Ladylike: The Necessity and Neglect of Camp Followers in the Continental Army

The contributions of female camp followers to the Continental Army are often overlooked in the study of the American Revolution. The lower-class women who followed the army performed services absolutely necessary for its operation and created a vital support network for the fledgling army that could not care for its own needs. Camp followers were therefore integral to the success of the American Revolution, but they rarely receive due credit for their contributions because they acted outside the bounds of eighteenth-century feminine values. The intent for this thesis is to pull camp followers out of the footnotes of history and to highlight their indispensable function in the Revolutionary War. It explains women’s crucial role in army camps, and it argues that their efforts are disregarded because the hardships of war tarnished traditional standards of their femininity, incited contemporary criticisms, and led to a severe shortage of academic works on the subject of camp followers. Using military reports and orders, pension records, contemporary accounts, sermons, letters, newspapers, and other publications, this thesis sheds light on the extraordinary challenges and sacrifices that camp followers made to achieve independence and keep their families together during the eight long years of the American Revolution

WELL

Interactive learning and design aspects work together to create an engaging environment for students with learning disabilities

Productivity and carbon sequestration potential of seagrass ecosystems in the eastern Aegean Sea

Atmospheric CO₂ levels have been increasing at ever faster rates, fueled by anthropogenic activity. Natural ecosystems,which typically form net autotrophic habitats such as seagrass meadows, could be crucial to counteracting CO₂ emissions. Increased fragmentation of Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadows within the eastern Mediterranean basin, linked to increased sea surface temperature, places these meadows at high risk of loss. Annual metabolism estimates showed patchy shallow water P. oceanica within the eastern region of the Aegean Sea to be overall autotrophic. P. oceanica net apparent productivity was heterotrophic in Autumn and significantly less than Summer when autotrophic, influenced by relative changes in irradiance and seagrass aboveground biomass. Seagrass biometrics also acted as predictors of carbon sequestration spatially, demonstrating higher productivity in the meadow center compared to the meadow edge. Future forecasts of autochthonous carbon storage must consider seasonal changes in productivity, potentially alongside seasonal changes in irradiance and aboveground biomass. Ultimately shallow patchy P. oceanica meadow’s contribution to carbon sequestration should not be overlooked. The non-indigenous seagrass Halophila Stipulacea was first recorded in the Mediterranean, within the Aegean Sea. Its tropical origin may enable it to thrive given global climate change predictions for the Mediterranean. However, the H. stipulacea community was highly heterotrophic during Autumn. Utilising periods of increased irradiance in Summer may enable the plant to persist at this locality, but it seems to live near its limits for survival.The presence of an uncommon endosymbiotic phytomyxid is documented and its potential influence on H.stipulacea metabolism discussed. Overall, this work demonstrates shallow water P. oceanica meadows in the Aegean Sea are annually autotrophic and if able to persist will continue to remove atmospheric carbon. Knowing H.stipulacea is near its limits in terms of metabolic balance and survival, indicates Mediterranean autochthonous carbon sequestration may decrease should H. stipulacea increase in abundance simultaneous to knownP. oceanica regression

Yellow Fever

Yellow Fever is a disease that is most common in Africa and South America that causes severe discomfort and has a high mortality rate, of the estimated over 200,000 cases of Yellow Fever, 30,000 cases end in death. Since it is so dangerous, it is important to know how to prevent and treat it if someone ever wanted to travel to either of those places. The disease is relatively easy to avoid, all someone really need to do is avoid mosquitoes either by wearing protective clothing or by avoiding high density mosquito areas. If one were get Yellow Fever, they would surely regret it, since the side effects include head and muscle aches, fever, vomiting blood, yellow skin and eyes, seizures and the possibilities of a coma or even death (University of Maryland Medical Center, 2015)

Risk, resilience and identity construction in the life narratives of young people leaving residential care

The role of residential care for children has developed very differently internationally, but in all cultural contexts there are questions about the extent to which it can help young people recover from high risk backgrounds. In the UK, residential care has come to be seen as the placement of last resort, yet new government guidance on permanence has suggested that residential care can provide security and a sense of belonging. Narrative analysis of interviews with 20 care leavers identified their different pathways from birth families through residential care to early adulthood. Some experienced a transformation from a negative sense of self as victims or ‘bad children’ to survivors, while others continued to struggle. Key to successful turning points were four interacting factors, all associated with resilience; connection, agency, activity and coherence. These narratives revealed the importance of nurturing relationships and a sense of ‘family’, but also the role of support after leaving residential care, when transitions workers helped them to move on but stay connected. The study highlighted how residential care leavers from adverse backgrounds attribute very different meanings to their experiences, which affects identity construction, resilience and the need for support

Contact after adoption::a follow-up in late adolescence

We would like to acknowledge the help of the many people who made this study possible, some of whom cannot be named individually for reasons of confidentiality. The research was funded by The Nuffield Foundation and was carried out in 2012 and 2013. Firstly we would like to thank all the adopted young people, adoptive parents and birth relatives who took part in the study. Their willingness to share their personal experiences and to take time to fill in questionnaires was vital to the success of the project. We would also like to thank the social workers and administrative staff from the participating adoption agencies who assisted us in tracing participants whose contact details were out of date. We are grateful to the help of After Adoption who assisted us in recruiting a group of adopted young people to advise us on the early stages of the study, and of course to the young people themselves who made many valuable suggestions which informed our data collection strategy

"Any lady can do this without much trouble ...": class and gender in The dining room (1878)

Macmillan's "Art at Home" series (1876–83) was a collection of domestic advice manuals. Mentioned in every study of the late-nineteenth-century domestic interior, they have often been interpreted, alongside contemporary publications such as Charles Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste (1868), as indicators of late 1870s home furnishing styles. Mrs Loftie's The Dining Room (1878) was the series' fifth book and it considers one of the home's principal (and traditionally masculine) domestic spaces. Recent research on middle-class cultural practices surrounding food has placed The Dining Room within the tradition of Mrs Beeton's Household Management (1861); however, it is not a cookery book and hardly mentions dinners. Drawing upon unpublished archival sources, this paper charts the production and reception of The Dining Room, aiming to unravel its relationships with other contemporary texts and to highlight the difficulties of using it as historical evidence. While it offers fascinating insights into contemporary taste, class and gender, this paper suggests that, as an example of domestic design advice literature, it reveals far more about the often expedient world of nineteenth-century publishing practices