Earning the Rank of Respect: One Woman\u27s Passage from Victorian Propriety to Battlefront Responsibility

Like Civil War soldiers, nurses in the Northern forces found it difficult to sustain the conflicting duties to home, nation, and army. It was especially difficult for women to assume responsibilities in battlefield hospitals. Women struggled with their new roles, which challenged and extended notions of nineteenth century womanhood. Furthermore, navigating a military establishment of male power, while also trying to maintain connections to home, forced women to use gender assumptions to their advantage when trying to gain agency in the hospitals, respect from their patients, and independence from their superiors. Women brought their Victorian manners, morals and duties into the public sphere out of necessity for the war effort and proved themselves worthy of respect by skill and strength when the government’s medical care was insufficient. Women of the North and their male allies were what the Civil War demanded and were therefore more valuable than skill in military strategy or even medical technique

Measuring Performance: The State Management Report Card for 2008

Grades each state's management performance, based on five criteria in each of the categories of money, people, infrastructure, and information. Includes an overview of each category with average grades and grade distribution maps

The Out-Front Western Region: An Overview

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network ---- with 36 states and 61 researchers ---- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.This first "Special Analysis Report" focuses on the Western region, which has the largest number of states -- six out of thirteen -- that are affirmatively implementing the Affordable Care Act. That is, they have state-administered health insurance exchanges and have expanded Medicaid as authorized under the law. Altogether, there are eleven states in the Western region of the contiguous states, and nine of them are in our sample. This report describes the policy setting and goal alignment of all nine Western sample states, with emphasis on five states -- California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Nevada -- that are clearly out front as ACA-affirming states. New Mexico is also an affirming ACA state, although its exchange will not be state run until 2014. Arizona and Idaho occupy an "In-Between" category; that is, in between affirming and oppositional. Arizona rejected the state-run exchange option but accepted Medicaid expansion. Idaho so far has done the opposite, accepting the state-run exchange option while tabling Medicaid expansion. Utah is the one fully oppositional state in our sample, choosing in 2013 not to run its exchange or expand Medicaid

The Literal Reconstruction of VMI: Reunion, Restitution, Remembrance

This is the second in a three-part series on the legacy of the Civil War at the Virginia Military Institute. You can also check out part one to read about VMI’s struggle for survival in the years immediately after the war. Stay tuned for the conclusion of the series. [excerpt

The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies

How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael\u27s sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war. Digging deeply into his soldiers\u27 writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was a common soldier but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers\u27 experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1146/thumbnail.jp

The relevance of the ‘h’ and ‘g’ index to economics in the context of a nation-wide research evaluation scheme: The New Zealand case

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of the citation-based ‘h’ and ‘g’ indexes as a means for measuring research output in economics. This study is unique in that it is the first to utilize the ‘h’ and ‘g’ indexes in the context of a time limited evaluation period and to provide comprehensive coverage of all academic economists in all university-based economics departments within a nation state. For illustration purposes we have selected New Zealand’s Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) as our evaluation scheme. In order to provide a frame of reference for ‘h’ and ‘g’ index output measures, we have also estimated research output using a number of journal-based weighting schemes. In general, our findings suggest that ‘h’ and ‘g’ index scores are strongly associated with low-powered journal ranking schemes and weakly associated with high powered journal weighting schemes. More specifically, we found the ‘h’ and ‘g’ indexes to suffer from a lack of differentiation: for example, 52 percent of all participants received a score of zero under both measures, and 92 and 89 percent received scores of two or less under ‘h’ and ‘g’, respectively. Overall, our findings suggest that ‘h’ and ‘g’ indexes should not be incorporated into a PBRF-like framework

“The Battle-Fortune of Marshal Hindenburg is not Bound up with the Possession of a Hill”: The Germans and Vimy Ridge, April 1917

On 9 April 1917 four Canadian divisions and one British division of 170,000 men broke through the “Vimy Group” of German Sixth Army of some 40,000 men. By late afternoon, the Germans had been driven off the Ridge. That day, as Brigadier-General Alexander Ross famously put it, constituted “the birth of a nation.” Rivers on ink have been spilled in the Canadians’ actions that day, but little attention has been paid to “the other side of the hill.” Which German units defended the Ridge? What was the quality of their leadership? Why did the defence collapse so quickly? Why did the German soldiers not break and run? And how were they able to prevent a deeper British-Canadian breakthrough? On the basis of German sources, this article seeks to provide answers to those question

Use of Multiple Methods: An Examination of Constraints Effecting Ethnic Minority Visitor Use of National Parks and Management Implications

Understanding outdoor recreation participation and national park visitation by members of ethnic minority groups has been a particular focus of outdoor recreation researchers for the past twenty years. Attracting ethnic minorities, and understanding their recreation needs and interests, demands a multi-faceted approach and sustained commitment not only by the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) but by other resource management agencies as well