Digital Commons Network^™

Swamp Tours In Louisiana Post Hurricane Katrina And Hurricane Rita, Dawn Schaffer

LSU Master's Theses

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita made landfall in southern Louisiana during August and September 2005, respectively. Prior to these storms swamp tours were a popular nature-based tourism experience that entertained visitors while teaching them about local flora, fauna, and culture. The number of swamp tour businesses in the state was slowly increasing. The purpose of this study was to determine how many swamp tours were operating after the hurricanes, what type of damage they sustained, and how they repaired their businesses. Differences between those tours that remained open after the hurricanes and those that closed were also examined. A 3-phase mail …

An Analysis Of Public Transit Accessibility Using The Distance Constrained P-Median Problem Approach: Bus Stop Consolidation For The Capital Area Transit System Of East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, Sainath Challuri

LSU Master's Theses

Over the past four decades public transit usage has declined in the United States. Transit Planners have suggested that public transit usage should be encouraged because public transit can account for greater travel demand than cars and would reduce pollution, traffic congestion and energy consumption. Easy access to public transit stops is important because research has found that usage of public transit and access are inversely proportional. U.S. transit systems have a relatively high density of stops resulting in high accessibility levels at the cost of increased travel times. In this study access distance to transit stops and bus stop …

Burn Scar Mapping In The Sabine National Wildlife Refuge Using Landsat Tm And Etm+ Imagery, Chris Pennington

LSU Master's Theses

Marsh fires burn on a regular basis on the Southwestern Louisiana Coast from both natural and anthropogenic ignitions. Remote sensing based studies of these fires are scarce. Several burn scar mapping techniques have been developed and implemented for study of forest fires in the American West but have not been applied to marsh fires. Erdas Imagine and ArcGIS Software was used to process Landsat imagery of the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge in accordance with the most commonly used burn scar mapping spectral indices and tested for accuracy against manually digitized burn scar maps. Indices tested included the Normalize Burn Ratio …

Underground In The Confederate Capital: Punk Subculture In Richmond, Virginia, Christopher J. Dalbom

LSU Master's Theses

The intent of this thesis is to investigate the role of the punk subculture in Richmond, Virginia from an ethnographic perspective. Through participant observation and open-ended interviews, it seeks an understanding of the role of the subculture in the lives of those who embrace it and how it shapes their experiences in Richmond. In doing so, it hopes to fill a gap in music geography and in the study of the punk subculture. According to much of the literature, punk died decades ago, but for those who claim punk allegiance in Richmond today, it is very alive and real. This …

The Education Of Girls In Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Mother-Daughter Relations And Portrayals Of Identity In George Sand And Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Christina Grace Thomas

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis examines the relationships between mothers and daughters against the background of education in early nineteenth-century France. This era was the first time that a large population of French girls was separated from their mothers. Because of their attendance at school, girls created an identity separate from that of the one that their mothers had helped them to create. By using George Sand’s autobiography Histoire de ma vie and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s poem “Ondine à l’ecole,” the process of distinguishing the daughter from the mother has been analyzed from both the mother’s perspective and the daughter’s perspective. For Sand, who …

Separation Anxieties: Representations Of Separatist Communities In Late Twentieth Century Fiction And Film, Brett Alan Riley

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the late 20th century and beyond, American social movements advocating equality have increased national attention to issues of exclusion, inclusion, and multiculturalism within communities. As a result, studying the nature of communities—how the term "community" might be defined, who belongs to a given group or social structure, who does not belong, and why—has become increasingly important. American artists have responded by exploring these sites of social, political, and personal change in their works. Separation Anxieties: Representations of Separatist Communities in Late Twentieth Century Fiction and Film analyzes seven fictional works in which some group is philosophically and/or geographically isolated—sometimes …

Politics Of The Personal In The Old North State: Griffith Rutherford In Revolutionary North Carolina, James Matthew Mac Donald

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the annals of North Carolina history, few figures stand out more than Griffith Rutherford. An orphan when he arrived in the new world, Rutherford settled in the North Carolina backcountry two decades before the American Revolution. Almost immediately he ascended a social and economic ladder in Rowan County in his service as a soldier and elected assemblyman. A consummate “fixer” during his military career, Rutherford continually rushed to scenes when a Loyalist insurrections or party of marauding Indians threatened the state. As a militia general during the Revolution he was responsible for the defense of the entire western quadrant …

The Development Of Global Awareness In Elementary Students Through Participation In An Online Cross-Cultural Project, Allen C. Grant

