The Ku Klux Klan was reestablished in Atlanta in 1915, barely a week before the Atlanta premiere of The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith's paean to the original Klan. While this link between ...Griffith's film and the Klan has been widely acknowledged, Tom Rice explores the little-known relationship between the Klan's success and its use of film and media in the interwar years when the image, function, and moral rectitude of the Klan was contested on the national stage. By examining rich archival materials including a series of films produced by the Klan and a wealth of documents, newspaper clippings, and manuals, Rice uncovers the fraught history of the Klan as a local force that manipulated the American film industry to extend its reach across the country. White Robes, Silver Screens highlights the ways in which the Klan used, produced, and protested against film in order to recruit members, generate publicity, and define its role within American society.
The Ku Klux Klan has peaked three times in American history: after the Civil War, around the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and in the 1920s, when the Klan spread farthest and fastest. Recruiting ...millions of members even in non-Southern states, the Klan's nationalist insurgency burst into mainstream politics. Almost one hundred years later, the pent-up anger of white Americans left behind by a changing economy has once again directed itself at immigrants and cultural outsiders and roiled a presidential election. InThe Politics of Losing, Rory McVeigh and Kevin Estep trace the parallels between the 1920s Klan and today's right-wing backlash, identifying the conditions that allow white nationalism to emerge from the shadows. White middle-class Protestant Americans in the 1920s found themselves stranded by an economy that was increasingly industrialized and fueled by immigrant labor. Mirroring the Klan's earlier tactics, Donald Trump delivered a message that mingled economic populism with deep cultural resentments. McVeigh and Estep present a sociological analysis of the Klan's outbreaks that goes beyond Trump the individual to show how his rise to power was made possible by a convergence of circumstances. White Americans' experience of declining privilege and perceptions of lost power can trigger a political backlash that overtly asserts white-nationalist goals.The Politics of Losingoffers a rigorous and lucid explanation for a recurrent phenomenon in American history, with important lessons about the origins of our alarming political climate.
ABSTRACT
The fast variability observed in the X-ray emission from black hole binaries has a very complex phenomenology, but offers the possibility to investigate directly the properties of the inner ...accretion flow. In particular, type-B oscillations in the 2–8 Hz range, observed in the soft-intermediate state, have been associated with the emission from a relativistic jet. We present the results of the timing and spectral analysis of a set of observations of the bright transient MAXI J1348−630 made with the NICER (Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer) telescope. The observations are in the brightest part of the outburst and all feature a strong type-B quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) at ∼4.5 Hz. We compute the energy dependence of the fractional rms and the phase lags at the QPO frequency, obtaining high signal-to-noise data and sampling for the first time at energies below 2 keV. The fractional rms decreases from more than 10 per cent at 9 keV to 0.6 per cent at 1.5 keV, and is constant below that energy. Taking the 2–3 keV band as reference, photons at all energies show a hard lag, increasing with the distance from the reference band. The behaviour below 2 keV has never been observed before, due to the higher energy bandpass of previous timing instruments. The energy spectrum can be fitted with a standard model for this state, consisting of a thin disc component and a harder power law, plus an emission line between 6 and 7 keV. We discuss the results, concentrating on the phase lags, and show that they can be interpreted within a Comptonization model.
ABSTRACT
The inverse Compton process by which soft photons are up-scattered by hot electrons in a corona plays a fundamental role in shaping the X-ray spectra of black hole (BH) low-mass X-ray ...binaries (LMXBs), particularly in the hard and hard-intermediate states. In these states, the power-density spectra of these sources typically show Type-C low-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs). Although several models have been proposed to explain the dynamical origin of their frequency, only a few of those models predict the spectral-timing radiative properties of the QPOs. Here, we study the physical and geometrical properties of the corona of the BH-LMXB GRS 1915+105 based on a large sample of observations available in the RXTE archive. We use a recently developed spectral-timing Comptonization model to fit simultaneously the energy-dependent fractional rms amplitude and phase-lag spectra of the Type-C QPO in 398 observations. For this, we include spectral information gathered from fitting a Comptonization model to the corresponding time-averaged spectra. We analyse the dependence of the physical and geometrical properties of the corona upon the QPO frequency and spectral state of the source, the latter characterized by the hardness ratio. We find consistent trends in the evolution of the corona size, temperature, and feedback (the fraction of the corona photons that impinge back on to the disc) that persist for roughly 15 yr. By correlating our observations with simultaneous radio-monitoring of the source at 15 GHz, we propose a scenario in which the disc–corona interactions connect with the launching mechanism of the radio jet in this source.
