"Civil War Cinema in New Deal America"

During the early decades of the 20th century, Hollywood filmmakers both shaped and reflected the popular understanding of the Confederacy, slavery, and Abraham Lincoln.Accepted manuscrip

Reunion and reconciliation, reviewed and reconsidered

At the close of the Civil War in 1865, many Americans began talking about “reunion” and “reunification,” even “healing” and “reconciliation,” although the precise meaning of those words would remain elusive. From 1865 down to the present day, these sentiments have reverberated in American culture and American politics, and they sounded at gatherings of Union and Confederate veterans and then of their descendants, in the pages of newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the speeches of presidents and politicians, and in countless films and theatrical productions that imagined northern and southern men joining hands in unity and fraternal love. Two years after the surrender at Appomattox, the former abolitionist Gerrit Smith told of his longing “for a heart-union between the North and the South.” Seventy-one years later, in a final gathering of ancient soldiers on the once-blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated an Eternal Light Peace Memorial and honored the “joint and precious heritage” that Gettysburg had come to symbolize. Speaking in July 1938 to the “men who wore the blue and men who wore the gray,” fdr praised all the soldiers, “not asking under which flag they fought then—thankful that they stand together under one flag now.” Roosevelt’s tribute to a peace-loving and unified America, coming at this moment when the world was poised on the brink of an even more catastrophic war, may have offered its own small measure of comfort to anxious Americans.Accepted manuscrip

An ordinal approach to the measurement of inequality in asset ownership: methodology and an application to Mexican data.

Asset indices based on durable goods ownership and housing characteristics are widely used to proxy wealth when income or expenditure data are not available. In this paper, we propose an ordinal approach to using data on assets when estimating the wealth of a household (or individual). Using Correspondence Analysis, we derive a ranking of the correlations between the various assets and the first factor, a latent variable assumed to represent the standard of living. We then use this correlation ranking of the assets to derive indices of ordinal inequality that have been recently proposed in the literature. We also use the information on the proportion of individuals holding each type of assets to derive again ordinal measures of inequality in asset ownership. Our empirical analysis, based on data covering the various states of Mexico in 2000 and 2010, shows that the correlation between measures of ordinal inequality in asset ownership derived from correspondence analysis and traditional Gini indices of household income is high, and even higher than that between these Gini indices and ordinal inequality indices based on the percentage ownership of the different assets.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

New stability results for long-wavelength convection patterns

We consider the transition from a spatially uniform state to a steady, spatially-periodic pattern in a partial differential equation describing long-wavelength convection. This both extends existing work on the study of rolls, squares and hexagons and demonstrates how recent generic results for the stability of spatially-periodic patterns may be applied in practice. We find that squares, even if stable to roll perturbations, are often unstable when a wider class of perturbations is considered. We also find scenarios where transitions from hexagons to rectangles can occur. In some cases we find that, near onset, more exotic spatially-periodic planforms are preferred over the usual rolls, squares and hexagons.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figure

On the uniqueness of invariant tori in D4*S1 symmetric systems

The uniqueness of the branch of two-tori in the D4-equivariant Hopf bifurcation problem is proved in a neighbourhood of a particular limiting case where, after reduction, the Euler equations for the rotation of a free rigid body apply

Relative deprivation, reference groups and the assessment of standard of living

This paper proposes two new indices of relative deprivation, derived from an extension of the concept of the generalized Gini for the measurement of distributional change. Population- and income-weighted relative deprivation indices are then defined and, using panel data from the Consortium of Household Panels for European Socio-Economic Research, this paper checks which of the various ways of defining individual deprivation best fits the answers given by individuals on the degree of their satisfaction with income. The analysis finds that the deprivation indices proposed are consistently and negatively correlated with income satisfaction as reported by respondents, that income weighted measures fit better than population weighted measures, and that this fit improves with countries that experienced deep institutional changes such as the transitional economies of Eastern Europe.Inequality,Economic Theory&Research,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Labor Policies,Emerging Markets

Justice in Review: New Trends in State Sentencing and Corrections 2014-2015

In 2014 and 2015, 46 states enacted at least 201 bills, executive orders, and ballot initiatives to reform at least one aspect of their sentencing and corrections systems. In conducting this review of state criminal justice reforms, Vera found that most of the policy changes focused on three areas: creating or expanding opportunities to divert people away from the criminal justice system; reducing prison populations by enacting sentencing reform, expanding opportunities for early release from prison, and reducing the number of people admitted to prison for violating the terms of their community supervision; and supporting reentry into the community from prison. By providing concise summaries of representative reforms in each of these areas, this report serves as a practical guide for other state and federal policymakers looking to affect similar changes in criminal justice policy

"Earnings Functions and the Measurement of the Determinants of Wage Dispersion: Extending Oaxaca’s Approach"

This paper extends the famous Blinder (1973) and Oaxaca (1973) discrimination in several directions. First, the wage difference breakdown is not limited to two groups. Second, a decomposition technique is proposed that allows analysis of the determinants of the overall wage dispersion. The authors’ approach combines two techniques. The first of these is popular in the field of income inequality measurement and concerns the breakdown of inequality by population subgroup. The second technique, very common in the literature of labor economics, uses Mincerian earnings functions to derive a decomposition of wage differences into components measuring group differences in the average values of the explanatory variables, in the coefficients of these variables in the earnings functions, and in the unobservable characteristics. This methodological novelty allows one to determine the exact impact of each of these three elements on the overall wage dispersion, on the dispersion within and between-groups, and on the degree of overlap between the wage distributions of the various groups. However, this paper goes beyond a static analysis insofar as it succeeds in breaking down the change over time in the overall wage dispersion and its components (both between and within group dispersion and group overlapping) into elements related to changes in the value of the explanatory variables and the coefficients of those variables in the earnings functions, in the unobservable characteristics, and in the relative size of the various groups.

Temporal Forcing of Small-Amplitude Waves in Anisotropic Systems

We investigate the effect of resonant temporal forcing on an anisotropic system that exhibits a Hopf bifurcation to obliquely traveling waves in the absence of this forcing. We find that the forcing can excite various phase-locked standing-wave structures: rolls, rectangles and cross rolls. At onset, at most one of the two - rolls or rectangles - is stable. The cross rolls can arise in a secondary bifurcation and can be stable. Experimentally, they would appear as a periodic switching between a structure in which the `zig'-component dominates and one with dominating `zag'-structure. Since there are two symmetry-related states of this kind one may expect disordered structures to arise due to the break-up of the pattern into domains. The results are consistent with recent experiments on electro-convection in nematic liquid crystals by de la Torre and Rehberg. We also apply the general analysis to a model of the behavior near a Lifshitz point, where the angle of obliqueness vanishes. This analysis indicates that phase-locked standing rectangles are always unstable in this parameter regime.Comment: 36 pages (Revtex 3), 12 figures (postscript