Combined diplexer and harmonic filter

By using two directional filters having circular waveguide filter cavities, diplexing and harmonic filtering functions can be combined into a more compact integrated waveguide assembly. Device is filter which passes power within its pass band limits, but also has a directional characteristic so power transmitted into two-port output waveguide will travel in only one direction

A Sufficiently Republican Church: George David Cummins and the Reformed Episcopalians in 1873

In 1873 George David Cummins, the assistant bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Kentucky, rocked the complacency of the Protestant Episcopal Church by resigning his Kentucky episcopate and founding an entirely new Episcopal denomination, the Reformed Episcopal Church. Schismatic movements in American religion are hardly a novelty. Still, Cummins and his movement occupy a peculiar position in both the history of American religion and the cultural history of the Gilded Age. Unlike the wave of church schisms before the Civil War, the Reformed Episcopal schism of 1873 had no clear relation to sectional issues. And unlike the fundamentalist schisms of the early 1900s, it had no real connection to the great debate in American religion between conservativism and modernism. Instead, the story of George David Cummins hangs upon a ferocious struggle within the Episcopal Church about ritual, romanism, and Episcopal identity - or, in other words, about symbol and culture in the Gilded Age. And in 1873, that cultural struggle was closely bound up with the fearful and unresolved questions posed by America\u27s full integration into the great networks of international, industrial, and finance capitalism. Cummins and the Reformed Episcopal schism was, in miniature, part of the persistent conflict between the old antebellum republican ideals of public virtue and restraint and the new capitalist ethic of consumption which restructured American public culture in the Gilded Age. [excerpt

Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction

Beneath the surface of the apparently untutored and deceptively frank Abraham Lincoln ran private tunnels of self-taught study, a restless philosophical curiosity, and a profound grasp of the fundamentals of democracy. Now, in Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, the award-winning Lincoln authority Allen C. Guelzo offers a penetrating look into the mind of one of our greatest presidents.If Lincoln was famous for reading aloud from joke books, Guelzo shows that he also plunged deeply into the mainstream of nineteenth-century liberal democratic thought. Guelzo takes us on a wide-ranging exploration of problems that confronted Lincoln and liberal democracy--equality, opportunity, the rule of law, slavery, freedom, peace, and his legacy. The book sets these problems and Lincoln\u27s responses against the larger world of American and trans-Atlantic liberal democracy in the 19th century, comparing Lincoln not just to Andrew Jackson or John Calhoun, but to British thinkers such as Richard Cobden, Jeremy Bentham, and John Bright, and to French observers Alexis de Tocqueville and François Guizot. The Lincoln we meet here is an Enlightenment figure who struggled to create a common ground between a people focused on individual rights and a society eager to establish a certain moral, philosophical, and intellectual bedrock. Lincoln insisted that liberal democracy had a higher purpose, which was the realization of a morally right political order. But how to interject that sense of moral order into a system that values personal self-satisfaction-- the pursuit of happiness --remains a fundamental dilemma even today.Abraham Lincoln was a man who, according to his friend and biographer William Henry Herndon, lived in the mind. Guelzo paints a marvelous portrait of this Lincoln--Lincoln the man of ideas--providing new insights into one of the giants of American history. [From the publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1067/thumbnail.jp

Abraham Lincoln and the Development of the War Powers of the Presidency

By conferring on the President the title of commander in chief, the Constitution created an awkward and undefined area of presidential prerogative. The first President to have to confront this ambiguity was Abraham Lincoln, who developed a presidential war powers doctrine based on his presidential oath, the Constitution\u27s republican guarantee, and the necessity imposed by the novelty of a civil war. This doctrine was seriously contested in Lincoln\u27s time by both Congress and the judiciary, and it continues to be an unresolved constitutional question in the present. But Lincoln\u27s use of such war powers is one demonstration of how a doctrine aimed at awarding the President unilateral powers to override civil liberties safeguards need not create a lethal threat to democratic and constitutional government

Did Religion Make the American Civil War Worse?

If there is one sober lesson Americans seem to be taking out of the bathos of the Civil War sesquicentennial, it’s the folly of a nation allowing itself to be dragged into the war in the first place. After all, from 1861 to 1865 the nation pledged itself to what amounted to a moral regime change, especially concerning race and slavery—only to realize that it had no practical plan for implementing it. No wonder that two of the most important books emerging from the Sesquicentennial years—by Harvard president Drew Faust, and Yale’s Harry Stout—questioned pretty frankly whether the appalling costs of the Civil War could be justified by its comparatively meager results. No wonder, either, that both of them were written in the shadow of the Iraq War, which was followed by another reconstruction that suffered from the same lack of planning. [excerpt

Calvinist Metaphysics to Republican Theory: Jonathan Edwards and James Dana on Freedom of the Will

