Bridgewater State University

About: Bridgewater State University is a education organization based out in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 625 authors who have published 1223 publications receiving 21820 citations. The organization is also known as: BSU & Bridgewater State.

Gender Turnover and Roll Call Voting in the US Senate

Abstract: Most studies looking at the roll call voting behavior of female legislators have investigated this phenomenon at the state legislative level and for the US House of Representatives. Very little research has looked at the impact of gender on the policy records of US senators. With the number of female senators continuing to increase it is now possible to undertake such an analysis. This study examines the influence of gender in predicting the roll call voting behavior of US senators across several recent congresses. To unearth gender effects, it employs a longitudinal design based on turnover in the Senate, which holds constituency constant while allowing gender and party to vary. The results indicate that male and female senators representing the same state compile very similar voting records on the basic left/right policy dimension. However, when votes on issues of concern to women are examined, female senators tend to be more supportive than the male senators they replaced, and male senators tend to be ...

Russia on the Eve of Modernity: Popular Religion and Traditional Culture under the Last Tsars

Abstract: Russia on the Eve of Modernity is a pioneering exploration of a world that has been largely destroyed by revolutionary upheavals and obscured in historical memory by scholarly focus on elites. Drawing on traditional religious texts, ethnographic materials and contemporary accounts, this book brings to light the ideas and perceptions of the ordinary Russian people of the towns and countryside who continued to live in a pre-modern, non-Western culture that showed great resilience to the very end of the Romanov Empire. Leonid Heretz offers an overview of traditional Russian understandings of the world and its workings, and shows popular responses to events from the assassination of Alexander II to the First World War. This history of ordinary Russians illuminates key themes ranging from peasant monarchism to apocalyptic responses to intrusions from the modern world and will appeal to scholars of Russian history and the history of religion in modern Europe.

The Everyday Politics of Being a Student in South Africa

Abstract: Over the past year, a student movement that has come to be known as "Fallism" has swept South Africa. Student protests under the banner "Rhodes Must Fall" advocated the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes and the "decolonization" of the University of Cape Town and peer institutions; subsequent protests have demanded that "Fees Must Fall" at universities across the country. This article examines the history and historiography of student politics in 20th century South Africa, at this time when both unresolved tensions and nostalgic visions of past struggles are pressing up urgently against the present. Student politics has long been a major topic for South African scholars. Indeed, in the wake of 1976, many historians conceived of the history of black education in South Africa simply as the history of student protest. The study of resistance has remained integral to the field. Yet since the end of apartheid in 1994, the ways that historians look at student politics has been changing, in three interconnected ways. The first is our attention to political imagination — tending not only to possibilities that were embraced as key organizing strategies, but also (and more so) to possibilities that fizzled in their time, to fail or to reemerge later, in new forms. This interest flows from the circumstances of our present: like historians working elsewhere in post-colonial Africa, many of us are disappointed with how things turned out. We have ever-growing analytical distance to ask questions impossible at the height of anti-apartheid struggle, and the technological capabilities to access many obscure sources more quickly. These same factors explain a second shift in our field: we are seeing the spaces of politics differently. We are moving beyond familiar narratives of student resistance because we are looking not only at the campuses that played emblematic roles in the making of African nationalism and anti-apartheid struggle. We are also looking at stranger places — such as an elite mission school for African girls that thrived during segregation and apartheid, or a rural art school created by the apartheid government. These new vantage points enable us to see different political actors — for whom education was clearly a question of power, but a question with many different answers than those that an earlier generation of scholarship would have led us to expect.

An empirical evaluation: gunshot detection system and its effectiveness on police practices

Abstract: The rapid development of technologies has led police departments to adopt new physical security systems to manage violent crimes. This study evaluates the implementation of a gunshot detection system in an urban neighborhood plagued by high rates of violent crime in southeast Massachusetts. Data were collected from the police dispatch log of a southeastern Massachusetts city employing the technology; the research design then evaluated the impact of the Shotspotter™ system on the ability of the police to more effectively identify, investigate, and prosecute gun-involved crimes. This study utilized a quasi-experimental design confirming positive outcomes in police response and dispatch times, but not except case resolutions. Future research may need to establish a refined measurement on case resolution variable to clearly reflect its constructs considering the police investigation process.