UVM NOTEBOOK
photo by Andy Duback
Running deep
Grant funds new approach to Lake Champlain study
A watch is complicated, but a watershed is complex. Remove one gear from the hundreds in the watch and it, predictably, stops working. Pollute one river with excess phosphorous and the whole watershed is likely to change in hundreds of ways, but nobody can be quite sure if or when or where a beach-closing toxic algae bloom will appear in Lake Champlain.
“Complex and complicated mean two very different things,” says Judith Van Houten, professor of biology, and the lead researcher on a new project, Complex Systems Modeling for Environmental Problem Solving, funded by a $6.7 million National Science Foundation grant to the EPSCoR program (see sidebar) at the University of Vermont.
“A complex system is far more than the sum of its parts,” she says, “the whole always has surprises that could not have been predicted by studying individual pieces.” Cardiac cells yield a beating heart. Leaderless ants build bridges with their bodies. Chaotic hurricanes retain their fierce form across the ocean.
Or think of the Lake Champlain watershed. It doesn’t sit there like a paper-maché model. Instead, the whole emerges from the interplay of tiny parts, and evolves in reaction to itself. It’s 8,234 square miles, constantly remade by molecules of water, grains of shifting sediment, and the scuttling of microscopic insects—but also by large forces like land development, regional weather, and the globe’s climate. Traditional studies of one scale or stream or species are not able to produce a very illuminating guide to what makes the whole watershed tick.
Which may explain why, though pollution has been attacked by researchers and citizens for decades—and phosphorous in a concerted way since 1991—many problems in the lake remain and are poorly understood.
“We know that areas that have higher phosphorous concentration are more likely to have blue-green algae blooms,” says lake ecologist Mary Watzin, one of more than a dozen UVM scientists working with Van Houten. “But if you look at the south lake and you look at Missisquoi Bay they actually have about the same concentrations of phosphorous and yet the north lake is plagued with algae blooms and the south lake is not. Why is that? We don’t understand.”
The new project promises a way forward for unraveling this mystery and many other as-yet-undiscovered principles governing the lake’s watershed. But Van Houten’s team will not take the conventional approach of trooping out to the field to collect additional information.
Instead, drawing together ecologists, computer scientists, and engineers from across UVM, they’ll compile the many rich data sets already collected over the last two decades by Watzin and other researchers, the State of Vermont, and the Lake Champlain Basin Program. These tally nitrogen and phosphorous levels, streambank erosion, forest cover, phytoplankton abundance, farm field locations, insect species richness, fish and bird populations, new pavement, weather conditions, soil types, and many other variables in and around the lake.
Then it all goes in the blender. Using powerful mathematical modeling tools, the scientists will examine numerous layers of this disparate data at the same time. High-speed computers at UVM’s Advanced Computing Center, running self-learning programs—including “artificial neural networks” that evolve as they work, echoing the complex systems they study—should fish out patterns hidden within the brew of interactions between water, organisms, pollution, and land use changes.
“I’m interested in developing the tools that will enable you to model these kinds of systems,” says assistant professor of engineering Donna Rizzo, one of the project’s partners, “but what’s most exciting is getting together those of us on the computational side with the people who have been observing what’s been happening in the watershed,” like Watzin and UVM geologist Paul Bierman.
“If we can truly understand their data sets, we can help,” Rizzo says. “They’ve been picking up patterns. Picking up patterns is what is so exciting.”
The new computational approaches that Rizzo and her colleagues are developing “to draw these patterns to the surface” do more than calculate quickly. They take into account the “nonlinear” or chaotic properties that can make a small change create a huge effect and the ways in which simple interactions give rise to complex emergent properties.
“We cannot model the whole lake with traditional deterministic models,” Rizzo says, derived from averages and that assume the system is a static backdrop. “We’re not going to be able to answer management problems that way. We’re going to have to deal with chaos and the way the whole system changes.”
And from this darkness, “the hope is that these modeling tools can tease out what is associated with global climate change,” Watzin says, “and determine what most powerfully shapes water quality in the lake. Can we see points where the system suddenly starts to deteriorate more rapidly, ‘a so-called threshold response.’”
The UVM researchers think complex systems-based computer models will give answers to this kind of question—and a better sense of what various policies are likely to yield.
