by Ganesh Mysore and Valerie Parks

The spring semester has officially kicked off, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to have the students back on campus! We wish them well as they had back into the classroom and spend their evenings studying in the library. May will be here before you know it!

Want to join in on the fun this spring? Check out these cool happenings:

• Alumni events
• Campus events

The discussion over HTML5 vs. hybrid or native apps has been a much debated topic for mobile app developers for the last few years with HTML5 being tagged as incomplete and incapable of standing up native tools, in walks Telerik with an answer. 

A lecture by History Associate Professor Anne Rubin in her Civil War and Reconstruction class recently aired on C-SPAN3. The class was taped by C-SPAN as part of a series on Civil War Memory and “The Lost Cause.”

Rubin’s lecture analyzed how the Civil War was remembered in the decades after the conflict with a focus on the former Confederate states. In the lecture, Rubin talks about the Southern Historical Society’s contributions to The Lost Cause myth which idealized how the pre-war South was perceived. She also analyzes cemeteries and monuments that honor the Confederate dead among other topics.

The class aired on C-SPAN 3 Saturday, January 25. You can watch the lecture in its entirety here.

Anne Rubin is author of A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868. 

Jasmine makes it possible to test that a given DOM event occurred and what the results of the event were. In today's article, Rob Gravelle demonstrates how to write tests for the button click event using Jasmine 2.0, jQuery, and an additional third-party library called jasmine-jquery.

The Princeton Review released its list of “Best Value Colleges for 2014” today, created based on surveys regarding academics, cost and financial aid awards.

Out of the 2,000 undergraduate institutions surveyed, UMBC was one of 75 public universities named a “Best Value College.” UMBC also received this distinction in 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2013.

An interactive database of the 75 public and 75 private schools on the “Best Value Colleges” list can be found at USA Today.

Princeton Review also released a companion book, The Best Value Colleges: The 150 Best-Buy Schools and What It Takes to Get In, featuring profiles of the colleges and universities on the list.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton became the first woman to testify before Congress on January 20, 1869. In an appearance on WYPR’s Humanities Connection, Gender and Women’s Studies Lecturer Kate Drabinski reflected on Stanton’s position in history and vision of women’s rights.

When Stanton testified before Congress, she was speaking out against the Fifteenth Amendment which guaranteed the right to vote for African American men. Drabinski commented that Stanton fought for abolition during the Civil War, but for her, “suffrage was about all people, not just men, and she refused to support an amendment to the Constitution that expanded rights for some while leaving others out in the cold,” Drabinski said.

Drabinski further commented that Stanton had a broader vision of women’s rights beyond suffrage that inspires women’s activism today: “Stanton was a lifelong activist agitating against slavery and sexism, demanding the natural rights of women not just to vote, but to hold property, file for divorce, inherit, and more,” she added.

You can listen to the full appearance by Kate Drabinski on Humanities Connection here.

Charlotte Keniston, UMBC MFA student and Shriver Peaceworker Fellow, was featured in a blog post by the National Peace Corps Association for her food justice project, Pigtown Food for Thought.

Her upcoming work at the MFA thesis exhibition opens April 3rd at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Cultural at UMBC, and will feature her work in Pigtown. For more information on Charlotte’s art, check out her website: www.charlottekeniston.com

The weather may be wintery, but it’s time for the spring semester here at UMBC! This week, classes kicked off and students poured back onto campus. As they settle down to the business of studying and creating and making, we wanted to take a moment and thank you, our donors, for all you do to support our students!

Want to continue your investment in our students as they work toward graduation in May? Check out some of these cool student initiatives:

• Haud Collumi Scholarship
• LGBTQ Outreach and Support