Tapping into War: Leveraging World War I in the Drive for a Dry Nation
Abstract This study examines the communication efforts of the Anti-Saloon League of America in the years leading up to National Prohibition. The ASLA has been studied in the context of the Progressive Era, but it has not been examined in the context of its role in public relations history even though its efforts, along with those of the suffrage movement, have been said to have contributed to the postwar boom in publicity/public relations firms. Thus, it will be shown that the ASLA employed a multitiered approach in its own fight for a dry nation via national legislation and congressional hearings, its publishing partner, the Scientific Temperance Federation, and its own American Issue. And that it did so by weaving elements of emotion and cognition through messages arising from war-related issues such as anti-German sentiment, patriotism, and rationing. Such an approach might not be so unusual today, nor were elements of its efforts new to advocacy groups at the time, but the League demonstrated that, for better or worse, a Midwest, church-based social reform movement grounded in the Progressive Era could successfully harness persuasive strategies and tactics to fulfill its agenda for a dry nation.
Beauty and the Beasts: Significance of Press Coverage of the 1913 National Suffrage Parade
When five thousand suffragists marched down Pennsylvania Avenue on 3 March 1913, a drunken mob broke up their parade. This article discusses the cultural significance of widespread indignation discovered in parade coverage by ten daily newspapers. Newspapers became the forum for a broader debate on women's place in society stirred by the mayhem. Newspaper coverage of the suffrage parade was significant because it conferred legitimacy upon women's right of assembly. The acknowledgement by the mainstream press that women enjoyed some rights of citizenship moved it closer to the logical conclusion that women also had a right to vote.
Spectroscopy of high rate events during active interrogation
Abstract Pulsed accelerators are being used for radiographic inspections in homeland security applications. Adding spectroscopic detection capability enables additional information to be extracted but challenges signal processing hardware. This work compares two approaches to cost-effective digital spectroscopy systems designed to handle these high rate scenarios. In the first system, the signal from a PMT is directly digitized and then deconvolved on a PC using standard techniques. Bypassing the preamplifier, this system can handle high count rates (>10 6  cps) from an LaCl 3 detector with no dead time and an energy resolution of 5% at 1.33 MeV. Spectra acquired from fission product gamma rays between interrogation pulses are shown. At higher rates, this approach is limited by the DAQ transfer rate to the PC. Instead, we tested a fast ADC (125 MSPS) and an FPGA that performed onboard, real-time digital signal processing (DSP). The energy spectrum is generated on the FPGA board during the measurement and transferred later. This system was tested in nuclear resonance fluorescence (NRF) experiments. Resonance peaks from NRF reactions are shown.