Steve Ditko (1927-2018) is one of the most important contributors to American comic books. As the cocreator of Spider-Man and sole creator of Doctor Strange, Ditko made an indelible mark on American popular culture. Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity resets the conversation about his heady and powerful work. Always inward facing, Ditko's narratives employed superhero and supernatural fantasy in the service of self-examination, and with characters like the Question, Mr. A, and Static, Ditko turned ordinary superhero comics into philosophic treatises. Many of Ditko's philosophy-driven comics show a clear debt to ideas found in Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Unfortunately, readers often reduce Ditko's work to a mouthpiece for Rand's vision. Mysterious Travelers unsettles this notion. In this book, Zack Kruse argues that Ditko's philosophy draws on a complicated network of ideas that is best understood as mystic liberalism. Although Ditko is not the originator of mystic liberalism, his comics provide a unique window into how such an ideology operates in popular media. Examining selections of Ditko's output from 1953 to 1986, Kruse demonstrates how Ditko's comics provide insight into a unique strand of American thought that has had a lasting impact.

In the land of Odyssia, former hero Quest unwillingly becomes the bodyguard to Prince Nestor, a young smart-alec who knows the whereabouts of a mystic dagger that is key to ultimate power. Together, they'll face creatures, bounty hunters and other evils vying for the weapon. In the meantime, they'll have to deal with each other.

Take a journey deep into South Texas, where Lucille Thomas Kruse grows up as a young girl in Falfurrias during the 1920s and 1930s.

The Thomas family's fate is determined when Grandfather Thomas moves all his belongings and farm animals, including his beehives, to Falfurrias in an immigrant railroad car. In letters from 1907, he praises the lush and fertile land with fl owing artesian water.

It also turns out to be a great place to grow up, and Kruse recalls life as it used to be-exploring the farm she grew up on where she rode horses and found adventure around every corner. When she became a teenager, excitement consisted of climbing onto the roof of the courthouse or trying to outrun a jackrabbit in a car.

Kruse also recalls her sophisticated city relatives who streamed in to visit and experience the family farm. Eccentric ranchers, older folks who remember battling Indians and hunters who rely on their hound dogs to go on wolf hunts all fi gure into this historical account.

See how life used to be and discover a forgotten piece of America as you venture "Deep in the Brush Country."

Extensions to the No-Core Shell Model presents three extensions to the No-Core Shell Model (NCSM) that allow for calculations of heavier nuclei, specifically for the p-shell nuclei. The Importance-Truncated NCSM (IT-NCSM) formulated on arguments of multi-configurational perturbation theory selects a small set of basis states from the initially large basis space in which the Hamiltonian is diagonalized. Previous IT-NCSM calculations have proven reliable, however, there has been no thorough investigation of the inherent error in the truncated IT-NCSM calculations. This thesis provides a detailed study of IT-NCSM calculations and compares them to full NCSM calculations to judge the accuracy of IT-NCSM in heavier nuclei. When IT-NCSM calculations are performed, one often needs to extrapolate the ground-state energy from the finite basis (or model) spaces to the full NCSM model space. In this thesis a careful investigation of the extrapolation procedures was performed. On a related note, extrapolations in the NCSM are commonplace, but up to recently did not have the ultraviolet (UV) or infrared (IR) physics under control. This work additionally presents a method that maps the NCSM parameters into an effective-field theory inspired framework, in which the UV and IR physics are treated appropriately. The NCSM is well-suited to describe bound-state properties of nuclei, but is not well-adapted to describe loosely bound systems, such as the exotic nuclei near the neutron drip line. With the inclusion of the Resonating Group Method (RGM), the NCSM / RGM can provide a first-principles description of exotic nuclei and the first extension of the NCSM.

The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media have led large numbers of Americans to believe in fictions over facts, making constructive dialogue impossible and imperilling our democracy. In Myth America, Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of fellow historians to push back against this misinformation. The contributors debunk narratives that portray the New Deal and Great Society as failures, immigrants as hostile invaders, and feminists as anti-family warriors-among numerous other partisan lies. Based on a firm foundation of historical scholarship, their findings revitalize our understanding of American history. Replacing myths with research and reality, Myth America is essential reading amid today's heated debates about our nation's past. With Essays By Akhil Reed Amar Kathleen Belew Carol Anderson Kevin Kruse Erika Lee Daniel Immerwahr Elizabeth Hinton Naomi Oreskes Erik M. Conway Ari Kelman Geraldo Cadava David A. Bell Joshua Zeitz Sarah Churchwell Michael Kazin Karen L. Cox Eric Rauchway Glenda Gilmore Natalia Mehlman Petrzela Lawrence B. Glickman Julian E. Zelizer

Daisy's Training Trials is about a girl who trains horses at Ms. Laura's stable. With more and more horses coming to be worked with, and also with Daisy's cousins coming to visit her, will she have enough time to train all the horses in time for the Christmas horse show? Find out in Daisy's Training Trials!

In this controversial and groundbreaking new history, Timothy Messer-Kruse rewrites the standard narrative of the most iconic event in American labor history: the Haymarket Bombing and Trial of 1886. Using thousands of pages of previously unexamined materials, Messer-Kruse demonstrates that, contrary to longstanding historical opinion, the trial was not the "travesty of justice" it has commonly been depicted as. Prosecutors in the trial successfully brought to light a daunting amount of evidence revealing the inner workings of an anarchist conspiracy to spark insurrection by attacking police, and connected their plans to the bomber through a solid chain of evidence. Rather than being an example of "judicial murder," the Haymarket trial was a tragic case of judicial suicide, as the defense chose to use the trial as a grandstand for anarchism rather than deploy a sound legal defense. Though bumblers in the courtroom, the anarchist lawyers proved adept in the court of public opinion and succeeded in influencing the way historians and activists would remember this event for the next 125 years. Exhaustively researched and forcefully argued, this is a vital new contribution to our understanding of labor history and the world of Gilded Age America.

Tycoons, Scorchers, and Outlaws charts the class and cultural origins of auto racing in America, arguing for the first time that auto racing was invented by millionaires who viewed the new sport like horse racing, where ownership and patronage counted for more than skill on the track. It reveals how these elites' plans to establish the sport along French lines with grand road rallies that usurped the common right of way were thwarted by a public backlash based largely on class. As these tycoons reluctantly moved racing onto tracks, they lost control to both manufacturers and working class drivers who saw the sport as a commercial opportunity. Soon the elite clubmen's grip on racing slipped away and auto racing emerged as a popular working class sport.

This book presents the proceedings of a conference on dynamical systems held in honor of Jurgen Scheurle in January 2012. Through both original research papers and survey articles leading experts in the field offer overviews of the current state of the theory and its applications to mechanics and physics. In particular, the following aspects of the theory of dynamical systems are covered: - Stability and bifurcation - Geometric mechanics and control theory - Invariant manifolds, attractors and chaos - Fluid mechanics and elasticity - Perturbations and multiscale problems - Hamiltonian dynamics and KAM theory Researchers and graduate students in dynamical systems and related fields, including engineering, will benefit from the articles presented in this volume.