Student Researchers Uncover the Resting Place of Famous Arctic Explorer

Location of the resting place of Isaac Israel Hayes, M.D.

Penn State Abington students Janet Stock and Steven Mangier examine Hayes’ grave marker.

Since 2006, three different seminar courses in American studies and Anthropology at Penn State University Abington College have sought to locate the birth and burial spots of four Arctic explorers all born in Pennsylvania.  Some of these, such as the birthplace of Robert E. Peary outside Altoona, PA, are relatively well-known, as of course is his burial place at Arlington National Cemetery.

The other three Arctic explorers, Edwin de Haven, Elisha Kent Kane, and Isaac Israel Hayes, proved more difficult to trace.  Kane’s crypt was located in 2006 at the famous Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, and in the summer of 2012, the grave of de Haven was located at Christ Church, Philadelphia, little more than 50 feet from the grave of Benjamin Franklin.

The final resting place of Arctic explorer Isaac Israel Hayes, however, proved a much more difficult task.  Penn State Abington student Kevin Drew in 2006 uncovered a lead to a Friends cemetery in West Chester, PA.  Abington students Steven Mangier and Janet Stock followed up on this in the spring semester, 2013, but made little headway until a field trip to the Friends cemetery in West Chester on 3 April 2013 failed to locate Hayes. 

However, on this same trip, Stock alertly took down the phone number of a locale Friends school and that led to a lead that Hayes was in fact buried in another Friends cemetery, one located in the nearby village of West Goshen, PA.  A second field trip, this to West Goshen, finally discovered the grave of Isaac Israel Hayes, M.D., in the Oakland Friends Burial Ground. 

The modest white marker over Dr. Hayes is difficult to read.  It has a patina of lichen growth over much of it.  Hayes is surrounded by other Hayeses from his immediate family, including his father Benjamin, who outlived his famous son.   Isaac Israel Hayes was born on 5 March 1832 and died in New York on 17 December 1881. 

After his internment, the only mention of him in the New York Times is a brief note from May of 1882 that described a delegation from New York coming to place flowers on his grave on Decoration Day (now Memorial Day).  The students of Penn State Abington who found Hayes on 17 April 2013 were likely some of the first visitors to the Arctic explorer’s grave site in a century or more. 

– Dr. P.J. Capelotti, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Abington Professor Studies Consumer Behavior at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Dr. Gupta along with a colleague from a business school in Navi Mumbai during a visit to Lotus Colony in Govandi, Navi Mumbai, India.

Dr. Shruti Gupta, Associate Professor of Marketing at Penn State Abington spent her sabbatical leave in Fall 2012 in India. She divided her time between Mumbai and Kolkata where she interviewed individuals with a personal daily income of approximately $2-4 per day. This market segment has been labeled as the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP). Companies believe that marketing to this group of consumers would help with poverty alleviation (by stimulating consumption) and provide a growth potential for multinationals that face saturated markets in the developed world. Most of the BoP is either self-employed in the informal retail sector or work as housekeepers, food service providers, rickshaw drivers, construction labor etc.

For her research, Dr. Gupta conducted in-depth interviews with 55 BoP consumers to learn about their identity with poverty, consumption decisions, marketplace exploitation and susceptibility to marketing stimuli, if any. In Mumbai, she interviewed individuals from Rafinagar and Lotus Colony in Govandi which is now part of the largest slum in Asia. Her interviewees from Govandi were mostly self-employed in hand embroidery and worked on a contract basis for suppliers. Inhabitants of Rafinagar, settled on a garbage dump site, were mostly trash and rag pickers. Her other interviewees for the study came from far flung slums in Kharghar and Vashi in Navi Mumbai. These men and women were mostly employed in housekeeping and janitorial work though some were also self-employed in the informal retail sector. Informants for the study conducted in Kolkata lived in distant villages and either worked as caregivers at a homeless shelter for young children or as domestic help for upper income households.

In the coming semesters, Dr. Gupta plans to publish her research findings in the form of several scholarly journal publications and conference presentations. Her first paper from the sabbatical research data titled, Despite Unethical Retail Practices, Consumers at the Bottom of the Pyramid Remain Loyal is under review with the 2013 Summer Educator’s Conference of the American Marketing Association, August 9-11, 2013 at Boston, Massachusetts.

Penn State Professor Collaborates on Topic that Needs to Be Exposed

Dr. Judith Newman, associate professor of Human Development at Penn State University (Abington), Allen Hornblum and Gregory J. Dober are collaborating on a topic that makes many uncomfortable, but one that needs to be discussed, the exploitation of children as medical “guinea pigs.”   Their book,  Against Their Will, The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America comes out in June of this year.

