Middle Name Research Articles

Analysing conflicts around small-scale gold mining in the Amazon: The contribution of a multi-temporal model

Conflict is small-scale gold mining’s middle name. In only a very few situations do mining operations take place without some sort of conflict accompanying the activity, and often various conflicting stakeholders struggle for their interests simultaneously. Analyses of such conflicts are typically confined to unpacking the more structural or long-term dimension, the actual actions of the stakeholders or the sequence of incidents. We believe that such strategies have limitations, and in particular can often not explain how in most cases a certain equilibrium, an arrangement, a ‘conflict choreography’, emerges. To be able to account for such situations, we introduce a multi-temporal model for conflict analysis in small-scale gold mining. We distinguish between a protracted structural dimension, concentrating on the underlying causes, an expeditious dimension of the actual interactions and confrontations, and an intermediate dimension of the preparation or equipment of the actors, focusing on such questions as: from what backgrounds and with what aspirations do people come? And what identity, collectively and individually, did that formation produce? We argue that only by taking into account the latter dimension might we be able to better analyse the how’s and why’s of the low-intensity nature of mining conflicts that, at face value, should result in unrelenting hostilities.

Match quality of a linkage strategy based on the combined use of a statistical linkage key and the Levenshtein distance to link birth to death records in Brazil.

ABSTRACTObjectivesTo assess the match quality of a linkage strategy based on the combined use of a statistical linkage key and the Levenshtein distance to link birth to death records in Brazil. ApproachFirst we evaluated the discrimination power of a statistical linkage key adapted from the Australian SLK-581. The modified statistical linkage key (MSLK-781) was based on the concatenation of the 2nd, 3rd and 5th letters of the mother's family name, the 2nd and 3rd letters of the mother's given name, the 2nd and 3rd letters of the mother's middle name, the child's date of birth and sex. We calculated the proportion of records that have a unique value for the MSLK-781 within the 2013 live births (N=224,038 records) and mortality (N=132,646 records) databases for Rio de Janeiro state. We also calculated the joint unique proportion measure based on the product of these two proportions. Second we evaluated the match quality of a linkage strategy based on the combined use of the MSLK-781 and the Levenshtein distance of the mother's name to link the live births database to death records of singleton children younger than one year of age (N=1,488). To assess the match quality we calculated the sensitivity, the predictive positive value (PPV) and the F-measure. ResultsThe proportion of records that have a unique value for the MSLK-781 within the live birth and the mortality databases were, respectively, 97.5% and 98.8%, which yields a joint unique proportion of 96.1%. The match quality measures of the linkage strategy based only on the MSLK-781 were: sensitivity=83.6%; PPV=98.3%; F-measure=90.4%. Combining the agreement on the MSLK-781 with a Levenshtein distance of the mother's name of less than 4 for the record pairs classification eliminated the false-positive matches (PPV=100%) with a small decline in the sensitivity (81.7%) and the F-measure (89.9%). ConclusionUsing the MSLK-781 combined with the Levenshtein distance can be used as a first pass for linking birth to death records in Brazil without having to send pairs of records to clerical review.

Correction: GM-CSF Induces Inflammatory Macrophages by Regulating Glycolysis and Lipid Metabolism.

Na, Y. R., G. J. Gu, D. Jung, Y. W. Kim, J. Na, J. S. Woo, J. Y. Cho, H. Youn, and S. H. Seok. 2016. GM-CSF induces inflammatory macrophages by regulating glycolysis and lipid metabolism. J . Immunol . 197: [4101–4109][1]. The second author’s middle name was published incorrectly. The correct

Stuart Levine (1932–2016)

Stuart Levine (1932–2016)

Algorithm for Coding Person’s Names in large Databases / Data Warehouses to Enhance Processing Speed, Efficiency and Reduce Storage Requirements

A technique to codify the names of people in Databases andData warehouses to reduce the storage requirements and enhanceprocessing speed is presented. It is estimated that the storage requirementcan be reduced, which is normally dominated by the entries of first name,middle name and last name and storage requirements for Datawarehouses keep on increasing. The scheme of the Algorithm replacesthe first name, middle name and last name in numeric charterers insteadof alpha characters for storage. It decodes them into actual AlphaCharacters at the time retrieval.

