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Artistic Interiors at the Met Museum: Satinwood and Purpleheart with Mother-of-Pearl Inlays, Depictions of Hand Mirrors, Scissors, Hair Combs, Brooches, Necklaces, and Earrings

The restored Worsham-Rockefeller dressing room, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The most sumptuous moment in America’s Gilded Age is revealed through the work of some of its most noted design firms in Artistic Furniture of the Gilded Age at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The centerpiece of the three-part exhibition is the opulent Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room from the New York City house commissioned by art collector and philanthropist Arabella Worsham (later Huntington; ca. 1850–1924). A complete work of art, with its elaborate woodwork and decorations, it is a rare surviving commission by the New York-based cabinetmaker and interior decorator George A. Schastey (1839–1894), who is the subject of the second part of the exhibition.

Although little-known today, Schastey operated a large and successful decorating firm in the late 19th century, catering to some of the nation’s wealthiest individuals. His work and important role is highlighted by loans from public and private collections, some of them newly attributed to him and never before on public view. Furniture by some of his contemporaries also is included.

An adjoining gallery displays works by Schastey’s best-known competitor, Herter Brothers, which were created for the firm’s most important commission, the William H. Vanderbilt House. In total, the exhibition includes more than three dozen examples of furniture from America’s Gilded Age. Visitors will gain new insights into the luxurious and artistic interiors found in New York’s wealthiest households in the late 19th century.

Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room (Gallery 742)
The Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room is a jewel-box of a room and a quintessential expression of the Aesthetic movement, which was in vogue during the late 1870s and early 1880s. The movement stressed the artistic and embraced an amalgamation of different styles, as seen here in the flat, stylized, natural ornamentation in combination with carved flourishes in the Renaissance style. The room comes from the 4 West 54th Street home of Arabella Worsham, mistress (and later, wife) of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington. She commissioned Schastey to decorate the house in 1881.

Side chair: Satinwood, purpleheart, brass castors, reproduction upholstery. George A. Schastey & Co. (1873–97). Gift of The Museum of the City of New York, 2008

The private room, intended solely for Worsham’s use, is a totally cohesive artistic interior with intricate woodwork, a built-in wardrobe, two full-length dressing mirrors, and a vanity en suite with a delicate dressing table, dressing glass, and chairs. Careful study of the ornate marquetry ornamentation — executed in satinwood and purpleheart with mother-of-pearl inlays — reveals a multitude of seashell and pearl motifs that reference Worsham’s great love of pearl jewelry, while depictions of hand mirrors, scissors, hair combs, brooches, necklaces, and earrings suggest the dressing room’s intended purpose. The room exemplifies the work of Schastey’s interior decorating firm and his close relationship with his patrons.

April 15, 2016
In This Election Year, The Belmont-Paul Park Site: Force-feeding and Imprisonment Could Not Stop Suffragist Alice Paul

From the National Park Service celebrating its centennial this year; Library of Congress photograph

“The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument contains the most complete collection of women’s suffrage and equal rights movement documents and artifacts in America. These resources help tell the story of women in America and one that will now be told by the best storytellers in the business — the National Park Service.“

Presidential Proclamation of Establishment of the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument

Force-feeding and imprisonment could not stop suffragist Alice Paul’s march forward. A new park site would tell her story.

“This is a major step toward ensuring our national parks tell more diverse stories, including those about women’s history,” said Theresa Pierno, president and CEO for the National Parks Conservation Association. “Alice Paul, one of the greatest women’s rights advocates and political strategists in American history, led the National Woman’s Party from this site, which has historic, cultural, economic, and educational significance. We all owe President Obama our gratitude for creating a more inclusive National Park System, and specifically for ensuring future generations learn about the women’s suffrage and equal rights movement.”

“Women’s history is America’s history,” said Page Harrington, executive director for the Sewall-Belmont House & Museum. “From the efforts of the early suffragists to those who continue to work for equal rights today, these important stories deserve to be told and shared with our nation.”

The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument will be the ninth national park site that specifically commemorates women’s history.

