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The Loyalty Of West Point’S Graduates Debated, John David Miles

Civil War Book Review

The principle of loyalty – and its unseemly brother, treason – was at the center of the debate about the coming war leading up to and following the firing of the guns at Fort Sumter. As William Blair points out in his 2014 book With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era, accusations of treason were ubiquitous in northern newspapers during the war, despite the narrow definition of the crime specified by the US Constitution. Blair argues that popular accusations of “treasonous behavior” were wielded indiscriminately during the period, beyond and sometimes in seeming opposition …

Civil War Obscura: Madame Castel’S Lodger, Meg Groeling

Civil War Book Review

In 2019, most folks know what fan fiction is, and this book definitely falls into that category. I have never read a book quite like Madame Castel’s Lodger, a semi-factual, semi-fictional biography of Confederate General P. T. G. Beauregard. Digging up old books that once were popular may seem like an odd hobby, but this particular volume reminds me of why I do it. It is truly an homage to Beauregard and gives some insight into his character only possible if the writer is southern herself.

Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History Of Civil War And Emancipation In The Cotton South, Madeline Berry

Civil War Book Review

Eschewing historical trends that see environmental conditions as secondary influences both during and after the Civil War, Erin Mauldin’s well researched tome Unredeemed Land assigns southern lands, and their soils, a central role in the conflict and the uneasy peace that followed. Her book links post war agricultural shifts to the results of long-term ecological legacies that were exacerbated by the Civil War and emancipation. Focusing on the late antebellum period through the 1880s, Mauldin argues that war and emancipation hastened ecological changes that rippled throughout the former Confederate state. A changing landscape widened social fissures between southerners, both black …

A Civil Life In An Uncivil Time: Julia Wilbur’S Struggle For Purpose, Sara Brooks Sundberg

Civil War Book Review

Wars oftentimes cause individuals to challenge themselves to reach beyond traditional expectations. In Paula Tarnapol Whitacre‘s biography of Julia Wilbur, Wilbur breaks through the traditional expectation of female dependency for a mid-nineteenth century unmarried, white, middle-class woman like herself. Instead, she becomes an independent, middle-class working woman, and social reformer. Based upon several decades of diaries and various correspondence, Whitacre reconstructs Wilbur’s life story dividing it into three sections that outline her life and work before, during, and after the Civil War. Two locations shape Wilbur’s life in significant ways: Rochester, New York, where she taught school, learned about social …

Naringenin Promotes Thermogenic Gene Expression In Human White Adipose Tissue, Candida J. Rebello, Frank L. Greenway, Frank H. Lau, Yuan Lin, Jacqueline M. Stephens, William D. Johnson, Ann A. Coulter

Faculty Publications

© 2018 The Obesity Society Objective: Naringenin, a citrus flavonoid, prevents diet-induced weight gain and improves glucose and lipid metabolism in rodents. There is evidence that naringenin activates brown fat and increases energy expenditure in mice, but little is known about its effects in humans. The goal of this study was to examine the effects of naringenin on energy expenditure in adipose tissue. Methods: Human white adipocyte cultures (hADSC) and abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue (pWAT) were treated with naringenin for 7 to 14 days. Expression (quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction, immunoblotting) of candidate genes involved in thermogenesis and glucose metabolism …

Fabrication And Characterization Of Thiol-Triacrylate Polymer Via Michael Addition Reaction For Biomedical Applications, Anoosha Forghani, Leah Garber, Cong Chen, Fariborz Tavangarian, Timothy B. Tighe, Ram Devireddy, John A. Pojman, Daniel Hayes

Faculty Publications

© 2018 IOP Publishing Ltd. Thiol-acrylate polymers have therapeutic potential as biocompatible scaffolds for bone tissue regeneration. Synthesis of a novel cyto-compatible and biodegradable polymer composed of trimethylolpropane ethoxylate triacrylate-trimethylolpropane tris (3-mercaptopropionate) (TMPeTA-TMPTMP) using a simple amine-catalyzed Michael addition reaction is reported in this study. This study explores the impact of molecular weight and crosslink density on the cyto-compatibility of human adipose derived mesenchymal stem cells. Eight groups were prepared with two different average molecular weights of trimethylolpropane ethoxylate triacrylate (TMPeTA 692 and 912) and four different concentrations of diethylamine (DEA) as catalyst. The materials were physically characterized by mechanical …

Seed Treatment Using Methyl Jasmonate Induces Resistance To Rice Water Weevil But Reduces Plant Growth In Rice, Emily C. Kraus, Michael J. Stout