“If we know what the most powerful forces are and where those thresholds are, then we can develop management plans that focus where it matters and work aggressively to not cross those thresholds,” says Watzin. “We know it’s more complicated than just phosphorous.” It’s complex.
—Joshua Brown
The score on EPSCoR
The Vermont Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) at UVM was founded in 1985 and is directed by professor of biology Judith Van Houten.
EPSCoR works to improve the research competitiveness of Vermont scientists and engineers. There are EPSCoR programs in twenty-six smaller and rural states, funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and Department of Energy.
The new grant, secured with key leadership from Senator Patrick Leahy, will start several new programs in addition to the UVM Complex Systems research group (see main article). A new education and workforce development effort, the Streams Project, will bring together high school students and their teachers with undergraduates and professors from several Vermont colleges on a long-term study, sampling and analyzing water from streams throughout the Lake Champlain watershed. The Streams Project will apply new “complex systems” models to the data collected, providing insights into the well-being of many Vermont streams while engaging students in science, mathematics, and engineering topics, building their interest in careers in these fields.
A new initiative in EPSCoR’s highly successful Small Business Innovation Research program, which supports research in the private sector, will allow fledgling start-up businesses to use UVM research facilities to collect the data they need to move on to advanced phases of the program.
Innovation Fund awards, about $10,000 each, will go to four Vermont companies and entrepreneurs who optimistically ask, “what if this works” about high-risk, high-impact research ideas. History shows these long-shot ideas are the necessary starting point for new technology breakthroughs.
More information: uvm.edu/EPSCoR.Just 4 questions
One migraine blog likened him to “Mr. Smith”—Jimmy Stewart’s famous citizen-Senator cinematic crusader. But Dr. Robert Shapiro’s recent visit to Washington, for a marathon day of lobbying he co-developed and organized dubbed “Headache on the Hill,” offered more data than drama (although many television cameras were present). The event brought forty-five headache doctors, researchers, and patients to lobby Congress for a correction of what the associate professor of neurology and director of the Fletcher Allen headache clinic calls a “glaring disparity”: Thirty-six million Americans suffer from migraine, $20 billion in work is lost to migraine and headache disorders each year, and yet only an infinitesimal percentage of National Institutes of Health total funding is devoted to headache disorders.
Q. One of your catchphrases at presentations has been “migraine is not headache.” What is it then?
A. Patients who have migraine suffer tremendously from the confusion between a symptom, which can occur in the disorder they have, and the actual disorder that they have. Migraine is a state of the brain. It is better thought of as comparable to other brain states, be it waking, sleeping, anxious, or depressed or whatever. This state has certain symptoms. Headache is the dominant symptom for most people; it’s the one that brings patients to see doctors and prompts drug companies to make products, but you don’t have to have headache for it to be migraine.
Q. Why are migraine and headache relatively underrated in terms of research and drug development?
A. Part of it is that people who have never experienced migraine tend to make assumptions about what people with migraine experience. Part of it may have to do with the fact that migraine afflicts women much more than men. When attitudes about migraine were hardened, physicians were almost exclusively men, and there may be a very entrenched form of sexism and a cultural expectation that people should endure pain. This stigma may have made patients with migraine somewhat more reluctant to advocate for themselves. In 2006, the National Institutes of Health spent $10 million on headache research— less than .05 percent of the NIH’s total funding. This amount is not adequate, and it is not proportional to the prevalence and severity of migraine and other headache disorders.
Q. What did you ask Congress for during “Headache on the Hill”?
A. Based on our analysis of other diseases, migraine should be funded in excess of $100 million annually—and that’s a low estimate based on NIH spending. Other statistics (tracking the disability caused by migraine) might indicate $150 million per year should be spent on headache disorders. The numbers are stark and dramatic and almost preposterous. So, we’re asking Congress to move to $100 million in funding for headache over the next five years. This is an extraordinary request, going from about $10 million to $100 million, even if it’s directly proportional to the unmet need.
