The High Water Mark of Social History in Civil War Studies

Just hours before the Army of Northern Virginia raised the white flag at Appomattox Court House, Confederate Colonel Edward Porter Alexander approached his commanding officer, Robert E. Lee, with what he hoped was a game-saving plan. Rather than suffer the mortification of surrendering, Alexander begged Lee to scatter his men across the countryside like “rabbits & partridges” where they could continue waging war, not as regular Confederate soldiers, but as elusive guerrilla fighters. Lee listened patiently to his subordinate’s reasoning for irregular warfare. Before Alexander finished, he reminded Lee that the men were utterly devoted to their commanding general, and that such loyalty would continue to inspire the sacrifice of more blood, even if it meant taking to the woods and fighting like common outlaws. When Alexander concluded his impassioned plea, Lee asked his subordinate to imagine what would happen if he turned Alexander’s suggestion into official policy. But before Alexander had a chance to respond, Lee reminded him that virtually every Southern community had been overrun by Union armies, that farms were in disarray, and that crops were ruined. Lee feared that his veterans, upon returning home, would have no choice but to plunder and rob for survival. It would take no time for his disciplined army to descend into a demoralized mob that would take the rest of the South into a downward spiral of unending and unrestrained violence. “As for myself,” Lee concluded, “while you young men might afford to go to bushwhacking, the only proper & dignified course for me would be to surrender myself & take the consequences of my actions.” [excerpt

Electroweak precision constraints on the Lee-Wick Standard Model

We perform an analysis of the electroweak precision observables in the Lee-Wick Standard Model. The most stringent restrictions come from the S and T parameters that receive important tree level and one loop contributions. In general the model predicts a large positive S and a negative T. To reproduce the electroweak data, if all the Lee-Wick masses are of the same order, the Lee-Wick scale is of order 5 TeV. We show that it is possible to find some regions in the parameter space with a fermionic state as light as 2.4-3.5 TeV, at the price of rising all the other masses to be larger than 5-8 TeV. To obtain a light Higgs with such heavy resonances a fine-tuning of order a few per cent, at least, is needed. We also propose a simple extension of the model including a fourth generation of Standard Model fermions with their Lee-Wick partners. We show that in this case it is possible to pass the electroweak constraints with Lee-Wick fermionic masses of order 0.4-1.5 TeV and Lee-Wick gauge masses of order 3 TeV.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figure

The Trophies of Victory and the Relics of Defeat: Returning Home in the Spring of 1865

The remains of a lone apple tree, cut down and carved into small pieces by Confederate soldiers, lay along a rutted dirt road that led to the village of Appomattox Court House. Earlier on 9 April 1865, Robert E. Lee had waited under the shade of the apple tree, anxious to hear from Ulysses S.Grant about surrendering his army. Messages between the generals eventually led to a brief meeting between Lee and two Union staff offices who then secured the parlor in Wilmer McLean\u27s house, where Grant dictated the surrender terms to Lee. As soon as the agreement was signed and Lee walked out the door, Union officers decluttered the parlor with Yankee efficiency, cutting strips of upholstery from plush sofas, breaking chair legs into small keepsakes, and appropriating candleholders and chairs until the room was left barren. [excerpt

PANEL DISCUSSION: THE EXPANDING PROSECUTORIAL ROLE FROM TRIAL COUNSEL TO INVESTIGATOR AND ADMINISTRATOR

MODERATOR: Daniel C. Richman PANELISTS: Laurie L. Levenson, GerardE. Lynch, Honorable John S. Martin, Jr., Julie R. O\u27Sullivan, Mary Lee Warren, Mary Jo Whit

Lee and Grant: Images of Fatherhood in Victorian America

Before they were great Civil War generals, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant were fathers. Lee had seven children, three sons and four daughters. Grant was the father of three boys and a single girl. Though they are intended to paint overwhelmingly positive portraits of the two men, their children’s words give us a sense of these two generals as fathers and the ways in which they reflected standard trends in fathering during the Victorian Era. [excerpt

Sweeping the cd-Index and the Toric h-Vector

We derive formulas for the cd-index and the toric h-vector of a convex polytope P from a sweeping by a hyperplane. These arise from interpreting the corresponding S-shelling of the dual of P. We describe a partition of the faces of the complete truncation of P to reflect explicitly the nonnegativity of its cd-index and what its components are counting. One corollary is a quick way to compute the toric h-vector directly from the cd-index. We also propose an "extended toric" h-vector that fully captures the information in the flag h-vector.Comment: 23 page

Taiwan`s domestic politics since the presidential elections 2000

This paper looks at several developments that have taken place in domestic politics on Taiwan since the election of Chen Shui-bian as president of the Republic of China on Taiwan in 1998. After discussing the political successes and failures of the incumbent Chen administration, it analyses its strategy in dealing with the consequences of divided government. Some of the problems encountered by the administration are traced to changes in the political system of Taiwan that took place during the presidency of Lee Teng-hui. The paper also deals with the new role of the president as chief executive and functioning of the legislative. Finally, the reaction of the major political parties to the changes in the political situation is explored. --Taiwan,domestic politics,divided government,political system,party system,Chen Shui-bian,Lee Teng-hui

Ten Miles from Richmond

At the tiny crossroads town of Cold Harbor, Ulysses S. Grant hoped to crush Robert E. Lee\u27s army and hasten the war\u27s end. What happened instead would become one of his greatest regrets