Faculty Publications

© 2019 Kraus, Stout. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The jasmonic acid cascade plays a pivotal role in induced plant resistance to herbivores. There have been a number of investigations into the potential uses of derivatives of this hormone for pest management. Understanding the phenotypic plasticity of plant defense traits interactions in agricultural systems may facilitate the development of novel and improved management practices, which is desirable as management of insects …

Dominin And Segon Form Multiprotein Particles In The Plasma Of Eastern Oysters (Crassostrea Virginica) And Are Likely Involved In Shell Formation, Qinggang Xue, Jean Philipe Beguel, Jerome La Peyre

Faculty Publications

Copyright © 2019 Xue, Beguel and La Peyre. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Dominin and segon are two proteins purified and characterized from the plasma of eastern oysters Crassostrea virginica, making up about 70% of the total plasma …

Growth And Development Symposium: Stem And Progenitor Cells In Animal Growth: The Regulation Of Beef Quality By Resident Progenitor Cells, Xing Fu, Chaoyang Li, Qianglin Liu, Kenneth W. Mcmillin

Faculty Publications

© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society of Animal Science. All rights reserved. The intramuscular adipose tissue deposition in the skeletal muscle of beef cattle is a highly desired trait essential for high-quality beef. In contrast, the excessive accumulation of crosslinked collagen in intramuscular connective tissue contributes to beef toughness. Recent studies revealed that adipose tissue and connective tissue share an embryonic origin in mice and may be derived from a common immediate bipotent precursor in mice and humans. Having the same linkages in the development of adipose tissue and connective tissue …

Erk1/2 Signaling Induces Skeletal Muscle Slow Fiber-Type Switching And Reduces Muscular Dystrophy Disease Severity, Justin G. Boyer, Vikram Prasad, Taejeong Song, Donghoon Lee, Xing Fu, Kelly M. Grimes, Michelle A. Sargent, Sakthivel Sadayappan, Jeffery D. Molkentin

Faculty Publications

© 2019 American Society for Clinical Investigation. MAPK signaling consists of an array of successively acting kinases. ERK1 and -2 (ERK1/2) are major components of the greater MAPK cascade that transduce growth factor signaling at the cell membrane. Here, we investigated ERK1/2 signaling in skeletal muscle homeostasis and disease. Using mouse genetics, we observed that the muscle-specifc expression of a constitutively active MEK1 mutant promotes greater ERK1/2 signaling that mediates fber-type switching to a slow, oxidative phenotype with type I myosin heavy chain expression. Using a conditional and temporally regulated Cre strategy, as well as Mapk1 (ERK2) and Mapk3 (ERK1) …

Church In The Wild: Evangelicals In Antebellum America, Spencer W. Mcbride

Civil War Book Review

Scholars have written extensively about this historic development in American religious culture. In Church in the Wild, Brett Malcolm Grainger builds upon that body of scholarship and offers a fresh view of the ways that praying in the woods altered evangelical Christianity in the United States and Americans’ understandings of the natural world. “Evangelicals participated in the most popular movement of nature spiritualism in nineteenth-century America,” Grainger argues, “a movement based upon the conviction that the natural world was enlivened by Christ, the alpha and omega of all created things” (p. 3).

American Abolitionism: Its Direct Political Impact From Colonial Times Into Reconstruction, Fred L. Johnson

Civil War Book Review

he historiography pertaining to chattel slavery in the United States, and the price that was ultimately paid to finally remove its blight, has firmly established that unfortunate institution as the most pernicious challenge confronting the nation during the nineteenth-century. Slaveholder and Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson, with his usual gift for ironic contradiction, was accurate when, in the aftermath of the slavery controversy that erupted over Missouri’s 1819 petition to join the Union, lamented “we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” The dangerous dilemma articulated by Jefferson’s metaphor …

A Fiery Gospel: The Battle Hymn Of The Republic And The Road To Righteous War, Paul E. Teed

Civil War Book Review

In this engagingly written and thoroughly researched book, Richard M. Gamble traces the history of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” from its conception at the outset of the Civil War though the beginning of the 21^st century. Gamble argues that the “Battle Hymn,” with its biblically informed themes of righteous and redemptive violence should be understood not simply as an aspect of America’s civil religion, but more specifically as an expression of religious nationalism, a self-conscious identification of the United States with God’s ongoing war against sin and evil. Built upon the interconnected notions that God’s …

Spying On The South: An Odyssey Across The American Divide, Daniel W. Crofts

Civil War Book Review

Spying on the South juxtaposes two intervals when the United States appeared to have fractured into hostile tribes. Writer and journalist Tony Horwitz set out to probe today’s “American divide” with a template in mind—the effort by Frederick Law Olmsted to comprehend North-South antagonisms during the 1850s. Just as Olmsted once had done, Horwitz decided to head South.

