Division and Diversity in American Literature: Post-Civil War to Present

In this representation of American literature, we convey the varied contributions of authors from three major literary movements following the Civil War: realism, modernism, and postmodernism were important causal forces behind the growth of American culture. Within these movements are authors: the individual forces of nature, rulebreakers, and liberators that represent our nation’s artistic spirit at its finest. We distribute these three eras as a triptych chronology. Our visual representations describe influential authors and their innovations. We display the breadth of peoples who guided this country’s creative development, and appreciate the impressions of their works upon present and historic American literature. Through rigorous study, we have curated authors who most represent the diversity, bravery, and skill with which American literature has become synonymous. Our project is a collaborative class effort of 22 undergraduate students studying American literature and asking what the canon of the field looks like when students write the story. We are eager to share it with our peers

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7