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Berger uses the term "non consuming use" to define activities in the wilderness that do not have a lasting impact on nature. He talks about how these non consuming acts are practiced by the Native People and some recreational activities. He contrasts this with the idea that commercial industry exploits the wilderness in a way that permanently affects it. An interesting example to look at here is commercial hunting and fishing practices in the North compared to recreational and indigenous ones. Commercial hunting and fishing operations does not have a decorated history in the Arctic. Whaling practices have led to the collapse of the North Atlantic Right whale which was at one point considered to be the most abundant species in the Arctic. As of today "it is arguably the most threatened large cetacean in the Atlantic Ocean, if not the world, with an estimated minimum population size of 313 animals." This dramatic decrease in population is not only seen in whales but also in many common fish species in the area as well. In 1992 there was a moratorium put on cod fishing in Canada because the population was so over harvested that there was only a few schools left in the ocean. Both of these situation brought a lot of economic hard ship to fishing regions in Canada that relied on these populations for work. The irony in this situation comes from how the large scale fishing operations caused a ban for indigenous populations too even for their comparatively miniscule action.

Parsons, E.C.M., J. Patrick Rice, and Laleh Sadeghi. "Awareness of whale conservation status and whaling policy in the US--a preliminary study on American Youth." Anthrozoos 23, no. 2 (2010): 119+. Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources (accessed May 8, 2017).

This idea has been an overarching theme in western society for the last half century but the roots of this problem goes back further than that. Since the industrial revolution, Americans have developed the reputation as the most wasteful people and rightfully so. Berger refers to the early days of frontier settlement in North America where there was flagrant misuse of natural resources. It is easy to think of examples of this but one that stands out above the rest was the extermination of the American Buffalo in the Great Plains. Ranchers and hunters were just killing these animals and leaving the corpses out in the fields. Other examples of this is the different mining practices that were used throughout North America. This includes surface mining which is a very intrusive process that leaves the entire area barren and destroyed. In many areas, "because of [surface] mining, the environment has been very bad, and destroyed the balance of the ecology, the stability of the water level and the water quality around the mine for long term." Fortunately, there has been a much stronger movement through sustainable practices within the new generation. Earth Day was created in 1970 to bring awareness to the environment and conservation efforts. In Vancouver, there is a yearly march and celebration led by high school students to help raise awareness of issues facing our planet like climate change and pollution. One student says "without this Earth, without the stuff it provides for us, and if we don't do something about it, it's going to be too late in the future." "Vancouver youth help raise awareness about climate change." Xinhua News Agency, April 27, 2015. Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources (accessed May 8, 2017).

Yi, Pan, Liu Yang, Yang Min, WangLinyan, Yang Shuangchun, and Zhang Jinhui. "The environmental impact assessments of oil shale in in-situ mining and surface mining." International Journal of Applied Environmental Sciences 7, no. 4 (2012): 403+. Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources (accessed May 8, 2017).

Sigurd Olson was a writer in the 20th century who focused on nature and how humans interact with nature. Olson grew up in Minnesota and lived there most of his life where he found his love of nature by traveling to different parts of the state. Olson played a big role in drafting the Wilderness Act of 1964 passed. He was responsible for establishing a few national parks including Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota, Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and Point Reyes National Seashore in California. Olson also held the position of President of the Wilderness Society and National Parks Association at different times in his life. With all of the work he did, Olson was a well known figure in the conservationist and environmentalist field. Olson wrote many books about the wilderness of different places he traveled and many of them focused on places in the northern states of the US. Olson had a simplistic view of nature as he felt "the wilderness offers simplicity and brings people closer to nature. It is also a place where a person can find a renewed sense of identity." Olson's legacy is continued by his preservation work and the many places he was able to establish wilderness protection laws. In 1978 Olson was able to get full wilderness status granted to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area which was the area he grew up near.

"Sigurd Olson, a Writer And Environmentalist." The New York Times. January 14, 1982. Accessed May 07, 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/15/obituaries/sigurd-olson-a-writer-and-environmentalist.html. Nelson, Michael. "Wilderness." In Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, edited by J. Callicott and Robert Frodeman, 402-405. Vol. 2. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2009. Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources (accessed May 7, 2017).