Slaves, Slaveholders, And A Kentucky Community’S Struggle Toward Freedom, Jennifer Harbour

Civil War Book Review

Elizabeth Leonard’s latest work in a long line of impressive scholarship is a love letter of sorts. In 2012, she won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). In that book, Leonard offered a compelling portrayal and analysis of the life of Joseph Holt, who was initially a Kentucky Democrat and slaveowner until he became Lincoln’s trusted advisor and supporter of abolition. In this new work, Leonard returns to the Holt’s story, this time to enlarge our understanding of Kentucky, enlistment for black men, and …

“Too Much For Human Endurance”: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals And The Battle Of Gettysburg, Peter J. D'Onofrio

Civil War Book Review

“Too Much for Human Endurance” is the story of George Spangler, his family, and their farm during and after the 3-day Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. What makes this volume so valuable is that it not only establishes the strategic importance of the property, but introduces the readers to the untold stories of the Spanglers, the soldiers who were brought there wounded and dying, and the medical personnel who labored to save their lives.

Bluecoat And Pioneer: The Recollections Of John Benton Hart, 1864-1868, George C. Rable

Civil War Book Review

Late in life John Benton Hart, with the encouragement of his son Harry, recorded his reminiscences of Civil War service and later experiences in the West. Hart served in the 11th Kansas Infantry (later converted into the 11th Kansas Cavalry) and after the war spent several years in Montana. Son Harry embellished his father’s recollections, and some of the episodes recorded, especially some long conversations, beggar belief. Yet especially in the post-Civil War sections, the narrative is unfailingly interesting and in places quite revealing.

Confederate Statues And Memorialization, Gaines M. Foster

Civil War Book Review

What a good idea. Editors Catherine Clinton and Jim Downs along with the University of Georgia Press have established a series that will publish books bringing historians’ insights to bear on issues of contemporary importance. And what a good topic with which to inaugurate the series, the current debate raging over Confederate statues and memorialization.

The resulting book has three distinct parts. First, it presents a roundtable discussion among five historians who are experts on the memory of the Civil War—Clinton, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Karen L. Cox, Gary W. Gallagher, and Nell Irvin Painter. Second, it reprints what editor Clinton …

Coming Full Circle: The Seneca Nation Of Indians, 1848-1934, Frank Rzeczkowski

Civil War Book Review

The title of Laurence Hauptman’s Coming Full Circle: The Seneca Nation of Indians, 1848-1934 has a double meaning; not only does it chronicle the development and maturity of a new form of government among the Seneca of the Allegany and Cattaragus reservations during that era, it also fills the final temporal gap in Hauptman’s nearly 50 years of study and scholarship on the Iroquois (and more specifically the Seneca Nation of Iroquois) since American independence.

Fluorescence-Based Ratiometric Nanosensor For Selective Imaging Of Cancer Cells, Isiah M. Warner, Kelsey E. Mcneel, Noureen Siraj, Nimisha Bhattarai

Faculty Publications

Herein, we report the synthesis and characterization of a nanosensor developed from a group of uniform materials based on organic salts (GUMBOS). This sensor is composed of three ionic species, namely, fluorescein, rhodamine B, and tetradecyltrihexyl phosphonium (P-66614) ions. Nanoparticles prepared from this three-component GUMBOS, termed nanoGUMBOS, exhibited increased fluorescence at two wavelengths with increases in pH values. The ratio of fluorescence emission corresponding to FL and RhB components of these nanoGUMBOS also changed with pH, allowing ratiometric analysis of pH through fluorescence measurements. Peak ratios were significantly different at pH 5 and pH 7, indicating potential applications of this …

Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, And The Birth Of Modern Visual Politics In America, Jack Trammell

Civil War Book Review

The invention of the camera transformed the visual culture of the world; in essence it opened up a brand-new window onto the soul. Contemporary scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson have explored this new visual rhetoric, suggesting that the positionality of subject and object, and the impact of the gaze, have created a startling new social environment where all of the traditional ideas associated with visual judgement are now in flux or in question. In Exposing Slavery, Matthew Fox-Amato confirms this from a historical perspective, showing readers with actual photographs and through a narration on visual politics the surprising power …

Gettysburg Contested:150 Years Of Preserving America’S Cherished Landscape, Jennifer M. Murray

Civil War Book Review

Civil War historians have produced no fewer than 6,000 books on the Gettysburg Campaign, saturating the Gettysburg historiography and feeding our seemingly endless fascination with the three-day battle. Recent scholarship has focused on Gettysburg in memory, including an exploration of the process of preserving and interpreting America’s most popular battlefield. In Gettysburg Contested, Brian Black, an environmental historian at Penn State University’s campus in Altoona, focuses on the process of preserving the battlefield from 1863 to the battle’s sesquicentennial in 2013. As Black states, the vision for the book came from “a personal need to understand the ongoing effort to …

The American Military: A Concise History, Stanley J. Adamiak

Civil War Book Review

The United States has had a tumultuous history, growing from colonies on the edge of the Atlantic world to a global superpower. Its armed forces have fought a variety of wars, both large and small, including a destructive civil war and global conflicts. Over time, its policies adapted to the challenges of industrialization, societal change, and projecting its economic and military power beyond its borders.