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study provided insights about how to develop online cross-cultural projects designed to foster global awareness in upper elementary-age students. Three schools, located in the southern United States, Mexico and Turkey, implemented a cross-cultural model as part of a comparative case study. The primary goal of this research was to gain an understanding of how these populations develop global awareness in an online environment. A second goal was to determine the necessary implications for practice when conducting online, cross-cultural projects in upper elementary classrooms. During eight weeks of implementation, students participated in cross-cultural groups as members of an online community. …

Lsu In The Eye Of The Storm: A University Model For Disaster Response, Renée Bacher, Teresa Devlin, Kristine Calongne, Joshua Duplechain, Stephanie Pertuit

LSU Press Published Books

No abstract provided.

Rediscovering Civil War Classics:Shiloh: A Novel, David Madden

Civil War Book Review

Shelby Foote at the Cross Roads of Our Being

Big-Bodied Males Help Us Recognize That Females Have Big Pelves, Robert G. Tague

Faculty Publications

Schultz ([1949] Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 7:401-424) presented a conundrum: among primates, sexual dimorphism of the pelvis is a developmental adjunct to dimorphism in other aspects of the body, albeit in the converse direction. Among species in which males are larger than females in body size, females are larger than males in some pelvic dimensions; species with little sexual dimorphism in nonpelvic size show little pelvic dimorphism. Obstetrical difficulty does not explain this relationship. The present study addresses this issue, evaluating the relationship between pelvic and femoral sexual dimorphism in 12 anthropoid species. The hypothesis is that species in which …

Adult Demographic Composition In The Poole-Rose Ossuary, Kirsten Marie Brown

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Regionally Isolated Populations Of An Imperiled Caribbean Coral, Acropora Palmata, Iliana B. Baums, Margaret W. Miller, Michael E. Hellberg

Faculty Publications

The movements of larvae between marine populations are difficult to follow directly and have been the subject of much controversy, especially in the Caribbean. The debate centres on the degree to which populations are demographically open, such that depleted populations can be replenished by recruitment from distant healthy populations, or demographically closed and thus in need of local management. Given the depressed state of many tropical reef populations, the understanding of these movements now bears critically on the number, placement, and size of marine reserves. Most genetic analyses assume that dispersal patterns have been stable for thousands of generations, thus …

Hurricane Ivan's Impact Along The Northern Gulf Of Mexico, G. W. Stone, N. D. Walker, S. A. Hsu, A. Babin, B. Liu, B. D. Keim, W. Teague, D. Mitchell, R. Leben

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ernst Mayr And The Complexity Of Life, Dominique G. Homberger

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Recentism In Environmental History On Latin America, Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Blaut's Early Natural/Social Theorization, Cultural Ecology, And Political Ecology, Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Is Geography Destiny?: Lessons From Latin America. And Troubled Harvest: Agronomy And Revolution In Mexico, 1880–2002, Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Marine Radiations At Small Geographic Scales: Speciation In Neotropical Reef Gobies (Elacatinus), Michael S. Taylor, Michael E. Hellberg

Faculty Publications

Studies of speciation in the marine environment have historically compared broad-scale distributions and estimated larval dispersal potential to infer the geographic barriers responsible for allopatric speciation. However, many marine clades show high species diversity in geographically restricted areas where barriers are not obvious and estimated dispersal potential should bring many sister taxa into contact. Genetic differentiation at small (separation <1000 >km) spatial scales could facilitate speciation by mechanisms other than the gradual accumulation of reproductive isolation during extended allopatry, such as ecological adaptation to local environmental conditions or the rapid evolution of genes tied to mate recognition, but the role of …

Components, Volume 1 (2005), Lsu Center For Computation & Technology

Components

No abstract provided.

She Speaks As One Having Authority”: Mary E. Downey’S Use Of Libraries As A Means To Public Power, Suzanne Marie Stauffer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Forgery As Performance Art The Strange Case Of George Psalmanazar, Jack Lynch

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

An Empire Divided By Common Sense The Paine-Hanway Argument, Richard Samuelson

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Insect Colonization Of Child-Sized Remains And Delay Of Post Mortem Interval: An Exploratory Study In The Behavioral Analysis Of Pig Carcasses Via 24 Hour High Resolution Video Surveillance, Abigail L. Gremillion

