When Ulysses S. Grant succumbed to cancer on July 23, 1885, the nation mourned the loss of one of its greatest generals and the first president to enforce the civil rights of African Americans. As scholars are increasingly recognizing, many Republicans remained committed to the protection of Black suffrage as late as 1890, but in exploring the reaction to Grant’s death, Civil War memory scholars have overlooked the importance of memories of Grant’s presidency. Through an examination of newspapers and biographies in the months after Grant’s death and the immediate years thereafter, up to 1890, this article demonstrates that Americans of all political stripes used their memories of Grant’s presidency to aid their long-term political goals of either restricting or promoting Black civil rights. Democrats and reform-minded Republicans tried to denigrate Grant’s administration for supposed corruption while still applauding his magnanimity at Appomattox. In contrast, their Republican opponents, Black and white, contested this memory by constructing a politically purposeful memory of Grant’s Reconstruction-era politics as part of their ongoing fight to enforce Black voting rights and by extension secure the fruits of Union military victory. In doing so, Americans demonstrated that they remained unreconciled and divided on both the battlefields of Civil War memory and Reconstruction.

This article, prepared for the symposium, “Law, Christianity, Racial Justice: Shaping the Future,” puts Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for a “revolution in values” and radical change in prevailing political convictions within the context of contemporary liberal theory, liberal legal thought, and critical race theory. The author argues that Rawlsian political theory and liberal legal thought largely overlook the need to transform the underlying political convictions that are at the root of racial injustice. In contrast, as did King, critical race theory recognizes the importance of extra-legal attitudes in producing and sustaining injustice. But, in part because of its skepticism of objective truth, critical race theory does not cogently reveal how convictions can be changed. In contrast to both liberalism and critical race theory, King’s pastoral vocation, experiential approach to truth, and commitment to wielding nonviolent coercive power offers a promising path for fostering changes in existing political and moral convictions and thereby opens a path to wider social change, including structural change. Given the importance of the pastoral vocation to King’s work, the author concludes that scholarship at the intersection of Christianity, race, and the law might have its most practical impact in the hands of the pastorate.

In this paper, we introduce and validate signal processing techniques for the estimation of the individual rotation rates of multicopter’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), by exploiting a multistatic radar echoes. To validate the techniques, which have been introduced in our previous works, in this paper, we present a simulator for the multistatic radar echoes scattered by a UAV that integrates quadcopter’s aerodynamics with electromagnetic modeling to generate realistic radar return, characterized by blades rotating in different directions and with different rates depending on the flight trajectory to be traveled. This simulator enables the validation of signal processing.

We leverage the simulator to assess the effectiveness of autocorrelation and cross-correlation (XCF) techniques in separating multiple propellers, both in hovering and along a realistic flight trajectory. Simulated results confirm that XCF allows distinguishing counter-rotating propellers, while co-rotating ones remain unresolved due to their similar speeds. The simulator also demonstrates how variations in rotation rates can be used to infer the presence and weight of a payload. Experimental validation with a C-band continuous wave radar confirms the findings and highlights the impact of material properties on resolution. Finally, we exploit the simulator to investigate the effect of higher carrier frequencies, showing that increasing the operating frequency improves the ability to discriminate co-rotating propellers, supporting improved UAV classification, payload estimation, and trajectory prediction for anti-drone applications.

More autonomous humanitarian international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have greater capacity to determine who receives aid among conflict- and crisis-affected populations than their donor-following counterparts. The latter are more likely to become instruments of states seeking geostrategic influence in places like Syria and Ukraine. Drawing on more than 120 interviews with INGO and donor agency workers, 10 months of political ethnography among INGOs working with refugees in Lebanon and Jordan after the war in Syria, and content analysis of organizational documents, this article investigates the ways that INGOs secure autonomy from donors. In a theory-building exercise, it introduces the concept of negotiation experience to explain why some INGOs develop skills and strategies that allow them to resist donor demands. It also identifies some of the tactics used by experienced negotiators to do so. The findings have implications for who controls and is accountable for humanitarian policy and practice, as well as the abilities of state donors to influence humanitarian behavior. They call into question expectations that INGOs “scramble” for funds under conditions of funding scarcity.

This article explores Eugene V. Debs’s experiences at the Moundsville prison and the federal penitentiary in Atlanta (1919–1921). It looks at his relationships with other inmates and his supporters outside of prison and examines the effects prison life had on Debs and his ideology. Most importantly, it closely examines his only book-length work: his prison memoir, Walls and Bars. It explores Debs’s critique of the prison system, the jailing of drug addicts, and the interconnectedness of capitalism and the penitentiary system.

We study convergence rates, in mean, for the Hausdorff metric between a finite set of stationary random variables and their common support, which is supposed to be a compact subset of $\mathbb{R}^d$. We propose two different approaches for this study. The first is based on the notion of a minimal index. This notion is introduced in this paper. It is in the spirit of the extremal index, which is much used in extreme value theory. The second approach is based on a $\beta$-mixing condition together with a local-type dependence assumption. More precisely, all our results concern stationary $\beta$-mixing sequences satisfying a tail condition, known as the (a, b)-standard assumption, together with a local-type dependence condition or stationary sequences satisfying the (a, b)-standard assumption and having a positive minimal index. We prove that the optimal rates of the independent and identically distributed setting can be reached. We apply our results to stationary Markov chains on a ball, or to a class of Markov chains on a circle or on a torus. We study with simulations the particular examples of a Möbius Markov chain on the unit circle and of a Markov chain on the unit square wrapped on a torus.