History Commons^™

Wicked Problems And The Invention Of Calculus, Ernesto Diaz

Natural Sciences and Mathematics | Faculty Scholarship

Since the 1980s, wicked problems have represented a category of challenges that defy clear description, cannot be addressed with existing models or theories, and resist experimentation in trying to solve them. This class of problems existed before they were identified and have been unsuccessfully addressed with Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific discovery, an expectation that requires the identification of a new object and the development of its correct interpretation. This paper proposes an alternative view of scientific discovery using the invention of Calculus as a case study that describes a successful process addressing wicked-like problems from a philosophical perspective, develops …

A Misguided Attempt To Populate Upper Canada With Loyalists After The American Revolution, Marvin L. Simner

History Publications

Following the American Revolution, and to achieve a more appropriate governing climate, the British Parliament issued the Constitutional Act of 1791 which created, out of a single province, “two separate Canadas, each having a representative government with an elected assembly of its own.” The French-speaking sector became known as Lower Canada while the English-speaking sector was called Upper Canada. [1] What became immediately apparent with this division of the province was the highly disproportionate population in the two distinct sectors, and the potential danger this posed for the security of the province as a whole. In Lower Canada, today known …

The Purpose Of The Electoral College: A Seemingly Endless Controversy, Marvin L. Simner

History Publications

Use of the Electoral College as the sole means for determining the outcome of a presidential election in the United States has come under repeated attack in recent years. The purpose of this article is to review the nature of the attack, the reason for the College as discussed by the Framers of the Constitution, its questionable early significance, and finally, a current proposal for altering its importance that appears to be gaining momentum.

Special Topics In European Women’S History Women And The Book, 1200-1900, Katherine Goodwin

Printing and the Book During the Reformation: 1450-1650, an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers

book history oriented syllabus

Towards A Revised Taxonomy Of Markings In 16th-Century English Bibles, Jeremy Specland

Printing and the Book During the Reformation: 1450-1650, an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers

overview of hand-written annotations in early printed English Bibles

Early Modern Chronicle Readers: Authority And Discourse, Shaun Stiemsma

Printing and the Book During the Reformation: 1450-1650, an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers

Report of research findings on early readers of 16th century English chronicles.

Archival Enterprise Across Early Modern Europe: A Review Essay, Kristen J. Nyitray

Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists

In the early modern era, archives were a conduit for information transfer across Europe. Historians have increasingly centered archives and archivists as actors in scholarship of Early Modern European (c. 1450-1800) historical concerns. In particular, two linked areas of inquiry have been emphasized: the impact of archives on forming European identities, and the influence of European archivists on shaping archives. Studies of archives are rich sources that tease out ideological shifts in early modern times. This essay discusses recent literature and seminal writings contributing to understandings of emergent archives and archival practices across Early Modern Europe. Exploring the concept of …

Local Church Autonomy And The Role Of Associations Defined By America's First Baptist Assembly, David Crum

Selected Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cover

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Langland, Father Of American Literatures, John M. Bowers

Quidditas

Geoffrey Chaucer’s position as “father of English literature” has been steadily challenged in recent years. This paper both proposes and interrogates the other fourteenth-century English poet William Langland’s possible claims as the origin for the Puritan tradition of New England and, hence, the later traditions of American literatures—in the plural. We know that the first copy of his satirical, theological dream-vision Piers Plowman arrived in New England in 1630 with the father of Anne Bradstreet, and as a result any patriarchal genealogy is already problematic because the first author in the American family-tree was a woman. Rather than the linearity …

Hamlet In Cinema: Oedipus Lives On, Keolanani Kinghorn

Quidditas

I have often questioned why Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play more than 400 years old, remains tied to a century-old Freudian concept. Since Freud’s Oedipus Complex has been disproven, what purpose does it still serve and why are directors still intrigued by this interpretation of Hamlet? In 1949, Dr. Ernest Jones published his book, Hamlet and Oedipus (1949),1 but at the time he was also collaborating with Laurence Olivier to create the first movie adaptation of Hamlet to embrace the Oedipus Complex. I believe that because of Jones and Olivier Shakespeare’s Hamlet will always be connected to psychoanalysis. While …

