Zachary Schrag

George Mason University | GMU · Department of History and Art History

Since the 1950s, policymakers and researchers in the United States and abroad have labored to distinguish those activities that require some level of prior approval from other forms of human interaction and information exchange. In 1978, Albert Jonsen — a member of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behav...

On the afternoon of Saturday, July 21, 1877, members of the Pennsylvania National Guard fired into a crowd of strikers, tramps, and curiosity seekers on a Pittsburgh hillside. It is not known how many were killed, but the dead included an old man, a little girl, and, quite possibly, Private Jacob Neumeister, a guardsman himself. Neumeister (whose d...

For decades, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have questioned the appropriateness and utility of prior review of their research by human subjects' ethics committees. This essay seeks to organize thematically some of their published complaints and to serve as a brief restatement of the major critiques of ethics review. In particular, i...

University researchers in the United States seeking to observe, survey, or interview people are required first to complete ethical training courses and to submit their proposals to an institutional review board (IRB). Under current rules, IRBs have the power to deny funding, degrees, or promotion if their recommended modifications to scholars' prop...

Since the late 1990s, institutional review boards, or IRBs, have become increasingly assertive in their claims that they have the moral and legal authority to control the work of researchers in the humanities and social sciences. These boards often demand that university researchers complete ethical training courses, submit their proposed research...

In universities across the United States, institutional review boards, or IRBs, claim that they have the moral and legal authority to control the work of researchers in the humanities and social sciences. While IRBs may claim powers independent of federal regulations, they invariably point to these regulations as a key source of their authority. Th...

Jeff Kisseloff was an adolescent in the late 1960s, too young to take a direct part in the great protests against segregation and the Vietnam War, but old enough to be aware of what was going on. He admired the activists slightly older than he who "had what I didn't have—the courage to stand up and be heard, to say no to the things that were wrong"...

Samuel Insull's life was a tragedy in three acts. In his youth he embodied the Horatio Alger tale of a young man of humble origins whose pluck and talents gain the notice of a great man—in this case Thomas Edison—and propel him to prosperity. In his prime he was a grand tycoon, amassing millions of dollars by electrifying the American Midwest and s...

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the proposed Three Sisters Bridge over the Potomac River became one of the most prominent controversies in the national debate over urban freeway construction. Because of the District of Columbia's unique federal status, both highway advocates and opponents saw the bridge as a matter of national importance. Previo...

Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. By Andrew Wiese. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 411. $37.50 - - Volume 64 Issue 3 - ZACHARY M. SCHRAG

Technology and Culture 43.4 (2002) 802-803 Today, about half of all Americans live in suburbs, and four out of five consider themselves environmentalists. Adam Rome traces both phenomena back to the quarter century after 1945, when developers built tens of millions of suburban houses, each year covering an area the size of Rhode Island with develop...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Technology and Culture 41.1 (2000) 51-79 Figures In 1979, the New York City Planning Commission proposed a new vision for mass transit on the streets of Manhattan. The commission proposed to replace sixty-eight crosstown buses on Forty-second Street with twelve electric streetcars, wh...

Technology and Culture 41.3 (2000) 638-640 Chicago Transit: An Illustrated History. By David M. Young. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998. Pp. viii+213; illustrations, tables, appendixes, notes/references, bibliography, index. $35. At first glance, Chicago Transit appears to be a standard railfan chronicle: eleven inches high, l...

Thesis (A.B., Honors in Social Studies)--Harvard University, 1992. Includes bibliographical references.