The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the attack by Confederate forces under Forrest's command left many of the Tennessee Unionists and black soldiers garrisoned there dead in a confrontation widely labeled as a "massacre." In "The River Was Dyed with Blood," best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its defenders. Rather, the general's great failing was losing control of his troops.

A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort Pillow--which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters "dyed with blood"--occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war. After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends, popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves.

Wills sets what took place at Fort Pillow in the context of other wartime excesses from the American Revolution to World War II and Vietnam, as well as the cultural transformations brought on by the Civil War. Confederates viewed black Union soldiers as the embodiment of slave rebellion and reacted accordingly. Nevertheless, Wills concludes that the engagement was neither a massacre carried out deliberately by Forrest, as charged by a congressional committee, nor solely a northern fabrication meant to discredit him and the Confederate States of America, as pro-Southern apologists have suggested. The battle-scarred fighter with his homespun aphorisms was neither an infallible warrior nor a heartless butcher, but a product of his time and his heritage.

This textbook on practical data analytics unites fundamental principles, algorithms, and data. Algorithms are the keystone of data analytics and the focal point of this textbook. Clear and intuitive explanations of the mathematical and statistical foundations make the algorithms transparent. But practical data analytics requires more than just the foundations. Problems and data are enormously variable and only the most elementary of algorithms can be used without modification. Programming fluency and experience with real and challenging data is indispensable and so the reader is immersed in Python and R and real data analysis. By the end of the book, the reader will have gained the ability to adapt algorithms to new problems and carry out innovative analyses. This book has three parts:(a) Data Reduction: Begins with the concepts of data reduction, data maps, and information extraction. The second chapter introduces associative statistics, the mathematical foundation of scalable algorithms and distributed computing. Practical aspects of distributed computing is the subject of the Hadoop and MapReduce chapter.(b) Extracting Information from Data: Linear regression and data visualization are the principal topics of Part II. The authors dedicate a chapter to the critical domain of Healthcare Analytics for an extended example of practical data analytics. The algorithms and analytics will be of much interest to practitioners interested in utilizing the large and unwieldly data sets of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.(c) Predictive Analytics Two foundational and widely used algorithms, k-nearest neighbors and naive Bayes, are developed in detail. A chapter is dedicated to forecasting. The last chapter focuses on streaming data and uses publicly accessible data streams originating from the Twitter API and the NASDAQ stock market in the tutorials. This book is intended for a one- or two-semester course in data analytics for upper-division undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics, statistics, and computer science. The prerequisites are kept low, and students with one or two courses in probability or statistics, an exposure to vectors and matrices, and a programming course will have no difficulty. The core material of every chapter is accessible to all with these prerequisites. The chapters often expand at the close with innovations of interest to practitioners of data science. Each chapter includes exercises of varying levels of difficulty. The text is eminently suitable for self-study and an exceptional resource for practitioners.

This textbook on practical data analytics unites fundamental principles, algorithms, and data. Algorithms are the keystone of data analytics and the focal point of this textbook. Clear and intuitive explanations of the mathematical and statistical foundations make the algorithms transparent. But practical data analytics requires more than just the foundations. Problems and data are enormously variable and only the most elementary of algorithms can be used without modification. Programming fluency and experience with real and challenging data is indispensable and so the reader is immersed in Python and R and real data analysis. By the end of the book, the reader will have gained the ability to adapt algorithms to new problems and carry out innovative analyses. This book has three parts:(a) Data Reduction: Begins with the concepts of data reduction, data maps, and information extraction. The second chapter introduces associative statistics, the mathematical foundation of scalable algorithms and distributed computing. Practical aspects of distributed computing is the subject of the Hadoop and MapReduce chapter.(b) Extracting Information from Data: Linear regression and data visualization are the principal topics of Part II. The authors dedicate a chapter to the critical domain of Healthcare Analytics for an extended example of practical data analytics. The algorithms and analytics will be of much interest to practitioners interested in utilizing the large and unwieldly data sets of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.(c) Predictive Analytics Two foundational and widely used algorithms, k-nearest neighbors and naive Bayes, are developed in detail. A chapter is dedicated to forecasting. The last chapter focuses on streaming data and uses publicly accessible data streams originating from the Twitter API and the NASDAQ stock market in the tutorials. This book is intended for a one- or two-semester course in data analytics for upper-division undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics, statistics, and computer science. The prerequisites are kept low, and students with one or two courses in probability or statistics, an exposure to vectors and matrices, and a programming course will have no difficulty. The core material of every chapter is accessible to all with these prerequisites. The chapters often expand at the close with innovations of interest to practitioners of data science. Each chapter includes exercises of varying levels of difficulty. The text is eminently suitable for self-study and an exceptional resource for practitioners.

