Tag Archives: history

Argument: current and proposed streetcar projects are a “swindle”

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Samuel Schieb argues that the resurgent popularity of the urban streetcar is a swindle that doesn’t live up to its promotion:

There are currently 16 streetcar lines operating as public transit in the United States, but depending on how you count there are as many as 80 cities with streetcars in the planning or development phase. Far from the dominant form of urban transport they once were, streetcars have become prestige projects celebrated for their history, beauty, and alleged ability to promote development.

But the sad secret is that streetcars of all descriptions and vintages are at best modestly successful transportation projects, at worst expensive objets d’art that very few people use. Demand for the vehicles is driven not by the public but by the dreams of land-use planners and downtown boosters who imagine that aesthetically pleasing vehicles lumbering in slow circles through walkable areas will somehow prompt a boom in economic activity. Streetcar booster Gloria Ohland has often written that streetcars should be considered “economic development projects with transportation benefits.”…

The highest and best use for a streetcar system is to connect dense student housing, a university, a functioning downtown, and a regional shopping venue, hospital, or other large attractor in a community of around 100,000 people. Athens, Gainesville, Norman, and Bloomington are ideal for this type of alignment (as is Lansing, which has opted to build a bus rapid transit system). We already have models for how to do this. Three systems in France provide exactly this kind of service: LeMans, Orleans, and Reims carry between 35,000 and 48,000 trips daily on systems that have between 6.9 and 11.2 miles of track. These streetcars—called tramways there—not only serve universities and downtowns but also take advantage of the tram’s small footprint by wending between buildings, using rights of way that are useless to larger mass transit vehicles or automobiles.

Planners in Tampa and other streetcar cities have been betting on modal magnetism, the notion that the inherent attractiveness of rail will get people to use it even if there is not an existing demand for the service. This idea is wrong, and it has not worked. Transit projects should be built not to create demand but to serve the demonstrated needs of the public.

Read the whole thing to get an overview of the streetcar’s history as well as its reintroduction to American cities.

I think Schieb is making a larger point: projects built for nostalgic or historic purposes may not be enough to justify their cost or to expect that they will generate more traffic and revenues by themselves. Such projects still need to be designed well and take advantage of existing patterns, not just hope for new social patterns to emerge. Related to the streetcar, Schieb also discusses the pedestrian mall, a technique tried in a number of communities across the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. (A note: this was tried in Chicago on State Street and proposed in Wheaton for Hale Street but both streets returned to roadways.) While these pedestrian malls might harken back to a day without cars (though urban streets were possibly more chaotic before cars), simply putting one in is not enough in itself to attract people. In conjunction with other helpful factors, streetcars and pedestrian malls can be successful but they are not quick fixes that can simply be plopped into places.

h/t Instapundit

Perhaps the 1950s, and not the 1960s, were the really strange decade

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It common to hear that the 1960s marked a shift in American and global culture and social life. Yet, the more I learn about the 1950s, it seems like this is the decade that was really unusual.

I was thinking about this again recently while reading Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History. Coontz describes how Victorian views of marriage started unraveling at the turn of the 20th century and changes accelerated in the 1920s. Women were more free to work, be aggressors in seeking out intimate relationships, and conservatives worried that divorce rates and levels of premarital sex were rising. But after World War II, traditionalism made a comeback: millions of women who had worked in jobs that helped the war effort returned home as housewives, the country had an unprecedented baby boom, and many Americans sought out single-family homes in the suburbs in order to fully realize their familial potential. This bubble burst in the 1960s but this highlights the short course of the 1950s world; Coontz suggests this idyllic world lasted for only about 15 years.

Of course, there were a host of other factors that made the 1950s unique in the United States. The US was the only major country that hadn’t been ravaged by war. America became a military, economic, and cultural powerhouse as other countries struggled to rebuild. There was enough prosperity across the board to help keep some of the very real inequalities (particularly in terms of race) off the radar screen for many Americans. There was a clear enemy, Communism, and no controversial wars to get bogged down in. America moved to becoming a suburban nation as many become occupied with buying and maintaining single-family homes and stocking them with new appliances. There was a real mass media (just check out the TV ratings and shares for that decade) and an uptick in church attendance.

This is still a relevant issue today. After the Republican National Convention last week, President Obama suggested the Republicans want to go back to the 1950s. If the 1950s were indeed a very unique period that would be difficult to replicate and we know the decade did indeed have real issues, then this may indeed be a problem in 2012 when the world looks very different. Perhaps we could even argue that Republicans want a world that carries on the 1950s and Democrats would prefer one that carries on the legacy of the 1960s.

