Acknowledging the work of others

Literary criticism   Original passage taken from Harris, T (1991).  Fictions and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press.

"I would contend that [Toni] Morrison succeeds in closing the gap [between author/tale-teller and reader/listener] by creating a story that insists upon response from readers.  She does that by politely assaulting our acceptance of certain cultural assumptions.  Initially, she challenges beliefs about morality, about the absoluteness of good and evil; she has done so in all of her books, but the challenge is more intense in Beloved.  Killing a child is certainly antithetical to the basic roots of our society, but Morrison forces us to ask again and again what we might have done under the circumstances". (p.171)

Science   Original passage taken from Baker, A. C. (2001).  Reef corals bleach to survive change. Nature 411, 765 - 766.

"The bleaching of coral reefs, in which symbiotic algae are lost from reef-building invertebrates, is usually considered to be a drastic and damaging response to adverse environmental conditions. Here I report results from transplant experiments involving different combinations of coral host and algal symbiont that support an alternative view, in which bleaching offers a high-risk ecological opportunity for reef corals to rid themselves rapidly of suboptimal algae and to acquire new partners. This strategy could be an advantage to coral reefs that face increasingly frequent and severe episodes of mass bleaching as a result of projected climate change." (p.765)

Social science   Original passage taken from Wade, P. (1997).  Race and Ethnicity in Latin America.  London and Chicago: Pluto Press.

"But it is no coincidence that just as abolitionist opinion gained dominance in Europe, making the institutionalized inferiority of blacks morally insecure, theories [claiming to be ‘scientific'] began to emerge that could justify the continued dominance over blacks (not to mention Native Americans, Asians and Orientals) in terms of supposedly innate and permanent inferiority and now with the full power of scientific backing". (p.11)

Economics   Original passage taken from Friedman, T. L. (2000). The Lexus and the Olive Tree.  New York: Anchor Books. 

"This first era of globalization and global finance capitalism was broken apart by the successive hammer blows of World War I, the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression, which combined to fracture the world both physically and ideologically.  The formally divided world that emerged after World War II was then frozen in place by the Cold War.  The Cold War was also an international system.  It lasted roughly from 1945 to 1989, when, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was replaced by another system: the new era of globalization we are now in.  Call it "Globalization Round II."  It turns out that the roughly seventy-five-year period from the start of World War I to the end of the Cold War was just a long time-out between one era of globalization and another". (p. xvii)

History   Original passage taken from Halberstam, D. (1993). The Fifties. New York: Villard.

"[Martin Luther King, Jr.] knew from his experience in Montgomery, where television news was making its earliest inroads, that what he was doing was no longer merely local, that because of television, for the first time the nation was converging each evening around 6 or 7 P.M. […]

"King was appealing to the national electorate at the expense of the regional power structure, which he considered hostile anyway.  He needed some measure of white backlash, and he needed, among other things, proper villains.  He wanted ordinary white people to sit in their homes and watch blacks acting with great dignity while Southern officials, moved by the need to preserve a system he hated, assaulted them.  As such he was the dramatist of a national morality play; The blacks were in white hats; the whites, much to their surprise, would find themselves in the black hats." (p.690-691)