Digital Commons Network^™

American Catholics And The Quest For Equality In The Civil War Era., James G. Bland

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

From The Wilderness To Appomattox: The Fifteenth New York Heavy Artillery In The Civil War, Jonathan M. Steplyk

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

The Iron Dice Of Battle: Albert Sidney Johnson And The Civil War In The West, Matthew Hulbert

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

Book Challenges And Censorship Attempts In Louisiana: A Case Study, Jennifer E. Steele

Faculty Publications

Book challenges and censorship have long played a significant role in the cultural and educational landscapes of the United States. In recent years, Louisiana has become a focal point in national conversations about intellectual freedom, public and school library governance, parental rights, and the political pressures surrounding children and young adult literature. This dynamic environment has led to significant debates about what materials should be accessible to young people, how libraries should be managed, and what role the state and local governments should play in determining the availability of information. The rise in book challenges across Louisiana reflects national trends …

Louisiana Youth For Excellence (Lyfe): 2024 Data Collection & Technical Assistance Final Report, Elizabeth Winchester, Jada Thomas-Smith, Quynh-Tram Tran

Reports

Louisiana Youth for Excellence (LYFE) is a Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRAE) program funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families. The program housed in the Governor’s Office targets youth ages 10-19. LYFE uses an evidence-based curriculum to equip youth with skills that promote positive youth development.

LYFE subgrantees reported program, participant, and administrative data during two collection periods: Winter 2024 and Summer 2025. LYFE subgrantees are required to submit data based on three performance indicators: 1) annual structure cost and support; 2) biannual attendance, reach and dosage; and 3) biannual participant characteristics, …

Louisiana Graduate Network In Applied Evolution (Lagniappe): 2024-2025 End-Year Report, Kristina G. Little, Samuel B. Robison, Bret Blackmon

Reports

The Louisiana Graduate Network in Applied Evolution (LAGNiAppE) is a post-baccalaureate program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and hosted by the LSU Department of Biological Sciences. In its second year, the program provides recent college graduates with a structured, immersive research experience designed to prepare them for graduate education and careers in STEM. This report presents findings from the 2024–2025 program year (cohort 2) and is based on comprehensive evaluation data collected from Scholars, mentors, and co-mentors. The 2024–2025 cohort engaged in a wide range of activities, including intensive bootcamp training, independent research projects, scientific presentations, weekly seminars, …

Two Earth-Size Planets And An Earth-Size Candidate Transiting The Nearby Star Hd 101581, Michelle Kunimoto, Zifan Lin, Sarah Millholland, Alexander Venner, Natalie R. Hinkel, Avi Shporer, Andrew Vanderburg, Jeremy Bailey, Rafael Brahm, Jennifer A. Burt, R. Paul Butler, Brad Carter, David R. Ciardi, Karen A. Collins, Kevin I. Collins, Knicole D. Colón, Jeffrey D. Crane, Tansu Daylan, Matías R. Díaz, John P. Doty, Fabo Feng, Eike W. Guenther, Jonathan Horner, Steve B. Howell, Jan Janik, Hugh R.A. Jones, Petr Kabáth, Shubham Kanodia, Colin Littlefield, Hugh P. Osborn, Simon O’Toole, Martin Paegert, Pavel Pintr

Faculty Publications

We report the validation of multiple planets transiting the nearby (d = 12.8 pc) K5V dwarf HD 101581 (GJ 435, TOI-6276, TIC 397362481). This system consists of at least two Earth-size planets whose orbits are near a mutual 4:3 mean-motion resonance, HD 101581 b ( R p = 0.956 − 0.061 + 0.063 R ⊕ , P = 4.47 days) and HD 101581c ( R p = 0.990 − 0.070 + 0.070 R ⊕ , P = 6.21 days). Both planets were discovered in Sectors 63 and 64 TESS observations and statistically validated with supporting ground-based follow-up. We also identify …

Calibrating The Clock Of Jwst, A. W. Shaw, D. L. Kaplan, P. Gandhi, T. J. Maccarone, E. S. Borowski, C. T. Britt, D. A.H. Buckley, K. B. Burdge, P. A. Charles, V. S. Dhillon, R. G. French, C. O. Heinke, R. I. Hynes, C. Knigge, S. P. Littlefair, Devraj Pawar, R. M. Plotkin, M. E. Ressler, P. Santos-Sanz, T. Shahbaz, G. R. Sivakoff, A. L. Stevens