Argument for historic preservation district for less than 20 year old McMansions

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I wondered when this day might come: a local government official in Australia is suggesting a set of McMansions less than twenty years go should be protected by a historic preservation district.

Hornsby councillor Bruce Mills is leading a push to have Cannan Close, Cherrybrook, gazetted as a heritage conservation area.

While the cul-de-sac was only developed in the 1990s, Mr Mills said it was already architecturally significant, and brushed aside claims that it was too new to be listed.

“I don’t think anyone turns into Cannan Close who doesn’t let out an involuntary ‘wow’,” Mr Mills said. “The houses are consistent in their look, feel, style and materials, the width of the blocks, even the trees and gardens.

“I know that the Cannan Close dwellings are only 20 or so years old, but what will our grandchildren be debating if we say it’s not old enough

“Under these new planning laws, nothing will survive until it’s 70 years old because nothing is protected.”

The logic here doesn’t seem terribly unreasonable: buildings that are not protected can be altered and/or destroyed. Yet, I imagine people might have two major objections:

1. Historic buildings should be a little more historic than less than 20 years old. This is actually an interesting question: at what point does a community have enough perspective to be able to declare something worth protecting or not? Buildings are not simply protected because they are old; it is often because they exemplify a particular style (even Brutalist structures can be considered for protection) or the community has found them to be worthwhile structures.

2. Some will argue that McMansions should never be historically protected, even if they were much older. One critique of McMansions factors in here: such homes are often not considered to be paragons of architectural style and because they are mass produced, will not age well. Put another way, these homes are not architecturally worth saving.

All together, discussions about historic preservation districts often stir up a lot of discussion as it can pit community interests versus the rights of homeowners. It will be interesting to see if these Australian McMansions do get protected.

A sociologist on the iPhone at 5: “There has been no other device that has changed social and technological life in such a short time”

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The iPhone just turned five years old and a sociologist makes some big claims about the impact of the device:

“There has been no other device that has changed social and technological life in such a short time,” said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University sociologist and psychologist who studies how technology impacts society. “There has been nothing like it in the world.”

This is a bold claim. I assume this primarily about the time period: important technology today has the ability to make rapid changes. This is one of the defining features of today’s globalization: stuff happens and spreads quickly. The iPhone itself is influential but it quickly led to other changes and pushed Android and other phone makers as well. I can admit that the smartphone world has some advantages.

At the same time, I wonder if this claim is too much. Looking at the broad sweep of human history, how does the iPhone stack up? What about the printing press, the plow, the steam engine, and so on? These devices may not have had such a quick effect but these led or contributed to whole eras like the Renaissance, the Agricultural Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Will we look back in fifty or one hundred years and see the iPhone as a similar singular device or is it part of the computer-age process?

Quick Review: the Chicago History Museum

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I recently had a chance to visit the Chicago History Museum, a place I had visited several times as a kid but hadn’t been to in at least 15 years. Here are a few thoughts about the museum:

1. The best exhibit, in my opinion, is the dioramas of key moments in Chicago’s history. While these are now decades old, they still look quite good and effectively tell the story of Chicago’s early years. Here is the classic diorama of the 1871 Chicago Fire:

2. The museum has some interesting historical artifacts, ranging from Native American items to modern-day Chicago neighborhoods. My favorite: the Pioneer locomotive which made the first run on the Galena & Chicago Union railroad (the first railroad running out of Chicago and currently the Union Pacific West line in Metra nomenclature) in 1849:

3. Moving beyond my favorites, I think there is a larger issue with the museum: who is supposed to be its target audience? School kids? Tourists? Local residents? This drives another decision: how much detail should the museum present? I think there is a surprising lack of detail about major events which seems particularly appalling since Chicago is a world class city and urban sociologists still talk about (or perhaps joke about) Chicago being the quintessential American city. The second floor covers more modern Chicago history but it does this very quickly and without much context for each event/issue. For some of these modern topics, say transportation or Chicago neighborhoods or suburbanization, you could fill whole museum rooms and really inform the public about what happened and what it means for the future.

4. I also noticed that there is a very little in the museum about recent politicians (say, since the early 1900s). No commentary on the two Daleys and Harold Washington? I assume part of this might be driven by the fact that the Daleys are still around but there is a lot of potential material that could be covered here. For example, there is a small display about the 1968 Democratic Convention and a clip from a History Channel documentary on the subject but there is very little commentary on it. The lack of political material is quite noticeable when talking about the history of a city with powerful (and sometimes problematic) politicians.