Hrakʿotperož and Spandaranperož: Armenian Gawaṙs and Sasanian Šahrs

This paper tries to add more geographical details about two cantons of the Armenian Pʿaytakaran region as described in Ašxarhacʿoycʿ: Hrakʿotperož and Spandaranperož. These two cantons find their original Middle Persian names in sigillographic or literary (Middle and New Persian, and occasionally Arabic) sources. Pʿaytakaran, regarded as a region once belonging to the greater Armenia, was already under Iranian dominion and subject to Sasanian policy and its administrative reforms.

ЭТИКЕТНАЯ ЛЕКСИКА КАРАКАЛПАКСКОГО ЯЗЫКА

The article deals with the role of addressing by Name or Family name, and its stylistic usage. Etiquette words characterize interrelation of speakers, which shows the degree of their relationship. Each nation in accordance with its national features and psychology uses variously etiquette words in ad-dressing to someone, sometimes with name, middle name and family names in a different way. The given work describes the usage of etiquette words in communication of Karakalpak people. To be considered a member of certain social groups, a certain nationality, the people, tribal and other state, economic, political or cultural organizations (men, women, the elderly, youth, children, rural and urban residents) make them act according to the respective plans and procedures, obey them, follow schematic stereotypes that are inherent only to them. Similarly, the totality of the culture of action ripened, formed in the relations between people and who have fallen into a definite system, have recently been called the term etiquette. Etiquette is a philosophical, ethical and, on the other hand, pedagogical concept; Ie, they are con-sidered as a set of actions, ordered and systematized among people. After gaining independence and three or four years before it paid great attention to the national languages, national and nationwide rites and traditions, values, after their revival in Uzbekistan and the sovereign Karakalpakstan a new spiritual atmo-sphere was formed, we became even more clearly aware of our identity. Along with the national spiritual and material wealth, special attention is paid to the culture of language, especially its purity. In our opinion, all of this, indeed, is a spiritual unit that has an integral synthesis of speech etiquette, which is firmly linked to all of the above stated. Proceeding from such points of view, taking into account the spiritual requirements of our people and nations, growing at the present stage with each passing day, we believe that the special study of ques-tions of speech etiquette in modern Karakalpak language, its features, to bring in a certain scientific system one of the actual tasks of today's national linguistics. That’s because, any language of nation or nationality definitely has its own specificity of speech etiquette, which is a natural phenomenon. The words of etiquette in modern Karakalpak language constitute the object of research. But the identification of the role of using units of speech etiquette in forming the norms of the literary language, their consideration as the main features of the cultural speech, comparative study of the features of the speech etiquette with the Turkic languages in accordance with the internal laws of the language are con-sidered the subject of the study. Comparative analysis of materials related to speech etiquette is one of the methods of study of the philosophical, everyday, ethical and pedagogical views of the study in the linguistic aspect. We realized this, studying and taking into account the works of representatives of Russian, Uzbek, Kazakh linguistics, who had previously studied this issue with the scientific-theoretical, material points of view. When writing the work, historical, comparative-historical, descriptive methods were applied.

ОСНОВНЫЕ ТЕНДЕНЦИИ ИНТЕГРАЦИИ ORCID В НАУЧНО-ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЕ ПРОСТРАНСТВО

The study has analyzed existing digital identifiers including the unique ORCID iD, which solves the problem of identification of scientists on the international level related to the change of names, similar names and surnames, order of variable transcription and complex names including middle names, common names, initials, etc. It has considered the peculiarities of ORCID implementation in pilot schools and in a number of oversea projects of such universities as Aston University, Imperia College London, University of Kent, Northumbria University, Southampton University, Swansea University, University of York and University of Oxford.It has viewed the basic types of systems that require ORCID integration and studied the technical approaches of integrating technology of ORCID adopted in pilot institutions.It has chosen the main directions of ORCID integration for research institutions and universities.