Faculty Publications

JWST, despite not being designed to observe astrophysical phenomena that vary on rapid timescales, can be an unparalleled tool for such studies. If timing systematics can be controlled, JWST will be able to open up the subsecond infrared timescale regime. Rapid time-domain studies, such as lag measurements in accreting compact objects and solar system stellar occultations, require both precise interframe timing and knowing when a time series begins, down to an absolute accuracy significantly below 1 s. In this work, we present two long-duration observations of the deeply eclipsing double white dwarf system ZTF J153932.16+502738.8, which we use as a …

Concomitant Entanglement And Control Criticality Driven By Collective Measurements, Thomas Iadecola, Justin H. Wilson, J. H. Pixley

Faculty Publications

Adaptive quantum circuits - where a quantum many-body state is controlled using measurements and conditional unitary operations - are a powerful paradigm for state preparation and quantum error-correction tasks. They can support two types of nonequilibrium quantum phase transitions: measurement-induced transitions between volume- and area-law-entangled steady states and control-induced transitions where the system falls into an absorbing state or, more generally, an orbit visiting several absorbing states. Within this context, nonlocal conditional operations can alter the critical properties of the two transitions and the topology of the phase diagram. Here, we consider the scenario where the measurements are nonlocal, in …

Critical Filaments And Superconductivity In Quasiperiodic Twisted Bilayer Graphene, Xinghai Zhang, Justin H. Wilson, Matthew S. Foster

Faculty Publications

Multilayer moiré materials can exhibit topological electronic features yet are inherently quasiperiodic - leading to wave-function interference whose Anderson-localizing tendency can be mitigated by topology. We consider a quasiperiodic variant of the chiral Bistritzer-MacDonald model for twisted bilayer graphene with two incommensurate moiré potentials that serves as a toy model for twisted trilayer. We observe "filaments"linking magic angles with enhanced density of states and fractal wave functions that evade localization; states away from the filaments mimic fractal surface states of dirty topological superconductors. We demonstrate that topological quasiperiodicity can broadly enhance superconductivity without magic-angle fine-tuning.

A Review Of Flood Mitigation Benefit-Cost Analyses’ Inclusiveness Of Environmental Watershed Effects And Environmental Vulnerability: Gaps In Progress Towards More Resilient Flood Hazard Decision-Making, Fahmida Akhter, Sapana Bastola, Jerrod Penn, Thomas Douthat

Faculty Publications

US and EU flood mitigation policy both incorporate considerations of costs and benefits, and in recent years have taken steps to encourage accounting for positive and negative effects on vulnerable populations, broader non-market environmental impacts, and downstream effects beyond the target area of projects of flood mitigation projects. This work highlights the extent to which previous academic flood mitigation Benefit-Cost Analyses (BCA) papers have comprehensively considered such project effects. We do so through a systematic, PRISMA-style, review of BCA literature in the broader field of flood hazard mitigation and resilience decision-making. Our results suggest 1) most projects focus on monetizing …

Coupling Between Bacterial Phylogenetic Diversity And Heterotrophic Productivity In A Coastal Ecosystem Affected By Estuarine Plumes, Yao Liu, Shujie Cai, Wenxin Fan, Wupeng Xiao, Xin Liu, Edward A. Laws, Bangqin Huang

Faculty Publications

Understanding the diversity-productivity relationship (DPR) is crucial for elucidating the ecological functions of marine bacterioplankton. However, studies have often focused on species diversity, neglecting phylogenetic diversity, which may offer deeper insights into the complex ecological processes shaping DPR in natural systems. This study addressed this gap by exploring the role of phylogenetic diversity in bacterioplankton productivity in the northern South China Sea, a coastal ecosystem influenced by estuarine plumes. We aimed to disentangle the mechanisms driving DPR and investigate how estuarine plumes modulate these processes. Our results show that the substantial enhancement of phytoplankton production by the Pearl River plume …

Hispanic Americans In The Civil War, Germain Bienvenu

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

Arguing Until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, And The Struggle For American Democracy, Caleb G. Roark

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

Bioagricorridors: Uban Ecosystem Networks To Enhance Biological Diversity, Ecosystem Services And Food Production In Barcelona, Spain, Fabio Capra-Ribeiro, Filippo Vegezzi

Faculty Publications

Urbanisation and environmental degradation pose significant challenges to biodiversity, ecosystem services, and food pro- duction. The Bioagricorridors strategy addresses this by inte- grating agroecology in the urban environment, emphasising the continuity principle to connect diverse ecosystems through green infrastructure. Employing a mapping strategy, bioagricorridors bridge theory and space, using maps as communication tools and deep mapping to explore multi-layered, digital cartographic representations. This approach aids in addressing pressing urban conditions, enhancing genetic diversity, and improving soil and water quality. The exploration uses Barcelona as a case study, a city marked by historical urban planning shifts and landscape fragmentation. Taking into …