5. The lobby of the museum is pleasingly eccentric. If I remember correctly, the museum used to a grand staircase in the lobby which gave it a very traditional look. But here is what one of the lobby looks like now:

Overall, the Chicago History Museum has some good moments but I don’t think it lives up to the world-class standards of Chicago. When the best exhibit consists of decades-old dioramas, there is room for improvement. In a city known for its museums, culture, and history as well being a center for urban study, the museum could be so much more.

Sociologist is host of “History Detectives”

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I ran into an interesting side job for a sociologist: host of History Detectives on PBS. This involves investigating artifacts like an 1864 military discharge letter signed by President Abraham Lincoln:

The first few hours of filming took place in the Grand Army of the Republic Museum, where Versagi talked about how the artifact was found, and then re-enacted the find by pulling a scrap of paper out of a prop box. Taping continued at a park where Versagi would meet “History Detectives” host Tukufu Zuberi, professor and chair of the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania, to show him the piece of paper. The “reveal” took place in a Springfield resident’s home, where Versagi listened as the PBS host told her the story of the artifact based on their research.

How exactly does a sociologist get this kind of job over historians? Here is how the History Detectives website describes Zuberi’s contributions:

America has a long history of social upheaval and cultural mood swings. These shifts leave clear signs of their passing. The trick is knowing how to read the signs, and interpret their meaning.
Tukufu is an authority on the subject. Under his scrutiny, even subtle signs can yield vital evidence about the events at a mystery’s core.
He also provides the team with a context for their work, relating descriptive accounts of living conditions in that particular place, at that particular time.

Being aware of the social issues, pressures, and problems of the day can sometimes help the team determine the triggers of a past event, and the motives of the people involved.

I also wonder if there isn’t a lot of room for a sociologist to talk about how mysteries develop and are understood by the public. For example, what is the social significance of an Abraham Lincoln artifact and why is Lincoln still so popular today (see an earlier post about another sociologists who tackles this)? Not everything becomes an artifact and there is a lot of work that goes into creating and supporting cultural narratives.

If you want to see a list of episodes Zuberi hosts, they are listed on his CV.

By the way, I am a supporter of having more sociologists positively portrayed on TV and in movies (see earlier posts on this topic here and here).

History class “Lying About the Past” fools Wikipedia and the Internet…for a short time

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Here is a fascinating story of a history class at George Mason University that asked students to fabricate information on Wikipedia and it worked…for a short time.

Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly’s course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia’s community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information.

The first time Kelly taught the course, in 2008, his students confected the life of Edward Owens, mixing together actual lives and events with brazen fabrications. They created YouTube videos, interviewed experts, scanned and transcribed primary documents, and built a Wikipedia page to honor Owens’ memory. The romantic tale of a pirate plying his trade in the Chesapeake struck a chord, and quickly landed on USA Today’s pop culture blog. When Kelly announced the hoax at the end of the semester, some were amused, applauding his pedagogical innovations. Many others were livid.

Critics decried the creation of a fake Wikipedia page as digital vandalism. “Things like that really, really, really annoy me,” fumed founder Jimmy Wales, comparing it to dumping trash in the streets to test the willingness of a community to keep it clean. But the indignation may, in part, have been compounded by the weaknesses the project exposed. Wikipedia operates on a presumption of good will. Determined contributors, from public relations firms to activists to pranksters, often exploit that, inserting information they would like displayed. The sprawling scale of Wikipedia, with nearly four million English-language entries, ensures that even if overall quality remains high, many such efforts will prove successful…

Sometimes even an apparent failure can mask an underlying success. The students may have failed to pull off a spectacular hoax, but they surely learned a tremendous amount in the process. “Why would I design a course,” Kelly asks on his syllabus, “that is both a study of historical hoaxes and then has the specific aim of promoting a lie (or two) about the past?” Kelly explains that he hopes to mold his students into “much better consumers of historical information,” and at the same time, “to lighten up a little” in contrast to “overly stuffy” approaches to the subject. He defends his creative approach to teaching the mechanics of the historian’s craft, and plans to convert the class from an experimental course into a regular offering.

Should this professor be applauded for his innovative use of technology or questioned about the possible unethical nature of asking students to create stories online?