Wilderness is a very vague term that get used a lot in this chapter. Berger uses the definition which is “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” This definition covers the technical and legal definition of wilderness, but wilderness has many meanings that has changed over time. Before modern technology, the wilderness was a place that was dangerous and unforgiving. Because of this perception of the wild, there was a sense of masculinity to travelling in the through it. Even today this idea manifests in pop culture as shows such a Man vs Wild are still popular that focus on humans overcoming the elements in the wilderness. However, wilderness has a even deeper meaning than that. There has been a spiritual element to the wilderness that has been integral to North American society for centuries. From the Pilgrims to Thomas Cole to Thoreau to John Muir to Bob Marshall to Aldo Leopold, the spiritual aspect of the wild led these men on philosophical movements. John Nagle argues "the spiritual benefit which people receive from a stay in the wilderness is not a tangible item, but it must be an important consideration in legislation of America is truly dedicated to a somewhat idealistic sense of values." This notion has been seen throughout history as there was a clear sense of spirituality recognized when the Wilderness Act of 1964 was passed. Nagle, John Copeland. "The spiritual values of wilderness." Environmental Law, Fall 2005, p. 955+. Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources, find.galegroup.com/grnr/infomark.do?&source=gale&idigest=6f8f4a3faafd67e66fa023866730b0a1&prodId=GRNR&userGroupName=bucknell_it&tabID=T002&docId=A141802024&type=retrieve&PDFRange=%5B%5D&contentSet=IAC-Documents&version=1.0. Accessed 6 May 2017.

Wallace Stegner in an American author, environmentalist, and historian who grew up in the western part of the country where most of his writing was focused. He wrote about his life moving around the western states and growing up with nature having an important role in his life. Berger is quoting from Stegner's Wilderness Letter that he wrote in 1960. This quote is a good reflection of what Stegner's message was. Even though Stegner was a writer, he was an avid conservationist that was vocal with his beliefs. Once place Stegner lived was in Salt Lake City, Utah. He attended the University of Utah there and received his B.A. in 1930. Stegner continued his academics at the University of Iowa where he got his doctorate in 1935. Stegner went on to write Pulitzer Prize winning Angel of Repose in 1971 and National Book award winning the The Spectator Bird in 1976. Stegner's legacy as a writer and a conservationist can be seen throughout the places he lived. At the University of Utah the Wallace Stegner Prize in Environmental or American Western History was established in 2010. This award shows the lasting impact of Stegner's life on the subject. Stegner writes "Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed." Stegner is one of the fathers of the conservation effort of the wilderness in the United States and it is appropriate that Berger quotes him here. Stegner, Wallace. "Earth words." Mother Earth News, August-September 2004, 128. Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources (accessed May 6, 2017). http://find.galegroup.com/grnr/infomark.do?&source=gale&idigest=6f8f4a3faafd67e66fa023866730b0a1&prodId=GRNR&userGroupName=bucknell_it&tabID=T003&docId=A119782042&type=retrieve&PDFRange=%5B%5D&contentSet=IAC-Documents&version=1.0.

In this context, Berger is using the Wilderness Act to reference how wilderness is defined. This is a very famous definition for the eloquent way the wilderness is described. "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” After many drafts and eight years of work the Wilderness Act was signed in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Since the passage of this act there has been much debate about what land is "wilderness" and what should be done with this land. The main reason for the act is to protect these lands from development and industrialization. But another part of the reason was to increase recreational use of this land such as hiking, canoeing and fishing. "Over the decades an obvious contradiction has emerged between preservation and access." The National Forest Service is reluctant to put up signs and other infrastructure in these areas because it goes against the foremost goal of this act. Unfortunately, this is causing safety concerns for recreationists. Overall the Wilderness Act has made over 170,000 square miles into "wilderness" and has protect this land for the last half century. Gourlie, Don. "The Wilderness Act at 50." Environmental Law, Spring 2014, 285+. Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources (accessed May 6, 2017). http://find.galegroup.com/grnr/infomark.do?&source=gale&idigest=6f8f4a3faafd67e66fa023866730b0a1&prodId=GRNR&userGroupName=bucknell_it&tabID=T002&docId=A375290680&type=retrieve&PDFRange=%5B%5D&contentSet=IAC-Documents&version=1.0.

