205 research outputs found

    Secrecy in the American Revolution

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    This paper analyzes how the use of various cryptographic and cryptanalytic techniques affected the American Revolution. By examining specific instances of and each country\u27s general approaches to cryptography and cryptanalysis, it is determined that America\u27s use of these techniques provided the rising nation with a critical advantage over Great Britain that assisted in its victory

    The History of American Cryptology Prior to World War II

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    Charles William Frederick Dumas and the American Revolution (1775-1783 )

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    No American historian has in recent ears attempted to elucidate the career of Charles William Freerick Dumas during the American Revolution. Diplomatic historians such as Samuel Flagg Demis and John Bassett Hoore have written that C. W. F. Dumas, although an important figure in our diplomatic history, has not yet been given the attention due his service to the United States. It is the purpose of this investigation to examine the Revolutionary service of this relatively unknown American agent

    Ship of wealth: Massachusetts merchants, foreign goods, and the transformation of Anglo-America, 1670-1760

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    This study examines capitalism and cultural change in early New England. The research focuses on leading merchants in Boston and Salem, Massachusetts from the last third of the seventeenth century to 1760. During this period, merchants, royal officials, and professionals formed a prominent influential elite that refashioned the town landscape and social structure of colonial ports. Merchants adopted a new Anglo-American worldview that gradually supplanted Puritan spiritual and providential understanding of the world and, instead, emphasized visible, material characteristics as the source of value in science, commerce, and consumption. The resultant world of goods, created a social marketplace where identity, shaped by owning and displaying high-style goods and genteel manners, could be purchased by anyone with money. Incorporating both exotic imports and foreign merchants, the new culture fostered capitalism and helped to dispel earlier conflicts over sectarian beliefs and ethnic origins that had plagued Boston and Salem. Thus, this study argues that it was consumption and a worldview that placed value in the material not Puritan asceticism, as sociologist Max Weber and his supporters insist, that initiated the spirit of modern capitalism

    Science and imagination in Anglo-American children\u27s books, 1760--1855

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    Didactic, scientifically oriented children\u27s literature crisscrossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, finding wide popularity in Great Britain and the United States; yet the genre has since suffered from a reputation for being dull and pedantic and has been neglected by scholars. Challenging this scholarly devaluation, Science and Imagination in Anglo-American Children\u27s Books, 1760--1855 argues that didactic, scientifically oriented children\u27s books play upon and encourage the use of the imagination. Three significant Anglo-American children\u27s authors---Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and Nathaniel Hawthorne---infuse their writings with the wonders of science and the clear message that an active imagination is a necessary component of a moral upbringing. Indeed, these authors\u27 books, most particularly Sandford and Merton (1783--1789), Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825), and A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852), are more than mere lessons: they are didactic fantasies intended to spark creativity within their readers.;These didactic fantasies are best understood in the context of the emerging industrial revolution and the height of the Atlantic slave trade. These phenomena, combined with the entrenchment of classicism in Anglo-American culture and the lesser-known transatlantic botany craze, shaped the ways in which Day, Edgeworth, and Hawthorne crafted their children\u27s stories. Certainly dramatic changes on both sides of the Atlantic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries influenced the differences in the texts. More important to this study, however, are the vital connections among these stories. Each author draws heavily upon Rousseau\u27s ubiquitous child-rearing treatise Emile and upon her or his literary predecessor to create children\u27s books that encourage exploring nature through scientific experimentation and imaginative enterprise.;Yet these writers do not encourage the imagination run amok. Rather, they see the need for morally grounded scientific endeavor, for which they rely primarily on classicism and on gender ideology. Incorporating tales of the ancient world to inculcate the ideal of a virtuous, disinterested, and learned citizen responsible to the larger body politic, the three children\u27s authors---but most notably and explicitly Hawthorne---tie a romanticized, classical past to the emerging industrial world

    Metaphors for Change: the Narrative Power of Domestic Space in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Women’s Writing