This national monument, formerly known as the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, was the home of Alice Paul and the headquarters for the National Woman’s Party. Paul founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916 to further the cause of full equality for women and the site became a center for feminist education and social change. The group helped to pass hundreds of pieces of legislation, including the 19th Amendment, which gave women in every US state the right to vote (though many African-American women remained unable to vote for several decades). The monument includes a museum with some of the best resources on women’s suffrage and equal rights in the country.

The new national monument, located just steps away from the US Capitol Building and National Mall, served as the headquarters for the National Woman’s Party (NWP). Founded by Alice Paul in 1916, the NWP targeted Congress and the White House through marches, hunger strikes, speaking tours, and other forms of non-violent protest to garner support for the suffrage movement.

Library of Congress Photo

The 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote, also referred to as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, passed Congress in 1919 and was ratified in 1920. Even after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, the National Woman’s Party continued working for full equality for women — a struggle that continues today.

While establishing the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument will be done through an executive action, there have been congressional efforts to permanently honor and safeguard the site since 1974.

Most recently, in the current 114th Congress, Senators Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) introduced the Sewall-Belmont House Act of 2015 (S. 1975) in August 2015 to “… establish the Sewall-Belmont House National Historic Site as a unit of the National Park System.” This bipartisan bill is supported by more than two-thirds of all current female senators.

After more than 40 years, America will have a new national park site established to specifically tell the story of women’s suffrage and equal rights movements to future generations.

Editor’s Note: For a further, cinematic, look at the suffragist movement, we recommend the DVD, Iron-Jawed Angels. The Library of Congress’ section on Alice Paul is extensive.

And, don’t forget the 2016 White House Science Fair!

April 13, 2016
Literary Lab Explores Why We Feel Suspense: You’re sitting on the edge of your seat. Your heart starts racing. You scream aloud, “Don’t open that door!”

By Akemi Ueda

You’re sitting on the edge of your seat. Your heart starts racing. You scream aloud, “Don’t open that door!“

We all know the feeling of suspense. But why do we experience such an intense emotion when reading a book?

This is the question that the Stanford Literary Lab’s project on suspense has set out to answer using the tools of digital humanities. The project is led by Stanford English Assistant Professor Mark Algee-Hewitt, and involves a team of eight graduate students from the English Department.

Agatha Christie memorial in West End, London, England; Wikimedia Commons

“The big goal of the research is to try and explain why we feel suspense when confronted with certain aesthetic objects, even if we know the outcome of them,” Algee-Hewitt said.

In fact, the continued experience of suspense for readers even when they know what happens in the plot has been a central question for this type of literary study, he added.

Although the project is still ongoing, the group’s central finding so far is that suspense is characterized by the presence of words that convey how things appear to be rather than how they really are, such as “seemed,” “perceived,” or “observed.”

These words generate an “epistemological uncertainty,” Algee-Hewitt said.

“Suspense texts appear to be able to create a virtual space in which the reader can experience uncertainty without necessarily having this kind of ontological uncertainty about the text, or forgetting the ontological certainty of the text that he or she already knows,” he said.

In other words, even if you already know what is going to happen next, the text’s description of how things “seem” still triggers a feeling of uncertainty and suspense.

The way the group arrived at this finding is just as interesting as the finding itself. Studying suspense with digital humanities methodologies posed a problem from the beginning because suspense is so dependent on the reader’s emotional experience, Algee-Hewitt said.

To incorporate the reader’s response to the text into their data, the group used various methods of tracking their reading experience, such as rating paragraphs by the level of suspense they felt while reading on a scale of one to ten.

Hannah Walser, an English doctoral candidate, said, “It’s an exciting way not to jettison concepts like taste or suspense or attachment in the name of objectivity, but instead to take them as an object of study that you can track and quantify.”

When they compared their individual ratings of suspense in a set of short stories, it turned out that the group did agree on the points at which suspense increased or decreased, though they varied in their ratings of the degree of suspense felt.

“We discovered that we agree in general on what is suspenseful and what isn’t, at least in terms of the ups and downs of the narrative,” said Andrew Shephard, an English doctoral candidate.

They then turned to digital methods to assess what words and topics were most commonly associated with the moments of high suspense they had identified. They found that suspenseful passages were characterized by words relating to the imagination (e.g., “thought”), the senses (“saw”), and movement (“struggled”) and topics such as “assault,” “guns,” “crime,” and “dramatic weather.”

