I know that I have been slow in posting lately.  Sometimes life is so draining that it’s hard to find inspiration.  COVID numbers have been dying down.  I’m still waiting for the County Health Rankings numbers.  I did show this video from Drunk History about Florence Nightingale to my classes. Many of my students were […]

                          The unthinkable has happened.  Russia has invaded Ukraine.  I was clinging to the hope that their actions would not go beyond saber rattling.  Unlike they were in Iraq, U.S. leaders were right in warning about the threat posed by an outsider nation […]

Maus by Art Spiegelman was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer prize.  It tells the story of the Holocaust with the Jews depicted as mice and the Nazis depicted as cats.  The news that a school board in Tennessee has banned the book  (summarized by David Corn in MotherJones) has made me think of my […]

I thought I would take a break from the coronavirus pandemic and politics to take a look at the history of the craft we call journalism.  The late 1800s were a period of yellow journalism led by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst where sensational headlines were what sold newspapers.  There were trailblazing male and […]

PBS has a good series on how medicine has learned to fight pandemics.  This particular episode focuses on how data is used to understand and limit pandemics.  It starts with how William Farr used data to track a cholera outbreak.  I’ve embedded this episode here for your enjoyment and information. **Related Posts** Income and Life […]

Watching the developments of the past week were surprising even to me. Were the up swelling of protests over the death of George Floyd and the corona virus pandemic totally unrelated?  Is Trump’s generally incompetent leadership a factor?  The mostly peaceful demonstrations have been occurring just as the turbulent restriction from the pandemic are being lifted.  Do people […]

The late Dr. Bruce Williams, professor of Anthropology at the Pitt Johnstown campus or UPJ as we call it, produced a documentary called We’ll Make the Journey on the history of African Americans in Johnstown in 1992.  Seventeen older African Americans in the city were interviewed. The documentary states that there were two big African […]

Below is another excerpt from my upcoming book on Johnstown by the numbers.  It is a discussion of the job mobility of East central European immigrants in the steel mills in Johnstown, PA from 1900-1950.    Ewa Morawska (1985) in For Bread with Butter: Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890-1940 thoroughly chronicles the […]

It has been harder to find time to write on this blog between work, working on my book, and life in general.  Tonight I did have time to write about some of the books that have been helpful to me in writing my book.     The first series of books I would like to discuss […]

Iraq Body Count of Violent Civilian Deaths In Iraq Since 2003 I have been swamped with work and consulting and haven’t been able to post here.  I should have time in the next few weeks.  There have been various online researchers who collect data from the public to describe a social phenomena.  Iraq Body Count […]