Archive
Parents, Children, Libraries, and Reading
Parents, Children, Libraries, and Reading
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project
The vast majority of parents of minor children — children younger than 18 — feel libraries are very important for their children. That attachment carries over into parents’ own higher-than-average use of a wide range of library services.
The ties between parents and libraries start with the importance parents attach to the role of reading in their children’s lives. Half of parents of children under age 12 (50%) read to their child every day and an additional 26% do so a few times a week. Those with children under age 6 are especially keen on daily reading with their child: 58% of these parents read with their child every day and another 26% read multiple times a week with their children.
The importance parents assign to reading and access to knowledge shapes their enthusiasm for libraries and their programs:
- 94% of parents say libraries are important for their children and 79% describe libraries as “very important.” That is especially true of parents of young children (those under 6), some 84% of whom describe libraries as very important.
- 84% of these parents who say libraries are important say a major reason they want their children to have access to libraries is that libraries help inculcate their children’s love of reading and books.
- 81% say a major reason libraries are important is that libraries provide their children with information and resources not available at home.
- 71% also say a major reason libraries are important is that libraries are a safe place for children.
Almost every parent (97%) says it is important for libraries to offer programs and classes for children and teens.
Providing for the Casualties of War: The American Experience Through World War II
Providing for the Casualties of War: The American Experience Through World War II
Source: RAND Corporation
War has always been a dangerous business, bringing injury, wounds, and death, and — until recently — often disease. What has changed over time, most dramatically in the last 150 or so years, is the care these casualties receive and who provides it. Medical services have become highly organized and are state sponsored. Diseases are now prevented through vaccination and good sanitation. Sedation now ameliorates pain, and antibiotics combat infection. Wounds that once meant amputation or death no longer do so. Transfers from the field to more-capable hospitals are now as swift as aircraft can make them. The mental consequences of war are now seen as genuine illnesses and treated accordingly, rather than punished to the extreme. Likewise, treatment of those disabled by war and of veterans generally has changed markedly — along with who supplies these and other benefits. This book looks at the history of how humanity has cared for its war casualties, from ancient times through the aftermath of World War II. For each historical period, the author examines the care the sick and wounded received in the field and in hospitals, the care given to the disabled veteran and his dependents, and who provided that care and how. He shows how the lessons of history have informed the American experience over time. Finally, the author sums up this history thematically, focusing on changes in the nature and treatment of injuries, organization of services on and off the battlefield, the role of the state in providing care, and the invisible wounds of war.
The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books
The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books
Source: PLoS ONE
We report here trends in the usage of “mood” words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive and negative moods, underlain by a general decrease in the use of emotion-related words through time. Finally, we show that, in books, American English has become decidedly more “emotional” than British English in the last half-century, as a part of a more general increase of the stylistic divergence between the two variants of English language.
See: Fear Factor Increases, Emotions Decrease in Books Written in Last 50 Years
Average Food Prices: a snapshot of how much has changed over a century
Average Food Prices: a snapshot of how much has changed over a century
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
In January 1913, when the U.S. Department of Labor was formed, the buffalo nickel would soon replace the Liberty Head nickel, women were protesting for the right to vote, and a family could buy a pound of potatoes for less than two cents. Fast forward 100 years to January 2013, when the U.S. Department of Labor is a century old, credit cards and online purchases are the more common forms of payment than the cash purchases of 1913, a record number of women are elected to Congress, and a pound of potatoes now costs 62 cents. These historic comparisons show how much has changed in the United States, and food prices have changed as well.
To examine prices over time, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has Consumer Price Index (CPI) data going back to January 1913 and a few average prices going back to at least that far.1 This article summarizes some average food prices over the last century. Table 1 lists selected food average prices a century apart.
Word Diffusion and Climate Science
Word Diffusion and Climate Science
Source: PLoS ONE
As public and political debates often demonstrate, a substantial disjoint can exist between the findings of science and the impact it has on the public. Using climate-change science as a case example, we reconsider the role of scientists in the information-dissemination process, our hypothesis being that important keywords used in climate science follow “boom and bust” fashion cycles in public usage. Representing this public usage through extraordinary new data on word frequencies in books published up to the year 2008, we show that a classic two-parameter social-diffusion model closely fits the comings and goings of many keywords over generational or longer time scales. We suggest that the fashions of word usage contributes an empirical, possibly regular, correlate to the impact of climate science on society.
See: Public acceptance of climate change affected by word usage (EurekAlert!)