“We wound up figuring out a set of features that do a very good job of predicting suspense,” Algee-Hewitt said. They decided the next step would be to develop a virtual reader using a neural network that could identify suspense based on these features.

April 11, 2016
The Occasional Gardener; I Was So Inept That if There Had Been A Garden Court, My Yard Would have Been Placed in Guardianship

Crocus longiflorus; Wikimedia Commons

by Julia Sneden

I love my yard at this time of year, because things have begun to bloom. Forsythia, camellias, jonquils, crocuses, japonica, that rampant rascal Star of Bethlehem, and even the violets (growing in what we recklessly refer to as lawn) have a salubrious effect on me. I know that I am supposed to hate the violets because they’re interlopers, but I can’t help just cheering them on. They seem so brave, somehow.

All these harbingers of spring don’t ask for much, and they bring me blooms to fill every room in my house, with enough left over to take to friends. This year I cut some japonica and put it in water in my mother’s old celadon vase, to force early bloom. Its delicate coral/red blossoms made the cold outside our door seem positively inconsequential, because it was spring in the living room.

The wonderful perennials just do their thing, year after year, with almost no effort on my part. The former owners of this house planted them long ago, and all that they require from me is an occasional dose of fertilizer and a little water in the hot summer. Oh, every few years I take out the shears and whack away, as inexpert a job of pruning as you will find anywhere in the world, but the old plants are quite forgiving. They seem to thrive no matter how I neglect them. It’s not that I mean them any harm. It’s just that I have a short attention span.

Actually, my gardening skills have improved a lot over the years. When we first bought a house, I was so inept that if there had been garden police, I’d have been hauled off to jail. And if there were a Garden Court as well as a Family Court, my entire yard would have been removed from my guardianship and placed in foster care. It’s not that I didn’t make an effort. Having grown up in a home where both parents were dedicated gardeners, I could hardly wait to grow my own flowers. I carefully dug up and enriched the soil for a cutting bed, sinking it down a couple of inches the way one does in California, to catch and hold every drop of moisture during the long, dry summers. The only problem was that we had moved to hot, humid, eastern North Carolina, where rains are frequent, copious, and of long duration, all summer long. Within a month, every zinnia, daisy, columbine, cosmos, snapdragon, and aster had disappeared into a damp, moldy mass, rotted away from too much water.

When we moved to the western part of the state, we unthinkingly bought a house surrounded by a half acre of lawn. This was in itself a recipe for disaster. I feel about lawns the way I feel about magnolia trees: they belong in the vast grounds of stately mansions. Crammed into suburban yards, magnolias are out of scale. And lawns, it seems to me, require crews of groundskeepers who maintain constant vigilance. I have seen a number of beautiful lawns in places near and far; I admire them and enjoy them. I don’t want them. A lawn around a middle class house, someone once said, is nothing more than a boast that the owner can afford a power mower.

To add to my distress, there was one neighbor who was a lawn fanatic. I think she manicured the edges of her lawn with nail scissors. When she called me on October 20th to suggest that she knew a nice man who would rake our leaves (in this part of the world, the leaves begin to fall about Oct. 15th), I told her that we usually let them all fall before taking on the project. “Yes, but they’re blowing over onto my lawn!” she snapped. For some reason, we didn’t live in that house very long.

April 8, 2016
Get Ready, Political Fans: Convention Facts for the GOP

How It Works

The Republican National Convention meets every four years to adopt a Party platform, vote on rules to govern the Party, and, most importantly, to nominate candidates for President and Vice President.

EN ESPAÑOL

How Does a Candidate Become the Republican Nominee for President?

To become the Republican nominee, a candidate must secure the votes of a majority of the 2,472 delegates at Convention. A candidate that receives the vote of 1,237 delegates or more wins the nomination.

Every delegate has only one vote and a majority of delegates will be “bound” to vote for a certain candidate on the first ballot.

What Does the Voting Process Look Like?

The Chairman of the Convention will begin the roll call vote by asking each state to report their vote tallies. Every delegate has only one vote and a majority of delegates will be “bound” to vote for a certain candidate on the first ballot.

