“To Think of the Subject Unmans Me:” An Exploration of Grief and Soldiering Through the Letters of Henry Livermore Abbott

“‘To think of the subject unmans me:’ An Exploration of Grief and Soldiering Through the Letters of Henry Livermore Abbott,” explores the challenges to both the Victorian ideals of manliness and the culture of death presented by the American Civil War. The letters of Henry Abbott, a young officer serving with the 20th Massachusetts, display the tension between his upper class New England world in which gentleman were to operate within an ideal of emotional control and sentimentality, and his new existence on the ground level of the Army of the Potomac. After the death of his brother, this tension initially caused him to suppress his grief for fear of being “unmanned” in front of his fellow soldiers. Eventually, Abbott found a different and more acceptable way to display emotion through mourning the deaths of fellow soldiers in his regiment as surrogates for his brother’s death. Over time, Abbott’s comrades became much more than stand-ins for his family. He truly began to conceive of the men he fought and suffered with from the beginning of the war in brotherly terms, and this allowed him to create a space in which he was comfortable openly grieving. Abbott’s use of surrogates both for his family and for the idealized “Good Death” allowed him to salvage his ideological foundations and apply them to a new world of carnage and violence

Old War, New Deal: Commemorative Landscapes, the National Park Service, and the 75th Anniversary of the Civil War

The 75th Anniversary of the American Civil War was both the last major anniversary influenced by living Civil War veterans, and the first commemoration to occur with a number of key Civil War battlefields under the administrative control of the National Park Service. Although largely overlooked by historians, remembrance of the Civil War in the 1930s represented a key transition from commemoration primarily for the veterans of the conflict to a wider commemoration, finding from the Civil War a usable past and a landscape of national memorialization. Through this process, administrative and interpretive shifts changed the very purpose of Civil War battlefields, allowing for broader education and mass tourism. The landscape was also transformed, due to the influx of labor made possible by New Deal programs, into a representation of an idyllic 19th century environment appealing to nostalgic Americans during the tumultuous years of the Great Depression. Finally, commemorative events themselves focused primarily on narratives of bravery, sacrifice, and perseverance, emphasizing the redemption of democracy, and largely ignoring the suffering, sectional bitterness, and racial strife wrought by the Civil War. Despite the presence of veterans at these events, their stories were largely usurped into this larger collective narrative, and the veterans often became sources of amusement or curiosity, even a part of the battlefield landscape itself. This anniversary was an example of the intertwined nature of built commemorative environments and historical memory, as well as an example of aging veterans being appropriated as living monuments. The in-depth analysis of two very different battlefield landscapes, Gettysburg National Military Park and Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, provides a window through which this pivotal transformation can be examined

“A great weight at my heart:” A Personal Reaction to Pickett’s Charge

“When our great victory was just over the exultation of victory was so great that one didn’t think of our fearful losses, but now I can’t help feeling a great weight at my heart. Poor Henry Ropes was one of the dearest friends I ever had or expect to have. He was one of the purest-minded, noblest, most generous men I ever knew. His loss is terrible. His men actually wept when they showed me his body, even under the tremendous cannonade, a time when most soldiers see their comrades dying around them with indifference.” When twenty-one year old Henry Livermore Abbott penned these words on July 6, 1863, I highly doubt he expected his letter to be reconsidered by twenty-one year old Becky Oakes on July 6, 2013. Aside from being the same age, the Henry Abbott of 1863 and I have very little in common. He was a Harvard graduate from Massachusetts, and an officer in the Army of the Potomac. I am a graduate of Gettysburg College, originally from Ohio, and I study the Civil War. He wrote these words for his father, I type these words for a blog. [excerpt

Data mining of audiology patient records: factors influencing the choice of hearing aid type

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This paper describes the analysis of a database of over 180,000 patient records, collected from over 23,000 patients, by the hearing aid clinic at James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, UK. These records consist of audiograms (graphs of the faintest sounds audible to the patient at six different pitches), categorical data (such as age, gender, diagnosis and hearing aid type) and brief free text notes made by the technicians. This data is mined to determine which factors contribute to the decision to fit a BTE (worn behind the ear) hearing aid as opposed to an ITE (worn in the ear) hearing aid.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>From PCA (principal component analysis) four main audiogram types are determined, and are related to the type of hearing aid chosen. The effects of age, gender, diagnosis, masker, mould and individual audiogram frequencies are combined into a single model by means of logistic regression. Some significant keywords are also discovered in the free text fields by using the chi-squared (χ²) test, which can also be used in the model. The final model can act a decision support tool to help decide whether an individual patient should be offered a BTE or an ITE hearing aid.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The final model was tested using 5-fold cross validation, and was able to replicate the decisions of audiologists whether to fit an ITE or a BTE hearing aid with precision in the range 0.79 to 0.87.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>A decision support system was produced to predict the type of hearing aid which should be prescribed, with an explanation facility explaining how that decision was arrived at. This system should prove useful in providing a "second opinion" for audiologists.</p

Tall Fescue and Orchardgrass Productivity and Persistence Under Grazing Systems in Tennessee

The primary forage species used by cow-calf producers in grazing systems in Tennessee is tall-fescue. Tall fescue is considered an excellent cool-season perennial forage crop due to its high quality, production, and extended growing season. However, most of these tall fescue grazing systems are composed of tall fescue cv. Kentucky 31, which is known for containing a fungus endophyte that can be toxic to animals. Alternatively, orchardgrass is also a vastly used and important perennial cool-season forage in the United States. It can be used as a pasture, hay, and is a high-quality forage that is desirable for most livestock producers, especially dairy, beef and equine industries. The goal of this project was to compare four different cool-season forage species under grazing pressure while increasing productivity and persistence of the paddocks. The project assessed herbage mass, botanical composition, morphological composition, along with persistence of four different cool season grasses. While no statistical difference was seen among treatments within a single year for herbage mass, year did influence herbage mass. Additionally, botanical composition was noted as being significant on the year by treatment interaction

Threshold Resummation Effects in the Associated Production of Chargino and Neutralino at Hadron Colliders

We investigate the QCD effects in the associated production of the chargino and the neutralino, $\tilde\chi^\pm_{1}$ and $\tilde\chi^0_{2}$, in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) at both the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We include the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections (including supersymmetric QCD) and the threshold resummation effects. Our results show that, compared to the NLO predictions, the threshold resummation effects can increase the total cross sections by 3.6% and 3.9% for the associated production of $\tilde\chi^+_{1}\tilde\chi^0_{2}$ and $\tilde\chi^-_{1}\tilde\chi^0_{2}$ at the LHC, respectively, and by 4.7% for those of $\tilde\chi^\pm_{1}\tilde\chi^0_{2}$ at the Tevatron. In the invariant mass distributions the resummation effects are significant for large invariant mass. The threshold resummation reduces the dependence of the total cross sections at the LHC (Tevatron) on the renormalization/factorization scales to 5% (4%) from up to 7% (11%) at NLO.Comment: revised version with midifications, several references adde

ANALYSIS OF SMALL BUSINESS PARTICIPATION IN ONLINE MARKETPLACES

As commercial e-commerce portals continue to grow in popularity among the acquisition workforce, it is imperative that the federal government ensures companies of all business sizes are able to compete fairly. This research examines the current framework of platform providers and makes recommendations on how small businesses can be better utilized without sacrificing competition, while keeping an extensive industry base and receiving best value for both the taxpayer and warfighter.Civilian, Department of the NavyCivilian, Department of the NavyCivilian, Department of the NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited