Word: seale
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...This is the Massachusetts State Seal, adopted by Governor John Hancock in 1780. It appears all around campus—on the side of Lowell Lecture Hall or the base of the Anderson footbridge. Yet the seal may soon find itself sharing company with the Betsy Ross flag and the “Don’t Tread On Me” snake in the dustbin of iconographic history. The Massachusetts House of Representatives is currently considering House Bill 3412, a measure which would establish a special commission to determine whether the 230-year-old shield “accurately...
...center of the issue is the representation of Native Americans in state history. The seal’s centerpiece originally made it onto the image as a holdover from the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s previous seal, which featured a similar Native American, this time naked and base, with a motto emerging from his mouth: “Come and help us.” There is a grim irony in this apostrophe to the Puritan mission civilisatrice, for, as any American must admit, the colonization of North America proceeded not under the mantle of aid but of annihilation...
...Perhaps in subtle deference to this irony, the seal adopted in 1780 replaced the childlike Native American begging for help with the taciturn, muscled man standing upright that appears today. In a way, the image evokes Rousseau’s “noble savage,” emerging from the wilderness not as a barbarous or murderous villain but as a simple representation of the primitivist and paternalistic fantasy Europeans held about North America, a fantasy which envisaged the new continent as the seat of an uncorrupted paradise. His arrow pointed down in peace, his gaze forward, the hero...
...Where the seal seems to run into further trouble is in the two elements added to the 1780 design: the sword brandished above the Native American’s head and the truculent Latin motto added to the seal. The sword and the motto, bounding the Native American, seem to be visually duplicating the violent hegemony which the European colonists held over the natives. The vertical superiority of the bent white arm reinforces the ugly racial superiority that characterized early Puritan history of Massachusetts...
...took its current form only in the early 1970s. That's when Moody's and its competitors switched from selling research to investors to charging bond issuers to rate their goods. This approach wasn't unheard of: you have to advertise in Good Housekeeping to get the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. What made it problematic was that at about the same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) exalted the status of the ratings by writing them into the rules governing securities firms' capital holdings. Since then, the use of bond ratings in regulation has only grown. Many institutional...