Seafarers, seafaring, and occupational identity : 'Jack Tar' and its contemporary uses in Britain c.1815-1914

This is a paper about how maritime workers were perceived in the past. In 1968, in a very influential paper, the American historian Jesse Lemisch lamented that ‘Maritime history, as it has been written, has had little to do with the common seaman.’ (1) In prefacing his paper with a description of the archetypal sailor or ‘Jack Tar’, Lemisch argued that, as historians, ‘surely we can do better than these stereotypes’. At that time, this was an important proposition. Others seem to have agreed, for with the passage of time a lot of work has been done to understand the seafarer, though not necessarily as a direct response to Lemisch’s challenge. Space does not permit a discussion of the relevant literature, but without doubt a more rounded – if not fully formed – historical view of seafarers has resulted. (1)Jesse Lemisch, ‘Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 25/3 (1968), 371-407, at 372

Remembering Poland: The Ethics of Cultural Histories

Art Spiegelman\u27s Maus, Cynthia Ozick\u27s The Shawl, and Eva Hoffman\u27s Lost in Translation and Exit into History are recent American texts that draw upon cultural histories of Poland to launch their narratives. Each text confronts and reconstructs fragments of twentieth-century Poland at the interactive sites of collective culture and personal memory. By focusing on the contested relationship between Poles and Jews before, during, and after World War II, these texts dredge up the ghosts of centuries-long ethnic animosities. In the post-Cold War era, wherein Eastern Europe struggles to redefine itself, such texts have a formative influence in re-mapping the future of national identities

A Wavering Prayer

Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Sestina Imitation; Sarah Gorski\u27s A Wavering Prayer

Hubbard Model with Inter-Site Kinetic Correlations

We introduced the inter-site electron-electron correlation to the Hubbard III approximation. This correlation was excluded in the Hubbard III approximation and also in the equivalent coherent potential approximation. Including it brings two spin dependent effects: the bandwidth correction and the bandshift correction, which both stimulate the ferromagnetic ground state. The bandshift correction factor causes an exchange splitting between the spin-up and spin-down spectrum, and its role is similar to the exchange interaction in the classic Stoner model. The spin dependent bandwidth correction lowers the kinetic energy of electrons by decreasing the majority spin bandwidth for some electron occupations with respect to the minority spin bandwidth. In certain conditions it can lead to ferromagnetic alignment. A gain in the kinetic energy achieved in this way is the opposite extreme to the effect of a gain in potential energy due to exchange splitting. The bandshift factor is a dominant force behind the ferromagnetism. The influence of the bandwidth factor is too weak to create ferromagnetism and the only result is the correction to the classic coherent potential approximation in favor of ferromagnetism.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure