Theocritus and the Style of Hellenistic Poetry

This volume is a collection of fifteen papers written by a team of international experts in the field of Hellenistic literature

CL 553 United Methodist Polity and Discipline

The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church, 2004. Frank, Thomas Edward. Polity, Practice, and the Mission of The United Methodist Church, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006. Optional Tuell, Jack M. The Organization of the United Methodist Church 2005-2008, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005. Recommended Resources/Bookshttps://place.asburyseminary.edu/syllabi/3708/thumbnail.jp

People, sheep, and landscape change in colonial Mexico: the sixteenth-century transformation of the Valle del Mezquital

The causes of central Mexico’s environmental degradation are poorly understood. Scholarly contention centers on the role of introduced livestock as agents of soil erosion. This dissertation explores New Spain’s sixteenth-century livestock ecology by drawing upon archival and field data to reconstruct the spatio-temporal characteristics of sheep ranches in a southeastern section of central Mexico’s Valle del Mezquital. The introductory chapter outlines a scholarly disagreement from the 1990s that underscored differences between historical and geographical approaches to studying historical landscape transformations. On one side of this debate, geographer Karl W. Butzer finds in the sixteenth-century Mexican Bajío little evidence for environmental degradation from introduced livestock. On the other, environmental historian Elinor G.K. Melville’s research in the adjacent Valle del Mezquital suggests that sheep devastated that region’s environment by the sixteenth century’s close. This section looks beyond the finer points of methodology in search of other reasons for their disagreement, namely researcher positionality. Chapter 2 addresses the methodological concerns that arise from using colonial-era Mexican archival sources to study landscape transformations. This chapter outlines how previous scholars have approached these concerns and how this dissertation handles each of them. The discussion then turns to perceptions of environmental cause-and-effect with an emphasis on agricultural terrace abandonment as a possible mechanism of environmental degradation. The second chapter also reviews basic concepts in rangeland ecology. The two subsequent chapters focus on the natural environment and the pre-Hispanic inhabited environment together attempt to establish an ecological baseline with which to evaluate colonial-era landscape transformations. Chapter 5 leverages the relatively small size of this dissertation’s study area to map many of the sheep ranches to a relatively precise degree. A time-series of maps reveals the spatio-temporal development of the study area’s sheep ranch complex. A Geographic Information System analyzes the various spatial characteristics of each ranch’s location. This analysis emphasizes the reality of a three-dimensional landscape by considering the aspect, slope, and elevation of the ranching complex. The significant findings are: agricultural terrace abandonment likely instigated some of the region’s soil erosion; there appears to have been fewer sheep in the study area than previously thought; deep drought conditions operated synergistically with herbivory and land abandonment in the late sixteenth century to transform the Valle del Mezquital into the degraded region it is today

“Palaephatus,” Strabo, and the Boundaries of Myth

One of the principal problems confronting anyone concerned with the ancient critical reception of Homer and/or the broader question of how the Greeks began to construct distinctions in what they heard and read between history, fiction, and myth, or indeed between science and non-science, is that it is very difficult to get back to a “state of grace”: most of our ancient texts in these areas seem already contaminated by sophistications of one kind or another. That, however, may well be the point: there may never have been such a pure state, at least in the historical period covered by our extant texts. Rather, therefore, than trying to distinguish between Archaic texts, which come from a world that still understood, indeed functioned through, poetry and myth, and postclassical texts which had lost their intellectual virginity and for whom all this was play, I want to begin in mediis rebus with a text that is relatively early (late fourth century BCE), but also—when viewed from another perspective—seems very late indeed

A study of the occupational education involvement of selected small Iowa high schools

The purpose of this study is threefolds 1. the identification of the various types of occupational education programs which currently exist in selected small Iowa high schools; 2. the identification of selected characteristics of these programs; and, 3. the formation of a body of information which can be used by schools that are seeking to improve their occupational education programs

Epigenetic effects of stress and corticosteroids in the brain

Stress is a common life event with potentially long lasting effects on health and behavior. Stress, and the corticosteroid hormones that mediate many of its effects, are well known for their ability to alter brain function and plasticity. While genetic susceptibility may influence the impact of stress on the brain, it does not provide us with a complete understanding of the capacity of stress to produce long lasting perturbations on the brain and behavior. The growing science of epigenetics, however, shows great promise of deepening our understanding of the persistent impacts of stress and corticosteroids on health and disease. Epigenetics, broadly defined, refers to influences on phenotype operating above the level of the genetic code itself. At the molecular level, epigenetic events belong to three major classes: DNA methylation, covalent histone modification and non-coding RNA. This review will examine the bi-directional interactions between stress and corticosteroids and epigenetic mechanisms in the brain and how the novel insights, gleaned from recent research in neuro-epigenetics, change our understanding of mammalian brain function and human disease states