Fighting Over Blame in the Republican Party

In the last few weeks, the buzz about the internal battles inside the Republican Party has been growing. The Roveites hate the Libertarians, the Libertarians hate the mainstream Republicans, the mainstream Republicans hate the Tea Partiers and everybody hates President Obama. It feels more like a Tom Lehrer song than the plight of a serious political party facing a serious struggle

The American press, public, and the reaction to the outbreak of the First World War

The American popular reaction to the outbreak of the First World War in Europe can be overlooked in the historical discussion with its rush to study more elite opinion. What is usually assumed is that in general the American population was shocked and horrified in 1914, and from this initial reaction it moved to embrace neutrality. It is interesting that this historical discussion usually ignores the modern political science debate on the same subject which argues that the American reaction to war in conflict is not usually negative, especially at the beginning. Using a detailed examination of American newspapers and magazines from twelve of the United States’ largest cities this article examines the reaction of the press and public from the moment shooting started in august 1914 through the fascinating Congressional elections that November. The picture that emerges is twofold. The immediate reaction to the war was one of economic satisfaction. There was a strong consensus in the press that the war was, first and foremost, a golden trading opportunity that would not only require Europeans to purchase large amounts of American goods, it would allow American companies to supplant European companies around the world, particularly in Latin America. Also, there was considerable discussion about American entry into the war, with significant sector believing such intervention was not only possible, it might be necessary. Finally, in the 1914 election, whilst the Democrats tried to nationalize the campaign by turning the vote into an endorsement of Wilson’s War policy, the American population reacted with indifference. There was little sign that the war made any material difference in how the American people voted and afterwards the press, no matter what its partisan affiliation, endorsed this view

Scattertext: a Browser-Based Tool for Visualizing how Corpora Differ

Scattertext is an open source tool for visualizing linguistic variation between document categories in a language-independent way. The tool presents a scatterplot, where each axis corresponds to the rank-frequency a term occurs in a category of documents. Through a tie-breaking strategy, the tool is able to display thousands of visible term-representing points and find space to legibly label hundreds of them. Scattertext also lends itself to a query-based visualization of how the use of terms with similar embeddings differs between document categories, as well as a visualization for comparing the importance scores of bag-of-words features to univariate metrics.Comment: ACL 2017 Demos. 6 pages, 5 figures. See the Githup repo https://github.com/JasonKessler/scattertext for source code and documentatio

A life in progress: motion and emotion in the autobiography of Robert M. La Follette

This article is a study of a La Follette’s Autobiography, the autobiography of the leading Wisconsin progressive Robert M. La Follette, which was published serially in 1911 and, in book form, in 1913. Rather than focusing, as have other historians, on which parts of La Follette’s account are accurate and can therefore be trusted, it explains instead why and how this major autobiography was conceived and written. The article shows that the autobiography was the product of a sustained, complex, and often fraught series of collaborations among La Follette’s family, friends, and political allies, and in the process illuminates the importance of affective ties as well as political ambition and commitment in bringing the project to fruition. In the world of progressive reform, it argues, personal and political experiences were inseparable

A war for principle? Shifting memories of the Union cause in Iowa, 1865-1916

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Impact of the 1999 Earthquakes on the Outcome of the 2002 Parliamentary Election in Turkey

The two major earthquakes which struck northwestern Turkey in 1999, not only caused enormous amounts of death, destruction and suffering, but also exposed rampant government corruption involving construction and zoning code violations. The incompetence shown by the government in providing relief, the corruption allegations in regards to those efforts, and government’s failure to prosecute corrupt officials and businessmen, further angered the public. How voters responded to these in the 2002 parliamentary election is investigated, using cross-provincial data, and controlling for other social, political and economic factors. Our results show that voters held accountable all of the political parties which participated in governments during the last decade or so, and not just the incumbents in 2002. The party in charge of the ministry responsible for earthquake relief, and parties that served longest and controlled more of the city administrations in the quake zone were blamed more. The newly formed Justice and Development Party (AKP) was the beneficiary of the votes lost by these parties. The sensitivity shown by the electorate to real and perceived corruption implies that corruption problem will be tractable in Turkey, and can be reduced through increased transparency and democratization.Turkey, earthquake, corruption, election, party preference

George Meade’s Mixed Legacy

George Gordon Meade was 47 years old the morning of June 28, 1863, when command of the Army of the Potomac was unceremoniously dumped into his lap by General in Chief Henry Hallcck, and there is no reason to doubt Meade\u27s protest that the move rendered him the most surprised man in the entire Union Army. Meade had never wanted to be a soldier in the first place, much less take direction of an army that at that moment was facing perhaps its most daunting challenge. But compared to his immediate predecessors, Maj. Gens. Ambrose Burnside and Joseph Hooker, what Meade accomplished with that army was simply extraordinary -- he won the Battle of Gettysburg. Even more extraordinary, he defeated the supposedly invincible Robert E. Lee and the vaunted Army of Northern Virginia, And yet the mention of Meade has always been met with a certain degree of pause -- surprise that an officer with such modest credentials could manage to pull off such a mammoth victory as Gettysburg, and then chirping criticism that, having triumphed as he did, Meade failed to do more, failed to stop Lee from escaping back into Virginia and thus end the Civil War right there and then. ¸ Although both of those reactions are unfair, they are also accurate. And together, they have come to define George Gordon Meade\u27s long-term reputation. [excerpt