“Robin Hood of the Blue Ridge”: The Life, Legend, and Songs of Otto Wood, the Bandit

Otto Wood, a native of Wilkes County, North Carolina, became nationally known during the 1920s for his repetitive flights from the North Carolina State Prison. Wood began his rambling at an early age and spent his childhood years in the coalfields of southern West Virginia. After killing a Greensboro pawnbroker in the fall of 1923, he was sent to the North Carolina State Prison. Between 1924 and 1930, Wood made four escapes from the penitentiary and rose to the status of a criminal celebrity. He wrote his autobiography, Life History of Otto Wood, while incarcerated in 1926. In his Life History, Wood claimed that the poverty and neglect he experienced in childhood formed the roots of his criminal lifestyle. Governor O. Max Gardner attempted to use Wood as an “experiment in humanity,” but failed after Wood made his fourth escape in 1930. He died on December 31, 1930, following a gunfight with police on the streets of Salisbury, North Carolina. Wood’s legend was later spread in song by early country music artists. Drawing on primary sources, this thesis provides a biography of Otto Wood and places him within the economic and social context of the period in which he lived

Patterns and mechanisms of coseismic and postseismic slips of the 2011 M W 7.1 Van (Turkey) earthquake revealed by multi-platform synthetic aperture radar interferometry

On 23rd October 2011, a MW 7.1 reverse slip earthquake occurred in the Bardakçı-Saray thrust fault zone in the Van region, Eastern Turkey. Earlier geodetic studies have found different slip distributions in terms of both magnitude and pattern. In this paper, we present several COSMO-SkyMED (CSK), Envisat ASAR and RADARSAT-2 interferograms spanning different time intervals, showing that significant postseismic signals can be observed in the first three days after the mainshock. Using observations that combine coseismic and postseismic signals is shown to significantly underestimate coseismic slip. We hence employed the CSK pair with the minimum postseismic signals to generate one conventional interferogram and one along-track interferogram for further coseismic modelling. Our best-fit coseismic slip model suggests that: (1) this event is associated with a buried NNW dipping fault with a preferable dip angle of 49° and a maximum slip of 6.5 m at a depth of 12 km; and (2) two unequal asperities can be observed, consistent with previous seismic solutions. Significant oblique aseismic slip with predominant left-lateral slip components above the coseismic rupture zone within the first 3 days after the mainshock is also revealed by a postseismic CSK interferogram, indicating that the greatest principal stress axis might have rotated due to a significant stress drop during the coseismic rupture