I’d love to see the student evaluations for this course. This course could be practical on a variety of levels: it reveals some insights into how history is “made” (it requires a certain number of sources, credible sources, and a narrator or place where the facts can be put together), it involves current technology (a plus for today’s college student who spend a lot of time online and rely on Wikipedia a lot), and it shows students how to evaluate information (whether online or otherwise). These sound like laudable goals. Here is the syllabus for the second iteration of the course (Spring 2012) and some of the material from the first page:

Why would I design a course that is both a study of historical hoaxes and then has the specific aim of promoting a lie (or two) about the past? I have two answers to this question, both of which I hope will convince you that I’m onto something. The first answer is that by learning about historical fakery, lying, and hoaxes, we all become much better consumers of historical information. In short, we are much less likely to be tricked by what we find in our own personal research about the past. That alone ought to be enough of a reason to teach this course. But my second reason is that I believe that the study of history ought to be fun and that too often historians (I include myself in this category) take an overly stuffy approach to the past. Maybe it’s our conditioning in graduate school, or maybe we’re afraid that if we get too playful with our
field we won’t be taken seriously as scholars. Whatever the reason, I think history has just gotten a bit too boring for its own good. This course is my attempt to lighten up a little and see where it gets us.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have only taught this class once before and to my knowledge,
no other history professor in the world is willing to teach something similar (or works in a
department where they could get away with it). Various courses taught around the world spend
some time on hoaxes and hoaxing, but I haven’t found one that is all about the hoax. So the only
model to work from is the one I used last time (Fall 2008). The last time around, the final class
project generated a great deal of discussion (much, but not all of it negative) in the academic
blogosphere. As you’ll see when we discuss the previous iteration of this course, I’m not
particularly sympathetic to those who took a dim view of what my students did.

Learning Goals

I do have some specific learning goals for this course. I hope that you’ll improve your research
and analytical skills and that you’ll become a much better consumer of historical information. I
hope you’ll become more skeptical without becoming too skeptical for your own good. I hope
you’ll learn some new skills in the digital realm that can translate to other courses you take or to
your eventual career. And, I hope you’ll be at least a little sneakier than you were before you
started the course.

Interesting.

History – facts = sociology?

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Lamenting how history is taught in today’s schools, one writer argues that history without facts is just sociology:

My son’s teacher confirmed that this is broadly true. The teaching of history in British schools is increasingly influenced by US methods of presenting the past thematically rather than chronologically. Thus pupils might study crime and punishment, or kingship, and dip in and out of different centuries. Consequently, dates lose their value. So 1605, which for me means the Gunpowder Plot, for my son simply means that he is five minutes late for games.

I didn’t argue with his teacher, and in any case there is more than one way to skin a cat, as Torquemada (1420-1498) knew. Besides, a slant on history that was good enough for two of our greatest historians, WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman, ought to be good enough for me. The subtitle of their enduringly delightful 1930 book, 1066 And All That, was A Memorable History of England comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings, and 2 Genuine Dates.

Maybe it wasn’t crusty American academics but Sellar and Yeatman, having a laugh, who really popularised the notion that history can be taught largely without dates. “The first date in English history is 55BC,” they wrote, referring to the arrival of Julius Caesar and his legions on the pebbly shores of Kent. “For the other date, see Chapter 11, William the Conqueror.” They didn’t specify the year in which the King of Spain “sent the Great Spanish Armadillo to ravish the shores of England”.

Whatever, I can see the logic of going down the thematic rather than the chronological route. And I made sympathetic noises when my son’s teacher explained that “it’s helpful for those pupils who struggle to take in lots of facts”. But even if we leave out dates, aren’t facts what history is all about? The rest, as they say, is sociology.

This is not an unusual complaint: the next generations always seem to know less history and perhaps even more troubling is that they don’t seem to care.

A couple of other thoughts:

1. Why can’t you have both dates and thematic approaches? Knowing dates doesn’t necessarily know that a student knows what to do with the information or that they know the broad sweep of historical change.

2. I think the argument in the final sentence is that sociology is devoid of facts. While sociologists may indeed care about certain topics (such as race, class, and gender) that others don’t care as much about, we also care about facts. For example, many sociology undergraduate programs have students take statistics and research methods courses. We don’t want students or sociologists simply interpreting data and information without having their findings be reliable (replicable) and valid (measuring what we say we are). There is a lot of debate within the field about how we can best know about the world and determine what is causing or influencing what. This is not easy work since most social situations are quite complex and there are a lot of variables at play.

3. Why can’t history and sociology coexist? As an overgeneralization, history tends to tell us what happened and sociology helps us think through why these things happened. Why can’t sociology help inform us about history, particularly about how certain historical narratives develop and then become part of our collective memory?