If a candidate receives 1,237 delegates or more on the first round of voting, he or she wins the nomination. If no candidate reaches a majority, rounds of voting will occur until a candidate does.

All candidates may continue to be considered by the convention until a majority is achieved. No one is required to remove their name from consideration, regardless of how many delegates they received in the previous round of voting.

What Happens in an Open Convention?

An open convention only occurs if a candidate fails to secure a majority of bound delegates during the primary and caucus process and is unable to win enough unbound delegates to obtain 1,237 delegate votes.

If that is the case, we will have an open and transparent convention where delegates – empowered and selected by the grassroots – will elect the nominee for our Party.

April 6, 2016
Hospices Inappropriately Billed Medicare Over $250 Million for General Inpatient Care
WHY WE DID THIS STUDY

Nancy Harrison, Deputy Regional Inspector General for the Office of Evaluation and Inspections

Recent investigations by the Office of Inspector General [of the US Department of Health and Human Services] have shown a number of instances in which hospices inappropriately billed Medicare for hospice general inpatient care (GIP). Misuse of GIP includes care being billed but not provided and beneficiaries receiving care they do not need. Such misuse has human costs for this vulnerable population as well as financial costs for Medicare. The goals of hospice care are to help terminally ill beneficiaries with a life expectancy of 6 months or less to continue life with minimal disruptions and to support beneficiaries’ families and other caregivers. The care is palliative, rather than curative. Hospices must establish an individualized plan of care for each beneficiary. GIP is the second most expensive level of hospice care and is intended to be short-term inpatient care for symptom management and pain control that cannot be handled in other settings.

HOW WE DID THIS STUDY

We based this study on data from a medical record review of a stratified random sample of all GIP stays in 2012. We analyzed the results of the medical record review to estimate the percentage of GIP stays that were billed inappropriately. We also used Medicare Part D data to identify the drugs paid for by Part D and provided to beneficiaries during GIP stays.

WHAT WE FOUND

We found that hospices billed one-third of GIP stays inappropriately, costing Medicare $268 million in 2012. Hospices commonly billed for GIP when the beneficiary did not have uncontrolled pain or unmanaged symptoms.

Click to Enlarge

For example, a hospice billed for GIP for a beneficiary with a circulatory disease who had no unmanaged symptoms. This beneficiary could have been cared for at home, but the hospice billed Medicare for 46 consecutive days of GIP. The hospice was paid just over $31,000 for the stay.

Some States, such as Florida, had many inappropriate GIP stays. Hospices were more likely to inappropriately bill for GIP provided in skilled nursing facilities than GIP provided in other settings. For-profit hospices were more likely than other hospices to inappropriately bill for GIP. We also found that Medicare sometimes paid twice for drugs because they were paid for under Part D when they should have been provided by the hospice and covered under the hospice daily payment rate. Further, hospices did not meet all care planning requirements for 85 percent of GIP stays and sometimes provided poor-quality care. For example, one hospice provided GIP to a beneficiary with dementia for 16 days, but his pain was never brought under control.

WHAT WE RECOMMEND

The findings in this report make clear the need to address the misuse of GIP and hold hospices accountable when they bill inappropriately or provide poor-quality care. We recommend that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) (1) increase its oversight of hospice GIP claims and review Part D payments for drugs for hospice beneficiaries; (2) ensure that a physician is involved in the decision to use GIP; (3) conduct prepayment reviews for lengthy GIP stays; (4) increase surveyor efforts to ensure that hospices meet care planning requirements; (5) establish additional enforcement remedies for poor hospice performance; and (6) follow up on inappropriate GIP stays, inappropriate Part D payments, and hospices that provided poor-quality care. CMS concurred with all six recommendations.

Copies can also be obtained by contacting the Office of Public Affairs at Public.Affairs@oig.hhs.gov.

Download the complete report.
April 3, 2016
Culture Watch Reviews by Joan L. Cannon: The Railway Man’s Wife and The Yoga of Max’s Discontent

THE RAILWAYMAN’S WIFE

By Ashley Hay, © 2016

Published by Atria Books; Hardcover, 288 pages

A friend who was both a librarian and a book dealer once told me that a reader should definitely judge books by their covers. She meant that the titles, the jacket copy, not necessarily the cover art were important in deciding whether or not to read a book.