ABSTRACT
Quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) are often present in the X-ray flux from accreting stellar-mass black holes (BHs). If they are due to relativistic (Lense–Thirring) precession of an inner ...accretion flow which is misaligned with the disc, the iron emission line caused by irradiation of the disc by the inner flow will rock systematically between red and blue shifted during each QPO cycle. Here, we conduct phase-resolved spectroscopy of an ∼2.2 Hz type-C QPO from the BH X-ray binary GRS 1915+105, observed simultaneously with NICER and NuSTAR. We apply a tomographic model in order to constrain the QPO phase-dependent illumination profile of the disc. We detect the predicted QPO phase-dependent shifts of the iron line centroid energy, with our best fit featuring an asymmetric illumination profile (>2σ confidence). The observed line energy shifts can alternatively be explained by the spiral density waves of the accretion-ejection instability model. However, we additionally measure a significant (>3σ) modulation in reflection fraction, strongly favouring a geometric QPO origin. We infer that the disc is misaligned with previously observed jet ejections, which is consistent with the model of a truncated disc with an inner precessing hot flow. However, our inferred disc inner radius is small (rin ∼ 1.4 GM/c2). For this disc inner radius, Lense–Thirring precession cannot reproduce the observed QPO frequency. In fact, this disc inner radius is incompatible with the predictions of all well-studied QPO models in the literature.
Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne
Péralte is the first US scholarly examination of the
politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who fought
against the US military occupation ...of Haiti. The occupation lasted
close to two decades, from 1915-1934. Alexis argues for the
importance of documenting resistance while exploring the
occupation's mechanics and its imperialism. She takes us to Haiti,
exploring the sites of what she labels as resistance zones,
including Péralte's hometown of Hinche and the nation's large port
areas--Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien. Alexis offers a new reading
of U.S. military archival sources that record Haitian protests as
banditry. Haiti Fights Back illuminates how Péralte
launched a political movement, and meticulously captures how
Haitian women and men resisted occupation through silence, military
battles, and writings. She locates and assembles rare, multilingual
primary sources from traditional repositories, living archives
(oral stories), and artistic representations in Haiti and the
United States. The interdisciplinary work draws on legislation,
cacos' letters, newspapers, and murals, offering a unique
examination of Péralte's life (1885-1919) and the significance of
his legacy through the twenty-first century. Haiti Fights
Back offers a new approach to the study of the U.S. invasion
of the Americas by chronicling how Caribbean people fought back.
The long and rich correspondence between the two leading historians of religions Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) and Morton Smith (1915-1991) provides important insights on their world and approach. In ...particular, it sheds new light upon Smith's discovery of Clement of Alexandria's letter on the Secret Gospel of Mark.
In this work, we present a ∼90 ks continuous monitoring of the Galactic microquasar GRS 1915 + 105 with AstroSat when the source undergoes a major transition from a nonvariable, χ class (similar to ...radio-quiet χ class) to a structured, large-amplitude, periodic heartbeat state (similar to class). We show that such a transition takes place via an intermediate state when the large-amplitude, irregular variability of the order of hundreds of seconds in the soft X-ray band turned into 100-150 s regular, structured, nearly periodic flares. The properties of strong low-frequency (LF) quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) in the frequency range 3-5 Hz also evolve marginally during these variability transitions. We also study time-lag and rms spectra at the QPO and harmonic component and the dynamic power spectra. We note a few important differences between the heartbeat state and the class. Interestingly, the time-averaged LF QPO properties in the hard X-ray band are relatively stable in three states when compared to the significant evolution observed in the slow variability properties at millihertz frequencies. Such relative stability of LF QPOs implies that the inner disk-corona coupled accretion flow, which determines the LF QPO properties, may be uninterrupted by the launch of long, large-amplitude flares.
Using the Very Long Baseline Array, we have measured a trigonometric parallax for the microquasar GRS 1915+105, which contains a black hole and a K-giant companion. This yields a direct distance ...estimate of 8.6 super(+2.0) sub(-1.6) kpc and a revised estimate for the mass of the black hole of 12.4 super(+2.0) sub(-1.8) M sub(middot in circle). GRS 1915+105 is at about the same distance as some H II regions and water masers associated with high-mass star formation in the Sagittarius spiral arm of the Galaxy. The absolute proper motion of GRS 1915+105 is -3.19 + or - 0.03 mas yr super(-1) and -6.24 + or - 0.05 mas yr super(-1) toward the east and north, respectively, which corresponds to a modest peculiar speed of 22 + or - 24 km s super(-1) at the parallax distance, suggesting that the binary did not receive a large velocity kick when the black hole formed. On one observational epoch, GRS 1915+105 displayed superluminal motion along the direction of its approaching jet. Considering previous observations of jet motions, the jet in GRS 1915+105 can be modeled with a jet inclination to the line of sight of 60degrees + or - 5degrees and a variable flow speed between 0.65c and 0.81c, which possibly indicates deceleration of the jet at distances from the black hole gap2000 AU. Finally, using our measurements of distance and estimates of black hole mass and inclination, we provisionally confirm our earlier result that the black hole is spinning very rapidly.
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