articles from more than 200 newspapers, newsletters and magazines from the extremes of political progressivism including the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, the Green Left Weekly and Welfare Mothers Choice. The articles covered give insight into the activities and thought of such left-oriented political movements as environmentalists, feminists, various ethnic interests, gay/lesbian rights advocates, and even neo-socialists and communists.

To access API, click "Databases" on the Falvey Library home page; it will be listed under "A." API’s search engine allows for Boolean terms and truncation (under Advanced Search); some records will provide abstracts for described articles. Where a given source is available on the World Wide Web, increasingly how one accesses the alternative press, API will provide a link to the publication’s home page. (However, this is no guarantee the desired article is available online. Use interlibrary loan if not otherwise available.) Articles indexed are from 1991 to the present.

For example, let’s examine the coverage of the street protests during the recent Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. The television news shows made no attempt to determine precisely what issues the demonstrators were protesting; they focused on the disruptions caused by their activities. Local print media such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the City Paper gave little more insight. However, searching for information through API yields several articles about RNC demonstrations. Although most deal with the civil rights issues surrounding the resulting crackdown, some articles address the motive of those protests.

InTheseTimes.com from September 2000 features the article "The Battle of Philadelphia" by Dave Lindorff. He attests the protests were mostly against the death penalty and especially that sentence imposed on Mumia Abu-Jamal; they were not against specific elements of the Republican platform or even against globalization, as so many protests that year were.

Whatever one’s own politics, the alternative media can relate some aspects of current events which the mainstream media overlook.

Of course, information from the alternative press should never stand on its own; these articles evidence a strong (and proud) liberal bias. Students planning to use articles in API should be encouraged to search for other opinions too.

This brings up API’s greatest flaw: Its alternative titles are exclusively from the political left. Although there are many right-wing commentators on talk radio and cable television, there are also ultra-conservative print and web publications which also present views and news neglected by the mainstream media. One hopes that OCLC is working on a conservative alternative database to balance API.

Although caution is required when incorporating the alternative media into scholarly research, such articles can also spice up such projects with their anti-establishment views and coverage. The Alternative Press Index can help identify such articles.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky.
New York: Walker, 2002

[Call number: TN900.K96 2002, 4^th floor, circulating collection]

Reviewed by Jutta Seibert

Today salt has a rather bad reputation. We are told we consume too much of it, and indeed Americans are among the world’s biggest consumers of salt. However, Salt: A World History describes times when salt was a labor-intensive and time-consuming product that was valued nearly as much as gold. Salt is still important today; however, now it is easier to obtain. Salt is produced on a larger scale than ever, while it is also cheaper to produce and the supply seems to be unlimited. And no, even though Americans consume the most salt, we probably don’t eat that much more salt today. By far the biggest chunk of our salt production is used for de-icing streets.

I was intrigued when I saw the book on the shelf. It is fairly substantial (484 pages), and my first thought was, "Is there really that much to tell about salt?" I opened the book out of curiosity and I was fascinated by the chapter titles. Here are some examples: "A Discourse on Salt, Cadavers, and Pungent Sauces." " The Hapsburg Pickle." "Preserving Independence." I simply had to take a closer look.

Kurlansky starts at the very beginning, when humans first began to produce salt, and from there moves on to the growing importance of salt for food preservation and animal husbandry. Empires rose and fell with the availability of cheap salt. ‘Cheap’ is the keyword here: Apparently salt is found in most parts of the world (Kurlansky calls it one of earth’s most accessible commodities), but it can be fairly expensive and time consuming to produce if conditions aren’t favorable.

The author shares his seemingly endless knowledge on the subject in a lively and entertaining manner. The book has illustrations and authentic recipes for pickling, curing, and salting interspersed between the history of salted codfish, the herring, prosciutto, Tabasco, pickles, sauerkraut and soy sauce, to name but a few of its many salt-related topics.

The history of salt is anything but boring as Mark Kurlansky proves in his book.

For anyone who wants to delve further into the subject, I recommend Samuel Adshead’s Salt and Civilization (HD9213.A2 A33 1992) and Robert Multhauf’s Neptune’s Gift: A History of _common Salt (TN900.M84).

