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"The conspiracy scare phenomenon emerged from a combination of enslaved people's traumatic experience of terror and enslavers' awareness of their culpability and exposure to the people whom they exploited. On at least ninety-six documented occasions before 1790, colonial officials in eastern North America and the British Caribbean believed that they discovered evidence of a "slave conspiracy"-a detailed plan for insurrection coordinated by a network of enslaved men-just in time to avert the uprising. Often they ended up convincing themselves that they regularly dodged ambushes at decoy fires and averted a world turned upside down. Two questions about conspiracy scares motivate The World That Fear Made. How and why did white colonists, with the coerced involvement of enslaved people, create these particular fears and come to believe in them? And how did people remake their societies in relation to fear and navigate the world that it conjured?"--

A thought-provoking history of slaveholders' fear of the people they enslaved and its consequencesFrom the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, slave insurrections have been understood as emblematic rejections of enslavement, the most powerful and, perhaps, the only way for slaves to successfully challenge the brutal system they endured. In The World That Fear Made, Jason T. Sharples orients the mirror to those in power who were preoccupied with their exposure to insurrection. Because enslavers in British North America and the Caribbean methodically terrorized slaves and anticipated just vengeance, colonial officials consolidated their regime around the dread of rebellion. As Sharples shows through a comprehensive data set, colonial officials launched investigations into dubious rumors of planned revolts twice as often as actual slave uprisings occurred. In most of these cases, magistrates believed they had discovered plans for insurrection, coordinated by a network of enslaved men, just in time to avert the uprising. Their crackdowns, known as conspiracy scares, could last for weeks and involve hundreds of suspects. They sometimes brought the execution or banishment of dozens of slaves at a time, and loss and heartbreak many times over.Mining archival records, Sharples shows how colonists from New York to Barbados tortured slaves to solicit confessions of baroque plots that were strikingly consistent across places and periods. Informants claimed that conspirators took direction from foreign agents; timed alleged rebellions for a holiday such as Easter; planned to set fires that would make it easier to ambush white people in the confusion; and coordinated the uprising with European or Native American invasion forces. Yet, as Sharples demonstrates, these scripted accounts rarely resembled what enslaved rebels actually did when they took up arms. Ultimately, he argues, conspiracy scares locked colonists and slaves into a cycle of terror that bound American society together through shared racial fear

Abstract. Wildfire can become a catastrophic natural hazard, especially during dry summer seasons in Australia. Severity is influenced by various meteorological, geographical, and fuel characteristics. Modified Mark 4 McArthur's Grassland Fire Danger Index (GFDI) is a commonly used approach to determine the fire danger level in grassland ecosystems. The degree of curing (DOC, i.e. proportion of dead material) of the grass is one key ingredient in determining the fire danger. It is difficult to collect accurate DOC information in the field, and therefore ground-observed measurements are rather limited. In this study, we explore the possibility of whether adding satellite-observed data responding to vegetation water content (vegetation optical depth, VOD) will improve DOC prediction when compared with the existing satellite-observed data responding to DOC prediction models based on vegetation greenness (normalised difference vegetation index, NDVI). First, statistically significant relationships are established between selected ground-observed DOC and satellite-observed vegetation datasets (NDVI and VOD) with an r2 up to 0.67. DOC levels estimated using satellite observations were then evaluated using field measurements with an r2 of 0.44 to 0.55. Results suggest that VOD-based DOC estimation can reasonably reproduce ground-based observations in space and time and is comparable to the existing NDVI-based DOC estimation models.

Abstract. Extreme fires have substantial adverse effects on society and
natural ecosystems. Such events can be associated with the intense coupling of
fire behaviour with the atmosphere, resulting in extreme fire
characteristics such as pyrocumulonimbus cloud (pyroCb) development. Concern
that anthropogenic climate change is increasing the occurrence of pyroCbs
globally is driving more focused research into these meteorological
phenomena. Using 6 min scans from a nearby weather radar, we describe the
development of a pyroCb during the afternoon of 4 January 2013 above the
Forcett–Dunalley fire in south-eastern Tasmania. We relate storm development
to (1) near-surface weather using the McArthur forest fire danger index
(FFDI) and the C-Haines index, the latter of which is a measure of the vertical atmospheric
stability and dryness, both derived from gridded weather reanalysis for
Tasmania (BARRA-TA); and (2) a chronosequence of fire severity derived from
remote sensing. We show that the pyroCb rapidly developed over a 24 min
period on the afternoon of 4 January, with the cloud top reaching a height
of 15 km. The pyroCb was associated with a highly unstable lower atmosphere
(C-Haines value of 10–11) and severe–marginally extreme (FFDI 60–75) near-surface
fire weather, and it formed over an area of forest that was severely burned
(total crown defoliation). We use spatial patterns of elevated fire weather
in Tasmania and fire weather during major runs of large wildfires in
Tasmania for the period from 2007 to 2016 to geographically and historically
contextualise this pyroCb event. Although the Forcett–Dunalley fire is the
only known record of a pyroCb in Tasmania, our results show that eastern and
south-eastern Tasmania are prone to the conjunction of high FFDI and
C-Haines values that have been associated with pyroCb development. Our
findings have implications for fire weather forecasting and wildfire
management, and they highlight the vulnerability of south-east Tasmania to extreme
fire events.