Department of History

The West Virginia University (WVU) Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system was built between 1971 and 1975 in Morgantown, West Virginia to be a prototype transportation system of the future. Envisioned as a hybrid of public and automotive transportation, the fully automated cars deliver passengers directly to their destinations without stopping at intervening stations. The PRT concept may be familiar to STS scholars through Latour's study of Aramis, a PRT in Paris that was never completed. This article recounts a history with the opposite ending: the successful realization of a PRT in West Virginia. Our account supplements existing ones, which explain the construction of the WVUPRT primarily as the product of geography and politics. While not denying these factors, we carve out an explanatory role for another influence: a public narrative about the dangers of hitchhiking and crimes that might ensue from that practice. In weaving together that narrative with the history of the WVUPRT, we show how public narratives of crime authorize technological infrastructure.

Translations of Tycho Brahe, De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis (Uraniborg: Christophorus Weida, 1588), chapter 6 (selections) carried out in collaborative translation sessions that took place beginning in the spring of 2010 at the University of Cambridge as part of the AHRC-funded project, “Diagrams, Images, and the Transformation of Astronomy, 1450-1650.” Participants in the sessions included Nick Jardine, Sachiko Kusukawa, Christopher Lewis, Isabelle Pantin, and Renée Raphael. Please cite as: Brahe, Tycho De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis (Uraniborg: Christophorus Weida, 1588), chapter 6 (selections). Translated by Nick Jardine, Sachiko Kusukawa, Christopher Lewis, Isabelle Pantin, and Renée Raphael. eScholarship: University of California, 2013.

Jessica Millward discussed her book, "Finding Charity's Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland," where she places enslaved women in Maryland at the center of the long struggle for African American freedom. Speaker Biography: Jessica Millward is an assistant professor in the history department in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Her work focuses on African American history, early America, the African diaspora, slavery and gender.

The School of Humanities at UC Irvine presents, "The Ghosts of Slavery,” a Q&A with Georges Van Den Abbeele, dean of the School of Humanities and Jessica Millward, associate professor of history.

How do you uncover the life of a slave who left no paper trail? What can her everyday life tell us about slavery, how it was practiced, and how some slaves made the transition from slavery to freedom? Today, we explore the life of Charity Folks, an enslaved woman from Maryland who gained her freedom in the late-18th century. Our guide through Charity’s life is Jessica Millward, an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine and author of Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland.

Forensic feature-comparison examiners compare-or "match"-evidence samples (e.g., fingerprints) to provide judgments about the source of the evidence. Research demonstrates that examiners in select disciplines possess expertise in this task by outperforming novices-yet the psychological mechanisms underpinning this expertise are unclear. This article investigates one implicated mechanism: statistical learning, the ability to learn how often things occur in the environment. This ability is likely important in forensic decision-making as samples sharing rarer statistical information are more likely to come from the same source than those sharing more common information. We investigated 46 fingerprint examiners' and 52 novices' statistical learning of fingerprint categories and application of this knowledge in a source-likelihood judgment task. Participants completed four measures of their statistical learning (frequency discrimination judgments, bounded and unbounded frequency estimates, and source-likelihood judgments) before and after familiarization to the "ground-truth" category frequencies. Compared to novices, fingerprint examiners had superior domain-specific statistical learning across all measures-both before and after familiarization. This suggests that fingerprint expertise facilitates domain-specific statistical learning-something that has important theoretical and applied implications for the development of training programs and statistical databases in forensic science. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Abstract: In 1923, Los Angeles teachers protested the state’s biennial budget, a controversial document from newly elected governor Friend Richardson that significantly cut funding to government agencies. The budget was the culmination of more than a decade of fiscal policy reform that reflected a significant shift in anti-tax sentiment. The expansion of state governance in the early twentieth century required the development of fiscal policies to meet the needs of the modern state, and public debates about taxation reflected deep ideological differences about the structure and scope of government and implicated public schooling. This analysis demonstrates two features of fiscal policy reform in California. First, tax reform shaped and was shaped by the political context, demonstrating the dynamic relationship between fiscal policy and state formation. Second, debates about tax reform were ultimately about the scope of government. Anti-tax campaigns that sought a more limited government implicated schooling, the largest item in the state budget, and undermined efforts to achieve educational equity.