Wind quintet (consisting of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon) has been a favored ensemble of composers for centuries. Throughout the semester, these four students have been working on pieces for such an ensemble. During this session the presenters’ compositions will be performed live.

Historians make use of a plethora of material as they search for knowledge of the past, always adding new historiography to the existing literature. Only very recently have a few scholars, notably Joseph Witek, sought to examine comic books for what historians might glean from them about history. This study, the first of its kind in relation to comic books – at least as far as published scholarship – is comparable to Robert Darnton’s work, where he studied sixteenth- and seventeenth-century peasantry folktales to find evidence of their thoughts at the time, by looking at the mentalities they conveyed in their tales. Comic books, similar to folktales in their creative nature and fictional context, are no less useful for examining more recent mentalities. This paper examines two mentalities toward homosexuality in the United States through comic books published by Marvel Comics.

This paper presents research on various encryption schemes and their applications in securing data. Specifically, I discuss their vulnerabilities, implementations (both logically and mathematically), and briefly mention their durability against cryptanalysis attacks. I also present their mathematical properties, and theories that are assumed to hold within a security parameter. In particularly, I focus my attention on the RSA (Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman) Encryption Algorithm and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) Algorithm in CBC mode (Cipher Block Chaining) against chosen-plaintext attacks [1] due to their popularity. I also introduce BB84 (Benett and Brassard 1984) and its relation to the one-time pad encryption scheme. Finally, by analyzing the pros and cons of all of the algorithms, I explain why the use of the one-time pad and BB84 key exchange are inherently superior to other approaches.

During World War 1, the media portrayed the recruitment of women war workers as a huge success. Women were employed by the thousands, faithfully fulfilling their patriotic duty in support of the men fighting in the war. My research will show the downside for women working in the munitions factories: the dangers they faced from accidental detonations, their contact with chemicals, and the dangers to themselves and their families, the harsh conditions they faced within the factories and their dismissal from these factory positions after the Great War.

World War 1 created labor shortages particularly in factories. Formerly women were not allowed to work in munitions factories, but to fill vacancies and to satisfy the need for additional work, the Women Work Council and Ministry of Munitions launched large recruitment drives. These actions seemed positive because an ever larger number of women were earning ever higher incomes which enable the women to achieve a higher standard of living. These accomplishments however, blinded contemporaries to the downside of war-time work in munitions factories.

The negative aspects of women working in the munitions factories are important because the population was unaware of the conditions these women faced on a daily basis. The Ministry of Munitions did not disclose the dangers the women faced working in the munitions factories. Instead the government used propaganda and the media to lure the women into these positions reinforcing the idea that it was the women’s patriotic duty. The women were seen as a means of producing as many armaments as possible.

In 1917, the British War Office launched a program to incorporate dogs into the military to serve as messengers, sentries, and guards. Dogs were pulled from the public sphere where their well-being was safeguarded under the Animal Protection Act of 1911 and placed directly under the control of the military. This paper examines the British Military’s war dog policies, their nutritional guidelines, general protocols, and the culture of care cultivated, in order to glean insight into the motivations responsible for improvements in the level of training, medical attention, and the care and treatment dogs received. This involved examining newspaper articles, memoirs of the founders of the war dogs program, and casualty reports posted by canine advocacy groups. It was found that the military’s impetus to treat dogs more humanely by improving the quality of care stemmed from the necessity for marital success rather than fulfilling a moral obligation.

My presentation will focus on an area of relevant historical study that has been neglected until quite recently, namely, the Ku Klux Klan’s focus on educational reform in the 1920s. Specifically, by utilizing local primary source documents, graduate theses, secondary source surveys and journal articles, my presentation will compare and contrast the significant yet neglected case study of the Klan’s brief yet ultimately ineffective takeover of the Akron Public Schoolboard in the 1920s with case studies of other Klan chapters throughout the United States. In doing so, I will illustrate why this organization that boasted over six million members nationwide, including hundreds of large chapters such as that of Akron, Ohio failed to achieve any lasting reforms, even though the organizations stated philosophy and goals seemed to conform with much of mainstream political discourse.

Art and religion have an affinity that cannot really be explained. One can exist without the other, but they both would be a little less interesting without each other. If asked to make a general association of the two, the first response of most people is the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo. Philosophical history tells us that religion was the first cradle of art. Much thought is given to how art helped develop certain religious beliefs and reinforce others. In Medieval Europe, the notions of religious heresy and its connection to witchcraft were without a doubt helped along by the miniature pictures that were drawn by hand in the margins of handwritten religious manuscripts by men called Illuminators. At the time, religious writings were handwritten manuscripts. These manuscripts were very large, bulky and not available to the generally illiterate population. When the printing press became widely used, the print shops of the Holy Roman Empire, in what is now southern Germany, became the place where people congregated. These people were theologians, magistrates, artists, the artists’ patrons, and generally those who were educated. This is where the iconography of witchcraft was developed. The broomstick for flying, the cauldron for brewing potions, and kissing toads to cast spells were images that were created and spread throughout Europe, and are still in the minds of many today when asked to describe the activities of a witch.

William Faulkner and Toni Morrison are American authors who share a specific writing style. Specifically, my analysis compares the ways these authors use Gothic genre in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Morrison’s Beloved. Additionally, I explain their uses of multiple narrators and points of view to show how multiple narrators give separate voices to many characters in contrast to most novels’ single-voiced narrator. My study further explains the shared styles of these novels by exploring sentence structure, flashback, and motif repetition. I evaluate the imagery both authors use to define their characters outside of their physical being. I use examples such as the tree on Sethe’s back in Beloved to show how that image can have a deeper meaning than an inanimate object might. Similarly, I explain how in Faulkner’s novel the broken wagon represents the broken family riding in it. Furthermore, to bring together the authors’ uses of imagery, I note Faulkner’s and Morrison’s depiction of symbolic river crossings. I also explain how images of home, death, and isolation affect the characters. I have used each novel as well as several academic journals to better my understanding of the stylistic characteristics Faulkner and Morrison share.

In 2001, a civil action lawsuit was taken by families of survivors of the Holocaust against the French government owned railroad, Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais (SNCF). This and other similar lawsuits came before U.S. courts in several states because the SNCF was bidding on contracts to build railroads in the U.S., although they had participated in Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution” by deporting 60,000+ Jews to death camps such as Auschwitz. This lawsuit and others were all dismissed from U.S. courts based on jurisdiction issues. In December 2014, the French and U.S. governments negotiated a settlement for $60 million. This paper will look at the legality of this case as well as the ethical aspect of demanding reparations from “perpetrators” who did not participate in the Holocaust and “victims” who never really experienced the Holocaust.

We studied the pollination biology of three nocturnal moth species collected at the Biopond at Kent State Stark. The purpose of this research was to quantify the pollen load on the mouthparts (proboscis and labial palpi) of moth species. We hypothesized that moth species would differ in their pollen load; therefore, moth species differ in their role as pollinators. Moths were collected at the Stark Campus Biopond at night using a white sheet and a 250W mercury vapor light and stored in a -80 degree C freezer. Moth mouthparts were studied with a stereoscope and confocal microscopy to assess pollen load. Our results indicate significant differences in pollen load among species and that pollination patterns might not be based on family-level phylogenetic relationships, but represent species-level, moth-flower interactions. We suggest that additional studies are needed regarding this important insect-plant interaction.