In the 15 years since that day, Bernard Rosenthal has become one of the world’s leading authorities on the Salem witch trials, and his work continues to challenge and broaden traditional scholarship, even his own, regarding the hysteria that led to the deaths of 24 people, most of them women.

“I understood, at the time, that the only people executed were those individuals who insisted they were innocent, fearing the damnation of their immortal souls,” Rosenthal said. “Seeing them depicted as hags and not as the martyrs they were, made me think ‘Why is this so?'”

That question fueled his research regarding America’s original witch-hunt, an infamous spree that led to the hanging of 19 people on Gallows Hill in Salem Town and to the imprisonment of more than 200 others, some of whom died miserable deaths in prison.
As he wrote his book, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692, Rosenthal discovered he had inadvertently included an erroneously transcribed court date. Upon closer scrutiny, he found more.

“I found that there were things that didn’t make sense,” he said. “There was an arbitrary piece of manuscript put together with another where it didn’t belong. Before seeing that, I couldn’t figure it out why a particular event didn’t make sense to me.”
He discovered that the printed edition he was using was based on an incorrect manuscript. “Then after checking other things, I noticed a number of other errors existed,” he said. “They were minor but the discovery showed that the manuscript was not transcribed as closely as it could have been.”

According to Rosenthal, there were two major attempts to transcribe the original witch trial documents. The first transcription of the documents was done as a Works Progress Administration project during the Great Depression. Then in the 1970s historians attempted to modernize the WPA transcripts, but didn’t check them for accuracy. It was those texts that became the standard for Salem witch trial information.

“I don’t mean to imply that all the history is incorrect,” Rosenthal said. “Mistakes have been made in just about every book written on the subject — mine included. But now that we are aware of it, we know secondary sources need to be checked. We need to be much more careful with work on this particular issue.”

As a result, Rosenthal and his team of historians, linguists and other scholars have started their newest endeavor — the creation of a Manuscript Transcription Database, which includes a scribal database for the Salem witch trial documents, and will be housed on a private intranet site.

“Some of the historians I’m working with are decoding who wrote which manuscript, so that with any document you look up in the database, you’ll also have an identification of the scribe.”
The scribal information will include genealogical or family connections (i.e. kinships, relationships), all of which is important to consider because information could have been manipulated or omitted depending on the origin of the document.

Much of Rosenthal’s work is done by studying the original records found in Salem and Virginia. Although many of the transcripts have been scanned onto CDs, the researchers rely on original records because ink color can indicate changes to the original documents. “The ink colors and crossed-out portions of documents are very revealing,” Rosenthal said. “You can tell if the manuscripts have been doctored or changed. But you can only do this by looking at the original documents.”

Since even the smallest mistakes can change the story, transcripts will be scrutinized by anonymous peer review to ensure that no new mistakes are introduced, Rosenthal said.

Rosenthal’s research hopes to correct errors and find new documents that can add context to the events and life to the memories of the victims of the trials. “When we’re done we hope to have a collection of comprehensive and accurate documents pertaining to the Salem witch trials,” Rosenthal said. The collection will include 30-50 newly discovered documents discovered that do not appear in current standard editions of the trial transcripts. Some have appeared in print in obscure sources but where missed by the WPA, and some have never been in print, Rosenthal said.

According to Rosenthal the events leading up to the witch trials actually occurred in what is now the town of Danvers, then a parish of Salem Town, known as Salem Village, not Salem proper. That’s perhaps appropriate, Rosenthal said because not a lot in Salem is authentic. “But they do have the Phillips Library part of the Peabody Museum. A lot of the transcripts pertaining to the witchcraft trials are there,” he said. Focusing on those transcripts rather than on the sensationalized commercial images related to Salem is the only way to glean the truth about the sad events that took the lives of so many innocents.

Although they may seem like “no brainers” from the comfort of an American perspective, there are no easy answers to those questions, according to Edward McMahon, who has made a career of nurturing democratic institutions around the world.

Universal rights such as freedom of association, speech or religion would seem like appealing options for those who don’t have them, acknowledges McMahon, a dean’s professor of applied politics and director of the Center on Democratic Performance at Binghamton University. But fundamental reform doesn’t come quickly or easily.

