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Barracoon : the story of the last \black cargo\
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. Based on those interviews, which feature Cudjo's unique vernacular, this book illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it.
Book
Towards a robust hydrologic data assimilation system for hurricane-induced river flow forecasting
The Hybrid Ensemble and Variational Data Assimilation framework for Environmental Systems (HEAVEN) is a method developed to enhance hydrologic model predictions while accounting for different sources of uncertainties involved in various layers of model simulations. While the effectiveness of this data assimilation in forecasting streamflow has been proven in previous studies, its potential to improve flood forecasting during extreme events remains unexplored. This study aims to demonstrate this potential by employing HEAVEN to assimilate streamflow data from United States Geological Survey (USGS) stations into a conceptual hydrologic model to enhance its capability to forecast hurricane-induced floods across multiple locations within three watersheds in the southeastern United States. The Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting (SAC-SMA) hydrologic model is driven by two variables: precipitation and potential evapotranspiration (PET), collected from North American Land Data Assimilation System phase 2 (NLDAS-2) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite data, respectively. We validated the probabilistic streamflow predictions during five instances of hurricane-induced flooding across three regions. The results show that this data assimilation approach significantly improves the hydrologic model's ability to forecast extreme river flows. By accounting for different sources of uncertainty in model predictions – in particular model structural uncertainty (in addition to model parameter uncertainty) and atmospheric forcing data uncertainty – HEAVEN emerges as a powerful tool for enhancing flood prediction accuracy. The study found that data assimilation improved streamflow forecasting during Hurricane Harvey, enhancing the SAC-SMA model's accuracy across most USGS stations on the peak flow day. However, data assimilation had little effect on streamflow forecasting for Hurricane Rita. In Rita, the streamflow surged dramatically in a single day (from 28 to 566 m3 s−1), causing the model to miss the high-flow event despite accurate initialization the day before. For hurricanes Ivan and Matthew, data assimilation improved peak flow forecasts by 21 % to 46 % in Mobile and 5 % to 46 % in Savanah, with improvements varying by station location.
Journal Article
Barracoon : adapted for young readers
\"In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past--memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.\" -- Publisher's website.
Book
Exploration of science teaching self-efficacy outside professional development context for inquiry-based teaching
There are situations where teachers accustomed to years of traditional teaching are tasked with implementing inquiry-based science teaching in schools nationwide, with few professional developments to change their self-efficacy. The implicit expectations are that teachers' self-efficacy will improve as they implement inquiry-based practices over time. This study explored self-efficacy levels of science instructors outside of the professional development context; and combined concepts from social cognitive and curriculum implementation theories and findings to explore effective ways of implementing inquiry-based teaching practices in schools. We collected, analysed, and triangulated quantitative and qualitative data from a larger sample of 308 and subsample of 18 junior high school science instructors. We found that science instructors outside the professional development context had low self-efficacy of inquiry-based but high self-efficacy of traditional teaching practices. We also found that there were statistically substantial differences in self-efficacy of science instructors outside of the professional development context, based on school type, school location, and academic qualification. From combination of concepts from social cognitive and curriculum implementation theories and findings from the study, it was ascertained that differentiated and phased approach to implementation of inquiry-based teaching practices needs to be adopted in various schools of diverse teachers with different self-efficacy levels. Different teachers in different schools with different levels of self-efficacy may start implementing inquiry-based practices with different content knowledge, teaching skills, and progress at different rates.
Inquiry-based science pedagogy is a constructivist approach that is effective for promoting meaningful learning and scientific literacy. Consequently, there have been science education reform initiatives to adopt and implement inquiry-based pedagogy in schools in many countries, including Ghana. However, in many situations, teachers with years of experiences in traditional instruction are those tasked with implementing the innovative approach, without adequate professional development to re-orient their self-efficacy. Findings from this study suggest that it is less likely to have significant and sustained improvements in instructors' self-efficacy with few professional developments and rare engagements in inquiry practices over time. This study shows the importance of examining self-efficacy of science teachers in situations with no consistent opportunities for teachers to participate in professional development experiences. It also suggests the importance of adopting differentiated and phased approach to implementing inquiry-based practices in various schools with diverse teachers holding different levels of science teaching self-efficacy.
Journal Article
The survivors of the Clotilda : the lost stories of the last captives of the American slave trade
\"Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston's rediscovered classic Barracoon, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors-the last documented survivors of any slave ship-whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Among the Swamp People
Second in size only to the Mississippi River Delta, the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, or “the swamp,” consists of almost 260,000 acres of wetlands located just north of Mobile Bay, formed by the confluence of the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers. Watt Key, a Mobile native, discovered the delta twenty years ago and there have been few weekends since that he has not made it his retreat.
There is no way into the delta except by small boat. To most it would appear a maze of rivers and creeks between stunted swamp trees and mud. Key observes that there are few places where one can step out of a boat without “sinking to the knees in muck the consistency of axle grease. It is the only place I know where gloom and beauty can coexist at such extremes. And it never occurred to me that a land seemingly so bleak could hide such beauty and adventure.”
Among the Swamp People is Watt Key’s story of discovering the delta, leasing a habitable outcropping of land deep inside, and constructing from driftwood a primitive cabin to serve as a private getaway. His story is one that chronicles the beauties of the delta’s unparalleled natural wonders, the difficulties of survival within it, and an extraordinary community of characters—by turns generous and violent, gracious and paranoid, endearing and reckless—who live, thrive, and perish there.
It also chronicles Key’s maturation as a writer, from a twenty-five-year-old computer programmer with no formal training as a writer to a highly successful, award-winning writer of fiction for a young adult audience with three acclaimed novels published to date.
In learning to make a place for himself in the wild, as in learning to write, Key’s story is one of “hoping someone—even if just myself—would find value in my creations.”
eBook
Gone to the Swamp
To make a living here, one had to be capable, confident, clever and inventive, know a lot about survival, be able to fashion and repair tools, navigate a boat, fell a tree, treat a snakebite, make a meal from whatever was handy without asking too many questions about it, and get along with folks. This fascinating and instructive book is the careful and unpretentious account of a man who was artful in all the skills needed to survive and raise a family in an area where most people would be lost or helpless. Smith’s story is an important record of a way of life beginning to disappear, a loss not fully yet realized. We are lucky to have a work that is both instructive and warm-hearted and that preserves so much hard-won knowledge.
eBook
Old Mobile Archaeology
An archaeological guide to the earliest French settlement on the northern Gulf Coast. Archaeological excavations since 1989 have uncovered exciting evidence of the original townsite of Mobile, first capital of the Louisiana colony, and remnants of the colony's port on Dauphin Island.
eBook