Bon appetit!

Kurlansky includes this woodcut illustrating landing herring from Olaus Magnus’s 1555 Historiae de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (A Description of the Northern Peoples). An abridged edition of this Historia was published in Antwerp between 1558 and 1562, and a copy of this edition is available in Falvey’s Special Collections. Olaus Magnus (1490-1557) was Archbishop of Uppsala, Sweden, and he wrote this very detailed description of the Nordic countries in the Later Middle Ages. An English translation of A Description of the Northern Peoples, (London: Hakluyt Society, 1996-1998) is also available in Falvey Library.

Jutta Seibert is a catalog / reference librarian.

by Barbara Bores

On February 25, Dr. Edward Sion, professor of astronomy and astrophysics, presented a fascinating glimpse into the life cycle of a star during his Falvey Faculty Research Talk, "White Dwarfs: Fossil Stars, Explosive Stars and the Future Sun."

According to Sion, "White dwarf stars are the still glowing embers of dying stars, shrunken to planetary dimensions, destined to cool to invisibility as they travel through the endless voids of space. About 97 percent of the roughly 200 billion stars in our galaxy, including the sun, will eventually evolve into white dwarf stars at the end of their life. These incredibly dense objects are the size of a planet but contain the same mass as the sun. A spoonful of their matter would weigh hundreds of tons on earth. The acceleration of gravity is 3 million feet per second squared, compared with 32 feet per second squared on earth."

Dr. Sion noted that "a white dwarf has an atmosphere of ideal gas 40 to 60 miles thick, surrounding this extremely dense planet-sized core. This outer layer serves as a thermostat. The rate of cooling for a given white dwarf mass depends upon how transparent or opaque this atmosphere is to the radiation passing through it from the core. Curiously, the carbon cores found in the majority of white dwarfs eventually become cool enough to crystallize. Such objects become quite literally planet-sized diamonds (with impurities). Knowing the age of the white dwarf star, by knowing its temperature, is important to studies of the age of our galaxy and of the universe. For example, we know that the galactic disk, containing the spiral arms of our galaxy, cannot be older than the cooling ages of the lowest luminosity white dwarfs stars we can detect. Despite intensive searches, no white dwarf has been found fainter than 4/100,000th the sun’s brightness. This implies that the age of our galaxy’s disk is less than 12 billion years old."

He went on to explain that the gas in a white dwarf does not behave like the gas in the sun or the earth’s atmosphere. An ideal gas, like the air we breath, when heated, expands because the pressure depends on both temperature and density. In a white dwarf the electron gas pressure has no sensitivity to temperature. When white dwarf matter is heated there is no expansion response because the pressure depends only on the density. This property makes white dwarfs potentially explosive. Another bizarre property of white dwarfs is the higher the mass, the smaller the radius.

Showing an overhead of the "life cycle of a star," Sion stated that stars are born in a huge nebula of gas and dust or giant molecular cloud. The newly born stellar embryo shrinks or collapses, releasing energy due to its gravity, as it shrinks and heats up. The heat inside newly born stars becomes so great that thermal nuclear reactions are ignited. This marks the beginning of the stage of life in which our sun is now, main sequence or stellar middle age.

If the mass of a star is too tiny when born it can not become a main sequence star. It becomes a planet or brown dwarf. It therefore has a mass of less than 5 percent of our sun. It can not reach main sequence stage because it is too feeble in mass to even release nuclear energy. The main sequence lifetime is the longest, most stable stage in the lifetime of a star. During this stage the star uses up its store of hydrogen as it is converted to helium. This is what makes the star shine. However, when the hydrogen is used up the star must find a new source of energy to continue shining. To accomplish this it shrinks in its inner layers releasing energy due to gravity as it did earlier when it was an embryo. This shrinkage of the inner layer raises the temperature to ten times its original main sequence life temperature. The temperature of the inner layer becomes 100,000,000 degrees K. This is hot enough for helium, the new source of nuclear fuel, to turn into carbon with the release of energy, making the star shine. In the process of the inner layer shrinking and releasing energy due to gravity, the outer layers swell up to 100 times the radius of the sun. The star is now in the red giant phase.

