Verner W. Crane

Bio: Verner W. Crane is an academic researcher from University of Michigan. The author has contributed to research in topics: Frontier & Queen (playing card). The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 21 publications receiving 169 citations.

The Club of Honest Whigs: Friends of Science and Liberty

Abstract: FRANKLIN'S favorite coterie during his years as colonial agent in London was a supper club meeting fortnightly, on Thursdays, at St. Paul's Coffeehouse, and after I772 at the London Coffeehouse: the group that he fondly called in I775 his Club of Honest Whigs. The name implies a political club, and it is true that over the years this circle acquired significant overtones of libertarian politics. In origin and essential character, however, it was a philosophical club, as were most of the half-dozen or so informal coffeehouse or tavern clubs that Franklin, an inveterate joiner, attended in England as a member or a frequent guest. Each of them had a place, reflecting the interests of its members, within the broad spectrum of eighteenth-century natural and moral philosophy. Unfortunately, the personnel even of the best known of his clubs has never been determined with reasonable accuracy; as for the others, they have been barely mentioned, if mentioned at all, by the biographers. Hence the Honest Whig club has been viewed out of context in Franklin's wide acquaintance among contemporary figures, major and minor, of the English Enlightenment. Among the countless clubs meeting in England and the colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-clubs of wits, gaming clubs, merchants' clubs, medical clubs, etc.-the philosophical clubs were a distinctive species. Devoted to conviviality and intellectual conversation, they most closely resembled the famous clubs of men of letters, artists, and connoisseurs: Dr. Johnson's Literary Society notably. But it must be assumed that for the most part their talk mirrored another aspect of contemporary culture: the interest in science and in the applications of science widely diffused among not only the gentry but also merchants, expert master-tradesmen, and the middle classes generally. Such was the prestige of science that amateurs as well as

Место и роль инновационных технологий на уроках математики

Abstract: Для числа ε > 0 и вещественной функции f на отрезке [a, b] обозначим через N(ε, f, [a, b]) супремум множества тех номеров n, для которых в [a, b] существует набор неналегающих отрезков [ai, bi], i = 1, . . . , n, таких, что |f(ai)− f(bi)| > ε для всех i = 1, . . . , n (sup ∅ = 0). Доказана следующая теорема: если {fj} – поточечно ограниченная последовательность вещественных функций на отрезке [a, b] такая, что n(ε) ≡ lim supj→∞N(ε, fj , [a, b]) < ∞ для любого ε > 0, то {fj} содержит подпоследовательность, которая всюду на [a, b] сходится к некоторой функции f такой, что N(ε, f, [a, b]) 6 n(ε) при любом ε > 0. Показано, что основное условие в этой теореме, связанное с верхним пределом, необходимо для равномерно сходящейся последовательности {fj} и “почти” необходимо для всюду сходящейся последовательности измеримых функций и что многие поточечные принципы выбора, обобщающие классическую теорему Хелли, вытекают из этой теоремы, а также приводятся примеры, иллюстрирующие ее точность. Библиография: 16 названий.

Blue beads as African-American cultural symbols

Abstract: Blue beads are consistent finds at African-American sites. Archaeologists acknowledge these artifacts were used for adornment, yet some researchers also propose beads possessed additional cultural meaning among African Americans. For this study bead data from African-American sites in the South are analyzed. The results indicate blue is the predominant bead color. The prevalence of these items suggests they may indeed have been an important yet unrecognized aspect of African-American culture. The multiple underlying meanings assigned to blue beads are considered through reference to ethnographic information, folklore, and oral history associated with West and Central Africa and the Southeast.

The Southern Appalachians : a history of the landscape

Abstract: Natural and geological processes have changed the Southern Appalachian landscape repeatedly over millions of years. About 12,000 years ago, humans arrived and became important agents of change. People affected their environment by hunting, by spreading the seeds of plants they had gathered, by disturbing the vegetation around their habitations, and by increasing the frequency of fires. The extent and degree of human influence increased along with the population. In the Late Archaic period, horticulture expanded the impact of humans on the landscape. The first Europeans and Africans reached the Southern Appalachians in the 1500’s. Their arrival disrupted American Indian societies with new forms of trade, warfare, and disease. By the late 1700’s, only the Cherokee remained in the southern mountains. Thereafter, European settlers and African slaves established an economy based on farming, livestock, small-scale industry, and tourism. Market hunting greatly reduced wildlife populations, and grazing livestock affected vegetation. After reversals during the Civil War, mining, lumbering, and tourism emerged as the largest influences on the environment. Deforestation, erosion, pollution, fires, and floods became prevalent. Concern for conservation grew alongside industry, and, by the early 1900’s, both public and private agencies were involved in managing the resources and landscape of the Southern Appalachians. Conservation and resource use have fluctuated throughout the 20th century in response to economic trends and historical events. Parks and wilderness areas have provided refuges for native plants and animals, whereas in national forests managers have sought to regulate resource extraction. Nevertheless, pressure remains intense on the Southern Appalachian landscape, and management issues bring contention as different groups seek to use the region’s resources in different ways.

Facing independence: American Revolutionary portraits within the context of British identity

Abstract: This paper examines the content of eighteenth-century American and British portraits within the ideologically-expanding context of eighteenth-century British identity. It explores the ways in which Britons and Americans negotiated who they were and, consequently, their claims on society, in the era preceding and including the American Revolution. It does so for three reasons: to advance a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of American portraiture; to motivate further dialogue on the relationship between American and British portraits; and to invoke the potential for American portraits as documentary evidence of social history. Through historical examination of philosophical influences informing the development of British narratives, Part One considers the contexts within which portraits were produced and the implications of those contexts for the interpretation and presentation of identity. Against this ideological backdrop, Part Two deconstructs the content of selected portraits by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Ralph Earl, William Hogarth, Allan Ramsay, Sir Joshua Reynolds and others in order to come to terms with contemporary perceptions of reality and identity vis-a-vis the dominant narrative. Broadly speaking, American Revolutionary portraits suggest a standard for identity based on principles drawn from conflicting narratives. This standard intimates an effort to conflate the principal ideals of a dominant neo-Country narrative—those of natural progress, potentiality and virtue, for example—with Liberal and Reformed notions of autonomy, self-determination and industry that denied the doctrines of hierarchy, fixity and birth upon which the traditional ideals were said to depend. The results signaled a gap between British ideology and colonial experience visually manifest as conflicting perceptions of reality. Implicated in these conflicting perceptions was an alternative meaning of life whose suppression may have led, ultimately, to revolution.