U.S. Global Defense Posture, 1783–2011
U.S. Global Defense Posture, 1783–2011
Source: RAND Corporation
Debates over the U.S. global defense posture are not new. As policymakers today evaluate the U.S. forward military presence, it is important that they understand how and why the U.S. global posture has changed in the past. Today’s posture is under increasing pressure from a number of sources, including budgetary constraints, precision-guided weapons that reduce the survivability of forward bases, and host-nation opposition to a U.S. military presence. This monograph aims to describe the evolution of the U.S. global defense posture from 1783 to the present and to explain how the United States has grown from a relatively weak and insular regional power that was primarily concerned with territorial defense into the preeminent global power, with an expansive system of overseas bases and forward-deployed forces that enable it to conduct expeditionary operations around the globe. This historical overview has important implications for current policy and future efforts to develop an American military strategy, in particular the scope, size, and type of military presence overseas. As new and unpredictable threats emerge, alliance relationships are revised, and resources decline, past efforts at dealing with similar problems yield important lessons for future decisions. The author draws recommendations out of these lessons that touch on the importance of strategic planning; the need to think globally; the desirability of a lighter, more agile footprint overseas; and more.
Arts Organizations and Digital Technologies
Arts Organizations and Digital Technologies
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project
A survey of a wide-ranging mix of U.S.-based arts organizations shows that the internet, social media, and mobile connectivity now permeate their operations and have changed the way they stage performances, mount and showcase their exhibits, engage their audiences, sell tickets, and raise funds.
These organizations are even finding that technology has changed the very definition of art: 77% of respondents agree with the statement that the internet has “played a major role in broadening the boundaries of what is considered art.”
Lake Superior State University 2013 Banished Words List
Lake Superior State University 2013 Banished Words List
Source: Lake Superior State University
While the U.S. Congress has been kicking the can down the road and inching closer to the fiscal cliff, the word gurus at Lake Superior State University have doubled-down on their passion for the language and have released their 38th annual List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.
The list, compiled from nominations sent to LSSU throughout the year, is released each year on New Year’s Eve. It dates back to Dec. 31, 1975, when former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe (RAY-bee) and some colleagues cooked up the whimsical idea to banish overused words and phrases from the language. They issued the first list on New Year’s Day 1976. Much to the delight of word enthusiasts everywhere, the list has stayed the course into a fourth decade.
Through the years, LSSU has received tens of thousands of nominations for the list, which is closing in on its 1,000th banishment.
This year’s list is culled from nominations received mostly through the university’s website. Word-watchers target pet peeves from everyday speech, as well as from the news, fields of education, technology, advertising, politics and more. A committee makes a final cut in late December.
So, let’s see what’s trending. Grab your favorite superfood (boneless wings) as the list creators at LSSU reveal (spoiler alert!) their bucket list of misused, overused and generally useless words and phrases. YOLO!
The Civil War Begins: Opening Clashes, 1861
The Civil War Begins: Opening Clashes, 1861
Source: U.S. Army Military History Center
The Civil War Begins: Opening Clashes, 1861 is the first in a series of campaign brochures commemorating our national sacrifices during the American Civil War. Author Jennifer Murray examines the successes and challenges of both the Union and the Confederate forces during the early days of the Civil War. Notable battles discussed include: Fort Sumter, South Carolina; Bull Run, Virginia; Wilson’s Creek, Missouri; Cape Hatteras, North Carolina; and Port Royal, South Carolina. This brochure includes six maps and three tables.
Facts for Features: Thanksgiving Day: Nov. 22, 2012
Facts for Features: Thanksgiving Day: Nov. 22, 2012
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims, early settlers of Plymouth Colony, held a three-day feast to celebrate a bountiful harvest, an event many regard as the nation’s first Thanksgiving. Historians have also recorded ceremonies of thanks among other groups of European settlers in North America, including British colonists in Virginia in 1619. The legacy of thanks and the feast have survived the centuries, as the event became a national holiday in 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November as a national day of thanksgiving. Later, President Franklin Roosevelt clarified that Thanksgiving should always be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of the month to encourage earlier holiday shopping, never on the occasional fifth Thursday.
EconSouth Looks Back at Evolution of Economic Indicators
EconSouth Looks Back at Evolution of Economic Indicators
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta
Economic policymakers today have massive amounts of data at their disposal. Their circumstances are drastically different from those faced by their counterparts during the Great Depression. Indeed, armed with little more than stock indices, freight car loadings, and industrial production figures, policymakers struggled to monitor the economy’s pulse during the worst economic contraction in modern history.
The lack of data spawned a push for more and better data collection on the U.S. economy, explains staff writer Lela Somoza in “Part Chart, Part Science: The Evolution of Economic Indicators.” As a matter of fact, gross domestic product (GDP), one of the most closely followed indicators, has its roots in the Great Depression. Over time, however, it and other indicators have evolved to keep pace with the changing U.S. economy, which has grown in size and complexity.
