News, intelligence and 'little lies' : rumours between the Cherokees and the British 1740-1785

Rumour and information are one of the most fundamental ways in which people engage with one another. Rumours can change the way that individuals and groups see each other and the actions that they take. Sociologists and anthropologists have long used rumour as a way to explore the experiences of their subjects. Historians of early America have, in recent years, begun to make use of rumour as a way of examining the, often hidden, world of interactions between American Indians and white Europeans. This thesis will expand upon this work by exploring the changing role of rumour within an intercultural relationship over several decades. This thesis will focus on rumour in the relationship between the Cherokee Nation and the colonists of the British Empire. It will explore the ways that rumour influenced these interactions and the impact of the rapidly changing backcountry environment of the latter eighteenth century, both on rumour and on the wider Cherokee- British relationship. This thesis will argue that rumour shifted in the course of the eighteenth century from being a diplomatic tool which could be used- either to create further panic and confusion or to calm and smooth over problems- to an uncontrollable force which would deepen and exacerbate the divisions between Cherokees and the British. Rumour played an important role in politics and society in the eighteenth century backcountry and its changing function offers a way to better understand the shifting currents of life in early America

New results on DEPFET pixel detectors for radiation imaging and high energy particle detection

DEPFET pixel detectors are unique devices in terms of energy and spatial resolution because very low noise operation can be obtained (ENC = 2.2e - at room temperature) by implementing the amplifying transistor in the pixel cell itself. Full DEPFET pixel matrices have been built and operated for autoradiographical imaging with imaging resolutions of 4.3 ± 0.8 μm at 22 keV. For applications in low energy X-ray astronomy the high energy resolution of DEPFET detectors is attractive. For particle physics, DEPFET pixels are interesting as low mass detectors with high spatial resolution. For a linear collider detector the readout must be very fast. New readout chips have been designed and produced for the development of a DEPFET module for a pixel detector at the proposed TESLA collider, containing 520 × 4000 pixels, with 50 MHz line rate and 25 kHz frame rate. The circuitry contains current memory cells and current hit scanners for fast pedestal subtraction and sparsified readout. The imaging performance of DEPFET devices as well as present achievements toward a DEPFET vertex detector for a linear collider are presented