The Reverend Mr. James Dana, the pastor of the First Church in Wallingford, Connecticut, had never before attempted to pick a quarrel with his old friend and ally, Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College. But in the winter of 1782 what was happening at Yale passed all the bounds of propriety and friendship. I have understood that Mr. Edwards\u27s book on fatality was laid aside some years since at your university, Dana wrote (not stopping to add what he surely must have thought, and good riddance too); but now, it gave me pain to hear lately that the divinity professor, the epileptic Samuel Wales, particularly recommends this book to the young gentlemen who are studying divinity under his direction. Have you forgotten, Dana irritably asked, what kind of damage Jonathan Edwards and his Careful and Strict Enquiry in the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will, which is supposed to be essential to Moral Agency, Vertue and Vice, Reward and Punishment had done since the book appeared in 1754? I need not say to you, sir, that it has been the root of bitterness which has troubled us...like Achan in the camp of Israel, Hopkintonianism, Westianism, and Schism are grafted upon it. It promoted fatalism and mechanism, and if mechanism doth not explode moral good and evil, I have not the slightest pretence to any mental discernment. Not only mechanism and fatalism, Murrayism, Deism, and atheism also sprang indiscriminately from the head of Edwards\u27s book; Dana even blamed the sensational murder-suicide of William Beadle that summer on the principles of Mr. Edwards\u27s system. Suppress the book, Dana pleaded, interpose your good influence, that so dangerous a book be not introduced into college again. [excerpt

What if the South had Won the Civil War? 4 Sci-Fi Scenarios for HBO\u27s \u27Confederate\u27

“What if” has always been the favorite game of Civil War historians. Now, thanks to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — the team that created HBO’s insanely popular Game of Thrones — it looks as though we’ll get a chance to see that “what if” on screen. Their new project, Confederate, proposes an alternate America in which the secession of the Southern Confederacy in 1861 actually succeeds. It is a place where slavery is legal and pervasive, and where a new civil war is brewing between the divided sections. (excerpt

Book Review: Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement

“There is a clause in the Act which is likely to meet with misconstruction in Europe,” wrote Frederick Milnes Edge about the legislation that emancipated the slaves of the District of Columbia in April 1862, “namely the appropriation for colonizing the freed slaves.” Ignore it, Edge advised. It only “was adopted to silence the weak-nerved, whose name is legion—and to enable any of the slaves who see fit to emigrate to more genial climes.” And this, for a long time, has been the way that most commentators have understood colonization—a plan ostensibly designed to expatriate any emancipated blacks to Africa or the West Indies or South America, but offered mostly as a placebo to reassure nervous white Americans that their hiring halls and neighborhoods would not be swamped with cheap (and presumably undesirable) freedmen. [excerpt

Lincoln and Justice for All

“Justice and fairness” has become something of a mantra ever since presidential candidate Barack Obama told Joe the plumber that his hope was to “spread the wealth around” so that the economy is “good for everybody.” The plumber, Samuel Wurzelbacher, was less than thrilled by the implications of spreading the wealth, since his fear was that much of the wealth the president-to-be proposed to spread around was the plumber’s. But that has done nothing to give pause to President Obama’s determination to answer the “call to justice and fairness.” In his 2009 Lincoln’s Birthday speech in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, the president described justice and fairness—the “sense of shared sacrifice and responsibility for ourselves and one another”—as “the very definition of being American.” [excerpt

Book Review: The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln, by Phillip Shaw Paludan

Americans have had a highly complex love-hate relationship with politics, especially with political ideology. Recent books on the state of American politics underscore the resentment Americans feel at governments that have grown bloated and indifferent. And the groundswell of complaints about congressional gridlock and budgetary train wrecks seems to show that Americans are particularly impatient with political ideologues who insist on letting their philosophies, economics, or values get in the way of consensus and problem solving. Yet tumbling out of every newspaper, radio, and television, now as never before in this generation, is evidence of Americans\u27 possession by political polarizations defined by some as culture wars and by others as diversity, by some as pluralism and others as a dictatorship of virtue. The truth is that despite our supposed contempt for politics we are a passionately political people and derive our identity as a nation from not a single race, religion, ethnicity, or even language but from a set of political documents (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) and political principles (a highly democratic form of republic). Almost as if we fear the potentially destabilizing effect of ideological conflict on a nation held together only by ideas, we take refuge in a paradoxical denial of our passion for politics. We pretend, as Louis Hartz pretended in his memorable The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), that all Americans are really united in a common liberal consensus. Or, if we are historians of antebellum America, we pretend, following the lead of Lee Benson in The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (1961), that American political conflicts have been the product of ethno-cultural considerations rather than ideology. [excerpt