“Promoting the acceptance of the democratic ethos and aiding in the establishment of democratic governments around the world is an ambitious endeavor to say the least,” McMahon said. “It is time-consuming, tricky work with no guarantees of success.”

McMahon shared his views on how democracy is faring in the world at last week’s Harpur Forum luncheon and in separate interviews.

An expert in African democracy in particular, McMahon brings more than 30 years in foreign and international service with the State Department and other agencies to his current academic pursuits. He has served as a senior program officer to the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and as a senior advisor with the U.S. Agency for International Development. He has helped to develop civil society organizations, instructed political parties on how parties function in democratic environments, directed election observation missions and helped solve governance issues after elections.

Yet despite his first-hand experience and his theoretical pursuits, McMahon said he still finds democracy a somewhat elusive concept with no clear roadmap on how best to achieve it.

“This idea of democracy has been around for 2,000 years and we still haven’t got it totally figured out,” McMahon said. “It’s not a simple thing at all. A lot of people argue that the United States didn’t become a democracy until the passage of the Civil Rights Voting Act in 1964. We didn’t have competitive political parties in the first few decades of our existence. Just because the United States took 180 years, doesn’t mean that’s how long it takes. The world is a very different place now.”

Even now, McMahon asserts, the United States does not and cannot impose democracy on other countries, nor can it dictate the types of governmental institutions that other people choose – if they are able to choose at all.

“There is no one kind of democratic system around the world; there are all sorts of systems,” he said, “so it’s not appropriate to try to impose certain democratic models on a country. But what is important is for countries to be able to develop their own democratic institutions according to their own realities, but always respecting basic universal values.”

McMahon argues such core values as defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a growing body of international law should be viewed as universal rights regardless of the cultural boundaries.

“I’m certainly not prepared to suggest that people, just because they live in Saudi Arabia, for example, should not have freedom of association or speech,” he said. “It seems to me that those are core universal values.”

According to McMahon, one of the best indicators of the likelihood of the success of democratic development is a country’s previous experience with democratic institutions. That’s one reason previously Communist countries in eastern or central Europe have progressed relatively quickly toward democratic consolidation while democratic efforts in the Middle East have lagged.

Mechanisms that allow power sharing are also key to forming successful democratic political institutions.

“If you look at a country like South Africa in the late 1980s, not very many people would have thought that that country was going to be a real functioning democratic state and avoid massive bloodshed,” McMahon said. “I think one of the ways they’ve done it is by cleverly sharing power.”

South Africa maintains a decentralized system with power at many different levels that is accessible democratically.

McMahon said it is critical that all power does not reside simply in the presidential chair. “When power resides in one place, what you have is a win/lose situation,” McMahon said. “Either you win the power or you lose it. And we all know that losing power breeds discontent and dissatisfaction.”

But can government by committee be as effective as other forms of government? “Winston Churchill’s famous adage about democracy being the worst form of government except for all others is probably true,” McMahon said. “I asked a Belgian parliamentarian once, ‘you’ve got local councils, municipal councils, regional councils, provincial councils, a parliament… isn’t that a waste of resources?’ And he said to me ‘It’s cheaper than having a civil war.’ And you know I think there’s some truth to that.”

In the aftermath of September 11, democratization of countries in the Middle East has become an area of extreme interest. “Afghanistan or Iraq have really complex environments with no history of formal pluralistic political institutions,” McMahon said. “So the question then becomes ‘Is democracy irrelevant for those types of countries?’ My view is perhaps a somewhat conventional view that this is a sequential process that needs to develop in stages. What you hope to do is have some kind of enlightened leadership, while not necessarily elected or with all the trappings of formal democratic institutions, but one that permits a sense of dialog and development of different perspectives.”

In a country like Afghanistan, McMahon believes the international community can support the leadership there, but that change must come from within, primarily with the tolerance of diverse points of views.

