George Pappas - Böcker

Few institutions have influenced U.S. history as profoundly as the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which will celebrate its 200th anniversary on March 16, 2002. Born conceptually in Revolutionary War times, the USMA developed alongside the fledgling U.S. government, responded to presidential mandates, and produced dozens of national leaders. Yet the Academy itself receives short shrift from historians, who prefer to study its graduates. In To the Point: The United States Military Academy, 1802-1903, George Pappas offers the first fully developed chronicle of the USMA itself, seen through the eyes of the cadets and graduates who attended the Academy during its first hundred years. Colonel Pappas has drawn from hundreds of primary sources not previously available to or consulted by historians: military records, cadet and graduate letters, newspaper clippings, private diaries, scrapbooks, and photo albums. Taking special care to correct preexisting misconceptions, cadet sinkoids, and inaccurately reported facts and occurrences, he has interwoven the personal and the official to create a magnificent historical work. The reader discovers a key feature of the book in its very first section. Here, informed by newly available documents, Pappas describes in unprecedented detail the 27 years preceding the USMA's official beginnings in 1802. The reader learns of the Academy's precursors, the daily life of the early cadets--down to band practice and powdered hair--and the roots of a curriculum. Explained are the pivotal roles of such movers as Henry Burbeck, Jonathan Williams, and Henry Dearborn in effecting the Congressional mandate for the USMA.Subsequent sections, consistently displaying Colonel Pappas' tireless research, pursue the USMA's controversial first years, the selection and training of faculty members, development of the Academy's scientific and engineering curriculum, cultivation of administrators such as Alden Partridge and Sylvanus Thayer, and the institution's sometimes stormy relationship with the federal government. Moving through the USMA's first century, the book considers internal difficulties, disciplinary measures, and cadet recreation, integrating the USMA story with the Civil War and other historical events. The reader meets many historical figures such as George Washington, Jefferson Davis, Edgar Allan Poe, Davy Crockett, and James Madison--not as focal points but as players in the Academy's history. Pappas also marks the USMA's long-term impact, identifying graduates who performed outstandingly in the War with Mexico, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, as elected officials, as founders of colleges, as builders of railroads, canals, bridges, and roads across the United States. Throughout, readers will find the author's engaging, literate prose as captivating as the story he tells--a style that makes rich use of vignettes, folklore, humor, and the words of ordinary people to bring history to life. Historic maps and numerous photos, many previously unpublished, enhance detailed descriptions of physical settings.

The Literary and Legal Genealogy of Native American Dispossession offers a unique interpretation of how literary and public discourses influenced three U.S. Supreme Court Rulings written by Chief Justice John Marshall with respect to Native Americans. These cases, Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), collectively known as the Marshall Trilogy, have formed the legal basis for the dispossession of indigenous populations throughout the Commonwealth. The Trilogy cases are usually approached as ‘pure’ legal judgments. This book maintains, however, that it was the literary and public discourses from the early sixteenth through to the early nineteenth centuries that established a discursive tradition which, in part, transformed the American Indians from owners to ‘mere occupants’ of their land. Exploring the literary genesis of Marshall’s judgments, George Pappas draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, to analyse how these formative U.S. Supreme Court rulings blurred the distinction between literature and law.

The Literary and Legal Genealogy of Native American Dispossession offers a unique interpretation of how literary and public discourses influenced three U.S. Supreme Court Rulings written by Chief Justice John Marshall with respect to Native Americans. These cases, Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), collectively known as the Marshall Trilogy, have formed the legal basis for the dispossession of indigenous populations throughout the Commonwealth. The Trilogy cases are usually approached as ‘pure’ legal judgments. This book maintains, however, that it was the literary and public discourses from the early sixteenth through to the early nineteenth centuries that established a discursive tradition which, in part, transformed the American Indians from owners to ‘mere occupants’ of their land. Exploring the literary genesis of Marshall’s judgments, George Pappas draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, to analyse how these formative U.S. Supreme Court rulings blurred the distinction between literature and law.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, HSCC 2004, held in Philadelphia, PA, USA, in March 2004. The 43 revised full papers presented together with an invited article were carefully reviewed and selected from 117 submissions. The papers address all current issues in hybrid systems such as tools for analysis and verification, control and optimization, modeling and engineering applications, and emerging topics in programming language support and implementation; a special focus is on the interplay between biomolecular networks, systems biology, formal methods, and control of hybrid systems.

By the dawn of the new millennium, robotics has undergone a major transformation in scope and dimensions. This expansion has been brought about by the maturity of the field and the advances in its related technologies. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics has been rapidly expanding into the challenges of the human world. The new generation of robots is expected to safely and dependably co-habitat with humans in homes, workplaces, and communities, providing support in services, entertainment, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and assistance. Beyond its impact on physical robots, the body of knowledge robotics has produced is revealing a much wider range of applications reaching across diverse research areas and scientific disciplines, such as: biomechanics, haptics, neuros- ences, virtual simulation, animation, surgery, and sensor networks among others. In return, the challenges of the new emerging areas are proving an abundant source of stimulation and insights for the field of robotics. It is indeed at the intersection of disciplines that the most striking advances happen. The goal of the series of Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) is to bring, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics on the basis of their significance and quality. It is our hope that the wider dissemination of research developments will stimulate more exchanges and collaborations among the research community and contribute to further advancement of this rapidly growing field.