J. Lasley Dameron (1926–2016)

[We begin this obituary with a notice written by Lasley himself; following that, we include a tribute by Benjamin F. Fisher.]Dr. John Lasley Dameron, ninety years old, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Memphis, passed away at the Baptist Reynolds Hospice House on June 27, 2016. Born in Burlington, North Carolina, he was the third child of Judge E. S. W. Dameron, Sr., and Lola Lasley Dameron. Reared in Burlington with his late brother, E. S. W. Dameron, Jr., who became an attorney at law, Dr. Dameron attended the University of North Carolina and graduated with a B.S. in commerce in 1950 and an M.A. in English in 1952. During World War II he served with the U.S. Navy as a hospital corpsman from 1943 to 1945. He was assigned for several months to the Third Marine Division and in February 1945 participated in the Battle of Iwo Jima. From 1953 to 1955 he served as instructor of English at Emory and Henry College in Emory, Virginia, and in 1962 he was awarded a Ph.D. in English from the University of Tennessee.In the fall of 1962 Dr. Dameron joined the English Department of Memphis State University, retiring in 1991. Throughout his academic career he published and edited articles and books on nineteenth-century American writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He continued his research after his retirement and remained active in several scholarly organizations. He once served as president of the international Poe Studies Association from 1978 to 1980.Dr. Dameron was an avid tennis player. He and his wife of sixty-six years, Elizabeth Virginia Eaddy Dameron, each won several local and regional tennis championships. They have two sons: Dr. George Williamson Dameron, Professor of History at Saint Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont, and John Edgar Dameron, activity director at the Lodge, a retirement home in Carson City, Nevada. Dr. Dameron and his wife also have two grandsons and six great-grandchildren.The death of Lasley Dameron (who ordinarily used his middle name in introducing himself, thus honoring his mother's maiden name) brings to an end the senior generation of founding members of the PSA. The organization actually exists because of a discussion during an MLA conference in Chicago in 1971 between Lasley and Jim Gargano. From their desire to establish an umbrella organization for Poe scholars, the PSA was born. Officially begun in 1972, the PSA continues to thrive today, nearly a half century later.After serving as the PSA's vice president during Eric Carlson's presidency, Lasley was elected president and served in that capacity from 1978 to 1980. Considering that the name of Poe often evokes strong opinions and strident exchanges, Lasley's was always a voice that counseled graciousness and calm. Although he authored many studies of Poe, Lasley's chief contribution to Poe studies is perhaps the bibliography of writings about Poe that he and Irby B. Cauthen published. This book reminds us that work about Poe abounds. Lasley was particularly interested in Poe as magazinist and in Poe's sources. Although Poe was not Lasley's sole interest (the writings of Emerson and Hawthorne were two other strong enthusiasms), his contributions to Poe studies maintain great value for those engaging that field.Lasley will remain in memory as a genuine gentleman and scholar.

Keeping Her Surname as a Middle Name at Marriage: What Predicts this Practice Among Married Women Who Take Their Husband’s Last Name?

Data from 60,223 clients of MissNowMrs.com were used to identify predictors of women retaining their premarital surname as a middle name when changing their last name to that of their husband after they were married. Among women who changed their last name to that of their husband, 18 % kept their former last name as a middle name. We identify four significant predictors of women keeping their surname as their middle name: education, marital age, race, and region of residence. As their education level increased, women were significantly more likely to keep their surname before marriage as a middle name. Marital age had a curvilinear relationship with this naming choice. African Americans were significantly less likely than whites to use their birth name as a middle name while other women of color were significantly more likely than whites to follow this practice. The birth surname as middle name pattern was most common in the South, suggesting a regional cultural influence.

The impact of electronic health record (EHR) interoperability on immunization information system (IIS) data quality.

Objectives: To evaluate the impact of electronic health record (EHR) interoperability on the quality of immunization data in the North Dakota Immunization Information System (NDIIS). Methods: NDIIS doses administered data was evaluated for completeness of the patient and dose-level core data elements for records that belong to interoperable and non-interoperable providers. Data was compared at three months prior to electronic health record (EHR) interoperability enhancement to data at three, six, nine and twelve months post-enhancement following the interoperability go live date. Doses administered per month and by age group, timeliness of vaccine entry and the number of duplicate clients added to the NDIIS was also compared, in addition to, immunization rates for children 19 – 35 months of age and adolescents 11 – 18 years of age. Results: Doses administered by both interoperable and non-interoperable providers remained fairly consistent from pre-enhancement through twelve months post-enhancement. Comparing immunization rates for infants and adolescents, interoperable providers had higher rates both pre- and post-enhancement than non-interoperable providers for all vaccines and vaccine series assessed. The overall percentage of doses entered into the NDIIS within one month of administration varied slightly between interoperable and non-interoperable providers; however, there were significant changes between the percentage of doses entered within one day and within one week with the percentage entered within one day increasing and within one week decreasing with interoperability. The number of duplicate client records created by interoperable providers increased from 94 duplicates pre-enhancement to 10,552 at twelve months post-enhancement, while the duplicates from non-interoperable providers only increased from 300 to 637 over the same period. Of the 40 core data elements in the NDIIS, there was some difference in completeness between the interoperable versus non-interoperable providers. Only middle name, sex, county, phone number, mother’s maiden name, vaccine manufacturer, lot number and expiration date were significantly (>=5%) different between the two provider groups. Conclusions: Interoperability with provider EHRs has had an impact on NDIIS data quality. Timeliness of data entry has improved and overall doses administered have remained fairly consistent, as have the immunization rates for the providers assessed. There are more technical and non-technical interventions that will need to be accomplished by NDIIS staff and vendor to help reduce the negative impact of duplicate record creation, as well as, data completeness.

