Between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, General William S. Harney became one of the best-known military figures in America. In a career aided by Andrew Jackson and the concept of an expansible army, Harney saw duty in virtually every part of the country and participated in most of the key military episodes of his time. He chased remnants of Lafitte pirates in Louisiana, campaigned with Abraham Lincoln and Zachary Taylor during the Black Hawk War, developed Vietnam-style riverine tactics that ended the Second Seminole War, and led Winfield Scott's cavalry in the Mexican War. In the 1850s Harney devised the army's largest and most successful pre?Civil War campaign against Plains Indians, commanded troops charged with upholding federal authority in Kansas and Utah, and almost provoked hostilities with Great Britain in the Pacific Northwest. Removed from command amid false charges of disloyalty during the Missouri secession crisis, he returned as a leading member of the Indian Peace Commission of 1867?68. ø Harney was bold, ambitious, and innovative, but also impulsive, vindictive, and violent. His career illustrates the nineteenth-century army's role in implementing federal policy, highlights its limited resources compared to its responsibilities, and illuminates key aspects of its organizational structure, the behavior of its officers, and its impact on personal lives.

Though perhaps most famous for Walden, Henry David Thoreau was also a prolific essayist. Many of his essays touch on subjects similar to his famous book: long walks through nature, things found in moonlight that are invisible and unheard during the day, his preference for wild apples over domestic ones. In many ways he prefigured environmentalism, expressing his love for untouched nature and lamenting what the encroachment of man and cities were doing to it. He also had strong opinions on many other subjects. One of his most famous essays, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” was written as a result of his going to jail for refusing to pay several years’ worth of poll taxes. One of the primary reasons for his refusal was his holding the government in contempt for its support of slavery, and several of his other essays express support and admiration for John Brown, who thought to start a slave revolt when he attacked Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Whether discussing trees in a forest, slavery, or the works of Thomas Carlyle, Thoreau’s essays are deeply personal and full of keen observations, often in poetic language. They give a sense of the man expressing them as being much more than the views being expressed. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Investigates how data production and consumption territorialize the physical landscape filtered through Ireland’s role in global communications and, as told by the Irish Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, features an installation that focuses on the materiality of data infrastructure in space. As our everyday lives become increasingly entangled with data technologies, the book addresses the utopian fantasy that surrounds the Cloud, as transcending physical presence or resourcing. By bringing the physical infrastructure around data, and its impact on the environment under the spotlight, it hopes to reframe how we understand data production and highlight the myth that information technologies are hidden and without major material manifestations on the landscape. The context for the book is Ireland which has a significant historical role in the evolution of global communications and data infrastructure. In 1866, the world’s first transatlantic telegraph cable landed on the West coast of Ireland. In 1901, the inventor of the radio Guglielmo Marconi transmitted some of the world’s first wireless radio messages from Ireland across the Atlantic Ocean to Newfoundland. Today, Dublin has overtaken London as the data centre hub of Europe, hosting 25% of all available European server space. And by the year 2027, data centres are forecast to consume a third of Ireland’s total electricity demand. The book aims to raise awareness around the hardware of the global internet and Cloud services, which is interwoven with the Irish landscape—made manifest through the vast constellation of data centres, fibre optic cable networks, and energy grids that have come to populate its cities and suburbs over recent decades. The publication accompanies and supports Entanglement, the Irish Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale by archiving the production of the pavilion filtered through a series of poetic excerpts that describe the form, components, content and furniture that make up the installation. At the same time the book is conceived as more than just a catalog by positioning some of the cultural and spatial implications of data technologies in Ireland within a more universal context through contributions by ANNEX, the team selected to produce the pavilion, as well as invited contributors from the disciplines of Media Theory; Journalism; Computer Science, Geography; History and Architecture.

The editors have transcribed 2,500 of Wilkie Collins's letters, around 700 of them previously unidentified, and have given them all a full scholarly annotation and context. The letters shed light on the personal life and business activities of this creative Victorian personality.