The Bloody South Carolina Election of 1876: Wade Hampton III, the Red Shirt Campaign for Governor and the End of Reconstruction

Another Look at South Carolina Reconstruction In the preface to his new book, York County, S.C., historian and retired minister Jerry West confesses that he did not know quite where to go in looking at the election of 1876. He wanted to extend his study of wartime York County into the R...

Coming for to Carry Me Home: Race in America From Abolitionism to Jim Crow

Republicans, Race, and Reconstruction In Coming for to Carry Me Home, J. Michael Martinez, author of Life and Death in Civil War Prisons and Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan, argues that “the story of [Abraham] Lincoln and the Radical Republicans could ...

What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War

Why They Fought Civil War Soldiers and Slavery Chandra Manning opens her enlightening and important book with three quotations. The first is from the regimental newspaper of the Thirteenth Wisconsin Infantry Regiment in February 1862: The Fact that slavery is the sole undeniable...

The F Street Mess: How Southern Senators Rewrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act

In her first book, Alice Elizabeth Malavasic argues that four southern senators who made up the F Street mess from 1853 to 1856 constituted the “most powerful bloc in the U.S. Senate.” (p. 8) During the 1850s, as self-proclaimed heirs of John C. Calhoun’s constitutional ideas and proslavery strategy, these senators used their positions as chairmen of critical senatorial committees to push slavery’s interests vigorously. In Malavasic’s accounting, the friendship and group dynamic of the four Democratic messmates – David Rice Atchison of Missouri, Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia, and James M. Mason of Virginia – reinforced their institutional power to give them almost dictatorial control over key legislation. In the most significant demonstration of such power, Malavasic concludes, the junta of four messmates conspired to force an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise in drafting the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 as a condition of supporting the bill and persuaded a reluctant President Franklin Pierce to endorse the bill

Crossing the race divide : interracial sex in antebellum Savannah

This article explores the social significance of inter-racial sexual contact in an antebellum Southern city. How did inter-racial sex challenge the established social hierarchy in Savannah? Was it a controversial issue, viewed as a threat to the social order, or was it accepted as an inevitable evil resulting from a mixed population residing in close proximity

The SMC SNR 1E0102.2-7219 as a Calibration Standard for X-ray Astronomy in the 0.3-2.5 keV Bandpass

The flight calibration of the spectral response of CCD instruments below 1.5 keV is difficult in general because of the lack of strong lines in the on-board calibration sources typically available. We have been using 1E 0102.2-7219, the brightest supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud, to evaluate the response models of the ACIS CCDs on the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), the EPIC CCDs on the XMM-Newton Observatory, the XIS CCDs on the Suzaku Observatory, and the XRT CCD on the Swift Observatory. E0102 has strong lines of O, Ne, and Mg below 1.5 keV and little or no Fe emission to complicate the spectrum. The spectrum of E0102 has been well characterized using high-resolution grating instruments, namely the XMM-Newton RGS and the CXO HETG, through which a consistent spectral model has been developed that can then be used to fit the lower-resolution CCD spectra. We have also used the measured intensities of the lines to investigate the consistency of the effective area models for the various instruments around the bright O (~570 eV and 654 eV) and Ne (~910 eV and 1022 eV) lines. We find that the measured fluxes of the O VII triplet, the O VIII Ly-alpha line, the Ne IX triplet, and the Ne X Ly-alpha line generally agree to within +/-10 % for all instruments, with 28 of our 32 fitted normalizations within +/-10% of the RGS-determined value. The maximum discrepancies, computed as the percentage difference between the lowest and highest normalization for any instrument pair, are 23% for the O VII triplet, 24% for the O VIII Ly-alpha line, 13% for the Ne IX triplet, and 19% for the Ne X Ly-alpha line. If only the CXO and XMM are compared, the maximum discrepancies are 22% for the O VII triplet, 16% for the O VIII Ly-alpha line, 4% for the Ne IX triplet, and 12% for the Ne X Ly-alpha line.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, to be published in Proceedings of the SPIE 7011: Space Telescopes and Instrumentation II: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray 200

Mesophotic fish communities of the ancient coastline in Western Australia

Marine diversity across the Australian continental shelf is shaped by characteristic benthic habitats which are determined by geomorphic features such as paleoshorelines. In north-western Australia there has been little attention on the fish communities that inhabit an ancient coastline at ~125 m depth (the designated AC125), which is specified as a key ecological feature (KEF) of the region and is thought to comprise hard substrate and support enhanced diversity. We investigated drivers of fish species richness and assemblage composition spanning six degrees of latitude along sections of the ancient coastline, categorised as ‘on’ and ‘off’ the AC125 based on depth, across a range of habitats and seafloor complexity (~60–180 m depth). While some surveyed sections of the AC125 had hard bottom substrate and supported enhanced fish diversity, including over half of the total species observed, species richness and abundance overall were not greater on the AC125 than immediately adjacent to the AC125. Instead, depth, seafloor complexity and habitat type explained patterns in richness and abundance, and structured fish assemblages at both local and broad spatial scales. Fewer fishes were associated with deep sites characterized by negligible complexity and soft-bottom habitats, in contrast to shallower depths that featured benthic biota and pockets of complex substrate. Drivers of abundance of common species were species-specific and primarily related to sampling Areas, depth and substrate. Fishes of the ancient coastline and adjacent habitats are representative of mesophotic fish communities of the region, included species important to fisheries and conservation, and several species were observed deeper than their currently known distribution. This study provides the first assessment of fish biodiversity associated with an ancient coastline feature, improving our understanding of the function it plays in regional spatial patterns in abundance of mesophotic fishes. Management decisions that incorporate the broader variety of depths and habitats surrounding the designated AC125 could enhance the ecological role of this KEF, contributing to effective conservation of fish biodiversity on Australia’s north west shelf