Search

The depiction of the vernacular of the Antebellum South in literature raises doubts regarding its faithfulness, and questions whether it may be used as a source of scientific data. This question stems from the fact that there is no certainty as to the extent authors wanted to replicate the actual vernacular of the time and the extent to which this replication was a result of literary creativity. This research investigates the literary dialect representation in Hardin E. Taliaferro's 1859 work Fisher's River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters by "Skitt, who was raised thar". More specifically, we examine his usage of past tense be forms. Instances of was and were found in the book are verified against real written records extracted from an online database Private Voices: The Corpus of American Civil War Letters. The research concludes that while in Fisher's River we might observe a pattern where the allomorph were dominates in the singular and most plausibly in the plural, the data from letters selected from Private Voices present a different picture. In the authentic correspondence, leveling to was is by far the dominant variant form. Based on these findings we draw cautious conclusions and call for further studies based on works of other local colorist and authentic documents from the beginning of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a new adaptive framework for understanding children's growth in the past. Drawing upon the recent work on adaptive responses in relation to growth, it presents prenatal and postnatal adaptive mechanisms that affect the growth patterns of children. The most novel adaptive response to the historical literature is the prenatal predictive adaptive response where the metabolism and growth trajectory of a child is programmed to match predicted conditions later in life. Having discussed the framework in detail, a reinterpretation of the growth pattern of American slaves is then suggested. It seems likely that a mismatch between relatively good conditions in utero and absolutely appalling conditions in infancy and early childhood led slave children to become extremely stunted by the age of three or four. However, after this age, slave children experienced catch-up growth because their immune systems had become more developed and because their diet improved tremendously and hookworm exposure was reduced. Thus, it seems that American slave children may have experienced substantial catch-up growth because they were prenatally programmed for a higher metabolism and growth trajectory. The article concludes by setting out some stylized facts about children's growth in the past and pointing toward areas of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates scientific exchanges between Britain and France from 1806 to 1814, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. It argues for a picture of scientific communication that sees letters and printed texts not as separate media worlds, but as interconnected bearers of time-critical information within a single system of intelligence gathering and experimental practice. During this period, Napoleon Bonaparte's Continental System blockade severed most links between Britain and continental Europe, yet scientific communications continued--particularly on electrochemistry, a subject of fierce rivalry between Britain and France. The essay traces these exchanges using the archive of a key go-between, the English man of science Sir Charles Blagden. The first two sections look at Blagden's letter-writing operation, reconstructing how he harnessed connections with neutral American diplomats, merchants, and the State to get scientific intelligence between London and Paris. The third section, following Blagden's words from Britain to France to America, looks at how information in letters cross-fertilized with information in print. The final section considers how letters and print were used together to solve the difficult practical problem of replicating experiments across the blockade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]