Sequoia National Park is a large land reserve in southern California which is home to the Sequoia National Forest. This forest is home to five out of the ten largest trees in the world and contains the single largest tree known as the General Sherman Tree. General Sherman stands at a whopping 275ft and a 14ft diameter at the middle of the tree. Sequoia National Park was founded in 1890 and was part of the initial effort to create more national parks to conserve the different habitats and ecosystems in the United States. The mission of the national parks was to bring awareness of the beauty of our environment. National parks were created to have designated areas that were set aside for humans to enjoy in a natural state. This concept still holds true today in parks as research shows "that this wilderness, in contrast to where most visitors live, is highly valued for clean air and water, natural sounds, low density of people, lack of motorized noise, and where evidence of human influence is relatively unnoticeable." Sequoia and other national parks around it are a large source of eco-tourism in the area. Eco-tourism is becoming a more prevalent force in the world today and some countries such as Costa Rica have much of their entire economy built on it.

Watson A, Martin S, Christensen N, Fauth G, Williams D. The Relationship Between Perceptions of Wilderness Character and Attitudes Toward Management Intervention to Adapt Biophysical Resources to a Changing Climate and Nature Restoration at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park](http://insert-your-link-here.com))mber 2015;56(3):653-663. Available from: GreenFILE, Ipswich, MA. Accessed April 25, 2017.

Alexis de Tocqueville is a French politician and historian that is best known for his work, "Democracy in America". Tocqueville wrote this piece with two volumes in 1835 and 1840 after visiting the United States. He traveled around the country making observations on American society compared to his European standard. His work focused on the many aspects of US government and policy ranging from manifest destiny to slavery. A major part of de Tocqueville's work was his study of the different races and how they interact. He drew the picture of America "where three typical characters predominate: the black who suffer in slavery, the Indian who is free in idleness, and the white American who is at work and at work. Profit." Tocqueville focused on other parts of American society as well that Berger references at this part. Here, Berger is quoting a section about how American's drive for expansion led to the destruction of the environment which. Tocqueville was a revolutionary with this observation as he was one of the first people to document the devastation that industrialization can bring to the natural world. Over the next decades this idea would be adopted by many including Theodore Roosevelt and lead to the creation of National Parks across the United States. Berger is using this quote because this idea is still extremely prevalent in the conservation effort today. Berger concedes that expansion of technology and industrialization is inevitable but that sometimes the cost of this advancements is not worth the punishment to the environment. Tocqueville's observations are still major issue in developing countries where massive industrialization is just beginning.

Denys Delâge and Catherine Desbarats and Jean-Philippe Warren. "Alexis de Tocqueville in" wild "country." The Tocqueville Review / La revue Tocqueville 36, no. 2 (2015): 175-204. Https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed April 17, 2017).

The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line was a chain of 63 radio and communication centers that spread from Alaska to the Canadian Arctic to Greenland. The DEW line was an American defense project to protect them from Russian threat. The DEW line was the first joint American and Canadian defense project (Lajeunesse). Because the majority of the project was paid for and spearheaded by the United States, Canada feared losing sovereignty in the Arctic. The United States did not wish to control Canadian land, but would control military forces in that region. Canada feared American presence and demanded that any American military air force bases be located away from densely populated areas. The DEW Line was functional by 1957. The DEW line was primarily controlled by the American Air Force, as the Canadian Air Force personnel did not have proper training or manpower to serve the DEW line. The Canadian presence on the DEW line was largely ceremonial to display Canadian approval and control of their land. The Canadian government pushed for the DEW Line to become NATO territory to minimize American dominance of the region, but this hope was never realized. In order to regain control over their Arctic territory, Canada constructed its own radar line called the Mid-Canada Line. Constructing their own line allowed Canada to regain recognition as a powerful ally and partner to the United States.