There has been a glimmer of positive change in recent days, according to McMahon. “An Afghan newspaper printed a cartoon of President Karzai that depicted him in less than flattering terms while he was out of the country,” McMahon said. “So his number two in charge jailed the editor of the newspaper. When Karzai came back, he saw the cartoon and laughed at it. He told him to let him go – that this is just part of freedom of the press. Obviously the tradition of consensus that led to the selection of Karzai has some strong elements of democracy in it.”

Democracy building takes time, McMahon cautioned. While there have been significant gains towards democratization in most regions of the world, McMahon cautions there are many countries where change may or may not happen at all or at least not in our lifetime.

“This stuff is not simple,” McMahon said. “It’s not a science by any means, but that’s what makes it so fascinating.”

The Center on Democratic Performance

Since its inception in September 1999, the Center for Democratic Performance  has worked on a number of levels to help the academic and policy communities understand the functioning and performance of democratic political institutions around the world. Although based in the Political Science Department, the center encourages an interdisciplinary approach on campus to its work and has a collaborative relationship with SUNY’s Center for International Development. The center regularly works with legislatures in emerging democracies. One recent project was assisting the parliament of Rwanda. In addition, the center organizes conferences, such as the one it co-sponsored in October with the Institute of African Development at Cornell. The center is also developing an election results archive, which will soon be available online. The archive will provide an electronic compilation of election results from 900 elections in 130 countries over the past 30 years. The center also regularly consults for Freedom House and on assignments for the State Department, USAID and the World Bank.

When discoveries such as these develop, Rightmire is among the handful of experts in the world who is contacted for his expertise in identifying and studying the anatomy of new human or pre-human skulls. He has become an internationally recognized figure in the field and is regularly interviewed in national and international publications such as National Geographic, Science and the New York Times Science section.

The publicity is not without its downside. “I used to be happy to get a call from the media to explain the research,” Rightmire said. “Now it gets to be more of a burden, an obligation that goes along with the job.” The intense media interest in turn is generating potential funding. “All the publicity prompts granting agencies to sit up and take notice,” Rightmire said.

What prompted all of the attention was the discovery of three skulls and other specimens representing early Homo with an age of approximately 1.75 million years, making them the largest collection of such individuals from any one site older than around 300,000 years. In 2000, Rightmire was contacted to visit the site at Dmanisi, Georgia and offer some opinions on the new fossils.

“Nobody supposed humans this ancient would turn up anywhere in Eurasia,” Rightmire said. “The site in Georgia was a big surprise.”

Until this discovery, researchers generally believed that the first humans to leave Africa departed not much earlier than one million years ago and that they had large brains and relatively advanced stone tools that enabled them to explore unknown environments. But the numerous tools and stone objects found at the Georgian site are of an earlier, less sophisticated type. Also, the fossils suggest that the people were relatively small,” Rightmire said.

“The brain size varied from about 600 cubic centimeters to 775 cubic centimeters, about half that of a modern human. This has caused us to rethink the whole migration issue, because there’s not much in the way of a tool kit and they had a small brains.”

The new fossils also offer a rare glimpse into the diversity of a primitive human species. While we take for granted that modern humans come in all shapes and sizes, scientists know little about individual variation among our ancestors. “The findings show a single population caught in time,” Rightmire said. “Variation is to be expected in an early human group, but there are good indications that these people were generally small and lightly built.”

The discoveries were the start of an unexpected new direction in Rightmire’s research. “I was focusing on the last million years of evolution, but all of that is on the back burner now,” Rightmire said.

“Because early Homo erectus established a foothold at Dmanisi, this site and two or three others of the same age in Georgia will bear investigation.”

According to Rightmire, Georgia and other places, including eastern Turkey, have not been searched extensively before. “There is no reason people couldn’t have moved into these locations also,” Rightmire said.

“The discoveries have caused me to shift gears in terms of where I travel and what I research in the future. I plan on going back to Georgia for at least three or four years. I would have been traveling to east Africa, so it’s a shift in the direction of my research. But that’s something I’m pleased about.”

Rightmire will have sabbatical in the spring, so he may be traveling to Dmanisi then. “It’d be nicer to go back in May,” he said. “The weather in July and August, the field season there, is very dry and dusty, the worst part of the year. So I’m going to try to go back earlier.”