LSU Master's Theses

This research was designed to document the decompositional and behavioral patterns and activities of arthropods colonizing child-sized remains, as observed by field sampling and 24-hour, high resolution video surveillance. The purpose of this research was to test the relationship between delays in arthropod colonization of child-sized remains and climatic conditions. Between March and June 2004, the remains of two child-sized pigs (approximately 11 kilograms) were deposited in an isolated wooded region in a suburban area of Virginia. The sites were secluded, approximately 83 yards from any dwellings. The pigs were placed on the surface: one was clothed, the other was …

Secular Change In The Skull Between American Blacks And Whites, Nicole Danielle Truesdell

LSU Master's Theses

Biologically, discernable differences exist between and within populations based on environmental and genetic factors. Understanding these differences is necessary in forensic anthropology as biological ancestry is asked of forensic anthropologists when assessing an individual’s biological profile. In order to make this assessment, secular changes in population dynamics need to be tracked. The purpose of this research is to examine nonmetric racial characteristics in the skull between American blacks and whites. This study used twelve nonmetric traits as criteria on two different temporal groups from collections at the Smithsonian Institution (N=408) and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (N=218). Frequencies were calculated, …

Hydroclimatic And Circulation Anomalies Associated With The Gulf Of Mexico Hypoxic Zone, Natalie Amanda Vines

LSU Master's Theses

The Gulf of Mexico Hypoxic Zone (GMHZ) has been observed along the Louisiana continental shelf west of the mouth of the Mississippi River since 1985. Previous research associated the surface area of the GMHZ with runoff in the Mississippi-Missouri River Basin (MMRB), with "wet" years linked to larger GMHZs than "dry" years. This research uses monthly climate divisional Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) data and Palmer Hydrological Drought Index (PHDI) data and monthly atmospheric teleconnection indices are used to predict the GMHZ extent up to several months in advance, using stepwise multiple regression techniques. The predictive equations are then used …

The Art Of Living - The Marketing Of Identity Through Nationality And Spirituality, Shirisha Shankar

LSU Master's Theses

Spirituality has been a term that has always been associated with the East and more specifically with India. Spirituality has been revamped and repackaged in glossy packages by various spiritual groups and organizations in India. One among these organizations is the Art of Living, a non-governmental spiritual organization that has risen in popularity since 1996. This thesis concentrates on the Art of Living as an organization and of the dissemination of the new spirituality through this institution. This research study pertains to the identity of self and of the sense of nationhood through the discourse and the practice of certain …

Digging Through Discarded Identity: Archaeological Investigations Around The Kitchen And The Overseer's House At Whitney Plantation, Louisiana, Erika Sabine Roberts

LSU Master's Theses

During the mid-nineteenth century, the Haydel family was prominent sugar planters in southern Louisiana. Their plantation, Whitney Plantation (16SJB11), lies on the highway 18 on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Wallace, Louisiana. During the summer of 2002 archaeological investigations were conducted around the kitchen and the overseer’s house, in order to collect a sample of materials associated with these occupants. I hoped that the artifacts could yield information on how the planter and overseer family represented themselves materially. Although what I excavated was the discarded remnants of the Haydel family’s life, these remnants offer an understanding of …

Influences On The Establishment Of County Wildfire Risk Mitigation: The Case Of California's Fire Safe Councils, Timothy Richard Soileau

LSU Master's Theses

In response to increased annual wildfire destruction and insufficient wildfire mitigation approaches from the federal government, the state of California adopted Public Resources Code Sections 4290 and 4291 in the year 1991. These laws force the removal of fire-causing agents from public and private areas, and establish what is known as defensible space. Defensible space is defined in Section 4291 as the area within the perimeter of a parcel, development, neighborhood, or community where basic wildland fire protection practices and measures are implemented, providing the key point of defense from an approaching wildfire or escaping structure fire. One method to …

Spatial Heterogeneity In Forested Landscapes: An Examination Of Forest Fragmentation And Suburban Sprawl In The Florida Parishes Of Louisiana, Brady Randall Couvillion

LSU Master's Theses

Forest fragmentation refers to the spatial distribution of forests in a landscape. Forest fragmentation drastically alters forest composition, habitat quality, genetic flow and many other ecological processes associated with forested ecosystems. This research examined spatial patterns and rates of forest fragmentation during the 1991-2001 period for a region in southeast Louisiana known as the "Florida Parishes." Following classification of 1991 and 2001 Landsat data into forest and non-forest classes, spatial patterns were examined using Fragstats 3.3 spatial analysis software. Spatial statistics such as patch density, perimeter to area ratios, core area indices, edge density, and various landscape continuity indices were …