Sound in Conflict: Lyric Poetry and the American Civil War

This dissertation investigates the acoustic resources of lyric poems written during and about the American Civil War, and asks how closely related these acoustics were to their historical environment. I thus attempt to redress the dominant visual and material responses to Civil War aesthetics, in favour of attention to its sounds. I also set out to discover whether lyric poetry, now held to be an essentially sounded medium, can be understood as part of the boom in sound technologies that textured the nineteenth century. These two aims can be drawn together into one question: did the lyric poetry of the Civil War record anything? To answer this question, the dissertation positions itself at an intersection between sound studies, historical poetics, and lyric theory, examining whether the playful sound experiments noted by current writers on lyric were in conversation with their historical moment, even to the extent (and this is the proposal of some sound studies practitioners) that the poems can be used as acoustic evidence of particular Civil War soundscapes. The dissertation is made up of three chapters, structured around the three sounds that lyric poems have been held as making or containing: rhythm, rhyme and voice. The first chapter investigates the rhythmic patterning of Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps (1865), and its potential origin in Whitman’s theories of health and his work in army hospitals. The second chapter takes on rhyme, via a paired reading of Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces (1866) and Laura Redden’s Idyls of Battle and Poems of the Rebellion (1863). I argue that Melville was invested in rhyme as nonsense, and that Redden investigated the possibility of untying rhyme from sound, thus strengthening the prospect of a deaf Civil War poetry. The third chapter turns to the Civil War poems of Emily Dickinson and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and asks how they set about preserving or recovering the voices of Civil War soldiers. I conclude by looking at the place of Dunbar’s poems in the early market for recorded sound. The dissertation ultimately contends that while the poems discussed do not record their environment, their experiments with form and sound do let them work as a historiographic instrument, and that ‘lyric’ thus remains a valuable and informative way of reading Civil War literature

The multidriver: A reliable multicast service using the Xpress Transfer Protocol

A reliable multicast facility extends traditional point-to-point virtual circuit reliability to one-to-many communication. Such services can provide more efficient use of network resources, a powerful distributed name binding capability, and reduced latency in multidestination message delivery. These benefits will be especially valuable in real-time environments where reliable multicast can enable new applications and increase the availability and the reliability of data and services. We present a unique multicast service that exploits features in the next-generation, real-time transfer layer protocol, the Xpress Transfer Protocol (XTP). In its reliable mode, the service offers error, flow, and rate-controlled multidestination delivery of arbitrary-sized messages, with provision for the coordination of reliable reverse channels. Performance measurements on a single-segment Proteon ProNET-4 4 Mbps 802.5 token ring with heterogeneous nodes are discussed

Estimating the Undercoverage of a Sampling Frame due to Reporting Delays

One of the imperfections of a sampling frame is miscoverage caused by delays in recording real- life events that change the eligibility of population units. For example, new units generally appear on the frame some time after they came into existence and units that have ceased to exist are not removed from the frame immediately. We provide methodology for predicting the undercoverage due to delays in reporting new units. The approach presented here is novel in a business survey context, and is equally applicable to overcoverage due to delays in reporting the closure of units. As a special case, we also predict the number of new-born units per month. The methodology is applied to the principal business register in the UK, maintained by the Office for National Statistics. <br/

Animal Behavior: Who Will Croak Next?

A recent study with the predatory bat Trachops cirrhosus has shown the importance for this species of social learning about novel prey using auditory, rather than visual or olfactory, cues

Soil resources of phosphorus

This article continues a series that provides producers with information to aid in phosphorus (P) management and in understanding environmental issues related to P management. This article focuses on the presence and behavior of P in the soil. The nature, amount, distribution, and chemical composition of P compounds in soil are closely related to the classic factors of soil formation--climate, organisms, parent material, topography, and time. Because we have tilled, fertilized, drained, and allowed soils to erode, the form and amount of P in the surface horizon has changed