MS – 211: Earman Family Letters from WWII

The collection contains 389 letters, 15 V-mail , and 166 additional items addressed to members of the Earman family home. The majority of the correspondence is sent from Ernest and Randolph to their mother, Mrs. Earman. Because the Earman brothers did not see much direct combat, the bulk of their letters are updates on health and daily activities, or candid observations on the war, the Army, the weather, and women. The rest of the collection includes letters addressed to the Earman family from distant or extended family, close friends, and Ernest’s foreign and domestic girlfriends. Many of the letters are (legibly) handwritten, though some were typed. While the majority of the items are well–preserved inside their original envelopes, eleven letters are without envelopes and seven envelopes are without accompanying letters; these items are marked as “envelope only” or “letter only.” Many envelopes contain a variety of printed ephemera or artifacts like clippings, programs, advertisements, and photographs. There were 31 photographs/ephemera which were not enclosed in any specific letter or envelope; these loose items have been grouped together in Series VIII (see description). There are brief gaps in correspondence which can be attributed to Army furloughs or overseas travel. Because some of the correspondence from Ernest, Randolph, and Granville (particularly the V–mail) was written under censorship, details about military location or movements have been omitted or physically removed from the letters. Historians researching WWII communication and censorship may be interested in the Vmail, telegrams, or letters from the soldiers immediately after they arrived overseas. The collection’s female writers offer a helpful gendered perspective of the war, both on the home–front and abroad. Jo Bush’s letters detail the life and training of a Cadet Nurse. Mrs. (Dorothy) Randolph Earman’s letters express the concerns of a wife and mother trying to manage a household while worrying about the absence of her husband. The letters from Ernest’s foreign (often romantic) acquaintances reveal how French and German women saw America, Americans, and WWII. Arguably the collection’s greatest strength is its view into the personal lives and relationships of U.S. soldiers while overseas. While he entertained multiple romantic interests during his time as a soldier, Ernest struck up a serious relationship in France with Catherine Seux, whom he hoped to marry one day after returning home. As time passed and marriage proved increasingly unlikely, Catherine’s progressively dejected letters—which end quite abruptly in Aug. 1946—give voice to foreign women who, charmed by American soldiers, hoped to marry and come to the United States but were met instead with cultural and economic setbacks. Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information about each collection in addition to inventories of their content. More information about our collections can be found on our website http://www.gettysburg.edu/special_collections/collections/.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/findingaidsall/1184/thumbnail.jp

A Variational Tate Conjecture in crystalline cohomology

Given a smooth, proper family of varieties in characteristic $p>0$, and a cycle $z$ on a fibre of the family, we formulate a Variational Tate Conjecture characterising, in terms of the crystalline cycle class of $z$, whether $z$ extends cohomologically to the entire family. This is a characteristic $p$ analogue of Grothendieck's Variational Hodge Conjecture. We prove the conjecture for divisors, and an infinitesimal variant of the conjecture for cycles of higher codimension. This can be used to reduce the $\ell$-adic Tate conjecture for divisors over finite fields to the case of surfaces.Comment: The former Section 3.3, containing a sketched treatment of line bundles with Q_p-coefficients, has been removed as an error was found. This affects the validity of none of the main results, but necessitates giving a different proof of the application to the Tate Conjecture. Other minor change

Climate-Related Floral and Vegetative Size Variation in Leptosiphon androsaceus (Polemoniaceae)

Phenotypic plasticity in plants is a vital adaptive response to changing environmental conditions. Floral and vegetative morphology often varies as biotic and abiotic factors vary. Variation is the basis of evolution, and natural selection, acting on trait variation, can lead to speciation. For this study, floral and vegetative character traits of false babystars (Leptosiphon androsaceus, Polemoniaceae) were analyzed within four populations at Henry W. Coe State Park in 2011. Traits were measured to assess changes in size along a moisture availability gradient. Stable carbon isotope ratio samples were collected to measure integrated water-use efficiency (WUE) as it related to precipitation and floral size. Sizes of floral and vegetative characters varied significantly between the drier and wetter regions. Floral and vegetative character sizes for L. androsaceus decreased from the wetter to the drier region. The ratio of floral area/leaf area increased as precipitation decreased, suggesting that leaves may have incurred a physiological cost from floral growth within the drier region. A difference in WUE, as it related to trait size and precipitation, was not found for this study year. These results provide evidence that floral and vegetative characters of L. androsaceus vary in size in response to water-limiting conditions