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    Domestic spaces carry layers of meaning. They evidence structural changes over time, representing different social and economic ideologies and priorities. Their spatial organisation affects the way that life is conducted within them. They are the physical sites of the complex elements that combine to create ‘home’. This thesis draws on theories of architecture, space, place, culture and society to explain how domestic settings reflect the psychological position of women protagonists who, for one reason or another, experience a personal imperative for change. It explores the notion of ‘home’, how living spaces and their contents are intimately connected with the experiences of the women who inhabit them and provide metaphors that illuminate moments of personal, social, political or economic change. The novels selected for study were written by women authors between the mid-nineteenth to late twentieth centuries, providing a time frame that encompasses major social changes including the Industrial Revolution, two World Wars and first- and second-wave feminist movements. The effect of such events on the positions and aspirations of individual women are reflected in the narratives of the selected novels. The thesis is structured in chapters that categorise the novels according to the conditions under which habitation occurs. This structure also provides a chronology, starting with the ordered spaces of the country house in the mid-nineteenth-century, moving on to consider borrowed spaces in rented accommodation in the interbellum and post-World War Two, serviced spaces accommodating paying guests between the 1930s and the 1970s, and finally the shared spaces of hostels, bedsits, families and communes between 1960 and 1985. The novels discussed in this thesis tell the stories of women who are considered transgressive because they try to break away from conventional living patterns. The domestic spaces they occupy carry meanings that reflect a state of being at a point of uncertainty or change

    Voices, Identities, and Nations in the Narratives of Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849)

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    This thesis argues that Edgeworth's novels are interventions in the debate of her contemporaries about the relationship between individuals and nations. The thesis situates her work in the context of the ideological transition in Europe from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to Romantic nationalism, which rewrote that relationship. Edgeworth's texts interrogate how individuals should affiliate themselves with nations, often in terms of a particular patriotism which could legitimise individuals' national identities with cultural inclusiveness. The recent scholarship on Edgeworth has revolved around politicised readings that typically neglect stylistic issues. The thesis proposes that an application of narratology could rectify this imbalance in criticism of Edgeworth and similar problems in criticism of other Irish writings, women's writings, and the Romantic-period novels. The earlier chapters thereby shed new light on the complexity of Edgeworth's national identity, by employing Lanser's narratology. It is argued that Edgeworth's `authorial voice' and `personal voice', whether they are considered separately or together, demonstrate the predicament of her narrative authorisation as an Anglo-Irish writer and constitute her national identity as at once problematic and culturally flexible. The thematic formula of Edgeworth's ideal patriotism offers a solution to such a problem of her national identity, as the later chapters contend. The thesis demonstrates that this formula has ideological underpinnings in the discourse of both Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and Romantic nationalism. The formula, moreover, characterises ideal patriots as multilingual/multicultural in the sense that they can appreciate cultural differences without exclusive discrimination. Edgeworth's ideal patriots are thus modelled as overcoming the limitations of universalist Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and differential Romantic nationalism. The final chapter demonstrates that Edgeworth's novels may not necessarily authorise this formula coherently. It is, however, argued that in such instances, her `authorial voice' still verifies the viability of the formula, by legitimising her as an ideal patriot of the Irish, and the British nation with the multilingual/multicultural narrative voice crossing the borders between nations, social groups, and genders. The thesis concludes that Fdgeworth's novels reproduce a colonial context despite their attempt to resolve that thorny context

    Florida Historical Quarterly, Volume 61, Number 3

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    FLORIDA’S CAPITOLS Lee H. Warner TIMUCUAN REBELLION OF 1656: THE REBOLLEDO INVESTIGATION AND THE CIVIL-RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY Fred Lamar Pearson, Jr. POTTER COMMITTEE INVESTIGATION OF THE DISPUTED ELECTION OF 1876 Karen Guenther IMMIGRANT WOMEN IN TAMPA: THE ITALIAN EXPERIENCE, 1890-1930 Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozetta THE AGRARIANS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF FIFTY YEARS: AS ESSAY REVIEW Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. NOTES AND DOCUMENTS: FLORIDA HISTORY RESEARCH IN PROGRESS BOOK REVIEWSBOOK NOTESHISTORY NEW
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