Nothing about reviewing is impartial, in my opinion, so I say at the outset that I wanted to read The Railwayman’s Wife as soon as I saw the pre-release comments. “Poetic language,” “character-driven,” “celebrates love in all its forms” appealed to me.

Ashley Hay has more nonfiction to her credit than fiction. Perhaps an ability to penetrate beneath surfaces helps her to depict the lives of her widowed protagonist and those around her with both clarity and empathy.

This is not a novel whose plot depends on action or conflict. It is the inner life of its major players that is revealed. Hay describes vividly a landscape that enriches each of the main characters, and that beguiles the reader as brilliantly as any travel brochure. Such lyrical prose is uncommon. Hay limns in words as stunningly artistic as any painter with colors on canvas or paper.

Laid shortly after the end of World War II, this is a story about a young widow whose marriage was happy. She is suddenly bereaved, and left with a young daughter. The reader sees her trying to make a balanced life after the worst loss she can imagine. Hay shows us Ani’s Lachlan memories and enlarges our understanding of what her happiness was like. Hay makes artful use of flashbacks.

The narrative might make a depressing story, but it does not. There is none of the ‘gritty’ gratuitous harshness to which we have become inured. We like the people. Hay makes us understand the calm of an ordinary existence.

The mournful events are redeemed partly by an attitude that will strike a chord in many of us who grew up in the forties and fifties, or earlier: a kind of restrained, mannerly behavior pattern that has gone out of fashion in so many layers of modern society. This faintly archaic atmosphere, (perhaps part of Australian mores that is unfamiliar to Americans), lends this piercing look at love, loss, loyalty, and loneliness a special appealing flavor.

One is left with brilliant images of a landscape that offers its own distractions, and a depiction of how heartache can overtake people’s lives. Hay describes loves lost, pasts savaged by shock and horror, hopes defeated in the wake of happenings not yet consigned to experience. The story is about grief, for losses of more than one kind. Grief is the centerpiece of this unflinching look at people who are suffering from it.

The images are beautiful, gently heroic, and very sad. Nevertheless, you will be glad to have seen them. You will remember Ani Lachlan and the others with real affection.

April 1, 2016
Congressional Hearings and Bills Introduced: Opioid Abuse, WASPs’ Burial Bill; INSPIRE Act, Training and Counseling to Women Entrepreneurs
House Approves Burial Bill for Women Pilots

On March 22, the House approved, 385-0, H.R. 4336, the Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) Arlington Inurnment Restoration Act, sponsored by Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ). The House Veterans’ Affairs Committee approved the legislation in February (see The Source, 2/26/16).

Currently, WASPs are not eligible for burial at cemeteries under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense, such as Arlington National Cemetery.

House Supports INSPIRE Women Act

On March 22, the House approved, 380-3, H.R. 4755, the Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers, Innovators, Researchers, and Explorers (INSPIRE) Women Act, sponsored by Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA).

Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), House Small Business Committee

The legislation directs the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to encourage women and girls to “study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, pursue careers in aerospace, and further advance the nation’s space science and exploration efforts through” its NASA GIRLS, Aspire to Inspire, and Summer Institute in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Research (SISTER) programs.

Bill to Support Entrepreneurship by Women Scientists Clears House

On March 22, the House approved, 383-4, H.R. 4742, the Promoting Women Entrepreneurship Act, sponsored by Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-CT).

The measure finds that while women make up 50 percent of the workforce, they constitute only 25 percent of the workforce in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professions. The bill would authorize the National Science Foundation to “encourage its entrepreneurial programs to recruit and support women to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and into the commercial world.”

Small Business Development Centers Improvement Act

On March 23, the House Small Business Committee approved, by voice vote, H.R. 207, the Small Business Development Centers Improvement Act, sponsored by Ranking Member Nydia Velázquez (D-NY).

As amended, the bill seeks to reauthorize and modernize the Small Business Development Centers, Women’s Business Centers (WBCs), and Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) programs. Among other provisions, the bill would reauthorize the WBCs program through 2020 and establish an accreditation process that would hold WBCs nationwide to the same standards.