Just as indicators have evolved over time to reflect the increasingly complex U.S. economy, their relative importance has waxed and waned also, Somoza notes, pointing to monetary aggregates as a prominent example.
To read more about the evolution of economic indicators since the Great Depression, see the full article in the third-quarter issue of EconSouth. The article also includes a survey of some of the more offbeat indicators economists and others turn to for a more nuanced view of the U.S. economy.
Performing on the Global Stage: Exploring the Relationship between Finance and Arts in Global Cities
Performing on the Global Stage: Exploring the Relationship between Finance and Arts in Global Cities
Source: Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network ( Loughborough University)
In this article, we explore the relationship between contemporary Global Financial Centers or GFC and Global Arts Centers or GAC. Are financial entrepôts still places for cultural encounters? Does the symbiotic relationship between international financial prowess and ditto prominence in arts in cities still hold in an era of intensified globalization? Are Asian cities which have become prominent financial centers in recent years also global arts centers? To address these questions, we compare a ranking of Global Financial Centers with a ranking of Global Arts Centers. For the first, we make use of the Global Financial Center Index constructed by the Z/Yen Group, for the latter we created a large database with “art events” to be able to construct a ranking of cities according to their prominence-global and local-in arts. Our data show that the relationship is much more complex. At the top of both rankings, there is indeed a strong overlap, apart from Berlin which is GAC but not a GFC, but further down the picture gets blurred with only a partial overlap. European cities are strongly overrepresented, and to a lesser extent North-American cities, while Asian and South-American cities are underrepresented and African cities do not show up at all.
Lessons from Afghanistan’s History for the Current Transition and Beyond
Lessons from Afghanistan’s History for the Current Transition and Beyond (PDF)
Source: U.S. Institute of Peace
Despite interesting patterns from the past and at least superficially striking parallels with the present, policies on Afghanistan have not been adequately informed by an understanding of the country’s history. Nor has the extensive academic literature on Afghan history been translated into policy; on the contrary, much that has been attempted in Afghanistan since late 2001 has been remarkably ahistorical. This report identifies broad historical patterns and distills relevant lessons that may be applicable to policies during the 2011 to 2014 transition and beyond.
The Short Stories of Playboy and the Crisis of Masculinity
The Short Stories of Playboy and the Crisis of Masculinity (PDF)
Source: Utrecht University
We look at the world through media. They bring us the news; they bring us entertainment, science, art. They influence the way we view the world. In a way, they influence who we are. This does not mean that they change a person from one day to the next, but they co-determine structures of thought. One specific area in which the role of media becomes clear is gender – perhaps best described as the culturally defined and self-defined aspects of one’s identity relating to being a ‘man,’ a ‘woman,’ or perhaps something else. Different media propagate ideal images of what it means to be a man or a woman, and in our daily lives these ideal images are not often questioned.
This observation lies at the foundation of this thesis. My initial plan was to examine the ways in which media (re-)present gender identity. In particular, I wanted to examine male gender identity. The first ensuing issue was that as a historian, the historicity of gender and media needs to be acknowledged. In other words, media and masculinities are fluid and change over time. The second issue was that ‘media’ was too wide a category. Since this thesis is of a limited scope, I needed to demarcate the research further.
Ultimately, I chose one case-study of a magazine in a specific historical context: Playboy in 1950s America. The American 1950s were interesting given the subject, since a lot of literature discusses some sort of perceived ‘crisis of masculinity’ – it was a time where historical developments caused tensions with contemporary male identities that required a re-thinking of masculinity. Playboy was perhaps one of the most iconic examples of this re-thinking. The magazine offered a specific masculine identity that reacted to the contemporary gender identity crisis.
In a way, a magazine is a patchwork: It consists of differing elements, from articles to pictorials to advertisements. In order to explore male identity in the magazine in more detail, I chose to highlight one element: short stories. One of the features in Playboy that appeared from its start in December 1953 were short works of fiction. Moreover, these appeared on a highly regular basis. Therefore, the short stories made for an ample amount of source material.
The goal of this thesis is thus to answer the following research question: “How do the short stories in Playboy Magazine (re-)present a male identity in the context of the American 1950s?”
Transgenerational transmission of trauma and resilience: a qualitative study with Brazilian offspring of Holocaust survivors
Source: BMC Psychiatry
Background
Over the past five decades, clinicians and researchers have debated the impact of the Holocaust on the children of its survivors. The transgenerational transmission of trauma has been explored in more than 500 articles, which have failed to reach reliable conclusions that could be generalized. The psychiatric literature shows mixed findings regarding this subject: many clinical studies reported psychopathological findings related to transgenerational transmission of trauma and some empirical research has found no evidence of this phenomenon in offspring of Holocaust survivors.