The Texas Coast: Ship Channel Network Of The Petroleum Age, Alan Lessoff

Faculty Publications – History

This article provides an overview of the Texas Gulf Coast as a port city region dedicated above all to oil and gas. By the late 1800s, the same trends in transportation and industry that encouraged ship channel construction around the world drew attention to schemes to transform the Gulf Coast’s shallow bays and estuaries into inland deep-water harbors. An added factor in Texas was the vulnerability of Galveston and other coastal locations to hurricanes. Between 1902, when construction began on the 52-mile Houston Ship Channel, and the 1950s–60s, when a deep-water channel opened at Matagorda Bay along the mid-Texas coast, …

Facets Of Feminist Biography, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This is a brief overview of how I continue to be engaged with research on Elizabeth Robins in the context of other women writers, post-retirement. The presentation's subtitle might be phrased as "From my study of the one-woman show in graduate school to creative and poetic approaches as emerita researcher." I maintain the Elizabeth Robins Web at JSU and have presented two papers (virtually at recent SAMLA conferences) since leaving the classroom. I outline several of my creative approaches to women's biography through my academic career. I am particularly interested in the format of several poetry collections that piece together …

Web Resources For Teaching Women's History Month, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Web Resources for Teaching Women's History Month

This PowerPoint preserves the presentation at CORE Academy, 2015. All links have been updated to 2023 addresses, or, in a few cases, de-linked. While there is much to add with regard to more recent developments in the teaching of women's history and web resources, this presentation preserves some of the teaching approaches and particular specialties of my decades of teaching, primarily through Women's Literature classes, but also in specialties that stressed online supplements to textbooks and the expanding canon in American and English Literature. All images are taken from freely accessible sites on …

La Imagen Divina Híbrida Y Su Iconografía En Todas Las Culturas Del Antigó Perú, Uwe Carlson

Tejiendo imágenes. Homenaje a Victòria Solanilla Demestre

Resumen: Cuando se inició la construcción del templo de Chavín alrededor del año 1000 a.C., los sacerdotes del sitio también crearon una nueva y sorprendente imagen divina. Esta cambió ligeramente en torno al año 800 a.C. como adaptación estilística al diseño de los numerosos relieves en piedra utilizados en el templo. Alrededor del año 550 a.C. y evidentemente como consecuencia de una catástrofe natural que afectó a Chavín, se produjo una modificación de la representación felínica del dios supremo añadiendo la imagen de la harpía. Dicha figura divina, ahora híbrida, con la adición del simbolismo atributivo de la fertilidad (diosa …

Los Textiles Andinos Teñidos Por Amarras, El Motivo Del Punto En El Rombo Y Su Patrón De Difusión: Felinos, Serpientes Y El Cultivo Del Maíz En Un Mundo En Transformación, Denise Arnold

Tejiendo imágenes. Homenaje a Victòria Solanilla Demestre

Resumen Las técnicas de teñido por amarras en los textiles andinos, con el diseño de un punto en un cuadrado o rombo, tienen un amplio patrón de difusión. Se reconoce que son el origen de técnicas y diseños similares en Mesoamérica e incluso en el suroeste de Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, los estudios clave sobre estas técnicas y diseños en los Andes carecen de proponer cuáles serían los rasgos comunes que podrían haber impulsado esta difusión. Admiten que es probable que se compartiera el conocimiento técnico de esta técnica tejida por razones ideológicas o religiosas, pero no exploran cuáles podrían …

Down The Bay Oral History Project Newsletter - Summer 2023, Center For Archaeological Studies, Mccall Library

Down the Bay Oral History Project Newsletter

Public newsletter sharing information about progress and discoveries during the ongoing Down The Bay Project.

Down The Bay Oral History Project Newsletter - Spring 2023, Center For Archaeological Studies, Mccall Library

Down the Bay Oral History Project Newsletter

Public newsletter sharing information about progress and discoveries during the ongoing Down The Bay Project.