Q. What does your personal experience as someone with migraine bring to your professional perspective on this?
A. I don’t have migraine to the extent that it is disabling. But it gives me insight into what people are experiencing; it lets me see the other side. It’s also true, that while I don’t carry the stigma of the disease itself, within the realm of neurology people who care for patients with headache are somewhat looked down upon; for some neurologists, headache is not considered to be a suitable pursuit. This comes down to denial of certain kinds of pain rooted deep in medical culture. When a woman comes to see a male physician, especially decades ago, and there are no physical abnormalities, there was (and is) a tendency to dismiss the problem. That’s wrong, and it’s one of the attitudes that effective advocacy can help dismiss.
Photo by Herb Swanson
Hometown help
Having grown up in Vermont’s bucolic Northeast Kingdom, Kaela Gray ’08 was alarmed by the traffic-clogged roads and infinite march of strip malls she saw on visits to her mother’s Massachusetts hometown. “How could you live in a place like this?” she asked. “It must have been so weird growing up here.” Just as alarming: her mother’s disclosure that the landscape was mostly rural when she was a child. “I sometimes come back and I don’t even recognize where I am,” she told her daughter.
Gray, a senior in community development and applied economics, is doing her best to make sure that her own childhood home, the forests and fields of Lyndon and Burke and the small village of Lyndonville, remains a place she’ll recognize thirty years from now. As the Lyndon Planning Commission works to create a new plan, Gray is assisting in the process through a service-learning project in a CDAE course taught by Dan Baker. Though plans for small, rural towns can be fairly static, Grays says the need for keen foresight is essential for her hometown as potential major development just up Route 114 at Burke Mountain promises to impact the area.
Throughout the fall semester, Gray made the two-hour drive home nearly every Tuesday night for planning commission meetings. Once the plan is completed, she’ll take it the next step by researching recommendations on preserving the working landscape and housing and transportation issues to help them move toward implementation.
Gray’s thoughts on community development in the Kingdom are shaped by her experience in Cerro Azul, Honduras, where she took a study-abroad course, also taught by Baker. Questions about ecotourism in the tiny village situated in the middle of a national park are not so different from those under consideration thousands of miles away in northern Vermont. “It is this beautiful place where they are trying to find ways to benefit from the surroundings and protect them at the same time,” Gray says.
Back in Lyndon, the UVM student is both outsider (the lone woman and the only person under age forty-five at most planning meetings) and native daughter. Discussion at the meetings often turns upon what residents would like the area to be when their kids grow up. Sharing the table in the local municipal building with her friends’ parents, Gray reminds the group: “I am your kids.”
—Thomas Weaver
Photo by Raj Chawla
Dueling dishes
Iron Chef vs. Mark Bove
Since 1941, Bove’s Café on Pearl Street in Burlington has been serving Italian food, much of it consumed by hungry UVM students. That history and Grandma Victoria’s lasagna recipe were put to the test on October 12 when celebrity chef Bobby Flay came to town to test his skills against Mark Bove ’90 for a future episode of his “Throwdown” television show.
Flay’s visit was a surprise to Bove, his brother Richard ’86, and their family. Food Network producers led them to believe their sole purpose was taping a new program called “Food for Thought,” which would feature students’ favorite restaurants in five different college towns. Under that ruse, a crowd of students gathered in UVM’s Billings Hall to learn about lasagna making from Bove and grab their own share of fifteen-minutes of fame as members of the “studio” audience.
Midway through the lesson, Flay stepped into Billings unannounced, slipped around Bove, whiffed from a jar of the restaurant’s vodka sauce, and cracked a look that said, “Not bad.” “What’s up, Mark?” Flay asked, as the audience laughed and Bove looked on stunned. “I brought my noodles and ricotta, got on a plane this morning, and came up here to issue you a lasagna throwdown.”
Suddenly, a big day for the Boves had gotten much bigger. Within seconds, another long table for food preparation was set up and four of Flay’s assistant chefs got down to mincing and mixing with the precision of a military operation.
The two judges on the day would hand the “Throwdown” decision to Flay, but they gave props to Bove for his hefty portion and excellent execution of a classic recipe. The Iron Chef himself said Bove’s comfort food reminded him of the lasagna of his childhood: “I’d eat this all day long.”
Biggest winners on the day, though, were the students who lined up for helpings from both chefs. One UVM undergrad, both traditionalist and homer, dug into the local lasagna for the TV cameras and pronounced it superior: “It’s from Vermont and so am I.”