Method
This qualitative study aims to detect how the second generation perceives transgenerational transmission of their parents’ experiences in the Holocaust. In-depth individual interviews were conducted with fifteen offspring of Holocaust survivors and sought to analyze experiences, meanings and subjective processes of the participants. A Grounded Theory approach was employed, and constant comparative method was used for analysis of textual data.
Results
The development of conceptual categories led to the emergence of distinct patterns of communication from parents to their descendants. The qualitative methodology also allowed systematization of the different ways in which offspring can deal with parental trauma, which determine the development of specific mechanisms of traumatic experience or resilience in the second generation.
Conclusions
The conceptual categories constructed by the Grounded Theory approach were used to present a possible model of the transgenerational transmission of trauma, showing that not only traumatic experiences, but also resilience patterns can be transmitted to and developed by the second generation. As in all qualitative studies, these conclusions cannot be generalized, but the findings can be tested in other contexts.
World Cities Culture Report 2012
World Cities Culture Report 2012 (PDF)
Source: Mayor of London (UK)
The Mayor of London’s World Cities Culture Report 2012 is the biggest international survey of its kind. It has collected an unprecedented amount of data on the scope and impact of the cultural assets and activities that are produced and consumed in 12 major cities:
Berlin
Istanbul
Johannesburg
London
Mumbai
New York
Paris
São Paulo
Shanghai
Singapore
Sydney
Tokyo
Using 60 indicators and reports from each of the participating cities, the World Cities Culture Report 2012 shows that culture is seen as important as finance and trade and sits at the heart of public policy.
“Little Holes to Hide In”: Civil Defense and the Public Backlash Against Home Fallout Shelters, 1957-1963
Source: Georgia State University Digital Archive
Throughout the 1950s, U.S. policymakers actively encouraged Americans to participate in civil defense through a variety of policies. In 1958, amidst confusion concerning which of these policies were most efficient, President Eisenhower established the National Shelter Plan and a new civil defense agency titled The Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. This agency urged homeowners to build private fallout shelters through print media. In response, Americans used newspapers, magazines, and science fiction novels to contest civil defense and the foreign and domestic policies that it was based upon, including nuclear strategy. Many Americans remained unconvinced of the viability of civil defense or feared its psychological impacts on society. Eventually, these criticisms were able to weaken civil defense efforts and even alter nuclear defense strategy and missile defense technology.
Increases in Individualistic Words and Phrases in American Books, 1960–2008
Increases in Individualistic Words and Phrases in American Books, 1960–2008
Source: PLoS ONE
Cultural products such as song lyrics, television shows, and books reveal cultural differences, including cultural change over time. Two studies examine changes in the use of individualistic words (Study 1) and phrases (Study 2) in the Google Books Ngram corpus of millions of books in American English. Current samples from the general population generated and rated lists of individualistic words and phrases (e.g., “unique,” “personalize,” “self,” “all about me,” “I am special,” “I’m the best”). Individualistic words and phrases increased in use between 1960 and 2008, even when controlling for changes in communal words and phrases. Language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960.
Proud to Be an American: Perceptions of American Patriotism Portrayed Through Captain America Comic Books, 1941-2009
Patriotism, while easily defined as “love of one’s country” is not easily quantified. Patriotism is neither constant through space nor is it constant through time. Simply put, what constitutes patriotism depends on who is defining it. The United States of America has often been described as being a patriotic country and yet the idea of Patriotism continues to be a divisive and controversial ideal in America. One of the United States of America’s greatest symbols of patriotism in popular culture is Captain America. Created during the World War II, Captain America has defined patriotism for the youth of America, not only reflecting ideas of popular patriotism, but in ways shaping them. This paper seeks to analyze changing perceptions of patriotism since World War II through Captain America comic books. This will not only demonstrate where patriotism has come, but demonstrate the divisiveness of patriotism throughout United States history, how patriotism has be constantly reinvented throughout United States history, and where patriotism may be headed during the post-911 world.
The Arts, New Growth Theory, and Economic Development
The Arts, New Growth Theory, and Economic Development
Source: National Endowment for the Arts
New growth theory argues that, in advanced economies, economic growth stems less from the acquisition of additional capital and more from innovation and new ideas. On May 10, 2012, the Brookings Institution and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) hosted a symposium examining new growth theory as a tool for assessing the impact of art and culture on the U.S. economy, including the theory that cities play a major role in facilitating economic growth. The symposium featured papers jointly commissioned by the NEA Office of Research & Analysis and Michael Rushton, the co-editor of the Journal of Cultural Economics. The presentations were moderated by experts from Brookings, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the U.S. Department of Commerce.
