Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite ...in class.Heart Beatsis the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived.
Heart Beatsbegins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's "Invictus" and Rudyard Kipling's "If--," asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today.
Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities,Heart Beatsis an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.
Isaac Newton'sChronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, published in 1728, one year after the great man's death, unleashed a storm of controversy. And for good reason. The book presents a drastically ...revised timeline for ancient civilizations, contracting Greek history by five hundred years and Egypt's by a millennium.Newton and the Origin of Civilizationtells the story of how one of the most celebrated figures in the history of mathematics, optics, and mechanics came to apply his unique ways of thinking to problems of history, theology, and mythology, and of how his radical ideas produced an uproar that reverberated in Europe's learned circles throughout the eighteenth century and beyond.
Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold reveal the manner in which Newton strove for nearly half a century to rectify universal history by reading ancient texts through the lens of astronomy, and to create a tight theoretical system for interpreting the evolution of civilization on the basis of population dynamics. It was during Newton's earliest years at Cambridge that he developed the core of his singular method for generating and working with trustworthy knowledge, which he applied to his study of the past with the same rigor he brought to his work in physics and mathematics. Drawing extensively on Newton's unpublished papers and a host of other primary sources, Buchwald and Feingold reconcile Isaac Newton the rational scientist with Newton the natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian, and chronologist of ancient history.
Before Malory Moll, Richard J
Before Malory,
c2003, 20031126, 2003, 2000, 2003-01-01
eBook
Although most modern scholars doubt the historicity of King Arthur, parts of the legend were accepted as fact throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval accounts of the historical Arthur, however, present ...a very different king from the romances that are widely studied today. Richard Moll examines a wide variety of historical texts including Thomas Gray'sScalacronicaand John Hardyng'sChronicleto explore the relationship between the Arthurian chronicles and the romances. He demonstrates how competing and conflicting traditions interacted with one another, and how writers and readers of Arthurian texts negotiated a complex textual tradition.
Moll asserts that the enormous variety and number of existing chronicles demonstrates the immense popularity of the historical Arthur in medieval England. Since these chronicles were the dominant source of Arthurian information for the late medieval reader, they provide an invaluable, and neglected, interpretive context for modern readers of Malory and other later medieval romances. The first monograph to look at the impact of these historical texts on Arthurian literature,Before Maloryis also the first to show how canonical vernacular romances interacted with chronicle texts that have since dropped out of the canon.
The COVID-19 outbreak is deeply influencing the global social and economic framework, due to restrictive measures adopted worldwide by governments to counteract the pandemic contagion. In ...multi-region areas such as Italy, where the contagion peak has been reached, it is crucial to find targeted and coordinated optimal exit and restarting strategies on a regional basis to effectively cope with possible onset of further epidemic waves, while efficiently returning the economic activities to their standard level of intensity.
Differently from the related literature, where modeling and controlling the pandemic contagion is typically addressed on a national basis, this paper proposes an optimal control approach that supports governments in defining the most effective strategies to be adopted during post-lockdown mitigation phases in a multi-region scenario. Based on the joint use of a non-linear Model Predictive Control scheme and a modified Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR)-based epidemiological model, the approach is aimed at minimizing the cost of the so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions (that is, mitigation strategies), while ensuring that the capacity of the network of regional healthcare systems is not violated. In addition, the proposed approach supports policy makers in taking targeted intervention decisions on different regions by an integrated and structured model, thus both respecting the specific regional health systems characteristics and improving the system-wide performance by avoiding uncoordinated actions of the regions.
The methodology is tested on the COVID-19 outbreak data related to the network of Italian regions, showing its effectiveness in properly supporting the definition of effective regional strategies for managing the COVID-19 diffusion.
The forecasting of the temporal evolution of real-world diseases is systematically performed via mean-field, compartmental models, such as the SIR model and its various variants. Here, we investigate ...the spreading of SIR dynamics over a system of interacting, active agents – whose dynamics generate random contacts among the agents, as well as temporal and spatial correlation and fluctuations – to assess whether mean-field-like SIR models are able to accurately describe the temporal evolution of an epidemics. We find that such models display temporal dynamics that are intrinsically and fundamentally different from the ones obtained in active agent simulations. Specifically, we numerically prove that no effective mean-field SIR model is consistent with the dynamics that emerge in agent-based simulations. Our results call into question the use of such models to forecast the evolution of real-world epidemics, independently of the method used to estimate the basic reproduction number.
The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia document
the colony through its first twenty-five years and includes
correspondence between Georgia founder James Oglethorpe and the
Trustees for ...Establishing the Colony, as well as records pertaining
to land grants; agreements and interactions with Indigenous
peoples; the settlement of a small Jewish community and the
Salzburgers, German-speaking Protestant refugees; and the removal
on restrictions of land tenure, rum, and slavery in the colony.
Most of the local records of colonial Georgia were destroyed during
the Revolution. Under Governor James Wright's direction, merchant
John Graham loaded much of the official records on his vessel in
the Savannah River. During the Battle of the Rice Boats in March
1776, the Inverness was burned while it lay at anchor. The
destructive civil war that occurred in the latter phases of the
Revolution resulted in further destruction. The Colonial
Records of the State of Georgia , drawn from archival material
in Great Britain, remain a unique source. Volume 28, Part II
includes the papers of Governor James Wright, acting governor James
Habersham, and others. The Georgia Open History Library has
been made possible in part by a major grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views,
findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this
collection, do not necessarily represent those of the National
Endowment for the Humanities.
In 1806 General Thomas Picton, Britain's first governor of Trinidad, was brought to trial for the torture of a free mulatto named Louisa Calderon and for overseeing a regime of terror over the ...island's slave population. James Epstein offers a fascinating account of the unfolding of this colonial drama. He shows the ways in which the trial and its investigation brought empire 'home' and exposed the disjuncture between a national self-image of humane governance and the brutal realities of colonial rule. He uses the trial to open up a range of issues, including colonial violence and norms of justice, the status of the British subject, imperial careering, visions of development after slavery, slave conspiracy and the colonial archive. He reveals how Britain's imperial regime became more authoritarian, hierarchical and militarised but also how unease about abuses of power and of the rights of colonial subjects began to grow.
This book examines the relations between two phenomena that are central to modern conceptions of international relations. Geopolitics is the understanding of the inter-relations between empires, ...states, individuals, private companies, NGOs, and multilateral agencies as these are expressed and shaped spatially. This view of the world achieved notoriety as the scientific basis claimed by Nazi ideologists of global conquest. However, under this or another name, similar sets of ideas were important on both sides of the Cold War and now have a renewed resonance in debates over the New World Order of the so-called Global War on Terror. Geopolitics is a way of describing the conflicts between states as constrained by both physical and economic space. It makes such conflicts seem inevitable. The argument of the book is that this view of the world continues to appear salient because it serves to make the projection of force overseas seem an inevitable aspect of the foreign policy of states. This quasi-Darwinian view of international relations makes the pursuit of Empire appear a responsibility of larger and more powerful states. Powerful states must become Empires or submit to others seeking something similar. In its associations with Empire, the study of geopolitics returns continually to the ideas of a British geographer who never himself used the term. Halford Mackinder is the source of many of the ideas of geopolitics and by examining his ideas both in their original context and as they have been repeatedly rediscovered and reinvented this book contributes to current discussions of the ideology and practices of the US Empire today.
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