Paternal Affliction: Emotions And Masculinity Among Eighteenth-Century Italian Jewish Merchants, Francesca Bregoli

Publications and Research

This essay focuses on the “rhetoric of paternal affliction” that late eighteenthcentury

Italian Jewish merchant patriarchs employed in letters and supplications

addressing threats to their intertwined paternal and commercial authority,

particularly when filial disobedience or apostasy was involved. I examine this

rhetoric as an emotional style that illuminates Jewish merchant masculinity.

Although the image of a suffering father seems to deviate from known early

modern models of hegemonic masculinity, within the context of the eighteenthcentury

culture of sensibility this rhetoric emphasized Jewish patriarchs’ honesty

and righteousness, beseeching male compassion and sympathy. By performing

vulnerability vis-à-vis Jewish associates, as well as …

A Chronological History Of Morehead State University And Preceding Institutions, David Ace, Christian Wright

Morehead State College Histories

A an in-depth chronological timeline of Morehead State University, and its predecessors, from 1887 to 2023 by David Ace and Christian Wright published in 2023 to celebrate the Centennial of the college.

Novelizing The Feminist Biography, From Nancy Milford's Zelda To The Present: What Are The Ethics Of Sourcing?, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This presentation arose out of two parallel tracks: the desire to novelize my own feminist biography of Elizabeth Robins and the awareness -- especially made acute in the essay on Emma Tennant's two treatments of the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes material by Diane Middlebrook, "Misremembering Ted Hughes" -- that for a novelist to base fiction on historical subjects risks not merely critical exposure; it also has its ethical and sometimes legal complications.

Anyone of a certain age remembers or can mark the impact of Milford's study of Zelda Fitzgerald, published 1970, the finalist in several book awards and scores …

Re-Dress As Redress: Shakespeare’S Comedy Of Errors, Jane Foster Woodruff

Quidditas

DELNO C. WEST AWARD WINNER

Writing near the end of a century-long ‘explosion’ of Tudor theatre, Shakespeare benefitted from a variety of influences, both sacral and secular. Among his literary influences were the works of classical dramatists (Sophocles, Seneca, Plautus, and the like), who had used their plays to editorialize on contemporary societal issues. To this same end, in his early historical play Richard III Shakespeare chose to address a multiplicity of problematic themes, the most obvious being that, although Richard’s ambition and his lethality had been sufficient to win him a crown, they were insufficient to preserve it: power …

National Children’S Dental Health Month - Creating Your Own Press Release (2023), American Dental Association Foundation

National Children's Dental Health Month

No abstract provided.

National Children’S Dental Health Month - Program Planning Guide (2023), American Dental Association Foundation

National Children's Dental Health Month

No abstract provided.

My Butterfly, Alice G. Pellemoine

Geifman Prize in Holocaust Studies

This poem explores the experience of a father during the Holocaust. It shows the different losses he and his daughter went through during their time in the camps.

Down The Bay Oral History Project Newsletter - Fall 2023, Center For Archaeological Studies, Mccall Library

Down the Bay Oral History Project Newsletter

Public newsletter sharing information about progress and discoveries during the ongoing Down The Bay Project.

History’S Pathologists: Oswald Spengler, Jacques Barzun, John Lukacs And The Dying Of The West, Michael A. Flannery

Libraries Professional Work

This essay explores the perceived weakening and even possible collapse of Western Civilization as seen through the eyes of three prominent historians: Oswald Spengler, Jacques Barzun, and John Lukacs. Each of them has provoked controversy due to their pathologies of the West and their conclusion that its vital signs (identified as religion, science, and education), suggest a sick and possibly dying patient. All three developed metahistories that led, in Dermot Quinn’s words, to “that architecture of greater meaning by which historical facts make themselves intelligible.” That is to say, beyond their specific historical narratives, each made use of a wider …

Music As Propaganda In The Third Reich, Samantha Howerton

Vulcan Historical Review

pp. 47-51

Rebirth And Revitalization Of An Integral Cultural Identity: A History Of Mardi Gras Before And After The Civil War, Kane Mccreadie

Vulcan Historical Review

pp. 52-60