Murder in Manassas: Mental Illness and Psychological Trauma After the Civil War

Following the American Civil War, the small railroad junction of Manassas, Virginia grew into one of the most prominent towns in the region with the help of town founder William S. Fewell and his family. In 1872, the youngest daughter of the prominent Fewell family was seduced and abducted by Prince Williams County’s Commonwealth Attorney and most prominent orator, James F. Clark without warning. Having just come home from three years of military service in the Civil War, witnessing the death of his twin brother as well as suffering for a year in Elmira Prison as a prisoner of war, Lucien N. Fewell walked into Clark’s jail and murdered his younger sister’s abductor. Acquitted of murder on the terms of mental illness, Lucien Fewell continued to live a life of violence caused by his traumatic experiences during the Civil War. Like many soldiers who came home from the Civil War, Lucien Fewell gives historians an insight into those who came home with combat-induced mental illnesses, as he came back from his military services a changed and violent man

MS-161: Ellen Wild Letters

The Ellen Wild Letters Collection contains 21 letters, primarily featuring letters written in 1862 to 1865. The majority of the letters come from 1862, but several also come from her time following the Civil War. The letters recount Mrs. Wild’s time during the Civil War, waiting for news from her husband as well as surviving on the home front. She recounts Edward Wild’s adventures during the war, his life in camp, and his numerous woundings and ailments. Mrs. Wild discusses her husband’s involvement in North Carolina as well as with the free African Americans. She briefly mentions the Battle of Gettysburg and defends Joseph Hooker’s actions at the Battle of Chancellorsville. She gives her opinion about how the Civil War could be ended; saying that all that was required was the defeat of Robert E. Lee. In 1864, she follows Edward, taking residence in Norfolk, Virginia while her husband reports to Benjamin Butler. Mrs. Wild comments on Butler’s actions during this period of the war, and makes short mention of the battles occurring around Petersburg and Richmond. She continues to write about Edward Wild’s service in the American Army, noting his actions in Virginia as well as his state of mind during the late stages of the war. Following the American Civil War, letters from 1891 and 1892 recount Mr. Wild’s life during Reconstruction in Massachusetts. The letters pick up just a few months after Edward’s death, with many recounting the decisions Mrs. Wild had to make for herself as well as the struggles of living without her husband. She must decide what to do with the body of her husband as well as locating and processing his will to receive his estate. The will had been lost in Canada, and her letters recount her finding it once more with the help of her friends and Edward’s wartime contemporaries. Throughout these years, she is very ill, weak and fragile in the aftermath of her husband’s death. She also is taking care of her cousin Katy Wild, who is slowly dying of Pancreas cancer. Mrs. Wild goes into detail in almost every letter about Katy’s condition, with the series of letters ending before Katy passes. This group of letters talks about life after the Civil War and the affects Mrs. Wild can still see from it, even from the state of Massachusetts. Many years are missing in the series, including everything from 1866 to 1890. Several letters from each year are missing as well, and there is no continual narrative throughout. There are no replies back to Ellen Wild, just the letters written by her but she manages to answer many of the questions raised in a previous letter. Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information about each collection in addition to inventories of their content. More information about our collections can be found on our website http://www.gettysburg.edu/special_collections/collections/.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/findingaidsall/1161/thumbnail.jp

Bodies and everyday practices in designed urban environments

Copyright @ 2010 The Finnish Society for Science and Technology Studies. This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below.In recent years, the centres of many towns and cities have been reshaped by urban design projects, but little attention has been paid to how these transformations are experienced everyday by users of the city. In other words: how do the users of urban centers, such as shoppers, cleaners, or workers, perceive these changes, as embodied subjects in specific material environments? This paper analyses how bodies in two intensely designed urban spaces–the shopping centre of Milton Keynes, a 1960s new town, and Bedford’s recently redeveloped historic town centre–are affected by elements of the built environment. ’Affected’ is a term borrowed from Latour (2004),and the paper works with, and elaborates, some of his and others’ work on how bodies are effectuated by other entities. Such Latourian work pays a great deal of attention to how bodies are affected by both human and non-human entities of many kinds, and we examine how certain aspects of the built environment in these two towns affect bodies in specific ways. However, we also emphasise the variability in this process, in particular that bodies seem unaware–or ambivalently aware–of many entities’ affordances.Economic and Social Research Counci

Becoming the Gothic Archive: From Digital Collection to Digital Humanities

The Gothic Archive is the flagship digital humanities project for the Marquette University library. The project was birthed from a simple digital collection, and through the partnership of faculty and librarians, was transformed into something more. The core tenets of digital collection creation were adhered to in order to create a solid foundation upon which to build the Archive. The expertise of both groups and communication were key in the evolution of the collection, and in discovering and highlighting the relationships between the objects. This case study reviews the steps Marquette took in creating the collection and taking it to the level of digital humanities project

Producing place atmospheres digitally: Architecture, digital visualisations practices and the experience economy

Computer generated images have become the common means for architects and developers to visualise and market future urban developments. This article examines within the context of the experience economy how these digital images aim to evoke and manipulate specific place atmospheres to emphasize the experiential qualities of new buildings and urban environments. In particular, we argue that CGIs are far from ‘just’ glossy representations but are a new form of visualising the urban that captures and markets particular embodied sensations. Drawing on a two year qualitative study of architects’ practices that worked on the Msheireb project, a large scale redevelopment project in Doha (Qatar), we examine how digital visualisation technology enables the virtual engineering of sensory experiences using a wide range of graphic effects. We show how these CGIs are laboriously materialised in order to depict and present specific sensory, embodied regimes and affective experiences to appeal to clients and consumers. Such development has two key implications. Firstly, we demonstrate the importance of digital technologies in framing the ‘expressive infrastructure’ (Thrift 2012) of the experience economy. Secondly, we argue that although the Msheireb CGIs open up a field of negotiation between producers and the Qatari client, and work quite hard at being culturally specific, they ultimately draw “on a Westnocentric literary and sensory palette” (Tolia-Kelly 2006) that highlights the continuing influence of colonial sensibilities in supposedly postcolonial urban processes.This research was funded by the ESRC (RES-062-23-0223)

Apparent magnitudes in an inhomogeneous universe: the global viewpoint

Apparent magnitudes are important for high precision cosmology. It is generally accepted that weak gravitational lensing does not affect the relationship between apparent magnitude and redshift. By considering metric perturbations it is shown that objects observed in an inhomogeneous universe have, on average, higher apparent magnitudes than those observed at the same redshift in a homogeneous universe.Comment: 2 pages, Latex, with aastex and emulateapj

Leak test system

System for quantitative determination of leak rates in large pressurized compartments is described. Method uses pressure reference cylinder placed in thermal contact with internal environment of compartment. Construction of equipment and details of operational procedure are reported. Illustration of equipment is included