A short six decades ago, American scientists and doctors increasingly made an unthinkable choice: they would use one of the country’s most vulnerable populations, institutionalized children, as grist in the research mill. Against Their Will traces this harrowing story, showing how thousands of children, in hospitals, orphanages, and mental asylums, became the unwilling subjects of experimental studies. They were drafted as “volunteers” to test vaccines, subjected to electric shock, and given lobotomies. They were also fed radioactive isotopes and exposed to chemical warfare agents. The product of many years of archival work and numerous interviews with both scientific researchers and former test subjects, this is an important and disturbing book that finally uncovers a dark chapter of America’s medical/psychiatric history.

East Meets West at Penn State Abington

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”

Buddha

Dr. Pierce Salguero, Assistant Professor of Asian History, is a researcher of Buddhist medicine, a system of healing that spread widely throughout Asia in the first millennium CE along with Buddhism. Originating in India, Buddhist medical ideas are closely related to Indian Ayurveda and ancient Greco-Roman medicine. Historically, this system spread as far as Iran, Mongolia, Japan, and Indonesia. Today, it is still the foundation of traditional medicine in Tibet, Thailand, and other parts of Asia. At the same time that Buddhist medicine has become a transnational tradition, however, it has been reinterpreted locally through the lenses of the many different cultures that have adopted it. His research explores this interplay between transmitted and indigenous knowledge.

Dr. Salguero’s current work primarily focuses on the reception of Buddhist medical doctrines in medieval China. This historical process is a fascinating window onto China’s involvement in a Eurasia-wide network of cultural exchange via the Silk Road and maritime trade routes. It is an important case study of the role of translation in the transmission and reception of medicine. The exploration of this topic also touches on larger theoretical questions, such as what we mean by “religion” and “medicine” in a global historical context, and how to theorize the interactions between cultures.

In his work, he employs interdisciplinary methodologies and perspectives from History of Medicine, Religious Studies, Sociology, and Translation Studies, among other disciplines. It is also important for him to present his research in ways that are accessible for practitioners of Buddhism and traditional Asian medicine, as well as for general audiences.

Penn State Laureate Works on Hemingway’s Letters Project

“All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”  
Ernest Hemingway

Our own Linda Patterson Miller is Chair of the Editorial Review Board for the Hemingway Letters Project which is based at Penn State University under the general editorship of Sandra Spanier.  This project involves an international team of scholars who are engaged in gathering, transcribing, annotating and publishing all of Ernest Hemingway’s extensive and lifelong correspondence.  Cambridge University Press is publishing this multi-volume work, with The Letters of Ernest Hemingway Volume 1: 1907-1922 just published in fall 2011.  Dr. Miller wrote the Foreword for this much-anticipated volume 1, a book that has already garnered extraordinary reviews in the top media and scholarly outlets, including the New York Times Book Review and TSL (The Times Literary Supplement).  Comments therein include: “a fearsome team” of editors; “scrupulously edited”; “excellent introductory essays”; “elegant presentation”; “a spectacular scholarly achievement”; “a literary treasure trove.”  Dr. Miller continues to assist in an oversight role as the project moves forward with work on some projected sixteen volumes.

Tropical Ecology in Panama

Dr. Kathy Fadigan traveled to Panama from 7/6-7/22 with Penn State Lehigh Biology faculty to co-teach a summer course with an international travel component. The team is partnering with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to teach Penn State biology and education students, as well as in-service teachers from across the country and from Panama, about tropical ecology, biodiversity, inquiry science teaching, and global climate change. Students participated in professional development workshops, lectures, field studies, and laboratory work at five different Smithsonian field stations. The team will later evaluate the impacts of international field courses on participants’ understanding of the scientific inquiry process.

 

A Researcher For All Seasons: Focus on Dr. Pete Capelotti

Dr. P.J. Capelotti’s research on the archaeology and history of exploration has taken him from the equator to the North Pole, and from Indonesia to Russia. He did his doctoral fieldwork in archaeology 600 miles from the North Pole on the island of Danskøya in Northwest Svalbard, Norway.

His primary research centers on the history and archaeology of polar exploration and he is currently completing the first biography of the British polar explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith and beginning work on the first complete history of the American exploration of the Arctic archipelago of Franz Josef Land.  In the course of his polar research, he has been to the North Pole twice, visited several islands in the Franz Josef Land archipelago, and made six trips to Svalbard.

In 2009, he designed, wrote and opened at the Spitsbergen Airship Museum in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, a centennial exhibit on the polar flights of the American journalist Walter Wellman.  His two book chapters and an article on the possibilities of archaeological research in space were recently featured in an article in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. A book outlining his theory of archaeological research in space, The Human Archaeology of Space, was just published (McFarland 2010), as was an edited volume on whaling in Antarctica, The Whaling Expedition of the Ulysses, 1937-38 (University Press of Florida 2010).  In total he has written or edited 15 scholarly books.

Capelotti earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from the University of Rhode Island (1983, 1989) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Rutgers University (1994, 1996), and served 24 years in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, retiring in 2012 at the rank of Master Chief Petty Officer.  He is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Penn State University, Abington College.