Coercion Gone Wrong: Colonial Response to the Boston Port Act

On March 25, 1774, the British Parliament passed the Boston Port Act, closing Boston Harbor to commerce. The act was meant to force Boston into paying for tea dumped into the harbor four months earlier during the Boston Tea Party. Parliament believed that the colonies would not support Boston and it would be only a short time before Boston acquiesced and paid for the tea, reestablishing British authority in the colonies.1 They could not have been more wrong. The thirteen colonies were deeply disturbed by the Boston Port Act, and came together in a way that shocked Parliament. Rather than separating Boston from the rest of the colonies, the Boston Port Act ignited all of the colonies into anti-British actions

Hilbert modular forms with prescribed ramification

Let $K$ be a totally real field. In this article we present an asymptotic formula for the number of Hilbert modular cusp forms $f$ with given ramification at every place $v$ of $K$. When $v$ is an infinite place, this means specifying the weight of $f$ at $k$, and when $v$ is finite, this means specifying the restriction to inertia of the local Weil-Deligne representation attached to $f$ at $v$. Our formula shows that with essentially finitely many exceptions, the cusp forms of $K$ exhibit every possible sort of ramification behavior, thus generalizing a theorem of Khare and Prasad. From this fact we compute the minimal field over which a modular Jacobian becomes semi-stable.Comment: 30 pages, published versio

Kidnappings in Mexico City: A Social Problem

This paper examines criminal kidnappings in Mexico City, Mexico. While numerous types of crime are prevalent in Mexico’s capital, kidnapping remains a constant social problem affecting not only wealthy individuals and families, but also members across all types of social class. From the victims and their families, individuals living in fear, to criminal organizations, and local gangs, to the local, state, and federal government, everyone is impacted by this interconnecting social problem. This paper explains how kidnapping for ransom began in Mexico City, how methods of kidnappings have evolved overtime, the different types of kidnapping, and the preventative measures individual citizens, and Mexico City’s local and federal government are taking to combat this crime