References: Lajeunesse, Adam. "The Distant Early Warning Line and the Canadian Battle for Public Perception." Canadian Military Journal. Accessed May 04, 2017. http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo8/no2/lajeunes-eng.asp.

That is the least they can do. The very least.

The frontier has for a long time been an essential part of the identity of North America. In the United States, after the French and Indian Wars, people rapidly began to move out West on the "frontier" to create better lives for themselves. They saw the frontier as a land of great opportunity. Especially in America, there was so much fertile land that people would be able to move out westward and own massive areas of land to start agriculture on. But the frontier has also had many different motifs in the development of North America. The frontier was a very difficult place to live. Before the French and Indian Wars, white people on the frontier would constantly be harassed or even killed by Native Americans protecting their land. The frontier was also miles away from any substantial civilization so families were pretty much all on their own out there. It was seen as an area of grit and masculinity. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner talks about how the frontier was crucial to the development of American culture. He says that, "this perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character." While here I focus on the expansion westward, the "frontier" extended both northward and southward. When people began to move to westward and northward into Canada, it had already been done before in America. This led to pre-legislation and treaties with the indigenous people that allowed for easier transitions and avoid creating another "Wild West".

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The frontier in American history. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1935.

Yellowstone National Park is a large land reserve in the American west that extends into Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. Yellowstone is very well known for its incredible geology and wildlife. Yellowstone National Park is built on top of a ancient super volcano that causes interesting geological phenomena like geysers and hot springs. Furthermore, Yellowstone has very diverse wildlife that ranges from wolves to American bison to elk populations. Yellowstone was the first ever National Park in the world as it was established in 1872 by President Ulysses S. Grant. The original initiative for national parks came from the idea for people to leave areas of great natural beauty to be left alone and enjoyed by everyone. Though the first national park, the development of Yellowstone stared a theme of conservation and preservation that spread throughout the country. Even to this day, Yellowstone stands as a prime example of environmental preservation because of their ever expanding American Bison population as well as wolf populations. This can be seen even as early as last year as the Obama administration placed a ban on mining in an area near Yellowstone saying, "Today's action helps ensure that Yellowstone's watershed, wildlife and the tourism-based economy of local communities will not be threatened by the impact of mineral development."

Dennis, Brady. "Obama administration moves to block mining near Yellowstone." Washington Post, November 21, 2016. Global Reference on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources (accessed April 10, 2017). http://find.galegroup.com/grnr/infomark.do?&source=gale&idigest=6f8f4a3faafd67e66fa023866730b0a1&prodId=GRNR&userGroupName=bucknell_it&tabID=T004&docId=CJ470939393&type=retrieve&PDFRange=%5B%5D&contentSet=IAC-Documents&version=1.0

The dust bowl is a geographic region in the United States centralized in the panhandle of Oklahoma and northern part of Texas that extends to surrounding states like Kansas and New Mexico. The dust bowl is infamous for experiencing a severe drought for almost a decade in the 1930's. In addition to the drought, decades of poor farming practices led the top soil to be overused and low in nutrients. Because of these compounding problems, crops were not able to be grown in this region which forced tens of thousands of farming families to move away. The drought in the dust bowl could not have come at a worse time as it occurred during the Great Depression. With an already struggling economy, food supplies were severely reduced nationwide leading to even more struggle. "This convergence of geophysical and anthropogenic factors conspired to create what is arguably the most severe long-term human ecological crisis the USA has seen.” An iconic part of the dust bowl were the intense dust storms that were experienced because of the loose top soil and high power winds. These storms were know as black blizzards as they covered the sky in dust and blackened everything. These dust storms reached all the way to areas of the East coast.

Porter, Jess. 2014. "What was the Dust Bowl? Assessing contemporary popular knowledge." Population & Environment 35, no. 4: 391-416. GreenFILE, EBSCOhost (accessed April 10, 2017).

