Politics and Crisis in the 1850s: An Interview with Rachel Shelden

Today we are speaking with Rachel Shelden, Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), which received honorable mention for the Wiley-Silver Prize for the best first book on the Civil War and was a selection of the History book club. She is also the co-editor, with Gary W. Gallagher, of A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political History (University of Virginia Press, 2012). Dr. Shelden serves as the book review editor for the Journal of the Civil War Era. Her current book project explores the political culture of the U.S. Supreme Court in the long Civil War era, from the 1830s to the 1890s. [excerpt

Palindromes and Anagrams

The year 1973 will be remembered as witnessing the publication of a book that goes to the very heart of logology: Palindromes and Anagrams, by Howard W. Bergerson (Dover Publications, Inc., New York, paperbound, $2.50). The author is a former editor of Word Ways, and he has collected into one, compact volume much essential material available nowhere else. Consequently, the book becomes a sine qua non for all serious logologists, as well as for all laymen interested in verbal curiosities

Jörg Wunderlich (ed.) (2012): Fifteen papers on extant and fossil spiders (Araneae)

This book consists of fifteen papers (considered below as Chapters) on fossil and extant arachnids, mostly spiders. Most papers are written by the editor, two papers in cooperation with Peter Jäger and with Søren Toft, and a single one by Peter Jäger. Chapters 1 and 2 are identification keys to the European genera of the families Zodariidae and Corinnidae, respectively

Reexamining the Racial Record of Abraham Lincoln

Since his death in 1865 Abraham Lincoln has been universally honored in black America. In many black homes and businesses, his photograph often hangs in honor next to the one of Martin Luther King Jr. But a new book by Ebony editor Lerone Bennett Jr. contends that Lincoln was a crude bigot who told demeaning darky jokes, had an unquenchable thirst for minstrel shows, consistently used the word nigger, and supported efforts to ship Negroes back to Africa. As Jack E. White pointed out in a recent Time magazine article, this book largely has been ignored by the mainstream press. The book was not reviewed in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Chicago Tribune, or USA Today. JBHE [Journal of Blacks in Higher Education] asked a group of leading Lincoln scholars for their opinions of the Bennett book and the controversy surrounding its publication. Here are the replies

Book Editor’s Note for Novice Reviewers

After several years as book review editor for Sociological Research Online it is time for me to put some of my experiences on paper. This short reflective paper aims to help potential contributors to write a ‘better’, ‘more useful’ or even ‘more interesting’ book review

[Review of] Joseph Bruchac, ed. Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets

It is risky for an editor to compose a book of twenty-one interviews , each being centered in the same type of questions: What started you writing? Who were your models? What role does your tradition play in your work? How do you relate to mainstream poetry? The amazing result of reading this book is the recognition that it is neither repetitious nor dull, but highly informative and a pleasure to read. The reason for this outcome lies not only in the poetic sensibility, literary knowledge, and psychological skill of the interviewer, but in the quality of the poets selected and the wide spread of their tribal affiliations, mixed cultural traditions, and educational as well as personal backgrounds

Superulltramegalosesquipedalia

Recently, Jeff Grant of Hastings, New Zealand supplied the editor with the full 3641-letter name of the protein Bovine Glutamate Dehydrogenase, as constructed from the amino acid residue sequence shown in The Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure (1973), Volume 5, Supplement 1, published by The National Biomedical Research Foundation. Although this word has been cited by the Guinness Book of Records since 1976 as the longest word known, it was never written out in full there, nor has it apparently been published anywhere else

Chapter 7: Institutional Support

The OTiS (Online Teaching in Scotland) programme, run by the now defunct Scotcit programme, ran an International e-Workshop on Developing Online Tutoring Skills which was held between 8–12 May 2000. It was organised by Heriot–Watt University, Edinburgh and The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK. Out of this workshop came the seminal Online Tutoring E-Book, a generic primer on e-learning pedagogy and methodology, full of practical implementation guidelines. Although the Scotcit programme ended some years ago, the E-Book has been copied to the SONET site as a series of PDF files, which are now available via the ALT Open Access Repository. The editor, Carol Higgison, is currently working in e-learning at the University of Bradford (see her staff profile) and is the Chair of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)

Chapter 5: Evaluation

The OTiS (Online Teaching in Scotland) programme, run by the now defunct Scotcit programme, ran an International e-Workshop on Developing Online Tutoring Skills which was held between 8–12 May 2000. It was organised by Heriot–Watt University, Edinburgh and The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK. Out of this workshop came the seminal Online Tutoring E-Book, a generic primer on e-learning pedagogy and methodology, full of practical implementation guidelines. Although the Scotcit programme ended some years ago, the E-Book has been copied to the SONET site as a series of PDF files, which are now available via the ALT Open Access Repository. The editor, Carol Higgison, is currently working in e-learning at the University of Bradford (see her staff profile) and is the Chair of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)