—Thomas Weaver
Quote unquote
“Cuales vacas están en cello?”
Or, in English, “Which cows are in heat?”
The Spanish phrase is among those Vermont farmers are becoming familiar with through the Vermont Dairy Spanish Project. With more than two thousand Latin Americans employed in the state’s dairy industry, closing the communication gap has become increasingly important. UVM students in Community Development and Applied Economics have assisted with the state program that is funded by a USDA grant.Peace Prize piece
Surely, the Norwegian Nobel Committee didn’t notify Al Gore by email. But that’s how UVM’s Jennifer Jenkins learned of her share. “I am delighted that the enormous team work of the IPCC has earned recognition with the Nobel Peace Prize,” wrote Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on October 15. “This makes you and your colleagues a Nobel laureate.”
OK, but Jenkins, a research assistant professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, is not ready to add “Nobel Peace Prize, 2007,” to her resume.
“I think it’s a stretch,” she says, with a laugh, “though it is nice to have the work of the IPCC recognized.”
Jenkins was one of 450 lead authors who contributed chapters to the reports that the Nobel committee commended for creating “an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.”
“I was really pleased that Gore had been awarded,” she says, “I had been following the leading contenders and I knew that climate change was going to be highlighted. But I was surprised that a group could be given the prize.”
Jenkins studies the effects of global-scale processes, particularly the cycling of carbon, on forests as well as urban ecosystems. Her part of the vast IPCC effort—involving more than 3,000 scientists from 130 countries—falls under the National Greenhouse Gas Inventories Program. That team created guidelines nations can use for taking stock of their greenhouse gas sources and removals—industrial smokestack emissions to cow flatulence to carbon uptake of lawns.
Nominated by the US government in 2002 to serve on IPCC, Jenkins has traveled to Mauritius off the coast of Africa, Sydney, and Moscow to meet with her co-authors from Argentina, Japan, and elsewhere.
“Many nations, particularly developing nations, don’t have resources to deploy a team of experts,” Jenkins says, to figure out the complexities of greenhouse gas accounting. So, instead, they rely on the methods outlined by the IPCC—including Jenkins’s work.
But Jennifer Jenkins is more than a carbon accountant. She is an advocate for change, serving on the Vermont Governor’s Commission on Climate Change and teaching courses on the science and history of global warming.
“There is a lot of emphasis on getting people to reduce their carbon emissions. But it’s just not working!” she says, “Most people believe one thing and do another.”
“We need to make it a status symbol to reduce one’s climate impact,” Jenkins says. “It has to be fashionable.”
But the consequences of not slowing carbon emissions, as she knows too well, are far more sober than fashion. Or as the Nobel Peace Prize committee warns, extensive climate change will likely induce huge migrations, warfare over resources, and threaten the living conditions of most people.
“The Northwest Passage is now melted,” Jenkins says, and shrugs, “I don’t have words for what’s happening. Scary doesn’t do it.”
—Joshua BrownMain street nouveau
Is there a more neglected strip on the aesthetic landscape than the lowly street median? A major project in the 1990s greatly improved Burlington’s Main Street as it passes through campus, but the road has been plagued by a weedy median. A “Main Street Median Competition,” sponsored by Burlington City Arts, sought solutions, and the winner came from H. Keith Wagner Landscape Architects. Coolest feature:
Photo by Sally McCay
Orchestral cross-pollination
African beats
Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances,” Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”—the November 14 performance by the UVM Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Professor Michael Hopkins, included a fair sampling of well-known crowd pleasers. Less familiar, but perhaps more intriguing: a performance of “Agoo” by Sowah Mensah, a native of Ghana.
Mensah, a composer who teaches at Macalester College and the University of St. Thomas, both in St. Paul, Minnesota, is a James Marsh Professor-at-Large at UVM. The two-year-old program currently includes sixteen non-resident faculty from around the country who make periodic visits to UVM, with the intent of enriching the intellectual and cultural life of the University.
Mensah first visited UVM last spring, when the orchestra did its first run-through of “Agoo.” In addition to his performance with the University’s orchestra, Mensah’s November visit included talks to music and anthropology classes, and work with Professor Thomas Toner on a Mensah-composed piece that the University’s concert band (which Toner directs) may perform in the spring. Mensah is also in the early stages of organizing a festival of African music and dance at UVM.