Scholars of human prehistory eagerly await the next finds from Dmanisi and elsewhere. Hopefully new discoveries will help untangle the branches of the human family tree to reveal the true ancestry of Homo sapiens. Whether this happens or not, it is likely that Philip Rightmire will be in the middle of the effort.

According Martin Dillon, romance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact he hopes to expose romance for what it really is: bad. Dillon, distinguished teaching professor of philosophy, has been trying since 1976 to help students understand the difference between romance and genuine love in a course on the philosophy of love. A popular course, Phil 312-Philosophy of Love and Sexuality, is offered every semester and is never under-enrolled. Dillon teaches the course once every third semester while colleague Don Weiss also teaches it regularly.

Now Dillon’s taking his case to the public in a recently published book Beyond Romance (SUNY Press, 2001), in which he offers a critique of romantic traditions of love and an alternative that he calls authentic love.

“Our culture is suffering from erotic malaise,” Dillon explains in the book’s preface. “We do not seem to know how to love well, and that is manifest in the problems we seem unable to handle, the problems of bodily health apparent in the rise of sexually transmitted diseases, the problems of social health apparent in the proliferation of babies born to parents who are still children, and the problems of moral health apparent in our inability to make coherent policy decisions about abortion, commercial sex, homosexuality, extramarital sex, sexual harassment and the like.”

Drawing from the works of philosophers from the past such as Plato to those of more recent vintage, including Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, Freud, Sartre and Derrida, Dillon argues that much of current erotic dissatisfaction is traceable to flaws in the romantic model.

“Romance is seriously bad,” Dillon said. “The idea of romantic love is unattainable. In romantic love you’re in love with an illusion, an ideal. In authentic love you are in love with a flesh and blood person.”

Looking at the history of love as well as the philosophy and psychology of it, Dillon explores how romantic tradition and courtship in our culture impede our ability to develop genuine love, which he argues comes from knowledge and truth. According to Dillon, many romantic traditions, much like candlelight and wine, get in the way of real vision so you see the object of your affection in a flattering light. In romantic love, there is very little in the way of genuine discourse.

“In romantic love, the person is the amorphous object that allows you to discharge your fantasy ideas,” Dillon said. “And the more the real person intrudes, the more that he or she gets in the way of the fantasy. After carnal knowledge he or she becomes less than the fantasy, so it’s doomed to failure.”

Movie plots and romance novels reinforce the idea. “The roadmap for a successful romance novel,” Dillon said, “is: boy meets girl, obstacles are in the way, overcome that obstacle, another obstacle, overcome that obstacle, etc. and when you overcome that last obstacle you pop into bed, or don’t pop into bed, and the novel ends.”

Romantic traditions are not just a thing of the past, as evident in the popularity of cyber sex, an extension of romantic love since most of the interaction takes place without ever knowing the real person, allowing one to keep up the fantasy. Dillon suggests that only through real knowledge of the other person can you develop authentic love. “Authentic love deepens as you get to know the person,” Dillon said. “So the claim is that the cognitive dimension of love is important for the kind of love that I am arguing for. And in that kind of love, the more you know the person, either the deeper the relationship becomes or the end of the relationship happens.”

According to Dillon, people influenced by the romantic ideal are always looking for the infinite high that comes at the beginning of a new affair. He asserts that if that’s what you are looking for then all you’ll get are a bunch of new affairs. Even that will get boring after a while. If authentic love is your ideal, then you might respond to marital boredom in more creative ways, like pursuing common interests together.

“I think boredom is the iterability of the same,” Dillon said. “And I don’t think people are the same over time. I think there are a lot of changes that take place, especially people who are alive and growing. If your partner seems to be the same all the time, it could be that you’re not listening and it usually is that you’re not listening.”

Will exposing romantic traditions of love lead to greater happiness? “Scarred knees are part of the process,” Dillon said. “You can’t get it all from a book. There is a lot of luck involved. But, if you believe, as I do, that love is probably the one isolable phenomenon in life that’s more important than any other as far as happiness is concerned, then the more you know about it the better off you are. The more you understand it, the more you have your goals explicit rather than mystified. That’s when I think you stand a better chance at being more successful.”

