Sectionalism, Nationalism, And The Agrarian Revolt, 1877-1892

The Southern Farmers\u27 Alliance led the largest coalition of late-nineteenth-century farmers\u27 and urban reformers. The reform movement called for laws opposing speculation on agricultural prices, restricting the powers of business trusts, regulating railroad freight rates, and increasing the circulation of currency based on silver. Advocates also strongly opposed the proponents of sectionalism who emphasized differences and conflicts between the primary sections of the country, the North and the South. Differences between the North and South largely revolved around the issue of slavery and emerged shortly after the founding of the nation. Tension accelerated in the years following the Mexican-American War and reached a climax during the American Civil War and post-war Reconstruction. Although the Civil War and Reconstruction ceased by 1877, for decades the legacy of sectionalism continued to heavily influence regional identities and politics. Because of its continued prevalence in the late-nineteenth century, Alliance supporters identified sectionalism as a major barrier to national economic and political reform. Agrarian supporters depicted regional, gender, and racial identities as artificial compared to shared interests of the producer class. Reformers described the producer class as the vast majority of Americans who labored in urban and rural settings to create tangible goods of value for sale. The Southern Alliance led this coalition of the producer class by 1890. In its efforts to mobilize a national movement, the Alliance consistently emphasized sectional reconciliation. This work shows that sectionalism ultimately played a great role in the destruction of the farmers\u27 reform crusade by 1896

Recording brain activity can function as an implied social presence and alter neural connectivity.

People often behave differently when they know they are being watched. Here, we report the first investigation of whether such social presence effects also include brain monitoring technology, and also their impacts on the measured neural activity. We demonstrate that merely informing participants that fMRI has the potential to observe (thought-related) brain activity is sufficient to trigger changes in functional connectivity within and between relevant brain networks that have been previously associated selectively with executive and attentional control as well as self-relevant processing, social cognition, and theory of mind. These results demonstrate that an implied social presence, mediated here by recording brain activity with fMRI, can alter brain functional connectivity. These data provide a new manipulation of social attention, as well as shining light on a methodological hazard for researchers using equipment to monitor brain activity

Local Hadwiger's Conjecture

We propose local versions of Hadwiger's Conjecture, where only balls of radius $\Omega(\log v(G))$ around each vertex are required to be $K_{t}$-minor-free. We ask: if a graph is locally-$K_{t}$-minor-free, is it $t$-colourable? We show that the answer is yes when $t \leq 5$, even in the stronger setting of list-colouring, and we complement this result with a $O(\log v(G))$-round distributed colouring algorithm in the LOCAL model. Further, we show that for large enough values of $t$, we can list-colour locally-$K_{t}$-minor-free graphs with $13 \cdot \max\left\{h(t),\left\lceil \frac{31}{2}(t-1) \right\rceil \right\}$ colours, where $h(t)$ is any value such that all $K_{t}$-minor-free graphs are $h(t)$-list-colourable. We again complement this with a $O(\log v(G))$-round distributed algorithm.Comment: 24 pages; some minor typos have been fixe