In this sentence, Berger refers to how transport and industrial activity expanded heavily over this time period when many Americans were moving out west. This is a massive part of North American history because of the opportunities it opened up for rich and poor people alike. The first railroads in North America were established in the 1820's and quickly altered the face of life on the continent. The rapid expansion of the railroad industry led to the development of other industries like oil and steel. For a time in the 19th century these were the largest economic factors in the United States and whoever controlled these essentially controlled the country. However, Berger here is referring to the opportunities that railroads opened up for expansion across the west and north. The incredible development of railroads made travel to the west coast of America much easier than it ever was before. This changed the idea of the "frontier" in many people's mind. Because travel was much easier, the idea of the west in North America being a rustic and dangerous environment changed overtime and culminated in western economic opportunities like the Gold Rush. "Gold discoveries in the Far West preceded the gold rush of 1849 and encouraged migration from eastern cities." As western movement became more and more popular, the idea of a pristine, wild, and natural American west began to fade. The idea of a getting rich quick from the California Gold Rush was translated to the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon of Canada in 1896. This had similar affects on how people viewed the Northwest region of Canada and its wilderness.

"Railroad Promotion and Economic Expansion at Council Bluffs, Iowa, 1857-1869." Annals Of Iowa 42, no. 5 (Summer1974 1974): 371-389. America: History and Life with Full Text, EBSCOhost (accessed April 6, 2017).

• Aimé Césaire (American Academy of Poets)
• Aimé Césaire (VIAF)
• Aimé Césaire (English Wikipedia)
• Aimé Césaire (French Wikipedia)

Interesting that government was expected to have a religious aspect. Whereas, today people hate that politicians use God's time to justify their choices.

Photo of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin: three of the most prominent African American writers of the Civil Rights era. Image credit: New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Is this another reference to Western culture influence on the rest of the world?

They American Dialect Society Word of the Year 2016

Mo discusses this in her spot on This American Life: "The Poetry of Propaganda: Party On!"

What roles do sugar and slavery play in the expansion of European empires?

Sugar was becoming very popular in Asia and was quickly discovered by the Europeans. The Portuguese had to find new land to grow the sugar cane because it was required to have the right conditions to grow. This is when the Portuguese found the Guanches, an African tribe in order to take care of the sugar cane. This helped the Portuguese become very wealthy.

What were the three major crops developed in the Americas? What impact did they have?

The three major crops were corn, beans and squash which all had nutritional needs that sustained the cities and civilizations.

The Spanish was trying to take control over North and Central America. They were taking away valued goods from the Native Americans and made money off of it.

The Portuguese found that sugar was a high profitable crop that they can get wealthy off of and decided to take action in the market with it. They enslaved Africans during the time they grew crops so they could make a higher profit in the business.

Native Americans were the first group of people to be in North America, long before Columbus and the Europeans came. How could they take credit for finding this land first?

The ice age across North America left many people to panic on how they were going to survive these harsh temperatures. They had to find many ways to stay warm and finding food was tough because they would be trapped from going out in the cold.

Is this a veiled attempt at American exceptionalism?

Week 10 Video Lecture

Study Questions:

What political ideas develop in the colonies as a result of Great Britain’s failure to fully define the colonies' relationship to the empire?

What are the Sugar, Currency and Stamp Acts? How do colonists respond to these new laws?

How do protests begin to broaden to include members of colonial societies new to public political participation?

How do slaves and slavery point out the contradictions within the American Revolution?

Study Questions:

What does Abigail Adams mean when she writes “remember the ladies”?

What is John Adams reply to her request?

What power does she claim for women?

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) wrote to her husband John in 1776, as he and other colonial leaders were meeting in Philadelphia in the Second Continental Congress. Adams wrote from Braintree, Massachusetts, where she was raising her four young children and managing the family farm. Although her days were busy with the duties of a single parent living both in a war zone — the British Army was only about twelve miles away in Boston — and in an area ravaged by a smallpox epidemic, she still contemplated the political changes taking place, and those changes are reflected in her appeal to her husband.

wish? I wish I had a husband?

Ok, but also skeptical about using Christian tropes to define the story...