Once in the red giant phase all stars shed mass. The major loss of mass is in the form of a planetary nebulae, an expanding shell of gas representing the ejected outer layer of the red giant. What is left after ejection is the dense, hot core of the red giant which is now close to being a white dwarf star. The 3 percent which do not become white dwarfs become rare massive stars which explode as supernovae, leaving behind a rapidly spinning neutron star or pulsar, or a black hole.

In 1983 Dr. George McCook, chairman of the astronomy and astrophysics department, and Dr. Edward Sion published in the Astrophysical Journal the basic system for classifying the spectra of white dwarf stars. The system uses an upper case D, for degenerate, and an upper case A, B, C, O, Q, or Z, depending upon which spectral line is observed. Eighty per cent of the white dwarfs have hydrogen-rich atmospheres and are classified DA, while twenty per cent have helium rich atmospheres. Their temperatures range from 4500K to 120,000K. Of the helium-rich white dwarfs, those with pure helium atmospheres are classified DB. Those showing metal features, but not carbon, and too cool to show helium are classified DZ. The hottest helium-rich white dwarfs with temperatures ranging from 45,000K to 150,000K are classified DO. Those showing no spectral line are classified DC. Subsets with molecular carbon are classified DQ. Due to a white dwarf star’s enormous gravity, the lightest elements will"float up" to the stellar surface while heavy elements will sink rapidly. Therefore the presence of any heavy elements in their hydrogen or helium atmospheres is highly important. It indicates that some physical process is opposing the inexorable gravitational sinking. About five per cent of the white dwarf stars are highly magnetic with magnetic field strengths up to 1 billion Gauss. The sun’s field is less than 100 Gauss. Most of Dr. Sion’s research on single white dwarfs has concentrated on explaining the origin and evolution of these different types of white dwarfs. All of the known white dwarf stars are cataloged by McCook and Sion in the Villanova Catalogue of Spectroscopically Identified White Dwarfs. (It is published both in the Astrophysical Journal (1999) and on the web on the Astronomy and Astrophysics home page under "New WEB Based Catalogue of Spectroscopically Identified White Dwarfs.")

Dr. Sion stated that if these dying stars are able to accumulate sufficient fresh hydrogen from a close companion star or by passage through a gaseous nebula, they can then avoid frigid extinction by once again burning the hydrogen in thermonuclear reactions. Since the launch of the Hubble Telescope in 1990, Dr. Sion, his postdoctoral students and Dr. Paula Szkody, University of Washington, Seattle, have used it to peer into the heart of close binary stars called dwarf novae to determine the temperature, spin and chemical composition of the compact white dwarf star at the heart of the stellar fireworks. Each dwarf nova is a compact binary system, where its companion is a normal star. The stars whirl around each other for less than three hours in such close proximity that the entire binary system would fit inside our sun. This allows gas to flow from the normal star onto the dwarf where it swirls into a pancake-shaped disk. When the disk of gas periodically collapses onto the white dwarf, it unleashes kinetic energy, called a dwarf nova outburst, equivalent to 100 million times the energy of all the warheads in the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenal at the peak of the Cold War. Once dumped onto the dwarf’s surface, hydrogen accumulates until it undergoes thermonuclear fusion reactions which eventually trigger the classical nova explosion which is 10,000 times more energetic than the dwarf nova outburst. After the explosion, the "fueling" of the white dwarf starts again. Sion and co-investigators use the Hubble to make spectroscopic observations of the dwarf novae within a few days to a few weeks after its last eruption, before another gas disk forms, blocking direct observation.

The Hubble work by Sion and his collaborators discovered an evolutionary link between two classes of exploding stars, dwarf novae, whose outbursts are powered by gravitational energy release and the classical novae whose much more energetic stellar explosions are thermonuclear. They have determined for a number of such systems how much the accretion of disk material heats the white dwarf, adds mass with processed or solar composition chemical abundance, and injects angular momentum into the white dwarf envelop. According to Dr. Sion this work will lead to a global understanding of the physics and evolution of these systems.

Barbara Bores is acquisitions librarian.

Also contributing to this issue of Blueprints: Judith Olsen, Bente Polites, Jacqueline Smith and IMS Graphics.