Challenges In Combating Climate Change: Lessons From Latin American And Caribbean Case Studies, Fabio Capra-Ribeiro

Faculty Publications

Climate change presents a complex global threat, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the impacts are severe, yet the region also showcases innovative approaches to face these issues. This study systematically analyzes the challenges faced by urban sustainability projects in the region, drawing insights from 35 case studies in the Urban Sustainability Exchange (USE) database. The primary objective is to identify shared challenges in implementing climate action initiatives, offering valuable lessons for future projects. Challenges were categorized into 14 themes, with issues related to collaboration and communication emerging as the most frequent. Other significant challenges included infrastructure limitations, …

Funny Thing About The Civil War, Noah Dubroff

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

Entertaining History: The Civil War In Literature, Film, And Song, Katelyn Spencer

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

Brothers Gone Before: A Civil War Story, James Petrila

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battle For Home, Freedom, And Nation, Akua Lewis

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

A Systematic Review Of Environmentally Persistent Free Radical (Epfr) Formation, Characteristics, And Health Effects: Are There Sufficient Data For Risk Assessment?, Avinash Kumar, Divine Nde, Chuqi Guo, Rashmi Pathak, Fox Foley, Syed Ahmad, Prakash Dangal, Farhana Hasan, Myron Lard, Ankit Aryal, Martine E. Mathieu-Campbell, Jennifer Irving, Oluwafeyikemi Ogunmusi, Jennifer Richmond-Bryant, Slawomir Lomnicki, Lavrent Khachatryan, Stephania A. Cormier, Tammy R. Dugas

Faculty Publications

Environmentally persistent free radicals (EPFRs) are stable free radicals formed on particulate matter (PM) through processes such as combustion and pyrolysis. These free radicals are generated on transition metal oxide surfaces in the presence of aromatic precursors. Exposure to EPFRs occurs primarily via inhalation of PM deriving from combustion, traffic, industrial activities, and both indoor and outdoor burning. Other environmental factors that might generate EPFRs are radon, electronic and tobacco cigarettes. EPFRs exhibit unexpectedly long half-lives, ranging from several weeks to, in some cases, several years. EPFRs may be carbon-centered, oxygen-centered or mixed, identified by g-values exhibited in electron paramagnetic …

Playing Politics With Traffic Fines: Sheriff Elections And Political Cycles In Traffic Fines Revenue, Min Su, Christian Buerger

Faculty Publications

The political budget cycle theory has extensively documented how politicians manipulate policies during election years to gain an electoral advantage. This paper focuses on county sheriffs, crucial but often neglected local officials, and investigates their opportunistic political behavior during elections. Using a panel data set covering 57 California county governments over four election cycles, we find compelling evidence of traffic enforcement policy manipulation by county sheriffs during election years. Specifically, a county's per capita traffic fines revenue is 9% lower in the election than in nonelection years. The magnitude of the political cycle intensifies when an election is competitive. Our …

Do Major Customers Affect Firms' Environmental, Social And Governance Activities?, Feng Dong, John A. Doukas, Stephanie Walton, Rongyao Gloria Zhang, Yiyang Zhang

Faculty Publications

We examine the role of major customers in shaping firms' environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices. We find that firms with major customer relationships undertake fewer ESG activities compared to those without such ties. The association is attenuated when institutional ownership is high, firms are less diversified, customers exhibit greater bankruptcy risk and lower switching costs and during periods of elevated equity market sentiment. Taken together, our findings highlight that reliance on a concentrated customer base can weaken firms’ incentives to engage in ESG practices, with important implications for supply chain sustainability.

Convergence Of The Planewave Approximations For Quantum Incommensurate Systems, Ting Wang, Huajie Chen, Aihui Zhou, Yuzhi Zhou, Daniel Massatt

Faculty Publications

Incommensurate structures come from stacking the single layers of low dimensional materials on top of one another with misalignment such as a twist in orientation. While these structures are of significant physical interest, they pose many theoretical challenges due to the loss of periodicity. This paper studies the physical observables of continuum Schrodinger operators for incommensurate systems. We characterize the density of states and local density of states in real and reciprocal spaces, and develop novel numerical methods to approximate them. In particular, we (i) justify the thermodynamic limit of the density of states and local density of states via …

The Holomorphic Discrete Series Contribution To The Generalized Whittaker Plancherel Formula Ii. Non-Tube Type Groups, Jan Frahm, Gestur Ólafsson, Bent Ørsted

