While teaching experimental psychology, I did experiments aimed at finding ways to improve student vocabularies. Measurements I made showed that students who did well in school had vocabularies superior to the average student. Since superior vocabulary growth is not tied to any special trait, I wanted to find a method of vocabulary instruction that was effective, efficient, and would appeal to all students. Those experiments, three of which were published, indicated that the most effective way to teach vocabulary is to combine definitional learning with learning through context.
Did Confederate armies attack too often for their own good during the Civil War? Was the relentless, sometimes costly effort to preserve territory a blunder? These questions about Confederate strategy have dogged historians since Appomattox. Many have come to believe that the South might have won the Civil War if it had only avoided head-on battles, conducted an aggressive guerrilla campaign, and manoeuvred across wide swaths of territory. This volume offers a consideration of this widely-held theory.
The Upper South—Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia—was the scene of the most destructive war ever fought on American soil. Contending armies swept across the region from the outset of the Civil War until its end, marking their passage at Pea Ridge, Shiloh, Perryville, and Manassas. Alongside this much-studied conflict, the Confederacy also waged an irregular war, based on nineteenth-century principles of unconventional warfare. In The Uncivil War, Robert R. Mackey outlines the Southern strategy of waging war across an entire region, measures the Northern response, and explains the outcome. Complex military issues shaped both the Confederate irregular war and the Union response. Through detailed accounts of Rebel guerrilla, partisan, and raider activities, Mackey strips away romanticized notions of how the “shadow war” was fought, proving instead that irregular warfare was an integral part of Confederate strategy.
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, federal officials captured, imprisoned, and indicted Jefferson Davis for treason. If found guilty, the former Confederate president faced execution for his role in levying war against the United States. Although the federal government pursued the charges for over four years, the case never went to trial. In this comprehensive analysis of the saga, Treason on Trial, Robert Icenhauer-Ramirez suggests that while national politics played a role in the trial’s direction, the actions of lesser-known individuals ultimately resulted in the failure to convict Davis. Early on, two primary factions argued against trying the case. Influential northerners dreaded the prospect of a public trial, fearing it would reopen the wounds of the war and make a martyr of Davis. Conversely, white southerners pointed to the treatment and prosecution of Davis as vindictive on the part of the federal government. Moreover, they maintained, the right to secede from the Union remained within the bounds of the law, effectively linking the treason charge against Davis with the constitutionality of secession. While Icenhauer-Ramirez agrees that politics played a role in the case, he suggests that focusing exclusively on that aspect obscures the importance of the participants. In the United States of America v. Jefferson Davis, preeminent lawyers represented both parties. According to Icenhauer-Ramirez, Lucius H. Chandler, the local prosecuting attorney, lacked the skill and temperament necessary to put the case on a footing that would lead to trial. In addition, Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase had little desire to preside over the divisive case and intentionally stymied the prosecution’s efforts. The deft analysis in Treason on Trial illustrates how complications caused by Chandler and Chase led to a three-year delay and, eventually, to the dismissal of the case in 1868, when President Andrew Johnson granted blanket amnesty to those who participated in the armed rebellion.
The American Civil War was without doubt the defining event in the history of the United States. This up-to-date analyisis of a critical period goes beyond the origins, course and consequences of the Civil War to bring in other important themes such as racial conflict, gender relations, religion, the popular memory and state formation.
The premier secessionist of antebellum Mississippi, John A. Quitman was one of the half-dozen or so most prominent radicals in the entire South. In this full-length biography, Robert E. May takes issue with the recent tendency to portray secessionists as rabble-rousing, maladjusted outsiders bent on the glories of separate nationhood. May reveals Quitman to have been an ambitious but relatively stable insider who reluctantly advocated secession because of a despondency over slavery’s long-range future in the Union and a related conviction that northerners no longer respected southern claims to equality as American citizens. A fervent disciple of South Carolina “radical” John C. Calhoun’s nullification theories, Quitman also gained notoriety as his region’s most strident slavery imperialist. He articulated the case for new slaver territory, participated in the Texas Revolution, won national acclaim as a volunteer general in the Mexican War, and organized a private military—or “filibustering”—expedition with the intent of liberating Cuba from Spanish rule and making the island a new slave state. In 1850, while governor of Mississippi during the California crisis, Quitman wielded his influence in a vain attempt to induce Mississippi secession. Later, in Congress, he marked out an extreme southern position on Kansas. Mississippi’s most vehement “fire-eater,” Quitman played a significant role in the North-South estrangement that led to the American Civil War. The first critical biography of this important figure, May’s study sheds light on such current historical controversies as whether antebellum southerners were peculiarly militaristic or “antibourgeois” and helps illuminate the slave-master relations, mobility, intraregional class and geographic friction, partisan politics, and family customs of the Old South.
Functional organic and organometallic polymers and materials have gained much attention as versatile materials for energy interconversions and optoelectronic/photonic applications, including electrical energy generation in photovoltaic cells and light generation in organic light-emitting diodes, as they offer a low cost, light weight and simple option for device fabrication.Molecular Design and Applications of Photofunctional Polymers and Materials, presents a critical perspective of the current field, with emphasis on fundamental concepts and current applications in optoelectronics, electronics and nanotechnology. The book also covers photochemically degradable polymers, electrochromic and photochromic materials, biosensing and bioimaging materials, and low- and high-refractive index materials.With contributions from leading experts in the field, this timely book will provide a valuable contribution to the community enabling new synthetic methods to be developed to produce new materials with specific functional roles.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.