The Man Who Punched Jefferson Davis: The Political Life Of Henry S. Foote, Southern Unionist, Meg Groeling

Civil War Book Review

If you were planning a party in the 1850s, I would suggest you leave Mr. Henry S. Foote off the guest list—unless, of course, you want one of those parties that people talk about for years. Literally years. Foote is one of the strangest fire-eaters in the South. He was born in Virginia but made his mark as a Unionist politician in Mississippi, Texas, California, and Tennessee. Whether he was welcomed in any of these places or was eventually asked to leave, this is the story of this unusual man.

Writing History With Lightning: Cinematic Representations Of Nineteenth-Century America, David J. Brokaw

Civil War Book Review

Matthew Christopher Hulbert and John C. Inscoe’s edited volume, Writing History with Lightning: Cinematic Representations of Nineteenth-Century America, aptly gets its title from Wilson’s notorious response upon viewing Birth of a Nation. Wilson’s apocryphal statement, alluding to the undeniable lure of history played out on the big screen, arguably still holds true to this day. But as Hulbert notes in his introduction, Wilson purportedly added, “My only regret is that it is all so terribly true,” a claim not only fraught with historical error, but with devastating implications for Jim Crow America. As these twenty-six contributors deftly illustrate, …

The Limits Of Loyalty: Ordinary People In Civil War Mississippi, Erik Mathisen

Civil War Book Review

The reasons are not hard to understand. The centrifugal force in Civil War historiography remains the question of why the United States succeeded while the Confederacy collapsed. What Jarret Ruminski argues in this rich, complicated book, is that we ought to view the question of loyalty and disloyalty in the Confederacy not as a binary choice, but as an overlapping set of forces that pulled at individuals in several different directions and at different times. The contribution that Ruminski’s book makes is to emphasize loyalty’s complexity. By uncoupling it from the question of why the Confederacy lost the Civil War, …

Fighting For Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, And Trenches In The Civil War, Robert L. Glaze

Civil War Book Review

Between 2005 and 2009, Earl J. Hess authored a superb trilogy of books that brought new light to oft-studied campaigns by focusing on the role of trenches and field fortifications in the Eastern Theater. More recently, the prolific historian published the Tom Watson Book Award winning Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness (2015) as well as a series of works detailing pivotal battles of the Atlanta Campaign. Thus, Fighting for Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, and Trenches in the Civil War seems to be the natural convergence of years of research and writing.

Civil War Barons: The Tycoons, Entrepreneurs, Inventors, And Visionaries Who Forged Victory And Shaped A Nation, Geoff Lybeck

Civil War Book Review

In Civil War Barons Jeffry D. Wert weaves the stories of nineteen businessmen together into a narrative of the Union’s organizational response to the demands of the Civil War. Wert’s approach widens the scope of his analysis beyond that of a group biography to elucidate the networks that these businessmen built between government administrators, natural resources, and the men that labored and fought to preserve the Union. This broad view does not obscure the role of the individual in his account. To the contrary, the self-determination of these particular historical actors plays a central role in Wert’s explanation of the …

Southern White Ministers And The Civil Rights Movement, Keith M. Finley

Civil War Book Review

Each year brings an avalanche of new studies devoted to the civil rights struggle. The white southern response to the civil rights crusade of the 1950s and 1960s, once a scarcely considered subject, is receiving greater scholarly focus as part of this publication wave. Despite the ever-expanding corpus devoted to the movement considerable gaps exist in the historiography. Far less attention has been given to those white southerners, who risked their professions and sometimes their lives, to challenge the regional status quo. These unsung heroes of the civil rights fight are the subject of retired history teacher Elaine Lechtrek’s engaging …

The Coming Of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning In The Age Of Jackson, Martin Hershock

Civil War Book Review

Mark Cheathem’s The Coming of Democracy, which examines the beginnings of the nation’s turn toward cultural politics during the Jacksonian era, thus appears at an incredibly prescient moment and offers an interesting lens through which to examine both the nation’s current political setting as well as the robust and colorful political campaigns associated with the Age of Jackson. In this well written and accessible work, Cheatem offers readers a detailed account of the evolving usage of cultural politics in the elections that marked the birth of the second American party system.