Discovering the War at Home: Oakland Manor, George Gaither, and the Shipley Brothers

From my high school, which is majority African American, it takes only ten minutes to drive to Oakland Manor, a grand, sweeping 19th century-style stone house that sits in my hometown of Columbia, Maryland, a town made up mainly of apartments and identical suburban homes. Growing up, the manor was no more than a big, old building that hosted weddings and was somehow tied to my local history. Growing up, moreover, I did not realize the extent to which my hometown was tied to slavery and the Civil War; both seemed too far removed from a community that stressed diversity and inclusion throughout my childhood. However, after discovering a monument to the Confederate soldiers from Howard County, in which Columbia is located, I learned that Oakland Manor holds a historical narrative that I never knew existed so close to home. During the Civil War, it was the property of a cavalry officer who joined the Confederacy and owned three slaves–all brothers who joined the USCT and fought against their former owner’s cause. Ten minutes from my high school was sitting an opportunity to learn about and interpret slavery and the Civil War in my hometown. [excerpt

Ready, Aim, Feminism: When Women Went Off to War

I like to imagine that if Sarah Emma Edmonds were my contemporary she would often sport a t-shirt saying, This is what a feminist looks like. Edmonds was a patriot, a feminist, and, along with an estimated 400 other women, a soldier in the American Civil War. Fed up with her father’s abuse and appalled at the prospect of an arranged marriage Edmonds left her New Brunswick home at the age of fifteen and soon adopted a male identity to become a successful worker. When the war erupted, she was compelled by a sense of patriotism and adventure to join the fight and was soon mustered into Company F of the Second Michigan Volunteers. The newly dubbed Frank Thompson, with her cropped hair and ill-fitting uniform, was able to fit in easily with the other youthful soldiers and soon marched to Manassas where her war story commenced. Throughout the war, Edmonds/Thompson served as a postman, a nurse, and a spy until she contracted malaria and was forced to desert for fear of revealing her true sex [excerpt]

Solar engine

A solar engine is disclosed in which a fluid, which is first heated and then cooled, forces a piston outward as the fluid is heated, and then draws the piston inward as the fluid is cooled. The piston is connected to a shaft and produces work as it moves outward and inward. A displacer plate moves between an absorber plate and a cooling plate to form an air space between the displacer and one or the other of these two plates for heating and cooling the fluid. The displacer plate is moved from one plate to the other by the displacer push ring as the piston nears the midpoint of its travel on the outward stroke and again on the inward stroke

Solar heating system

A system is disclosed for using solar energy to heat the interior of a structure. The system utilizes a low cost solar collector to heat a recirculating air mass which then flows through a series of interconnected ducts and passageways without the use of exterior fans or blowers. Heat is transferred from the air mass to the structure's interior and the air mass is then reheated

Say “Neigh” to Abuse: On the Treatment of Horses and Mules in the Civil War

The stuffed head of Old Baldy, General George Meade’s favorite horse, can be found mounted on the wall of the Grand Army of the Republic Museum in Philadelphia. General Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveler, received gifts and international adoration even after the war’s end, and General Ulysses S. Grant’s three war mounts, including one pony stolen from a plantation belonging to Jeff Davis’ brother, rested comfortably in fame and verdant pastures until the ends of their lives [excerpt]

Remember Harpers Ferry: Masculinity and the 126th New York

“The Harpers Ferry Cowards” is not an enviable nickname, but it is the one with which the 126th New York Infantry was stuck after September 15, 1862, the date that saw the largest capture of United States troops until the Battle of Bataan roughly 70 years later. The regiment, which had been active for a mere 21 days, was stationed on Maryland Heights and had been successful in fending off Joseph Kershaw’s brigade on September 12 and 13, but when the 126th observed their colonel, Eliakim Sherrill, being carried from the field after receiving a wound to the face, a few companies lost all bearings and fled. After the surrender on September 15, the 126th was paroled at Camp Douglas in Chicago until November. [excerp

Dead Broets Society: Masculinity in Walt Whitman’s War Verse

There are two images of masculinity in Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps, his collection of wartime poetry: one, the strong, hardened soldier, the image of manliness, and the other the boyish, rosy-cheeked recruit. Whitman’s sexuality, while not the Victorian social norm, was no secret, and he wrote openly of the hospitalized soldiers during his time as a Union nurse with admiration, affection, and love. Some critics, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, castigated Whitman’s queer themes to be overwhelming, distractingly sensual, and unmanly, while others, like William Sloane Kennedy, dissented, arguing instead that the overt sexuality present in Whitman’s work was precisely what contributed to its masculinity, whether its desires were traditional or not. Whitman’s work, Drum-Taps included, certainly does overflow with themes of gender and sex with hardly any mention of women. How, then, did the poet find himself in a crossroads of contradicting ideas of masculinity, and what are the implications of this dichotomy? [excerpt

A non-regular Groebner fan

The Groebner fan of an ideal $I\subset k[x_1,...,x_n]$, defined by Mora and Robbiano, is a complex of polyhedral cones in $R^n$. The maximal cones of the fan are in bijection with the distinct monomial initial ideals of $I$ as the term order varies. If $I$ is homogeneous the Groebner fan is complete and is the normal fan of the state polytope of $I$. In general the Groebner fan is not complete and therefore not the normal fan of a polytope. We may ask if the restricted Groebner fan, a subdivision of $R_{>=0}^n$, is regular i.e. the normal fan of a polyhedron. The main result of this paper is an example of an ideal in $Q[x_1,...,x_4]$ whose restricted Groebner fan is not regular.Comment: 11 page

A Middle East Perspective: Civil War Memory in Syria and at Home

Last summer, while on a trip with the Eisenhower Institute’s Inside the Middle East program, I stood at the Israeli edge of the Golan Heights and heard a bomb explode across the border in Syria. We had spent the day within several miles of the war-ravaged nation with all remaining quiet until that moment, and while none of us wanted to admit it, we had the smallest hope that we might catch a glimpse of the conflict. However, when the sound of the detonation roared across the hills, excitement was replaced by a sense of fear and grief. I had lived a year in Gettysburg, yet I had never felt so close to a battlefield. [excerpt