The composer has made a career of cross-pollinating contemporary orchestral music with as many disparate styles as he can, an approach he’s taken since he first began writing music as a schoolboy growing up in west Africa. He soaked up Bach and Beethoven at home—his father was an organist, and his mother played the viola—as he explored the vast traditions of African song and dance at school and in his community.
When Mensah—who gives his age as “over fifty”—first arrived in Minnesota, more than twenty years ago, he says it was tough to find a college anywhere in the country where African music was being performed. Now, he says, traditional African music is played everywhere, and not just on university campuses. “I did an African xylophone residency recently at a small elementary school in Indiana,” he says. “That was a perfect example of what cultural diversity should be. The more you understand about different cultures, the better your understanding will be of people, and the better you’ll be able to think. Anyone in school now has opportunities to study about cultures that their parents never had, and I think that’s beautiful.”
—Scott SutherlandNice GPA
UVM has handed out myriad report cards. It’s about time the University received one. Courtesy of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, grades were handed down in October evaluating the sustainability practices of two hundred colleges and universities. The good news: UVM’s marks are worthy of refrigerator door posting. The University received an overall A-, the highest grade given by the institute and a mark shared by just five other schools—Harvard, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Carleton, and the University of Washington.
Journalist Kristof on teaching a global perspective
Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times and two-time Pulitzer winner, delivered the 32nd annual George D. Aiken Lecture at UVM on October 1. His subject: “The Promise and Price of Modernization in China.” Prior to his talk, Kristof spoke with Vermont Quarterly’s Lee Ann Cox for an interview which included the journalist’s views on student activism and global education.
BEYOND PROTESTS
“The fact that we’re providing a lot of relief aid to people from Darfur is pretty much attributable to students all across the country holding rallies and putting on green armbands and organizing themselves. Students have been a far more effective presence than the White House or the U.N. for Darfur. I sense among students that they want to get involved in larger issues; I also think they have more effective tools today than my generation did. In our day, if you cared about something the instinctive thing you did was organize a protest. And these days, students are good at protests, but they also have become more creative about pushing for solutions and figuring out innovative mechanisms that will actually achieve something.”
SHAKEN UP
“I also think that universities do a dismal job at educating young people about global problems. It’s just bizarre that somebody can consider themselves educated if they have read Shakespeare and know about the Punic Wars but don’t have any clue about how the world’s poor people live in villages today. Universities have to do a far better job of getting young people to travel abroad—not just organized trips to Florence but to Africa, Asia—to get out of their comfort zones. If you’re not shaken up, then something went wrong. The point of university should be to encounter different worlds, to grow; one good way to grow is to go to the villages where there are a billion people living in real poverty.”
VALUABLE LESSONS
“We’re going to have a much more effective citizenry deciding on public policy issues if people understand how foreigners perceive us, how instinctively suspicious (they) are of American intentions. If more Americans had traveled abroad then we probably wouldn’t have invaded Iraq on the assumption that Iraqis were going to welcome us.”
Tony Magistrale, professor of English, has received the 2007 Bordighera Poetry Prize for his collection What She Says About Love. The prize, sponsored by the Sonia Raiziss-Giop Foundation, honors poetry manuscripts in English by American poets of Italian descent. “Train South to Bari,” a poem from the collection, is printed with Magistrale’s permission.
TRAIN SOUTH TO BARI
The train sifted through four hours
of dense, pasty Milanese rain. South of Florence,
broke into rolling Tuscan hills,
yellowtop fields of mustard,
spliced red poppies, almond blossoms
like fresh wet snow. This is the land
my grandfather left for arctic winds of Buffalo.
I have returned to the gnarled and knotty olive
and fig groves of Apulia long abandoned
in pursuit of second chance dreams.
Close to the earth, wrinkled and squat,
like grape vines after autumn pruning,
the trees grow in symmetrical rows
along iron tracks tended by old men
wearing white tee-shirts. I wonder
are some of these hunkered farmers,
scratching hoes in short, methodical strokes
against long patches of red and brown,
distant relatives? Each one
bears me back, stirring disquieting
rhythms, to this man I barely remember,
dead forty years, buried
in a grave in a Buffalo suburb,
his calloused fingers deep
in cool, fragrant soil.
