Book Summary: This definitive scholarly reference on the American Revolution―written by acclaimed researchers and military experts from around the world―covers the causes, course, and consequences of the war and the political, social, and military origins of the nation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Public Administration." Includes bibliographical references (p. 242-247).

The major purpose of this study is to present a public biography of Joseph A. Goddard. Joseph Goddard (1840-1930) was a Muncie, Indiana wholesale grocer, business, civic, reform leader and philanthropist during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Goddard and his wife, Mary, were also responsible for establishing a Friends (Quaker) Meeting in the city of Muncie in 1876.Since the late 1940's and early 1950's, American historians have been concentrating on the efforts of ordinary citizens and their roles in building communities and various political, economic, and social movements. This dissertation is an account of one life who was instrumental in transforming Muncie from a rural, agriculturally based town into an urban industrial center. Goddard was like thousands of his fellow businessmen and entrepreneurs in the United States during that era. Most of these individuals were concerned with expandingutilize a portion of their wealth in order to better of others in their community.In order to better their communities, people of wealth sponsored such endeavors as public libraries, hospitals, their own economic base, yet they felt a responsibility to the livescharities, and reform movements. Goddard saw many opportunities to expand his own finiancial position following the gas boom of 1886. As Muncie grew, so did Goddard's supported various organizations and social movements that would make Muncie a better city. Goddard became the first president of the Citizen's industries to Muncie by offering such inducements as inexpensive natural gas. Goddard was also a firm supporter of education. He served on the Muncie School Board from 1886 to 1898, serving as secretary and president at various times. Mary and Joseph Goddard were also members of the Board of Trustees of Earlham College, a Quaker institution in Richmond, of their time and money to Earlham, an auditorium, Goddard Hall, was named in their honor. The Muncie Public Library also received numerous financial gifts from the Goddards. Following Mary's death in 1908, the Mary Hough Goddard Collection of Indiana Authors was created by funds donated by Joseph as a memorial to his wife's concern for education.In order to make Muncie an alcohol-free city, Joseph Goddard was an avid supporter of various temperance organizations. Goddard gave monetary gifts as well as served in a leadership capacity for such groups as the Anti-Saloon League, Personal Workers League, and the Dry League. In 1913 Goddard and other dedicated men to the cause of temperance wholesale grocerybusiness. Throughout Goddard's life, he Enterprise Company, a stock venture which sought to lure Indiana. Due to the fact that the Goddards gave generously formed the short-lived Citizen's Party as part of the "wet" vs. "dry" mayoral and city races of that year.Mary and Joseph Goddard were deeply committed Quakers. Not only did they found the Muncie Meeting, but both served various positions of leadership. Following Mary's death 1908, the Meeting renamed the meeting Friends Memorial Church in 1912 in honor of the many years of dedicated service and devotion which Mary had given to the young meeting. This was a fitting honor to the Goddard legacy. Joseph continued to serve the meeting and the Muncie community until his own by entertwining his life with the lives of others of his day, formed the nucleus of a modern Muncie. / Department of History

The (in)visible Briseis. A comparative literary analysis of the relationship between Achilles, Patroclus and Briseis in Homer’s Iliad and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls The purpose of this essay is to compare the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad (700s BC) and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2019), while also looking into the role of Briseis and how the story differs when it is told from her point of view. Through the analysis I find that the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus have always been intense. I argue, however, that the intensity is given more depth and meaning when described from different perspectives, such as that of Briseis and Achilles himself, as is done in The Silence of the Girls. With the help of Kevin Goddard’s theory of the male gaze, the perspective of both Briseis and Achilles become invaluable for interpreting the relationship between the characters, as well as the characters themselves. For Achilles, the gaze of his mother influences him in a negative way in his relationship with Briseis, while the gaze of Patroclus causes changes in his mentality. I argue that this has to do with the Oedipus complex. For once, Briseis is not invisible and even though she continues to be the slave everyone expects her to be, she is, through the gaze, able to create her own story once that of Achilles ends. It is still the story of the great Achilles, but one in which he is also human.