WBCs provide training and counseling to women entrepreneurs.

Human Trafficking Report

On March 22, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations held a hearing, “Get It Right This Time: A Victims-Centered Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report.” The hearing sought to address the concern that changes made to the tier rankings in the 2015 TIP Report were politically motivated.

The subcommittee held a similar hearing on November 4, focusing on the 2015 TIP report and the process behind the tier rankings of certain countries (see The Source, 11/6/15).

The following witnesses testified:
- Mark P. Lagon, president, Freedom House;
- Matthew Smith, executive director, Fortify Rights;
- Jinhye Jo, president, NKinUSA; and
- Maria Werlau, president, Free Society Project.
Committee Examines Federal Response to Opioid Abuse

On March 22, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing, “America’s Heroin and Opioid Abuse Epidemic.” The hearing focused on federal strategies to address the epidemic of opioid abuse.

“The administration continues to focus on vulnerable populations affected by opioids, including pregnant women and their newborns,” said Michael Botticelli, director, Office of National Drug Control Policy. Mr. Botticelli continued, “When used chronically by pregnant women, both prescription opioids and heroin can cause withdrawal symptoms in newborns at birth; if these opioids were withdrawn during pregnancy, fetal harm could result.”

The following witnesses also testified:
March 30, 2016
The Outlook, Uncertainty, and Monetary Policy; Janet Yellen’s Speech to the Economic Club of New York

At the Economic Club of New York, New York City; March 29, 2016

For more than a century, the Economic Club of New York has served as one of the nation’s leading nonpartisan forums for discussion of economic policy issues. It is an honor to appear before you today to speak about the Federal Reserve’s pursuit of maximum employment and price stability.

Photo from Ms. Yellen’s Federal Reserve (SF) days, 2005

In December, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) raised the target range for the federal funds rate, the Federal Reserve’s main policy rate, by 1/4 percentage point. This small step marked the end of an extraordinary seven-year period during which the federal funds rate was held near zero to support the recovery from the worst financial crisis and recession since the Great Depression. The Committee’s action recognized the considerable progress that the US economy had made in restoring the jobs and incomes of millions of Americans hurt by this downturn. It also reflected an expectation that the economy would continue to strengthen and that inflation, while low, would move up to the FOMC’s 2 percent objective as the transitory influences of lower oil prices and a stronger dollar gradually dissipate and as the labor market improves further. In light of this expectation, the Committee stated in December, and reiterated at the two subsequent meetings, that it “expects that economic conditions will evolve in a manner that will warrant only gradual increases in the federal funds rate.”¹

In my remarks today, I will explain why the Committee anticipates that only gradual increases in the federal funds rate are likely to be warranted in coming years, emphasizing that this guidance should be understood as a forecast for the trajectory of policy rates that the Committee anticipates will prove to be appropriate to achieve its objectives, conditional on the outlook for real economic activity and inflation. Importantly, this forecast is not a plan set in stone that will be carried out regardless of economic developments. Instead, monetary policy will, as always, respond to the economy’s twists and turns so as to promote, as best as we can in an uncertain economic environment, the employment and inflation goals assigned to us by the Congress.

The proviso that policy will evolve as needed is especially pertinent today in light of global economic and financial developments since December, which at times have included significant changes in oil prices, interest rates, and stock values. So far, these developments have not materially altered the Committee’s baseline — or most likely — outlook for economic activity and inflation over the medium term. Specifically, we continue to expect further labor market improvement and a return of inflation to our 2 percent objective over the next two or three years, consistent with data over recent months. But this is not to say that global developments since the turn of the year have been inconsequential. In part, the baseline outlook for real activity and inflation is little changed because investors responded to those developments by marking down their expectations for the future path of the federal funds rate, thereby putting downward pressure on longer-term interest rates and cushioning the adverse effects on economic activity. In addition, global developments have increased the risks associated with that outlook. In light of these considerations, the Committee decided to leave the stance of policy unchanged in both January and March.

I will next describe the Committee’s baseline economic outlook and the risks that cloud that outlook, emphasizing the FOMC’s commitment to adjust monetary policy as needed to achieve our employment and inflation objectives.

