Department of History

The article examines the story of Wikipedia's 14,000-word article on the “War of 1812.”  It was worked on by over 2,000 different people, with no overall coordinator or plan.  Debates raged as the 1812 article attracted over 3,300 comments by 627 of the most active editors. Interestingly the main dispute in the Wikipedia entry was who actually won the war. Jensen also looks at the sources used by the Wikipedia editors, which mainly rest upon free online sources and popular books, rather than scholarly monographs and articles. More generally the article looks at how Wikipedia is organized and points out that the core articles were largely written by 2007 and editorial activity has been dropping ever since, even though readership soars.  Wikipedia is written by and for the benefit of highly motivated amateurs within an anarchistic structure resembling the American frontier. Edit wars resemble frontier shootouts, and are handled by kangaroo courts. Military history is one of its strengths, with over 130,000 articles supervised by 700 well-organized volunteers who prevent mischief and work on upgrading quality.  Few scholars are involved.

Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which supposedly featured omnipresent signs in windows of stores and factories proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" (NINA) No historian or museum has ever found one of these NINA window signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. Newspaper ads for men were also very rare.  However newspaper ads for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality.  Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable, experienced supply of an essential service. The slogan was commonplace in England by the 1820s and English and Protestant Irish immigrants brought it to America. In 1862 in there was a song, "No Irish Need Apply," depicting an Irishman recently arrived in America who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the culprit. The song was an immediate hit, and is still sung in the Irish community. The song is the source of the myth.  The NINA slogan was often used in friendly fashion when an American Protestant met an Irishman. Historians looking at evidence from the job market--such as hiring by railroads, textile mills, construction firms and mines--have not discovered significant discrimination against the Irish.  On the contrary, many employers eagerly sought them out. Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. After the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no major efforts to exclude Irish immigrants.  There still were conflicts in U.S. between the "Green" (Catholic Irish) and the "Orange" (Protestant Irish) immigrants.  The Irish Catholics worked in gangs in job sites they could control through politics or through labor unions. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth of omnipresent window signs persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After World War II the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.

Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend? The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. By the 1820s it was a cliche in upper and upper middle class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. It is possible that handwritten NINA signs regarding maids did appear in a few American windows, though no one ever reported one. Apart from want ads for personal household workers, the NINA slogan has not turned up in the newspapers. The myth focuses on public NINA signs which deliberately marginalized and humiliated Irish male job applicants. The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably no such signs ever existed at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters etc. anywhere in America. Irish Americans all have heard about them?and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had "legs": people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O'Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up5 Historicaliy,

Tables, charts, notes, bibliography, and index.) A leading specialist on American and French legislative behavior here explores some of the more abstruse methods of discovering patterns of partisanship and the structure of issues from roll calls. Although Duncan Mac-Rae, Jr., is a sociologist, he ignores the problem of relating roll call responses to the personal or constituency characteristics of legislators. Few historians-even those who know the necessary matrix algebra-will find the book useful unless they are beginning a large roll call project and are uncertain about the assumptions and implications of the numerous techniques available. MacRae offers a highly condensed survey of clustering techniques up to multidimensional scaling, but he devotes his chief attention to factor analysis. This imbalance is unfortunate. Factor analysis owes its popularity to psychology, where it is used to simplify the patterns of responses to questionnaires. Psychologists compute hypothetical mathematical constructs called factors, and assume that all questionnaire responses are nothing more than combinations (called "loadings") of factors. The artificiality of factors hardly is bothersome, since the questionnaires are completely arbitrary in the first place. Historical roll calls, however, possess a reality quite apart from numerical manipulation. Few historians will be willing to assume that the voting behavior of a congressman is merely a set of loadings on some factors, especially when they realize that different mathematical methods produce quite different factors for the same data. Clustering techniques, however, bring together men or roll calls that most closely resemble each other. Clustering allows the historian to see meaningful patterns without straying far from the sources or assuming the existence of invisible factors. While MacRae recognizes the superiority of clustering over factoring, he fails to devote adequate attention to the problems and promises of Guttman and multidimensional scaling and other clustering procedures. Historians can no longer afford to borrow uncritically complex techniques devised in other disciplines for different problems and different kinds of measurement. Just as medievalists rightly devote much of their professional training to Latin, Americanists will have to learn statistics well enough to devise their own methods for finding patterns in legislative behavior.

Tables, charts, notes, bibliography, and index.) A leading specialist on American and French legislative behavior here explores some of the more abstruse methods of discovering patterns of partisanship and the structure of issues from roll calls. Although Duncan Mac-Rae, Jr., is a sociologist, he ignores the problem of relating roll call responses to the personal or constituency characteristics of legislators. Few historians-even those who know the necessary matrix algebra-will find the book useful unless they are beginning a large roll call project and are uncertain about the assumptions and implications of the numerous techniques available. MacRae offers a highly condensed survey of clustering techniques up to multidimensional scaling, but he devotes his chief attention to factor analysis. This imbalance is unfortunate. Factor analysis owes its popularity to psychology, where it is used to simplify the patterns of responses to questionnaires. Psychologists compute hypothetical mathematical constructs called factors, and assume that all questionnaire responses are nothing more than combinations (called "loadings") of factors. The artificiality of factors hardly is bothersome, since the questionnaires are completely arbitrary in the first place. Historical roll calls, however, possess a reality quite apart from numerical manipulation. Few historians will be willing to assume that the voting behavior of a congressman is merely a set of loadings on some factors, especially when they realize that different mathematical methods produce quite different factors for the same data. Clustering techniques, however, bring together men or roll calls that most closely resemble each other. Clustering allows the historian to see meaningful patterns without straying far from the sources or assuming the existence of invisible factors. While MacRae recognizes the superiority of clustering over factoring, he fails to devote adequate attention to the problems and promises of Guttman and multidimensional scaling and other clustering procedures. Historians can no longer afford to borrow uncritically complex techniques devised in other disciplines for different problems and different kinds of measurement. Just as medievalists rightly devote much of their professional training to Latin, Americanists will have to learn statistics well enough to devise their own methods for finding patterns in legislative behavior.

Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend? The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. By the 1820s it was a cliche in upper and upper middle class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. It is possible that handwritten NINA signs regarding maids did appear in a few American windows, though no one ever reported one. Apart from want ads for personal household workers, the NINA slogan has not turned up in the newspapers. The myth focuses on public NINA signs which deliberately marginalized and humiliated Irish male job applicants. The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably no such signs ever existed at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters etc. anywhere in America. Irish Americans all have heard about them?and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had "legs": people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O'Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up5 Historicaliy,