Faculty Publications

For every simple Hermitian Lie group G, we consider a certain maximal parabolic subgroup whose unipotent radical N is either abelian (if G is of tube type) or two-step nilpotent (if G is of non-tube type). By the generalized Whittaker Plancherel formula we mean the Plancherel decomposition of L²(G/N,ω), the space of square-integrable sections of the homogeneous vector bundle over G/N associated with an irreducible unitary representation ω of N. Assuming that the central character of ω is contained in a certain cone, we construct embeddings of all holomorphic discrete series representations of G into L²(G/N,ω) …

Realization Of Unitary Representations Of The Lorentz Group On De Sitter Space, Jan Frahm, Karl Hermann Neeb, Gestur Ólafsson

Faculty Publications

This paper builds on our previous work in which we showed that, for all connected semisimple linear Lie groups G acting on a non-compactly causal symmetric space M=G/H, every irreducible unitary representation of G can be realized by boundary value maps of holomorphic extensions in distributional sections of a vector bundle over M. In the present paper we discuss this procedure for the connected Lorentz group G=SO1,d(R)e acting on de Sitter space M=dS^d. We show in particular that the previously constructed nets of real subspaces satisfy the locality condition. Following ideas of Bros and Moschella from the 1990’s, …

Rethinking The Lake History Of Taylor Valley, Antarctica During The Ross Sea I Glaciation, Michael S. Stone, Peter T. Doran, Krista F. Myers

Faculty Publications

The Ross Sea I glaciation, marked by the northward advance of the Ross Ice Sheet (RIS) in the Ross Sea, east Antarctica, corresponds with the last major expansion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet during the last glacial period. During its advance, the RIS was grounded along the southern Victoria Land coast, completely blocking the mouths of several of the McMurdo Dry Valleys (MDVs). Several authors have proposed that very large paleolakes, proglacial to the RIS, existed in many of the MDVs. Studies of these large paleolakes have been key in the interpretation of the regional landscape, climate, hydrology, and …

Machine Learning Enabled Measurements Of Astrophysical (P,N) Reactions With The Secar Recoil Separator, P. Tsintari, N. Dimitrakopoulos, R. Garg, K. Hermansen, C. Marshall, F. Montes, G. Perdikakis, H. Schatz, K. Setoodehnia, H. Arora, G. P.A. Berg, R. Bhandari, J. C. Blackmon, C. R. Brune, K. A. Chipps, M. Couder, C. Deibel, A. Hood, M. Horana Gamage, R. Jain, C. Maher, S. Miskovich, J. Pereira, T. Ruland, M. S. Smith, M. Smith, I. Sultana, C. Tinson, A. Tsantiri, A. Villari, L. Wagner, R. G.T. Zegers

Faculty Publications

The synthesis of heavy elements in supernovae is affected by low-energy (n,p) and (p,n) reactions on unstable nuclei, yet experimental data on such reaction rates are scarce. The SECAR (SEparator for CApture Reactions) recoil separator at FRIB (Facility for Rare Isotope Beams) was originally designed to measure astrophysical reactions that change the mass of a nucleus significantly. We used a novel approach that integrates machine learning with ion-optical simulations to find an ion-optical solution for the separator that enables the measurement of (p,n) reactions, despite the reaction leaving the mass of the nucleus nearly unchanged. A new measurement of the …

The Work Of An Hour: A Case Study Of Propaganda, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

This research paper discusses the messaging of United States President George W. Bush and his administration regarding the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. Transcripts of presidential communications, national news programs, and public opinion polls from 2001-03 were analyzed to identify patterns in these communications. This review demonstrated techniques similar to those used in historical propaganda campaigns to sway public opinion. The introduction and repetition of key terminology from the government was followed by magnification by television news programs. These messages were broadcast despite lack of evidence of Iraq’s involvement with the 9/11 attacks or their possession of weapons of mass …

Spectroscopic Modeling Of Luminous Transients Powered By H-Rich And He-Rich Circumstellar Interaction, Gururaj A. Wagle, Emmanouil Chatzopoulos, Michael J. Baer

Faculty Publications

In this study, we perform detailed spectroscopic modeling to analyze the interaction of circumstellar material (CSM) with ejecta in both hydrogen-rich and hydrogen-poor superluminous supernovae (SLSNe), by systematically varying properties such as the CSM density, composition, and geometry to explore their effects on spectral lines and light-curve evolution. Using advanced radiative transfer simulations with the new, open-source SuperLite code to generate synthetic spectra, we identify key spectroscopic indicators of CSM characteristics. Our findings demonstrate that spectral lines of hydrogen and helium exhibit significant variations due to differences in CSM mass and composition. In hydrogen-rich Type II SLSNe, we observe pronounced …