Dillon acknowledges that some will contest the solutions he proposes, but he, like other philosophers, does not deal in absolutes. He simply hopes his theories will add to the discussions about love and perhaps bring about some positive change.

Now imagine turning on your office computer and tapping into the computing power of a PC in the office of a colleague at Berkley as well as hundreds of other computers across the country with the same ease.

Welcome to the world of the computing grid, which researchers say is the next evolution in the power of the Internet.

Binghamton University computer science Assistant Professor Michael Lewis is among those who are developing this new distributed computing system that promises to bring together scattered computing resources, integrate them, manage them, and take advantage of them as if they were one huge, virtual computer.

Lewis’ efforts were recently recognized by the National Science Foundation, which has awarded him a $395,000 grant from its prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program for young researchers. Over the next five years, the funds will support Lewis and his research group in their efforts to make changes to grid systems dynamic and automatic.

“Grid computing is not a reality yet, but it’s something that lots of people are shooting for,” said Lewis. “This is a very big initiative for open scientific research.”

Grid computing has attracted the interest of such computing giants as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle and is the focus of intense research interest at NSF centers and universities because of its huge potential to advance computing capabilities.

In effect, the Grid will make the Internet an automated computing platform, Lewis said. This “virtual computer” will provide disk storage for users, transparently swap files and optimize users collective performance, all with no central administration. This means that users will have access to a host of resources through their personal computer.

“The technology is important for research because with that kind of computing power, we could solve bigger problems faster.” Lewis said.

Lewis said grid technology will enable scientists from different parts of the world to collaborate on complex projects that require lots of computing firepower including things like climate modeling, high-energy physics, genetic research and earthquake simulations.

For example, one of the main projects being pursued at the University of San Diego is brain mapping research, which is critical to better understanding and treating Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s and a whole set of neurological diseases. The problem now is that each MRI or map of a brain uses huge amounts of storage space. And because many images of different brains are needed for comparison, research must rely on collaboration among many centers, so each can share their data. Grid computing systems will make that possible.

According to Lewis, breakthrough discoveries depend critically on computational and data management infrastructure as a scientific tool.

Grid computing systems promise to be far more powerful and flexible than any single super-computing system. Because of Lewis’ research, BU has become a member of an experimental grid environment, called NPACI-Net, using 200 or so machines connected over a high-speed network. Such experimental labs are the newest trend in supercom-puting.

NPACI-Net runs a grid software called Legion. “With a single Legion account on NPACI-net, researchers here at BU can now build and run their scientific applications on this grid,” Lewis said. “Their programs may be executed in San Diego, Virginia, Minnesota or any of the other machines that make up the grid. The grid itself decides where to execute the programs and automatically returns results back to applications programmers.”

One of the challenges in developing these super systems, however, is to make them operate automatically, making adjustments and updates as needed. Lewis’ research is involved with the process of changing running programs. “What I’m working on is allowing grid objects to evolve their behavior on the fly, so they are able to change or update without having to shut down or restart,” Lewis said.

According to Lewis, this is important because for some applications it is inconvenient or impossible to shut down. “Some components of the grid need to be available 24-7,“ he said. “If you have to shut an application down, it would cause a disruption in service and inconvenience users. What I’m working on would allow changes and updates to be performed seamlessly.”

Much like the change from telephone operators to automatic switching systems for the telephone industry, grid technology will require less human intervention and be able to take care of its own needs.

“If it needs more computing power, it goes and gets it, and doesn’t keep looking for a human to help,” Lewis said.

Lewis’ award is the first NSF Career award received by the BU Computer Science Department. Career awards recognize and support the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. Career awardees are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution.

“The award will allow me to hire and attract talented graduate students to work with me on this project,” Lewis said. “And attracting the best students is an important component to the success of this project.”

Lewis was also one of the original researchers to submit meritorious projects for the BU’s Internet2 grant proposal in 2000.