African Spirituality's Influence on the Slave Experience in America

This thesis examines African spirituality and its influence on the lives of enslaved Africans in America. Earlier historiography suggested that Christian beliefs had a profound impact on the cultural attitudes of the enslaved black populations. My thesis dislodges this theory and ultimately offers a compelling appraisal to the contrary. Indeed, African spirituality was embedded in the cultural, political, social, and religious lives of Africans prior to the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, insomuch that during the Middle Passage it was their spiritual connectedness which they held onto. My paper begins with the insurrection of Nat Turner and analyzes the fear that white planters had of African spirituality. Relaying that conversion to Christianity by enslaved Africans was minimal for the first century and a half of the slave experience, I present African spirituality as the paramount influence. Further, my thesis analyzes slave narratives showing how ritual worship was vital to the lives of enslaved Africans. Finally, I investigate the practice of conjuring and the religion of Hoodoo to display the processes through which enslaved Africans both protected themselves and developed a religious counter to Christianity. My findings show that there is a greater need to investigate the impacts of African spirituality on both sides of the Atlantic to deepen our understanding of the connection between African religions and Christianity both during the era of American slavery and modern times.No embargoAcademic Major: African American and African Studie

Conjure, Hoodoo, and the Cross: African Spirituality and the Slave Experience in Pre-Antebellum America

Arts and HumanitiesThis thesis examines African spirituality and its influence on the lives of enslaved Africans in America. Earlier historiography suggested that Christian beliefs had a profound impact on the cultural attitudes of the enslaved black populations. My thesis dislodges this theory and ultimately offers a compelling appraisal to the contrary. Indeed, African spirituality was embedded in the cultural, political, social, and religious lives of Africans prior to the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, insomuch that during the Middle Passage it was their spiritual connectedness which they held onto. My paper begins with the insurrection of Nat Turner and analyzes the fear that white planters had of African spirituality. Relaying that conversion to Christianity by enslaved Africans was minimal for the first century and a half of the slave experience, I present African spirituality as the paramount influence. Further, my thesis analyzes slave narratives showing how ritual worship was vital to the lives of enslaved Africans. Finally, I investigate the practice of conjuring and the religion of Hoodoo to display the processes through which enslaved Africans both protected themselves and developed a religious counter to Christianity. My findings show that there is a greater need to investigate the impacts of African spirituality on both sides of the Atlantic to deepen our understanding of the connection between African religions and Christianity both during the era of American slavery and modern times.Academic Major: African American and African Studie

Chris Newman: A Self Portrait

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Determining Expression Levels of the Notch Signaling Pathway in Self-Renewing hASCs

The abstract for this presentation can be downloaded by clicking on the blue download button

A scale-out RDF molecule store for distributed processing of biomedical data

The computational analysis of protein-protein interaction and biomolecular pathway data paves the way to efficient in silico drug discovery and therapeutic target identification. However, relevant data sources are currently distributed across a wide range of disparate, large-scale, publicly-available databases and repositories and are described using a wide range of taxonomies and ontologies. Sophisticated integration, manipulation, processing and analysis of these datasets are required in order to reveal previously undiscovered interactions and pathways that will lead to the discovery of new drugs. The BioMANTA project focuses on utilizing Semantic Web technologies together with a scale-out architecture to tackle the above challenges and to provide efficient analysis, querying, and reasoning about protein-protein interaction data. This paper describes the initial results of the BioMANTA project. The fully-developed system will allow knowledge representation and processing that are not currently available in typical scale-out or Semantic Web databases. We present the design of the architecture, basic ontology and some implementation details that aim to provide efficient, scalable RDF storage and inferencing. The results of initial performance evaluation are also provided

Investigating Expression Levels of the Notch Pathway in Self-Renewing hASCs

Chris Miller and Mengcheng Lieu are graduate students in Molecular Science and Nanotechnology at Louisiana Tech University. Avery Bryan and John Bradley Cart are undergraduate students in the School of Biological Sciences at Louisiana Tech University. Dr. Jamie Newman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Louisiana Tech University. The abstract for this presentation can be downloaded by clicking on the blue download button

Frugivory and seed dispersal by the yellow-throated marten (Martes flavigula), in a subtropical forest of China

The yellow-throated marten, Martes flavigula, is the only living species of the genus Martes found in subtropical and tropical forests (Harrison et al. 2004). It is distributed throughout central and southern Asia in a wide variety of habitats. Despite its extensive geographical range, the ecology and behaviour of this species has so far received little attention, aside from a study of habitat use (Grassman et al. 2005). Studies on other martens have shown that fruits are an important food resource (e.g. M. martes, Bermejo & Guitian 2000; M. foina, Pandolfi et al. 1996). Thus, they are considered to be important potential seed dispersers (Corlett 1998, Herrera 1989, Willson 1993), as confirmed by recent studies (M. melampus, Otani 2002; M. americana, Hickey et al. 1999; M. foina and M. martes, Schaumann & Heinken 2002). Although no systematic study of the diet of M. flavigula has been conducted (Harrison et al. 2004), it is known to be omnivorous and to consume fruit (Gao & Wang 1987). To date, however, there has been no comprehensive study of frugivory and seed dispersal by M. flavigula (but see Corlett 1998)

Smokers\u27 Neurological Responses to Novel and Repeated Health Warning Labels (HWLs) From Cigarette Packages

Graphic health warning labels (HWLs) depicting bodily injury due to smoking are effective for producing changes in affect, cognition and smoking behavior in adult smokers. However, little is known about the effects of repeated presentation of graphic HWL’s on the aforementioned processes. The goal of this study was to examine neural and behavioral responses to graphic HWL’s and evaluate whether the repeated presentation of graphic HWL’s leads to repetition suppression (RS). Smokers (N = 16) performed an event-related HWL cue task while blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal was collected during a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experimental session. Consistent with prior literature, graphic HWL’s, as compared to scrambled images, elicited increased BOLD response in brain regions involved in self-referential and emotion processing. Importantly, BOLD response at sites in this network diminished during repeated presentation of the same HWL. These findings suggest that while novel graphic HWL’smay have a significant effect on smokers’ brain activity, repeated presentationmay lead to muted responses and thus limit their potential to induce behavioral change

Relevancy 101

Where we present an overview on why relevancy is a problem, how important it is and how we can improve it. The topic of relevancy is becoming increasingly important in earth data discovery as our audience is tuned to the accuracy of standard search engines like Google