SENUFO AND THE SPECTER OF TRANSFIGURATION

The Senufo peoples in West Africa and in Cote d’Ivoire, in particular, have suffered a double colonization, including that of the Mandingo who have had the most penetrating and pervasive cultural and linguistic impact on them. Mandingo loan surnames within the Senufo communities are quite an edifying example. Although many members of these communities are complaisant about these loan names, over the years, increasing numbers of Senufo have expressed the desire to recover their ancient surname. Amidst this movement, a line on the sly, both insidious and alarming, has been firmly taking place. Indeed, some Senufo, more often than not, senior executives and icons of the Senufo communities, have abandoned the ancestral surname to adopt a new surname – the first or middle name of their father or a revered ancestor. Given the dimensions of Senufo names and surnames, what justifies this adoption? In what ways does this endangers the survival of the Senufo identity? It turns out that this practice is in line with a pseudo capricious desire for a search of originality which, unfortunately, takes on the appearance of a fad. This very situation surreptitiously presages another chaos regarding the cultural identity within the confines of the Senufo linguistic and cultural group. Article visualizations:

Corrigendum: Nuclear RNA-seq of single neurons reveals molecular signatures of activation.

Nature Communications 7: Article number:11022 (2016); Published 19 April 2016; Updated 14 June 2016 In the original version of this Article, the middle names or initials of the authors Suguna Rani Krishnaswami, Jerika J. Barron, Martijn J.E. Kelder, Sarah L. Parylak, Apuã C.M. Paquola and Jennifer A. Erwin were omitted from the author information.

The Poet’s Dog by Patricia MacLachlan

Reviewed by: The Poet’s Dog by Patricia MacLachlan Jeannette Hulick MacLachlan, Patricia The Poet’s Dog. HarperCollins, 2016 [112p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-06-229263-6 $15.89 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-229262-9 $14.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-229265-0 $14.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 2-4 Irish wolfhound Teddy narrates as he finds a pair of children in the woods during a winter storm and brings them back to the cabin of his recently deceased owner (a [End Page 81] poet named Sylvan). The trio waits out the storm for days while getting to know each other, with young Flora and Nickel able to understand Teddy’s speech. Teddy tells them about Sylvan’s getting sick and eventually dying and how Ellie, one of Sylvan’s poetry students, has been coming to the cabin to take care of Teddy since Sylvan’s death. Meanwhile, the children wait to be reunited with their parents—after their mother’s car went into the ditch, she went for help and couldn’t make it back before the car was towed by authorities to keep it from getting buried in the snow. There’s an awful lot of contrivance to this story, beginning with the initial premise (authorities are going to tow a car but leave two children stranded in a blizzard?) and ending with Teddy being adopted by Flora and Nickel. The connection between Flora’s middle name, Jewel, and her mother’s name, Ruby, to Sylvan’s deathbed admonition to Teddy to “find a jewel or two” is particularly heavy handed. These plot machinations, combined with Teddy’s solemn narration, gives this a tone that feels more adult-centered than childlike. Still, Teddy’s quiet, poetic voice does resonate against the snug, winter setting, and the thought of hunkering down in a cabin during a storm with a talking dog is an alluring one. Dog-lovers and budding poets with a taste for quiet whimsy, or fans of MacLachlan’s measured and lyrical writing, may want to check this out. Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist by Anne Boyd Rioux

