Or this whole affair is a failure : a special treasury agent\u27s observations of the Port Royal Experiment, Port Royal, South Carolina, April to May, 1862

This thesis covers two critical months (April and May, 1862) during the Port Royal Experiment, which took place during the Civil War in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. This abolitionist-influenced experiment has been enriched by numerous primary sources from a range of people: military officials, General Superintendents of the Treasury, abolitionists and educators. However, this topic has been missing one important source: Special Treasury Agents. These men implemented the orders of various groups involved with the Experiment. The unpublished papers of one such agent, James Severance, provides a new depth in Port Royal analysis. This firsthand account shows the results of conflicting orders among the ex-slaves and the Agents themselves, something not accounted for from previous historians. The Agents were exhausting and vilifying themselves by associating themselves to antebellum slave drivers, which led some to want to leave the Experiment. At the same time the ex-slaves resisted efforts by these groups to plant cotton and wanted consistency as to whether they were free or not. They were told they were free, but were both told later they really were not free and treated poorly in a pseudo-slavery condition brought by the Union occupation of the Sea Islands. Tragically, they also reveal that the Experiment was on the road to what could be a violent pre-mature conclusion within a couple of months after it began if drastic changes did not take place and fast. Fortunately, the Experiment did not fail because changes as consolidating management. Emphasis on cotton lessened, and the Emancipation Proclamation officially made the Sea Islands slaves freemen took place quickly. However, James Severance is the only primary source to reveal such a reality in the 1862

Religion, Senses, and Remembrance: Brooklyn’s Sumter Club in Postbellum Charleston, S.C.

Civil War historians are slowly coming to realize the need to explicitly analyze the senses of those who lived in, and survived, the Civil War era. Although vision has reigned as the “supreme” sense, the nonvisual senses, with the help of historians of the senses, are becoming just as important to Civil War research. However, scholars are still unraveling the lived experiences of Civil War Era Americans and the perceptions and meanings these Americans gave to those experiences, with Northerners receiving comparatively little attention. To understand the world of antebellum and Civil War Americans, we should take them at their word and on their own terms. There is general agreement that these Americans were not just more religious than us but applied their religious upbringing to understand the world around them differently. To better understand how Americans perceived their war, we must discover how the senses worked with their religion. This study examines a group of people from Brooklyn, New York who went on to form the Sumter Club. This is the first study to combine the study of Civil War Era religion and Sensory History. Drawing from their antebellum abolitionist activities, led by their reverend, Henry Ward Beecher, and carefully studying their account of the 1865 trip, we begin to see how they used religion to explain their sensorial experiences. Religion was, for this group, one of the most important references they could rely on to better understand the sensations of their world and their trip to Fort Sumter

Investor Reaction to Disclosure of Past Performance and Future Plans

Firms dedicate large portions of financial disclosures to updating and discussing their strategy and plans for the future, and investors often evaluate those plans after learning how the firm performed in the current period. I examine how current-period performance shapes investors’ beliefs about the appropriateness of managerial optimism which, in turn, affects their evaluation of firms that focus on either challenges or opportunities in future-oriented disclosures. I conduct three experiments that test my process theory. I hypothesize and find that a firm’s current-period performance shapes investors’ beliefs about whether managers can best achieve success by being more or less optimistic about the future. When a firm is performing poorly, investors believe that managers can best achieve success by being more optimistic and less realistic about the future, and therefore invest more if the firm focuses on opportunities rather than challenges in future-oriented disclosures. When a firm is performing well, on the other hand, investors believe that managers can best achieve success by being more realistic and less optimistic about the future, and therefore invest more if the firm focuses on challenges rather than opportunities. These results challenge the notion that investors always react positively (negatively) to disclosures that focus on opportunities (challenges). Instead, these results suggest circumstances in which managers can benefit by focusing on challenges, in order to signal a more realistic and less optimistic outlook about the future

Photocatalytic oxidation of arsenic(III): Evidence of hydroxyl radicals

10.1021/es0489238Environmental Science and Technology3961827-1834ESTH