UVM SHELFLIFE
Grassroots grow deeper
Dean phenomenon inspired many to action
The story of the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign has been told many times over by political pundits and Dean insiders such as campaign manager Joe Trippi. A new book, co-written by Thomas Streeter, associate professor of sociology, is the first to feature the people who grew the grassroots campaign from the ground up and conclude that, although the Internet is a major piece of the Dean legacy, the campaign’s real contribution is the thousands of Americans it inspired to become politically active.
At the time of last fall’s release of Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope (Paradigm Publishers), more than one thousand former Dean supporters had run for political office on the local, state, or federal level. Many of the 650,000 people on the Dean e-mail list who organized local “Meetups” and managed listserves on local and constituency topics are currently involved in political action groups, campaigns, or are members of city commissions, state legislatures, or the U.S. Congress.
For Streeter, editing chapters from people like Pam Paul of Oklahoma, who went from a disengaged voter to a grassroots activist hosting dozens of Dean events and creating a website, was a transformative experience. “The experience didn’t change my fundamental political views, but it did change what I thought was possible and how to go about doing it,” he says. “I’m more optimistic politically now.”
The idea for the book originated in 2003 with the late Joan Smith, then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Smith, who knew Dean and was fascinated by his use of the Internet, asked Streeter, an expert on emerging media and society, technology, law, and culture, to consider writing a book. “There was a sense that the whole story hadn’t been told,” says Streeter, who contacted his eventual co-author Zephyr Teachout, director of online organizing for the Dean Campaign and a political science lecturer at UVM in 2005-06, to help identify possible contributors to the book.
“Involvement in the Dean campaign was one of those uniquely intense personal experiences that, like sex or a profound religious conversion, are hard to describe and often look odd or pathetic to those not sharing in it,” writes Streeter. “This common personal experience, for all its variations, was an objective fact of the campaign. And, we suspect, experiences like this are of a piece with deep social change, and will be a component of any successful effort to build a more democratic society in the future. It deserves its place in understanding what happened.”
The book includes chapters by a now prominent blogger who helped create pro-Dean blogs; the key driver of the Dean Meetup phenomenon; Amanda Michel ’02, who played a central role in the development of Generation Dean; and Dean’s own thoughts via a three-hour interview conducted by the authors.
—Jon Reidel G’06Real Good Fire
Leah Tysse ’97
Vocalist Leah Tysse has been making her career as a musician in San Francisco for the past several years, and the state of her blues/soul art is showcased on her first CD, Real Good Fire. Tysse has built a following in northern California as a lead singer, shared the stage with the likes of Taj Mahal, and is also a featured soloist with the Glide Memorial Church Choir. During holiday opening festivities at San Francisco’s Justin Herman Plaza in November, Tysse even rocked that blues standard the National Anthem. More: Leahtysse.com
The Alphabet Games
Evan Goldstein ’94, Joelle Cohn, Allison Cohen, Eric Goldstein, Bruce Jacobson
Sporty Minds
There’s a family flavor to the new educational DVD venture Sporty Minds, and the group’s first product, The Alphabet Games. Alumnus Evan Goldstein is an attorney in Hartford, Connecticut by day, but has joined in on this team effort to create a DVD that appeals to sports-minded kids with lessons on letters, numbers, shapes, colors, and more. “A,” usually for “apple,” is for “alley-oop” in the puppet and cartoon world of Alphabet Games, where your hosts are a “SportsCenter” meets “Sesame Street” duo named Champ Smart and Lisa Learnwell. More: sportyminds.com
“The Troubled Roar of the Waters” Vermont in Flood and Recovery,
1927-1931
Deborah Pickman Clifford G’74 and Nicholas R. Clifford
University Press of New England
Deborah Pickman Clifford and Nicholas R. Clifford recount one of the worst natural disasters in Vermont history, the November 2, 1927 flood. Using first-hand accounts (including one of a rooster and hen log-rolling a barrel down a swollen stream in Richmond), photos of the wreckage, and historical documents of the state’s efforts to right itself after the rains, the pair tell the story of the flood and place their research in the larger context of the tumultuous changes across America in the 1920s.
(for UVM staff)