Reviewed by: Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist by Anne Boyd Rioux Donna M. Campbell (bio) Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, by Anne Boyd Rioux. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2016. xix + 391 pp. Cloth. $32.95. Anne Boyd Rioux opens her excellent new biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson with two indelible images that are the sum total of what most readers know about the author: in the first, "a woman jumps from the third-story window of her Venetian palazzo"; in the second, weeks later, a distraught Henry James sits in a boat in the middle of a Venetian lagoon, trying helplessly to submerge both the dresses and the record of their friendship, but the dresses "billow up like black balloons" (xiii). Unlike the dresses, Woolson's critical reputation has been less than buoyant in the century since her death, although an edition of her complete letters (Complete [End Page 88] Letters of Constance Fenimore Woolson, 2012), numerous book-length critical studies and articles employing feminist approaches, and Rioux's new collection of Woolson's stories should do much to restore her reputation. Rioux's carefully chosen title, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, signals this revival and Woolson's struggle for acceptance, for it echoes James's Portrait of a Lady, the work of an author whose reputation has shaded if not entirely effaced Woolson's own in literary history. "Lady," too, is particularly apposite, for Rioux's running theme is what the literary world might have made of Woolson had they treated her as simply a "novelist" without the diminishing modifier "lady." The book is thus a twofold portrait, not only of Woolson but of the literary world of high-culture magazines and publishers in which she found success but struggled to create a kind of writing that relied neither on the prosaic lack of idealism, as she saw it, in Howellsian realism, or the bloodless analytics of Jamesian psychology. Drawing extensively on new archival information and letters, Rioux chronicles the growth of Woolson as an artist in her own right, beginning with her early life in Cleveland and on Mackinac Island, her schooling at Madame Chegaray's in New York, and the early deaths of two of her sisters and father before her career began in earnest. A combination of her promise as a writer, her brother-in-law, and the middle name that linked her with her famous great-uncle James Fenimore Cooper brought Woolson to the attention of Henry Mills Alden at Harper & Brothers, which began publishing her work almost immediately. Beginning with travel letters for the Cleveland Herald and a prizewinning novel for children, The Old Stone House, that she later disowned, Woolson found her métier in the currently fashionable genre of regionalist or local color writing. Unlike regionalist writers such as Sara Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, however, who maintained a razor-sharp focus on the regions they knew best, Wo-olson wrote of the lives and customs she found in various regions, from Michigan, St. Augustine, the Reconstruction-era South, and Asheville, North Carolina. Her first regional story, "St. Clair Flats" appeared the Atlantic Monthly in 1873 and according to Rioux was "probably her best early work" (82), later collected with other tales in Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches (1875). In search of a healthful climate, Woolson traveled the east coast with her invalid mother, and, after her mother's death, moved to Europe, living for a time in Oxford, visiting Egypt, and spending her happiest years at Bellosguardo, near Florence, Italy, before moving to Venice, where she died in 1894. [End Page 89] In assessing Woolson's career, Rioux shows how Woolson developed her own style and perspective, challenging reviewers who expected a "sweet" style from a woman novelist with, as she told one correspondent, "such a horror of 'pretty,' 'sweet' writing" that she was willing to risk "a style that was ugly and bitter, provided it was also strong" (76). Male authors and editors, including E. C. Stedman, Henry Mills Alden, and, for a time, W. D. Howells, provided early guidance but did not always...

Функциональная дифференциация наименований ученых и учителей в английском языке XI-XV веков

Функциональная дифференциация наименований ученых и учителей в английском языке XI-XV веков

The meaning and interpretation of the Serbian discourse marker BRE

Bre is a word whose origin is neither exclusively tied to the Serbian language, nor is it even derived from the elements of the South Slavic languages. Nonetheless, it has come to serve as a most prominent typically Serbian linguistic item to the extent that a number of people in the social networks in Serbia (e.g. Facebook) have been signed in with the discourse marker bre between the first and the last names, in the place of the middle name (e.g. Jovan Bre Marković).This “small” bre (as Kapor (1989:9) would qualify it with the Serbian adjective malo) – inconspicuous, as it were – has a potential of an important accompaniment to the tune of a Serbian expression, to use a music metaphor. This has presented us with a challenge worthy of a deeper investigation: bre, clearly, contributes to the meaning of an utterance in which it occurs, but the question is what kind of contribution.Working within the relevance-theoretic framework (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95; Blakemore, 2002; Carston, 2002), we explore the issue of how this discourse marker contributes to the relevance of its host utterance. We conduct our analysis around the cognitive semantic distinction between conceptual and procedural types of meaning and the pragmatic distinction between explicitly and implicitly communicated assumptions by the speaker's utterance.Basing our findings on a corpus collected from Serbian newspapers and magazines as well as face-to-face exchanges, we conclude that bre is a procedural constraint on the construction of a higher-level explicature which expresses a speaker's particular attitude to the addressee.