Recent Developments and the Baseline Outlook
Readings on the US economy since the turn of the year have been somewhat mixed. On the one hand, many indicators have been quite favorable. The labor market has added an average of almost 230,000 jobs a month over the past three months. In addition, the unemployment rate has edged down further, more people are joining the workforce as the prospects for finding jobs have improved, and the employment-to-population ratio has increased by almost 1/2 percentage point. Consumer spending appears to be expanding at a moderate pace, driven by solid income gains, improved household balance sheets, and the ongoing effects of the increases in wealth and declines in oil prices over the past few years. The housing market continues its gradual recovery, and fiscal policy at all levels of government is now modestly boosting economic activity after exerting a considerable drag in recent years.

March 29, 2016
Designing Identity: The Power of Textiles in Late Antiquity

Square Panel from a Furnishing with Bust of Spring; ca. 5th– 6th century CE; Tapestry weave of dyed wools and undyed (?) wool. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of George F. Baker, 1890. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University’s spring exhibition in New York City, Designing Identity: The Power of Textiles in Late Antiquity, offers intimate glimpses into the lives of those who commissioned and used textiles and more sweeping views across Late Antique society (roughly third to seventh century CE).

The exhibition brings together over fifty textiles of diverse materials, techniques, and motifs to explore how clothing and cloth furnishings expressed ideals of self, society, and culture. By their valuable materials and virtuoso execution, the textiles displayed their owners’ wealth and discernment. To modern viewers, the materials and techniques also attest to developments around the Mediterranean world and farther east along the routes of the silk trade.

The Late Antique owners, in choosing from a vast repertory of motifs, represented (hopefully more than actually) the prosperity and well-being of their households. The owners represented themselves through the distinctively gendered imagery of manly and womanly virtues in mythological and Christian subjects so that in these textiles, we see distinctly personal manifestations of the religious transformation of the Roman Empire into a Christian Empire.

Tapestry weave of dyed wools and undyed linen, a: H. 103 cm; W. 148.2 cm. b: H. 5.5 cm; W. 15.5 cm. Egypt, ca. 6th–8th century CE. Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund

This wall hanging (above) depicts an arcade of three stories or more of servants at work on behalf of the household. They carry flowers, baskets, and chalices piled high with fruit. In the fuller, original composition, these figures may have represented a calendar with personifications of the months, bearing the earth’s bounty for each month, thereby ensuring prosperity for the household.

TEXTILES IN LATE ANTIQUITY

The term “Late Antiquity” is often used to designate the later Roman and early Byzantine empire (from about the late third through the seventh century CE). At the turn of the fourth century, Christianity began to displace traditional polytheist cults under the aegis of the emperor Constantine. At the ancient site of Byzantion in the eastern half of the empire, he established a new capital, known as both New Rome and Constantine’s City — Constantinople. The new capital was nearer to the empire’s wealthiest regions (Egypt and Syria), to its eastern frontier with the rival superpower Persia, and to the roots of Christianity in Palestine and the Greek-speaking East. During this period, the empire reached its greatest extent, encompassing the Mediterranean and a large swath of the Middle East. The governing elite maintained its authority through traditional social systems and networks, which were forged through a traditional education based in Greco-Roman cultural heritage. By the late seventh century, however, much of western Europe had been lost to smaller, successor kingdoms and the east to the emerging Islamic empire.

Both the continuity and the extraordinary cultural changes of Late Antiquity are strikingly evident in the textiles in this exhibition. These labor-intensive, costly items would have belonged to those with sufficient wealth to expend on a display of social standing. Designing Identity explores how the wealthy elite expressed the ideals of self, household, and society through materials, techniques, and the types and decoration of garments and furnishings.

The first gallery focuses on the uses and expressions of textiles with mythological imagery, particularly Dionysian, mainly within the context of the home. The second gallery displays a wider range of types of garments and decorative themes, drawing from the repertoires of pagan mythology, personifications of good things, and bounteous nature, as well as from charms intended to attract the good or ward off the bad. Other motifs decorating clothing were chosen to represent character, often by emphasizing virtue through the portrayal of exemplary figures such as heroes, divinities, and saints. In the selection of model personas, gender too played a constitutive role.

March 26, 2016