"Civil War Cinema in New Deal America"

During the early decades of the 20th century, Hollywood filmmakers both shaped and reflected the popular understanding of the Confederacy, slavery, and Abraham Lincoln.Accepted manuscrip

Point/Counterpoint: Anchoring Historical Memory

Wednesday, November 19, 2014 saw citizens and students of Gettysburg crowd into the Majestic Theater for the fifty-third annual Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture. The audience listened attentively as Dr. Nina Silber, a renowned historian of the American Civil War, explored the nuanced application of the memory of Abraham Lincoln during the 1930s and ‘40s, especially as associated with the figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. [excerpt

An ordinal approach to the measurement of inequality in asset ownership: methodology and an application to Mexican data.

Asset indices based on durable goods ownership and housing characteristics are widely used to proxy wealth when income or expenditure data are not available. In this paper, we propose an ordinal approach to using data on assets when estimating the wealth of a household (or individual). Using Correspondence Analysis, we derive a ranking of the correlations between the various assets and the first factor, a latent variable assumed to represent the standard of living. We then use this correlation ranking of the assets to derive indices of ordinal inequality that have been recently proposed in the literature. We also use the information on the proportion of individuals holding each type of assets to derive again ordinal measures of inequality in asset ownership. Our empirical analysis, based on data covering the various states of Mexico in 2000 and 2010, shows that the correlation between measures of ordinal inequality in asset ownership derived from correspondence analysis and traditional Gini indices of household income is high, and even higher than that between these Gini indices and ordinal inequality indices based on the percentage ownership of the different assets.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Reunion and reconciliation, reviewed and reconsidered

At the close of the Civil War in 1865, many Americans began talking about “reunion” and “reunification,” even “healing” and “reconciliation,” although the precise meaning of those words would remain elusive. From 1865 down to the present day, these sentiments have reverberated in American culture and American politics, and they sounded at gatherings of Union and Confederate veterans and then of their descendants, in the pages of newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the speeches of presidents and politicians, and in countless films and theatrical productions that imagined northern and southern men joining hands in unity and fraternal love. Two years after the surrender at Appomattox, the former abolitionist Gerrit Smith told of his longing “for a heart-union between the North and the South.” Seventy-one years later, in a final gathering of ancient soldiers on the once-blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated an Eternal Light Peace Memorial and honored the “joint and precious heritage” that Gettysburg had come to symbolize. Speaking in July 1938 to the “men who wore the blue and men who wore the gray,” fdr praised all the soldiers, “not asking under which flag they fought then—thankful that they stand together under one flag now.” Roosevelt’s tribute to a peace-loving and unified America, coming at this moment when the world was poised on the brink of an even more catastrophic war, may have offered its own small measure of comfort to anxious Americans.Accepted manuscrip

Muir String Quartet, April 20, 2010

This is the concert program of the Muir String Quartet performance on Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 7:00 p.m., at the Metcalf Trustee Center, 1 Silber Way, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were Quartet in C Minor, op. 18, No. 4, Quartet in F Major, op. 135, and Quartet in E Minor, op. 59, No. 2 by Ludwig van Beethoven. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Student faculty forum: Lessons from Charlottesville

Boston University Student Faculty Forum: Lessons from Charlottesville, large panel discussion that happens monthly based on a major topic in the news. Panelists included: Professor Walter Fluker (School of Theology), Professor Nina Silber (College of Arts & Sciences), Professor Spencer Piston (College of Arts & Sciences), Professor Jessica Stern (Pardee School of Global Studies) and Dr. Virginia Sapiro (College of Arts & Sciences).Boston University Howard Thurman Center for Common Groun

Muir String Quartet, March 29, 2011

This is the concert program of the Muir String Quartet performance on Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 8:00 p.m., at the Metcalf Trustee Center, 1 Silber Way, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were Quartet in G major, op. 77 No. 1 by Franz Joseph Haydn, Five Pieces for String Quartet by Erwin Schulhoff, and Quartet in A-flat major, op. 105 by Antonín Dvořák. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Muir String Quartet, September 11, 2009

This is the concert program of the Muir String Quartet performance on Friday, September 11, 2009 at 7:30 p.m., at the Metcalf Trustee Ballroom, 1 Silber Way, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were String Quartet in B-Flat Major, op. 18 no. 6, String Quartet in F Minor, op. 95, "Serioso", and String Quartet in A Minor, op. 132 by Ludwig van Beethoven. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Two classes of generalized deprivation indexes

The paper uses two particular formulations of the Gini index to derive two different relative deprivation measures. We then generalize the formulation of these measures following Donaldson and Weymark (1980) and Berrebi and Silber (1985) and show how these generalizations can be considered as two different classes of indexes. An example illustrates how the use of the two classes of indexes can lead to different results in empirical applications.Relative deprivation, inequality.

Two Classes of Generalized Deprivation Indexes

The paper uses two particular formulations of the Gini index to derive two different relative deprivation measures. We then generalize the formulation of these measures following Donaldson and Weymark (1980) and Berrebi and Silber (1985) and show how these generalizations can be considered as two different classes of indexes. An example illustrates how the use of the two classes of indexes can lead to different results in empirical applications.Gini, Relative Deprivations, Indexes