Teaching Trans for Children, Youth, and Adults Who Care for Them

Teaching Trans for Children, Youth, and Adults Who Care for Them

Reflecting on the Reflective Conversation

This brief essay develops three points to stretch the reflective conversation. One agrees that we need a more expansive understanding of qualitative research because doing qualitative research is doing real science. The second synthesizes insights in the conversation to develop three ways that grounded theory building (GTB) provides unique benefits to management research and complements conventional deductive work. With theory as our middle name, GTB generates new theory, something essential to a complex field with considerable fragmentation and ambiguity. Deductive research tests already established theory. Building defines the active process of gathering and analyzing data, and the conversationalists identify the bountiful array of approaches that already exist—if only all scientists would make some effort to understand them. Grounded means capturing the situated details and contingencies rather than abstracting them away since we need to understand the “things” of any phenomenon and how they interrelate if we are to build elegant new understandings. I offer suggestions for next steps in each area. My third point: Let’s get over the idea that qualitative methods means using qualitative data.

Interview with John R. Wunder

Interview with John R. Wunder Jon K. Lauck (bio) In May 2014 the historian John R. Wunder, who spent the largest part of his career at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, took time out from his current projects to discuss his career in general, and more particularly, his interest in regional history, including the history of the Plains and the Midwest. Wunder, born in Iowa, earned his ba and law degrees at the University of Iowa before earning his PhD in history under the guidance of Vernon Carstensen at the University of Washington. John taught at several universities around the United States—in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the southern Great Plains, and the Deep South. Eventually, Wunder became the director of the Center for Great Plains Studies and a professor of history at the University of Nebraska. He also served as associate dean of the University of Nebraska’s College of Arts and Sciences and president of the Western History Association and the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society. He is the author or editor of nineteen books and over fifty academic articles. Wunder retired from the University of Nebraska in August 2011. He still lives in Lincoln, where he continues his research and writing. Where were you born? I was born in a hospital in Vinton, Iowa, a small county seat town in east central Iowa on January 7, 1945, to Mary (Remley) Wunder and Arnold Wunder. My middle name was my mother’s maiden name. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Dysart, Iowa, which is a town of eight hundred about fifteen miles west of Vinton. What did your parents do for a living? My mother graduated from the University of Iowa and was a high school social studies teacher. She taught in several Iowa communities before she married my father, but her career was interrupted by my birth and then shortly thereafter by her contracting the awful disease multiple sclerosis which eventually [End Page 289] paralyzed her. My father graduated from Dysart High School; he worked first as a mechanic in a local gas station and then he had his own business supplying fuel oil and petroleum products to farmers and local businesses and homes. Where did you go to college and what did you study? I went to Iowa as a major in mathematics. We had had a wonderful high school math teacher who was a spinster and tough as nails. She taught us algebra, and trigonometry, geometry, and advanced algebra, but at Iowa I soon learned in my geometry class I just didn’t have a theoretical mathematics brain. At the end of my first semester and the beginning of the second, I first changed my major to accounting. That lasted one week. Instead I became a history major because my Western Civilization classes both semesters convinced me that history was to be my life’s work. I majored in history and political science graduating with a ba in 1967. I was captivated by the history of the American West classes (two courses for an entire academic year) taught by Professor Malcolm Rohrbough. I then took a fellowship to study the American West with Professor Rohrbough’s major professor, who was then at the University of Washington, Professor Vernon Carstensen.1 Rohrbough joked he was sending a son to study with his grandfather. [In 1974, after earning my PhD, I] received a position as a visiting assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. There I taught the American survey, American West, and American legal history. If I recall correctly, you also encountered Christopher Lasch during your time at Iowa.2 Is that correct? Yes, he often would entertain an informal group of students at the student union. I remember once (probably spring of 1968) when tension was very high on campus with Vietnam demonstrations, I sat on the ballroom floor along with a hundred students as Lasch, also sitting on the floor, talked at length about historic American wars and compared them to Vietnam. He was quite inspirational. At some point, his departure that year from Iowa was not a happy one for him or the history department. It has been noted...