So somehow the inability to hold their tongues is involved with them being a "little people?" Confused about how colonialism and genocide figure in...

Ok, so she spills the beans. Is this a grave sin of some kind?

Why do you think Katahdin doesn't want anyone to ask, and doesn't want his wife to tell, about the fact that he is the boy's father and her husband?

their religion is a cult by whose definition?

holy magic medicine!

heaven & hell?

a near-death experience that gives you a new perspective on life

he's preaching

do they basically worship this "medicine"?

he is using "ill" for being physically, mentally, and spiritually unwell

he's becoming a kind of religious healer

if he isn't white, why is he referring to Nat. Am. as Indians? Does he mean actual Indians from India?

his people

for some reason this line reminds me of "The Road Not Taken"

for some reason this line reminds me of "The Road Not Taken"

he's hooked!

the devil?

didn't take much convincing

own people? His name is John, so is he white?

interesting that Christian influences literally changed the meaning of the words of the Peyote baptism to its younger members

the leader

Does the Peyote religion have ties to Christianity?

forgiveness for what? their "sins"?

why is it considered a cult?

was Christmas a significant holiday/day for the Peyote?

How does it change the story of European colonization and genocide if it is recast this way?

Hmm. Ok, so why does he want his mother Christened? To understand this, I think we need to understand the history of the tribe, paticularly at the time that this story is being written down.

I love this.

Always intrigued by how these stories don't work out in the way that we are accustomed, with no final moral, no full explanation of the metaphor, no tying up of threads...

A metaphor for colonization by the Europeans?

Denial isn't just a river in Egypt.

Interesting. Need to look into how historical preservation is used to perpetuate oppression.

I love the details, the pride, the power of this description!

This is such a powerful articulation--borrowed from Baldwin as the epigraph makes clear--of the social construct of whiteness.

A riff on the title of TNC's forthcoming book, itself a a riff on WEB Du Bois's famous description of black experience in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). As he opens that book in a chapter entitled "Of Our Spiritual Strivings":

BETWEEN me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.

This reminds me of the incident during the Baltimore Uprising in April where Toya Graham beats her son. Stacey Patton wrote about this:

The kind of violent discipline Graham unleashed on her son did not originate with her, or with my adoptive mother who publicly beat me when I was a child, or with the legions of black parents who equate pain with protection and love. The beatings originated with white supremacy, a history of cultural and physical violence that devalues black life at every turn. From slavery through Jim Crow, from the school-to-prison pipeline, the innocence and protection of black children has always been a dream deferred. http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/29/why-is-america-celebrating-the-beating-of-a-black-child/

Hard not to relate this piece to another great statement of African American experience: Frederick Douglass's 1841 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

Because those creation myths are aligned with the cult of the individual in American culture. We tend to value individual accomplishment over collaboration.

Doesn't this project also radically depart from the traditional textbook format and industry in less than "safe," but equally exciting ways?

I really love this idea as the "yawp" as an organizing principle for a collaborative, open textbook. Given his own obsessively iterative composition of Leaves of Grass Whitman really is a great analogy for this project.

The "Gods of the mountains" line was a piece of Muir's larger metaphor for the holiness of natural places that figured those who would develop them as "temple destroyers." Here's the full quote from Muir's defense of the Hetch Hetchy in his book The Yosemite.:

These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

Recent scholars have critiqued Riis's work despite its effective advocacy for tenement reform. His photography certainly exposed the problem of urban poverty, but also exposed the personal lives of the poor to a largely wealthy audience.

How does this mess, though, relate directly to the "unraveling" of American promise signified by the late 60s. Was Hunter killed because he was black? Or because he was high? Or because the Angels were drunk?

Such an ambivalent phrase. The narrator seems to be claiming that this is a "moment" unparalleled in its significance. Yet this significance is "undetermined"; it remains unclear exactly how the moment is significant.

A line from Elvie Thomas's "Motherless Child Blues":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmj23UrVF80

The trope of the motherless child is a popular one in African American art. Of course the destruction of families was a major consequence of the slave trade and the institution of slavery.