Lincoln and Leadership: An Afterword

Lincoln and Leadership offers fresh perspectives on the 16th president—making novel contributions to the scholarship of one of the more studied figures of American history. The book explores Lincoln’s leadership through essays focused, respectively, on Lincoln as commander-in-chief, deft political operator, and powerful theologian. Taken together, the essays suggest the interplay of military, political, and religious factors informing Lincoln’s thought and action and guiding the dynamics of his leadership. The contributors, all respected scholars of the Civil War era, focus on several critical moments in Lincoln’s presidency to understand the ways Lincoln understood and dealt with such issues and concerns as emancipation, military strategy, relations with his generals, the use of black troops, party politics and his own re-election, the morality of the war, the place of America in God’s design, and the meaning and obligations of sustaining the Union. Overall, they argue that Lincoln was simultaneously consistent regarding his commitments to freedom, democratic government, and Union but flexible, and sometimes contradictory, in the means to preserve and extend them. They further point to the ways that Lincoln’s decision making defined the presidency and recast understandings of American “exceptionalism.” They emphasize that the “real” Lincoln was an unabashed party man and shrewd politician, a self-taught commander-in-chief, and a deeply religious man who was self-confident in his ability to judge men and to persuade them with words but unsure of what God demanded from America for its collective sins of slavery. Randall Miller’s Introduction in particular provides essential weight to the notion that Lincoln’s presidential leadership must be seen as a series of interlocking stories. In the end, the contributors collectively remind readers that the Lincoln enshrined as the “Great Emancipator” and “savior of the Union” was in life and practice a work-in-progress. And they insist that “getting right with Lincoln” requires seeing the intersections of his—and America’s—military, political, and religious interests and identities. [From the publisher

Capek\u27s Masterpiece

In R. U. R. Capek dramatizes the impending danger to mankind\u27s vitality of machine-like efficiency. Here is a pleasing fantasy attempting to develop a notion implicit in Mrs. Shelley\u27s Frankenstein, the peril of man\u27s creating a monster destined eventually to destroy him. Of course, Capek changes this notion somewhat by giving it a social application. It seems that he is primarily concerned with the future of mankind. However, his planetary consciousness has not a scientific basis; it springs rather from a desire to save human values from the enslavement of industrial civilization

“Untiring Joys and Sorrows”: Yeats and the Sidhe

Excerpt: In popular culture, the idea of Irishness has long been associated with the idea of fairies and leprechauns. This association has been explored by scholars who treat the Sidhe—also known as the daoine maithe, or the “good people”—as either a sociological or a literary construct. Most often, the sociological con- struct is somewhat insidious and the literary construct tends to be romantic. Recently, Angela Bourke has explored how the folkloric understanding of the fairies may be used to explain the otherwise inexplicable—for instance, when hormonal changes that come about through puberty or menopause were explained by saying that the fairies have taken the real person and left a changeling instead. Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999) examines the case of Michael Cleary, who burned his relatively independent wife to death in the hopes of forcing the fairies to change her back to the acquiescent wife that he desired. Bourke finds the mythology of the fairy world so deeply ingrained in Irish culture that it blurs the lines between the literary construct and the sociological us

Malaysian landscapes in the fiction of K S Maniam

[Introduction]: In his prolific output of fiction, including two published novels and numerous stories, K S Maniam has explored and revealed a range of Malaysian landscapes for the people who live there. Whilst acknowledging that “landscape” is an elusive concept that is difficult readily to define, this analysis accepts Victor Savage’s broad approach to landscape as a “living process “ which involves “the total sensually perceptible features of a person’s experience at a particular place and time.” (1) For Maniam, the landscapes are variously natural and cultural, exterior and interior, childlike and adult, a rich panorama. Accordingly, the paper examines such dimensions of landscape as physical settings, memory, dream, and imagination, mind and personality, margins and shadows, as well as institutions from plantation to coffee shop. Through all these settings, Maniam has furnished a vital and authentic Malaysian mosaic. This paper considers the significance of this mosaic through a thematic study of Maniam’s fictional output to date, i.e. from 1976 to the present. The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, has observed that “all artists know either consciously or instinctively that the secret intention of their life’s work is to rescue from the plunge of time something of beauty, permanence, significance,”(2) and so it is with Maniam as literary artist, and with Malaysia as place and experience. This analysis also draws on the key basic assumptions set out by Altick and Fenstermaker in The Art of Literary Research (1993), firstly that to understand the meaning of a text, it is necessary to know as much as possible about its creator, the author, and secondly that authors and texts are products of particular social and historical contexts.(3

English in the high school curriculum.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University Includes bibliography

Emerging technologies in physics education

Three emerging technologies in physics education are evaluated from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science and physics education research. The technologies - Physlet Physics, the Andes Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), and Microcomputer-Based Laboratory (MBL) Tools - are assessed particularly in terms of their potential at promoting conceptual change, developing expert-like problem-solving skills, and achieving the goals of the traditional physics laboratory. Pedagogical methods to maximize the potential of each educational technology are suggested.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of Science Education and Technology; 20 page