This book emphasizes the centrality of nationhood to Thomas Jefferson's thought and politics, envisioning Jefferson as a cultural nationalist whose political project sought the alignment of the American state system with the will and character of the nation. Jefferson believed that America was the one nation on earth able to realize in practice universal ideals to which other peoples could only aspire. He appears in the book as the essential narrator of what he once called the American Story: as the historian, the sociologist, and the ethnographer; the political theorist of the nation; the most successful practitioner of its politics; and its most enthusiastic champion. The book argues that reorienting Jefferson around the concept of American nationhood recovers an otherwise easily missed coherence to his political career and helps make sense of a number of conundrums in his thought and practice."

Richard B. Harwell Award Although often counted among the Union's top five generals, George Henry Thomas has still not received his due. A Virginian who sided with the North in the Civil War, he was a more complicated commander than traditional views have allowed. Brian Wills now provides a new and more complete look at the life of a man known to history as "The Rock of Chickamauga," to his troops as "Old Pap," and to General William T. Sherman as a soldier who was "as true as steel." While biographers have long been hampered by Thomas's lack of personal papers, Wills has drawn on previously untapped sources-notably the correspondence of Thomas's contemporaries-to offer new insights into what made him tick. Focusing on Thomas's personality and motivations, Wills contributes revealing discussions of his style and approach to command and successfully captures his troubled interactions with other Union commanders, providing a particularly more evenhanded evaluation of his relationship with Grant. He also gives a more substantial account of battlefield action than can be found in other biographies, capturing the ebb and flow of key encounters-Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge, Chattanooga and Atlanta, Stones River and Mill Springs, Peachtree Creek and Nashville-to help readers better understand Thomas's contributions to their outcomes. Throughout Wills presents a well-rounded individual whose complex views embraced the worlds of professional military service and scientific inquisitiveness, a man known for attention to detail and compassion to subordinates. We also meet a sharp-tempered person whose disdain for politics hurt his prospects for advancement as much as it reflected positively on his character, and Wills offers new insight into why Thomas might not have progressed as quickly up the ladder of command as he might have liked. More deeply researched than other biographies, Wills's work situates Thomas squarely in his own time to provide readers with a more thorough and balanced life story of this enigmatic Union general. It is a definitive military history that gives us a new and needed picture of the Rock of Chickamauga-a man whose devotion to duty and ideals made him as true as steel.

From Birth of a Nation to Cold Mountain hundreds of directors, actors, and screenwriters have used the Civil War to create compelling cinema. However, each generation of moviemakers has resolved the tug of war between entertainment value and historical accuracy differently. Historian Brian Steel Wills takes readers on a journey through the portrayal of the war in film, exploring what Hollywood got right and wrong, how the films influenced each other, and, ultimately, how the movies reflect America's changing understandings of the conflict and of the nation.

Adrien Brody and Lawrence Fishburne star in this sci-fi action sequel to the 1987 film 'Predator'. Produced by Robert Rodriguez, the film follows contract killer Royce (Brody) as he is abducted by alien creatures and released along with seven other professional killers onto a strange and hostile planet. Battling for survival, the group comes across Noland (Fishburne), an American commando who has managed to survive on the planet for several years by hiding out in a cave, and discover to their horror that they have been brought there as prey for a new and merciless race of vicious human-eating alien predators.

