Thunder on the River: The Civil War in Northeast Florida

Emerging Slavery Economy and Disruption in Civil War Florida Dan Schafer, professor emeritus at the University of North Florida, brings a lifetime of research to this well written, fast-pasted narrative of the Civil War in Northeast Florida. Most of his previous scholarly work has been di...

The Long Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere

An Important Look at How Slavery and Law Interacted in the New World History, as C. Vann Woodward reminded us on many occasions, is full of contradictions, ironies, and strange turns. In this impressive study of slavery, race, and law in the American Hemisphere from its European coloniza...

Crime and Punishment in Antebellum Pensacola

In the spring of 1828 Pensacola, Florida suffered a serious crime wave. The Escambia County Grand Jury with a highly laudable determination to do their duty, found twenty bills of indictment after a most laborious session of thirteen days. The panel indicted two men named Alvarez and Gray for murder, though both remained at large throughout the entire session. Convicted mail robber Martin Hutto escaped for the second time with a convicted burglar named Enoch Hoye who received the customary punishment for thieves: thirty-nine lashes (with ten extra stripes thrown in for good measure) and two hours on the pillory. The postmaster offered a $50 reward for Hutto\u27s arrest, Overall, Benjamin D. Wright, U. S. Attorney for the Western Judicial District of Florida, secured seven convictions on twenty indictments with fines totaling$106.

Historic Notes and Documents: Our Desired Haven : The Letters of Corinna Brown Aldrich from Antebellum Key West, 1849-1850

On January 8,1849, Dr. Edward S. Aldrich wrote his wife Corinna Brown Aldrich from Key West, Florida. His description of American\u27s southernmost town spoke of its beauty and economic potential

Why Was Antebellum Florida Murderous? A Quantitative Analysis of Homicide in Florida, 1821-1861

Before the Civil War, Florida was one of the most murderous places in the United States. Its homicide rate was rivaled only by Texas and California.1 When it came to murders of or by blacks, Florida was typical for a slave state. But its white citizens killed each other at an extraordinary rate-usually three or four times the rate in most other slave states and eight to ten times the prevailing rate during the Second Seminole War, 1835-42, and the secession crisis, 1858-61

The Florida Cracker Before the Civil War As Seen Through Travelers\u27 Accounts

Lieutenant Colonel John Wilder of the Union occupation force was stationed for most of the Civil War in Key West. A week after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox he visited Cedar Key. Located near the mouth of the Suwannee River, Cedar Key was an important rendezvous point for refugees, Union troops, Confederate deserters, and Unionist sympathizers. On April 20, 1865, Wilder wrote his mother that when he arrived there were about 2,000 white refugees, a “great curiosity; crackers most of them— that is poor whites, not more intelligent or virtuous than the negroes.” He described them as “pale, cadaverous, ignorant, and many of them fierce.” Some of the group had joined the Federal army. “Most of them,” he claimed, “have been persecuted by” the Rebels “and are very implacable. They are splendid rifle shots and go about all over the state. They talk of killing this man or that, when they go out as a matter of course— not in fight, but in murdering him.

Historic Notes and Documents: Everything is Hubbub Here : Lt. James Willoughby Anderson\u27s Second Seminole War, 1837-1842

As the Second Seminole War drew to a close in the spring of 1842, Lieutenant James Willoughby Anderson prepared to leave territorial Florida for a post in the Old Northwest. Pondering his experiences and life changes since entering the territory in 1837, Anderson would have looked back on many significant accomplishments. He had helped produce an important topographical map, accumulated distinguished service commendations, and made important professional relationships certain to advance his military career.1 But most of all, Anderson would have thought of the important personal relationships forged during his four years of service in Florida: his courtship and marriage to Ellen Brown; the birth of their son; and his close personal ties to his wife\u27s sister, Corinna, and her husband, Dr. Edward Aldrich, an army surgeon with whom he served

Assessing stream bank condition using airborne LiDAR and high spatial resolution image data in temperate semirural areas in Victoria, Australia

Stream bank condition is an important physical form indicator for streams related to the environmental condition of riparian corridors. This research developed and applied an approach for mapping bank condition from airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and high-spatial resolution optical image data in a temperate forest/woodland/urban environment. Field observations of bank condition were related to LiDAR and optical image-derived variables, including bank slope, plant projective cover, bank-full width, valley confinement, bank height, bank top crenulation, and ground vegetation cover. Image-based variables, showing correlation with the field measurements of stream bank condition, were used as input to a cumulative logistic regression model to estimate and map bank condition. The highest correlation was achieved between field-assessed bank condition and image-derived average bank slope (R2 1/4 0.60, n 1/4 41), ground vegetation cover (R2 1/4 0.43, n 1/4 41), bank width/height ratio (R2 1/4 0.41, n 1/4 41), and valley confinement (producer's accuracy 1/4 100%, n 1/4 9). Crossvalidation showed an average misclassification error of 0.95 from an ordinal scale from 0 to 4 using the developed model. This approach was developed to support the remotely sensed mapping of stream bank condition for 26,000 km of streams in Victoria, Australia, from 2010 to 2012

Voxel-based supervised machine learning of peripheral zone prostate cancer using noncontrast multiparametric MRI

Purpose: The aim of this study was to develop and assess the performance of supervised machine learning technique to classify magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) voxels as cancerous or noncancerous using noncontrast multiparametric MRI (mp-MRI), comprised of T2-weighted imaging (T2WI), diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), and advanced diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) parameters. Materials and methods: In this work, 191 radiomic features were extracted from mp-MRI from prostate cancer patients. A comprehensive set of support vector machine (SVM) models for T2WI and mp-MRI (T2WI + DWI, T2WI + DTI, and T2WI + DWI + DTI) were developed based on novel Bayesian parameters optimization method and validated using leave-one-patient-out approach to eliminate any possible overfitting. The diagnostic performance of each model was evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). The average sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the models were evaluated using the test data set and the corresponding binary maps generated. Finally, the SVM plus sigmoid function of the models with the highest performance were used to produce cancer probability maps. Results: The T2WI + DWI + DTI models using the optimal feature subset achieved the best performance in prostate cancer detection, with the average AUROC, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 0.93 ± 0.03, 0.85 ± 0.05, 0.82 ± 0.07, and 0.83 ± 0.04, respectively. The average diagnostic performance of T2WI + DTI models was slightly higher than T2WI + DWI models (+3.52%) using the optimal radiomic features. Conclusions: Combination of noncontrast mp-MRI (T2WI, DWI, and DTI) features with the framework of a supervised classification technique and Bayesian optimization method are able to differentiate cancer from noncancer voxels with high accuracy and without administration of contrast agent. The addition of cancer probability maps provides additional functionality for image interpretation, lesion heterogeneity evaluation, and treatment management.</p