Sociologist: Canadians and Americans are more alike than people might think

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A Canadian sociologist argues that Americans and Canadians are quite similar:

But experts suggest English Canadians — though the QMI Agency poll found we’re still divided whether stereotyping is widespread — are alike on most fronts.

In fact, so much so that most of us could blend in with our U.S. cousins, according to one scholar.

Ed Grabb, a professor in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Sociology, has begun a new course outlining how Canadians and Americans, while not identical, are more alike than most of us would have thought.

In fact, on things like attitudes toward health care, government and individuality, research has found we’re very similar.

Even differences in religion are shrinking. In 1991, Americans were 16% more likely than Canadians to take in a religious service at least once a week.

By 2006, that number had dropped to 11%.

While Grabb sees regional differences in both countries — during national elections, Quebec generally pulls Canada to the left just as the southern U.S. pulls that nation to the right — he’s also noticed a softening of old hackneyed chestnuts.

“I do think the Alberta redneck jibe is an endangered species,” Grabb said.

“I think that the assumption that all Ontarians are affluent is also going by the boards.

It would be interesting to see comparisons across the board: income, political and social views (both at home and abroad), religion, education, and consumer purchases and entertainment choices. Then, compare these to what Americans and Canadians think about each other. Why do I think Canadians would know way more about Americans than the other way around?

I also want to know how to explain this. Both the United States and Canada are settler colonies but we have different histories as Canada has had a different relationship with Great Britain in the last few centuries. Perhaps people might fall back on the frontier hypothesis since both countries pursued territorial expansion and span between two different (geographically and cultural) coasts. Perhaps today we tend to share a lot of media and cultural influences. For example, how many Americans care or would they have been able to tell without being told that Justin Bieber is Canadian. Perhaps our geopolitical position away from major international wars has led to similar ways of viewing the world. Perhaps the better way to differentiate between the countries is to refer to the “Jesusland” map where Canada joins with the East and West American coasts plus some of the Great Lakes states and red America is the south, great plains, and mountain west.

Quick Review: The Better Angels of Our Nature

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I hadn’t looked at much from psychologist Stephen Pinker for a while but I was intrigued by his latest book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Here are a few comments about this thought-provoking work:

1. Here is Pinker’s argument: we must just be living in the safest era in human history as violent crime is down and wars affect fewer people. If you adjust for the population on earth at the time, World War II barely makes the top 10 (while typically lists put it at #1). Since World War II, fewer people are affected by violence and most people don’t know this.

2. Best argument of this book: this remarkable peacefulness is almost completely under-the-radar and people need to recognize how much safer the world has become. (I’ve noted before the incorrect perceptions regarding crime.)

2a. Pinker marshals a lot of evidence to show the declining trends in violence. In fact, Pinker talks about this for dozens upon dozens of pages. In fact, if you went by the percentage of the book devoted to each topic, you might think Pinker is more of a social scientist who studies violence and who is most interested in how societies and cultures have changed in such a way as to deincentivize violence. Overall, the number of wars have decreased, the number of wars involving great powers has decreased, the number of soldier and civilian deaths has decreased, and the length of wars have decreased. Pinker is, of course, building upon the work of many others but there are a lot of charts and figures here that I find quite convincing.

2b. Several periods were key to this change: the Enlightenment which didn’t necessarily limit violence but brought about ideas and values that eventually contributed and the post-World War II era when the world responded to the horror by promoting international peace and human rights.

3. The catch: Pinker is committed to going beyond a social explanation in the decrease in violence and wants to argue that this has trickled down to individuals. On one hand, you could imagine a number of sociologists making this argument: changes in society and culture influence the choices available to and made by individuals. On the other hand, Pinker wants to go further and even suggest that humans have evolved away from violence. Making this connection between social and individual change is tougher to do and Pinker relies a lot on social psychology experiments such as Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Ultimatum Game. The social and cultural change arguments are convincing but taking this next step to the individual level is more problematic. Part of the problem here might be that Pinker is so committed to his own perspective that he is determined to push his points about rationality further than they can go.

4. An interesting issue: Pinker argues that one way in which violence can get out of hand is that it requires a powerful ideology. One type of ideology that Pinker makes clear he does not like is religion which he argues is false and generally contributes to violence. In his historical overviews, Pinker makes clear that religion only contributes to and legitimizes violence and may not do any good. Additionally, the revolutions in values happened solely in the secular sphere and humans today are much more able to be rational (and religion is not that).

Overall, this is an interesting, long book that presents several intriguing arguments. Pinker provides a service in helping to fight the narrative that violence is spiraling out of control and yet has more difficulty in showing how humans have evolved into more rational beings.