The Most Important Scholarly Work : Reflections on Twenty Years of Change in Historical Editing

Twenty years ago, at the first annual meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing in Princeton, New Jersey, Arthur Link stated that documentary editing is the most important scholarly work being done in the United States, and, if well done, it will be the most enduring. Last year, the distinguished historian Edmund S. Morgan echoed Link when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the 154 volumes produced by the Founding Fathers editions stand as the single most important achievement of American historical scholarship in this century. Despite this high praise, Link\u27s and Morgan\u27s opinions are not universally held. The 14 August 1998 issue of the Chronicle o/Higher Education carried a story on Ira Berlin, founder of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, that noted Mr. Berlin is widely respected, but documentary editing doesn\u27t have quite the cachet of traditional research. Gore Vidal, in the 20 April 1998 issue of The Nation, harshly questioned C. Vann Woodward\u27s Pulitzer Prize for his edition of Mary Chesnut\u27s diary as being inappropriate since the edition is hardly history writing. Thus, twenty years after the founding of the ADE, there still remains a diversity of opinion about the value and importance of documentary editing. These varying evaluations call for an assessment of the changes in historical editing during the past two decades. I intend to look back on change in three areas of our work: documentary editing as a craft, as a profession, and as a legacy for the future

War Stories: Review of \u3ci\u3eHome Front Soldier: The Story of a GI and His Italian American Family During World War II\u3c/i\u3e. Richard Aquila, ed.

One of the joys of documentary editing is the opportunity to watch stories unfold in the documents. Thus, it is not surprising to see academic and trade presses publishing works aimed at a popular audience that rely heavily on historical texts. In the past several decades, documentary editors have done a remarkable job in creating standards, although most of their energies have focused on scholarly editions. Those efforts have been less successful in reaching those who prepare popular editions. Home Front Soldier is a good example of a work that effectively uses documents to tell a story, yet has not benefited from the application of modern editorial standards. Boydston Prize for 199

President’s Letter: Looking Backward, Looking Forward

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Association for Documentary Editing, and it is a time to both celebrate our past and look forward to new directions. I recently took a look at the first volumes of The ADE Newsletter (predecessor of Documentary Editing) to refresh my memory of the ADE’s first annual meeting. I was struck by how much has changed over the past three decades, as well as by how much has stayed the same

Frequent Beneficial Mutations during Single-Colony Serial Transfer of Streptococcus pneumoniae

The appearance of new mutations within a population provides the raw material for evolution. The consistent decline in fitness observed in classical mutation accumulation studies has provided support for the long-held view that deleterious mutations are more common than beneficial mutations. Here we present results of a study using a mutation accumulation design with the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae in which the fitness of the derived populations increased. This rise in fitness was associated specifically with adaptation to survival during brief stationary phase periods between single-colony population bottlenecks. To understand better the population dynamics behind this unanticipated adaptation, we developed a maximum likelihood model describing the processes of mutation and stationary-phase selection in the context of frequent population bottlenecks. Using this model, we estimate that the rate of beneficial mutations may be as high as 4.8×10−4 events per genome for each time interval corresponding to the pneumococcal generation time. This rate is several orders of magnitude higher than earlier estimates of beneficial mutation rates in bacteria but supports recent results obtained through the propagation of small populations of Escherichia coli. Our findings indicate that beneficial mutations may be relatively frequent in bacteria and suggest that in S. pneumoniae, which develops natural competence for transformation, a steady supply of such mutations may be available for sampling by recombination

Regional Climate Trends and Scenarios for the U.S. National Climate Assessment Part 4. Climate of the U.S. Great Plains

This document is one of series of regional climate descriptions designed to provide input that can be used in the development of the National Climate Assessment (NCA). As part of a sustained assessment approach, it is intended that these documents will be updated as new and well-vetted model results are available and as new climate scenario needs become clear. It is also hoped that these documents (and associated data and resources) are of direct benefit to decision makers and communities seeking to use this information in developing adaptation plans. There are nine reports in this series, one each for eight regions defined by the NCA, and one for the contiguous U.S. The eight NCA regions are the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Great Plains, Northwest, Southwest, Alaska, and Hawai‘i/Pacific Islands. These documents include a description of the observed historical climate conditions for each region and a set of climate scenarios as plausible futures – these components are described in more detail below. While the datasets and simulations in these regional climate documents are not, by themselves, new, (they have been previously published in various sources), these documents represent a more complete and targeted synthesis of historical and plausible future climate conditions around the specific regions of the NCA. There are two components of these descriptions. One component is a description of the historical climate conditions in the region. The other component is a description of the climate conditions associated with two future pathways of greenhouse gas emissions

Wildfire, climate, and perceptions in northeast Oregon

Wildfire poses a rising threat in the western USA, fueled by synergies between historical fire suppression, changing land use, insects and disease, and shifts toward a drier, warmer climate. The rugged landscapes of northeast Oregon, with their historically forest- and resource-based economies, have been one of the areas affected. A 2011 survey found area residents highly concerned about fire and insect threats, but not about climate change. In 2014 we conducted a second survey that, to explore this apparent disconnect, included questions about past and future summertime (fire season) temperatures. Although regional temperatures have warmed in recent decades at twice the global rate, accompanied by increasing dryness and fire risks, the warming itself is recognized by only 40 % of our respondents. Awareness of recent warming proves unrelated to individual characteristics that might indicate experience on the land: old-timer versus newcomer status, year-round versus seasonal residence, and ownership of forested land. Perceptions of past warming and expectations of future warming are more common among younger respondents and less common among Tea Party supporters. The best-educated partisans stand farthest apart. Perceptions about local temperatures that are important for adaptation planning thus follow ideological patterns similar to beliefs about global climate change

Forest Views: Shifting Attitudes Toward the Environment in Northeast Oregon

This brief reports on a telephone survey conducted in fall 2014 as part of the ongoing Communities and Forests in Oregon (CAFOR) project. CAFOR focuses on seven counties in the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon (Baker, Crook, Grant, Umatilla, Union, Wallowa, and Wheeler), where the landscape and local livelihoods are changing in interconnected ways. In an effort to inform policy development around natural resource management, the study seeks to understand how public perceptions of climate change and forest management intersect. Authors Angela Boag, Joel Hartter, Lawrence Hamilton, Forrest Stevens, Mark Ducey, Michael Palace, Nils Christoffersen, and Paul Oester report that 65 percent of those surveyed believe that forests are less healthy than they were twenty years ago. Approximately half of residents support increased user fees to improve forest health on federal land, and a majority believes that climate change is happening, although opinion is split between those who believe it is human-caused and those who believe it is caused by natural forces. The authors conclude that innovative economic and policy solutions are needed across the Inland West to help people and forests regain a strong and productive relationship that both supports livelihoods and sustains working landscapes

The differential contributions of teen drinking homophily to new and existing friendships: An empirical assessment of assortative and proximity selection mechanisms

Alcohol use is pervasive in adolescence. Though most research is concerned with how friends influence drinking, alcohol is also important for connecting teens to one another. Prior studies have not distinguished between new friendship creation, and existing friendship durability, however. We argue that accounting for distinctions in creation–durability processes is critical for understanding the selection mechanisms drawing drinkers into homophilous friendships, and the social integration that results. In order to address these issues, we applied stochastic actor based models of network dynamics to National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data. Adolescents only modestly prefer new friendships with others who drinker similarly, but greatly prefer friends who indirectly connect them to homophilous drinkers. These indirect homophilous drinker relationships are shorter lived, however, and suggest that drinking is a social focus that connects adolescents via proximity, rather than assortativity. These findings suggest that drinking leads to more situational and superficial social integration