Counting Souls: Towards an historical demography of Africa.

BACKGROUND: Little is known about even the relatively recent demographic history of Africa, because of the lack of data. Elsewhere, historical demographic trends have been reconstructed by applying family reconstitution to church records. Such data also exist throughout Africa from the late 19th century. For the Counting Souls Project, nearly one million records from the oldest Catholic parishes in East and Central Africa have been digitised. These data are currently being processed into a relational database. The aim of this paper is to describe their potential for demographic reconstruction in the region, and to outline how their provenance defines the analytical approach. RESULTS: Empirically, religion is correlated with population patterns in contemporary Africa, and, historically, reproduction and family formation were central to Christian mission in the region. Measuring change using sources created by agents of change raises questions of epistemology, causation, and selection bias. This paper describes how these concerns are balanced by missionary determination to follow the intimate lives of their parishioners, to monitor their 'souls', and to measure their morality, fidelity, and faith. This intimate recording means that the African parish registers, together with related sources such as missionary diaries and letters and oral histories, describe qualitatively and quantitatively what happens to individual agency (reproductive decision-making) when the moral hegemony shifts (via evangelisation and colonisation), and how the two interact in a reciprocal process of change. CONCLUSION: Reconstructing long-term demographic trends using parish registers in Africa is therefore more than simply generating rates and testing their reliability. It is a bigger description of how 'decision rules' are structured and re-structured, unpicking the cognitive seam between individual and culture by exploring dynamic micro-interactions between reproduction, honour, hope, and modernity over the long term. With such a mixed-methods approach, parish registers offer real potential for historical demography in Africa

Two Steps Forward, One Step…Back? Missouri Legislature Targets Rise in Violent Crime

In May 2020, the Missouri Legislature passed Senate Bill 600, a controversial crime bill which made modifications to a handful of criminal provisions in an effort to tackle the violent crime plaguing the state’s largest cities. According to Senator Tony Luetkemeyer, the bill’s sponsor, inspiration for the legislation stemmed from an August 2019 USA Today report ranking Kansas City and St. Louis as the fifth- and first-most-dangerous cities in the country, respectively, and Springfield as the twelfth-most-dangerous. In a similar USA Today report ranking the most dangerous states, Missouri broke the top ten, coming in at number eight overall, with St. Louis and Kansas City being the most concentrated areas for violent crime. Prosecutors and law enforcement from both cities urged Governor Parson to address the increase in homicides and violent crime. In 2020, there were 262 homicides in St. Louis, compared to 194 in 2019 and 186 in 2018. Similarly, Kansas City tallied 173 homicides in 2020, surpassing the 153 homicides in 1953 – the city’s deadliest year – and the 151 homicides in 2019. To address these staggering figures, the Missouri Legislature made targeted modifications to several criminal provisions, including modernizing the state’s conspiracy and gang-related statutes. The legislature aimed to achieve two goals: (1) to keep violent criminals and reoffenders off the streets, and (2) to provide prosecutors with the requisite tools to effectively prosecute gangs and violent criminals

DEEPLY ROOTED: A FEASIBILITY STUDY TESTING THE POTENTIAL FOR AMS DATING THROUGH PALEOETHNOBOTANICAL RECOVERY METHODS AT THE TOPPER SITE (38AL23)

Archaeologists often make limiting operational choices that — though considered and logical — are (sometimes) necessarily selective in nature. One such a priori framework posits that costly paleoethnobotanical recovery and associated analyses are not worthwhile when working in sandy, acidic soils; as dateable organic remains are too rapidly destroyed by inherent chemical and mechanical processes to allow for differential preservation. This research demonstrates that these destructive processes are largely misunderstood. Indeed, the successful collection of significant paleoethnobotanical material is possible from certain types of sandy soils previously thought to be organically sterile. Moreover, such paleoethnobotanical recovery efforts can yield viable, datable material needed to establish an absolute chronology where not otherwise possible. Clovis, Archaic, Woodland, Mississippian, and Historic-aged carbonized plant remains were recovered from the late Quaternary sediments at the Topper Site (38AL23) (a chert-quarry based archaeological site located in South Carolina) and were dated via Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS). Additional supplementary chemical testing was also undertaken in support of the paleoethnobotanical recovery. The resulting data are shown to: (1) quantify the age of the associated lithic deposits; and (2) independently corroborate Topper’s vertical stratigraphic integrity. Too often, the utility of paleoethnobotany is narrowly conceived as only able to address matters of subsistence. Paleoethnobotanical recovery, however, can address a greater range of questions — the answers to which better inform the largely unresolved debates surrounding the archaeological questions of our time

Blown Whistle Falls on Deaf Ears: The Eighth Circuit Interprets MAP-21’s Whistleblower Provision

In recent years, whistleblowers have been praised as heroes by onlookers and in the media for bravely unveiling wrongdoing by their employers, but whistleblowers have not always enjoyed this white-hat status. These private employees expose themselves to serious risks of backlash and retaliation from their employers, historically without any guaranteed protection from Congress or their respective state legislatures. Decades-old social norms and corporate culture prioritized loyalty from employees. They allowed employers to fire employees who spoke out against the company and even blackball them from their respective industries. With blind loyalty or termination being the only options for employees witnessing wrongdoing within their company, silence was the norm. Over the last few decades, Congress has increasingly recognized the public importance of protecting these whistleblowers and has enacted more than two dozen statutes mandating protection from retaliation in a wide variety of industries, with more than half the states following suit

Charter Schools and the Road to College Readiness: The Effects on College Preparation, Attendance and Choice

The analysis here focuses on Boston's charter high schools. For the purpose of this report, an analysis of high schools is both a necessity and a virtue. It is necessary to study high schools because most students applying to charters in earlier grades are not yet old enough to generate data on postsecondary outcomes. Charter high schools are also of substantial policy interest: a growing body of research argues that high school may be too late for cost-effective human capital interventions. Indeed, impact analyses of interventions for urban youth have mostly generated disappointing results.This report is interested in ascertaining whether charter schools, which in Massachusetts are largely budget-neutral, can have a substantial impact on the life course of affected students. The set of schools studied here comes from an earlier investigation of the effects of charter attendance in Boston on test scores.The high schools from the earlier study, which enroll the bulk of charter high school students in Boston, generate statistically and socially significant gains on state assessments in the 10th grade. This report questions whether these gains are sustained