The two part purpose of this study is to first test whether perceived collective efficacy is positively significantly related to student achievement in select Texas suburban elementary schools. The second part is to determine which of three collective efficacy belief measures has the greatest predictive validity. Collective efficacy beliefs are grounded in social cognitive theory which explains a group’s belief in its capability to attain desired effects. Collective efficacy beliefs can influence the effort a group puts forth to achieve desired effects. In the context of education, a highly efficacious faculty that collaborates and works hard on a daily basis is likely to overcome arduous obstacles and achieve high levels of student success. Five districts participated and 100 schools were sampled in this study. However, due to missing data, only 97 schools were included in this study. Teacher respondents varied in age, ethnicity and experience within the five districts included in the sample. For test of predictive validity, student level data was also used, which included student level characteristics as well as 4th and 5th grade reading and math Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) scores representing student achievement. Factor and reliability analyses were used to create the Collective Efficacy Scale Short Form (CES-Short Form) and the Collective Teacher Belief Scale (CTBS). Both measures have been utilized for over a decade and the results were aligned with past studies. The third measure of collective efficacy was developed by Bandura who pioneered the field of efficacy belief research. A partial correlation was conducted to find the unique variance in student achievement that was explained by each measure. Of the three measures, the CES-Short Form explained more variance in math and reading achievement when accounting for the other two measures while maintaining significant results (p = 0.01). Further tests using multilevel analysis were consistent with these findings, specifically the CES-Short Form had the strongest relationship with achievement and the Bandura measure was not significantly related to reading and math achievement in multilevel models with controls for student and school characteristics. The results confirmed that perceived collective efficacy was a positive predictor of student achievement in select Texas suburban elementary schools with the CES-Short Form having greater predictive validity than the other two measures. Implications of this study for future research are discussed on collective efficacy beliefs in schools.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of History. / Bibliography: leaves [156]-162.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of History. / Electronic thesis. Bibliography: leaves [156]-162. Also available in print ed.

Conflicts should be analyzed in terms of a full spectrum conflict including discourse. There are more means to achieve an end goal than through the kinetic force such as military means. The invasion of Ukraine 24th of February 2022 was the culmination of many years of soft and hard power practiced by the Russian state.  With a thematic content analysis on the Russian President Putin’s address to the Nation 18th of March 2014 and 21st of February 2022 the rethoric was separated into themes and analyzed with two theories. The first was soft and hard power where the themes of attraction- and coercion-based rhetoric was applied to the analysis. The second was legitimacy theory, which entailed that rethoric is a mean to gain support towards a grand strategic policy by establishing the national interest, defining threats, course of action and mobilizing the necessary resources within the state. The results showed that in the first speech soft and hard power was more prominent since there was no official involvement from the Russian state in the conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk region of Ukraine that needed to be legitimized. There was an attempt to influence the Ukrainian government and population to change their policies in a more favorable direction with the use of soft and hard power. The second speech was more in line of legitimacy where the Russian state was about to engage military and thus needed to garner the approval of the Russian state and population to be able to mobilize the resources necessary to accomplish such grand strategic agenda.

This study paints a picture of prevalent attitudes toward the Mormon elderly in the nineteenth century. It identifies some characteristics of the aged population, and discusses feelings expressed by individual older persons about different aspects of their lives. It is a first step in gaining a greater understanding of how they fit into the larger pictures of old age and the Mormon Church in nineteenth century America.

This dissertation works against the longstanding literary critical premise that aesthetics and ethics are at odds. I challenge this notion by foregrounding the verse of four nineteenth-century-born and Northeastern-based poets who unapologetically prioritize aesthetic perception and experience in their writing. These poets—Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Emily Dickinson, Olivia Ward Bush, and William Stanley Braithwaite—were well aware of the criticism politicians, social reformers, educators, business proponents, and even other writers leveled against the functional and ethical utility of poetry in an era when transatlantic industrial revolutions and innovations in manufacturing and transportation technology contributed to a national ethos that celebrated progress and productivity in the most concrete terms. These developments, coupled with moral and political divisions over slavery and the economic and psychic strain of a nationwide war that brought life’s precariousness into relief, spurred citizens to contemplate their sense of purpose in contexts ranging from the vocational to the existential. Writers and poets in particular faced continual pressures to defend the practical value of their work. What makes the four poets in this dissertation unparalleled, I suggest, is the way they challenge readers to revise and expand their understanding of the aesthetic by devoting poetic attention to unsettling and unsightly products and processes in the natural world. Moldering plant matter, heaps of manure, broom-ravaged spiderwebs, and fragments of driftwood; the kinds of waste and remains normally deemed indecorous for nineteenth-century verse become vibrant and arresting in the work of these poets. Yet while each poet approaches humble and neglected phenomena as worthy of aesthetic treatment, they do so without idealizing the unpalatable and disregarded subjects they portray in verse. The attention they devote to the abject—a witnessing they extrapolate from literal to human nature—is, as I show over the course of this dissertation, an ethical and political act. In addition to upholding the unsettling and unglamorous qualities of the natural subjects they honor, these poets also abstain from sentimentalizing the elements of lived experience that inform their writing, and refuse to downplay the often demanding process of poetic composition itself. While this dissertation’s insistence on regarding aspects of nature that nineteenth-century poetry has traditionally neglected is, in part, an ecocritical intervention, my project is also a call to dignify the artistic labors that reframe overlooked natural phenomena as worthy of aesthetic attention. To portray writing as work is to regard the craft as just as substantial and legitimate a pursuit as occupations whose effects are more straightforwardly measurable in practical terms. Indeed, each poet in this dissertation insists upon depicting poetic making as a labor that requires the same dexterity as the construction of an architectural structure and that has as dramatic and far-reaching effects as military and legislative developments. Far from posing an escapist diversion from the social and civic realities of their day, I argue, these poets frame aesthetic creation and experience as fundamental to human nature, especially during wartime and periods of political upheaval.