French priest Joseph M. Paret (1807-1872) served in the missions of Louisiana from 1847 to 1869 as pastor of the Little Red Church, located upstream from New Orleans on the east bank of the Mississippi River. During his somewhat lonely tenure, Paret sketched landscapes, architecture, and interiors, capturing everyday life in prosperous St. Charles Parish. In 1987, fifty-three watercolors were discovered -- still bound in their original sketchbook -- among his personal effects. Plantations by the River contains twenty-eight of these paintings created in or about the year 1859. Paret's insightful artwork provides a visual social history of the antebellum creole culture of south Louisiana and documents properties in addition to structures and furnishings of the period.

The book features full-size reproductions of Paret's paintings, which have been restored to their original vibrancy. The value of Paret's detailed folk art lies in the accuracy of his depiction of the region he lived in. He faithfully renders parishioners attending church, men pulling driftwood from the Mississippi River, and the edifices and flora gracing local plantations Ormond and Good Hope, among many others. The text is presented in both English and French; and as a supplement to the art, an appendix of excerpts from Mon Journal d'Amerique -- a collection of correspondence between Paret and his family -- is included.

The beautiful, brightly colored paintings of Plantations by the River are a rare discovery and provide a unique view of rural Louisiana life before the onset of the Civil War.

How did Daniel do it? How can one adhere to Christian values in a corrupt world? How does one determine the most expedient path when choosing the lesser of the evils? Born into a farming family in Indiana, Jay Edwards, along with his wife and family, has been a missionary and agricultural businessman in South America since 1987. Challenged by the difficulty of dealing first-hand with decisions pertaining to bribes, extortion, threats, unfair bidding processes, political favoritism, blackmail, kickbacks, and other unethical practices, Edwards realized that the Daniel of the Bible, in all probability, faced these issues also. If God could guide Daniel in ancient Babylon, the cradle of perversity, then He could surely guide the author through the labyrinth of politically charged ethical dilemmas so often encountered in South American bureaucracy. This fast-paced historical fiction poses possible solutions for Daniel and his friends. The book includes as an appendix, Issues Daniel Faced, which provides interesting questions and themes which may be used as a discussion guide for similar issues in our world today.

A laboratory for competing visions of modernity, the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) continues to haunt the imagination of the twentieth century. Its political and cultural lessons retain uncanny relevance for all who seek to understand the tensions and possibilities of our age. "The Weimar Republic Sourcebook" represents the most comprehensive documentation of Weimar culture, history, and politics assembled in any language. It invites a wide community of readers to discover the richness and complexity of the turbulent years in Germany before Hitler's rise to power. Drawing from such primary sources as magazines, newspapers, manifestos, and official documents (many unknown even to specialists and most never before available in English), this book challenges the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, and social life. Its thirty chapters explore Germany's complex relationship to democracy, ideologies of 'reactionary modernism', the rise of the 'New Woman', Bauhaus architecture, the impact of mass media, the literary life, the tradition of cabaret and urban entertainment, and the situation of Jews, intellectuals, and workers before and during the emergence of fascism. While devoting much attention to the Republic's varied artistic and intellectual achievements (the Frankfurt School, political theater, twelve-tone music, cultural criticism, photomontage, and urban planning), the book is unique for its inclusion of many lesser-known materials on popular culture, consumerism, body culture, drugs, criminality, and sexuality; it also contains a timetable of major political events, an extensive bibliography, and capsule biographies. This will be a major resource and reference work for students and scholars in history; art; architecture; literature; social and political thought; and, cultural, film, German, and women's studies.

This best-selling title will challenge, encourage, and aid the reader in the development of a truly Christian home.

With the onset of massive cosmological data collection through media such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), galaxy classification has been accomplished for the most part with the help of citizen science communities like Galaxy Zoo. Seeking the wisdom of the crowd for such Big Data processing has proved extremely beneficial. However, an analysis of one of the Galaxy Zoo morphological classification data sets has shown that a significant majority of all classified galaxies are labelled as “Uncertain”. This book reports on how to use data mining, more specifically clustering, to identify galaxies that the public has shown some degree of uncertainty for as to whether they belong to one morphology type or another. The book shows the importance of transitions between different data mining techniques in an insightful workflow. It demonstrates that Clustering enables to identify discriminating features in the analysed data sets, adopting a novel feature selection algorithms called Incremental Feature Selection (IFS). The book shows the use of state-of-the-art classification techniques, Random Forests and Support Vector Machines to validate the acquired results. It is concluded that a vast majority of these galaxies are, in fact, of spiral morphology with a small subset potentially consisting of stars, elliptical galaxies or galaxies of other morphological variants.

With the onset of massive cosmological data collection through media such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), galaxy classification has been accomplished for the most part with the help of citizen science communities like Galaxy Zoo. Seeking the wisdom of the crowd for such Big Data processing has proved extremely beneficial. However, an analysis of one of the Galaxy Zoo morphological classification data sets has shown that a significant majority of all classified galaxies are labelled as Uncertain .

This book reports on how to use data mining, more specifically clustering, to identify galaxies that the public has shown some degree of uncertainty for as to whether they belong to one morphology type or another. The book shows the importance of transitions between different data mining techniques in an insightful workflow. It demonstrates that Clustering enables to identify discriminating features in the analysed data sets, adopting a novel feature selection algorithms called Incremental Feature Selection (IFS). The book shows the use of state-of-the-art classification techniques, Random Forests and Support Vector Machines to validate the acquired results. It is concluded that a vast majority of these galaxies are, in fact, of spiral morphology with a small subset potentially consisting of stars, elliptical galaxies or galaxies of other morphological variants."

How did Daniel do it? How can one adhere to Christian values in a corrupt world? How does one determine the most expedient path when choosing the lesser of the evils? Born into a farming family in Indiana, Jay Edwards, along with his wife and family, has been a missionary and agricultural businessman in South America since 1987. Challenged by the difficulty of dealing first-hand with decisions pertaining to bribes, extortion, threats, unfair bidding processes, political favoritism, blackmail, kickbacks, and other unethical practices, Edwards realized that the Daniel of the Bible, in all probability, faced these issues also. If God could guide Daniel in ancient Babylon, the cradle of perversity, then He could surely guide the author through the labyrinth of politically charged ethical dilemmas so often encountered in South American bureaucracy. This fast-paced historical fiction poses possible solutions for Daniel and his friends. The book includes as an appendix, Issues Daniel Faced, which provides interesting questions and themes which may be used as a discussion guide for similar issues in our world today.

The first book in the Folklife in the South series and by far the broadest look at traditional Cajun culture ever assembled. It not only describes the traditions as they are but also explains how they came to be.