The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the attack by Confederate forces under Forrest's command left many of the Tennessee Unionists and black soldiers garrisoned there dead in a confrontation widely labeled as a 'massacre.' In The River Was Dyed with Blood, best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its defenders. Rather, the general's great failing was losing control of his troops. A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort Pillow - which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters 'dyed with blood' - occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war. After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends, popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves. Wills sets what took place at Fort Pillow in the context of other wartime excesses from the American Revolution to World War II and Vietnam, as well as the cultural transformations brought on by the Civil War. Confederates viewed black Union soldiers as the embodiment of slave rebellion and reacted accordingly. Nevertheless, Wills concludes that the engagement was neither a massacre carried out deliberately by Forrest, as charged by a congressional committee, nor solely a northern fabrication meant to discredit him and the Confederate States of America, as pro-Southern apologists have suggested. The battle-scarred fighter with his homespun aphorisms was neither an infallible warrior nor a heartless butcher, but a product of his time and his heritage.

This book emphasises the centrality of nationhood to Thomas Jefferson's thought and politics, envisioning Jefferson as a cultural nationalist whose political project sought the alignment of the American state system with the will and character of the nation. Jefferson believed that America was the one nation on earth able to realise in practice universal ideals to which other peoples could only aspire. He appears in the book as the essential narrator of what he once called the 'American Story': as the historian, the sociologist and the ethnographer; the political theorist of the nation; the most successful practitioner of its politics; and its most enthusiastic champion. The book argues that reorienting Jefferson around the concept of American nationhood recovers an otherwise easily missed coherence to his political career and helps make sense of a number of conundrums in his thought and practice.

This is the best biography of one of the most exciting, colorful, and controversial figures of the Civil War. A renowned cavalryman, Nathan Bedford Forrest perfected a ruthless hit-and-run guerrilla warfare that terrified Union soldiers and garnered the respect of warriors like William Sherman, who described his adversary as "that Devil, Forrest . . . the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side." Historian Bruce Catton rated Forrest "one of the authentic military geniuses of the whole war," but Brian Steel Wills covers much more than the cavalryman's incredible feats on the field of battle. He also provides the most thoughtful and complete analysis of Forrest's hardscrabble childhood in backwater Mississippi; his rise to wealth in the Memphis slave trade; his role in the infamous Fort Pillow massacre of black Union soldiers; his role as early leader and Grand Wizard of the first Ku Klux Klan; and his declining health and premature death in a reconstructing America.

In 1863 Confederate forces under Lieutenant General James Longstreet, while scouring Southside Virginia for badly needed supplies, threatened the Union garrison in Suffolk. For the residents of surrounding Nansemond, Isle of Wight, and Southampton Counties, the Suffolk campaign followed an exhausting and deadly pattern. Already subjected to the demands of waves of soldiers, first Southern recruits and then Union occupation troops, the people of the region faced the severest tests the Civil War could impose upon human beings. In The War Hits Home, Brian Steel Wills tells the story of these real people in the crucible of war. Reconstructing life for soldiers from the region on the battlefield and for civilians in the homes of southeastern Virginia, Wills provides a full depiction of what life was like for the ordinary person-black, white, soldier, citizen, Unionist, or secessionist-contending with domestic, economic, social, and military hardship in the contest of sectionalism and war. Wills employs their individual experiences to illustrate the impact of the war on a human scale, on soldiers and their relatives, North and South. We witness battlefield horror and family despair, African Americans' embrace of freedom, and the persistence of Confederate nationalism among most whites in the region. Taken as a whole, The War Hits Home is a sweeping but extraordinarily detailed canvas of a fractured American South.

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

Adrien Brody and Lawrence Fishburne star in this sci-fi action sequel to the 1987 film 'Predator'. Produced by Robert Rodriguez, the film follows contract killer Royce (Brody) as he is abducted by alien creatures and released along with seven other professional killers onto a strange and hostile planet. Battling for survival, the group comes across Noland (Fishburne), an American commando who has managed to survive on the planet for several years by hiding out in a cave, and discover to their horror that they have been brought there as prey for a new and merciless race of vicious human-eating alien predators.

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Fourth film in the hugely popular 'Terminator' franchise. The film is set in 2018 in a post-apocalyptic world where the human race is at war with Skynet and its army of deadly Terminators. John Connor (Christian Bale) is a young soldier who is destined to become the leader of the human resistance. However, he is forced to question his certainty about the future when a mysterious stranger named Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) suddenly appears, and John must decide whether he has been sent from the past or the future. As Skynet grows more and more powerful and all hope for the human race looks like being eliminated in one final devastating attack, John and Marcus journey to the centre of Skynet's operations where they discover a shocking secret...