New data on number of Civil War deaths

I'm always yammering at my students that we need to re-examine "received wisdom," the facts that are handed down from generation to generation without critical analysis. Now, a Binghamton University professor is doing just that. Associate Professor J. David Hacker, using demographic research, has significantly revised upward the estimated number of Civil War deaths and by doing so, has also significantly shaken up received wisdom. If Hacker is correct, the traditional number used--618,222--is far too low. I've always used 620,000 to 640,000 when I teach the Civil War in my HIS 100 classes. But Hacker thinks that even that number is too low. His new research shows that the number should be at least 650,000 and may be as high as 850,000. So, he'll average the two and finds 750,000 to be the most accurate number.

Similar to the approach I have always advocated in my HIS 100 classes, Hacker thinks that the Civil War deaths have affected far more people than just the soldier indicate. And he agrees that the new estimate proves that Civil War military deaths are still greater than all the military deaths in all the other American wars combined. "A higher death toll," he says, "implies that more women were widowed and more children were orphaned as a result of the war than has long been suspected. The war touched more lives and communities more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensuing decades of American history in ways which we have not yet fully grasped."


Now, add to the numbers of people affected at the time the numbers of people affected since then. By that, I mean that we should imagine all the generations of people who were never born because their great-great-great-great grandfathers died on a Civil War battlefield, in a prisoner-of-war camp, or in a military hospital. That would be the really meaningful number, but I have no idea how that could be estimated.   

For my "Roosevelt to Reagan" students and anyone else interested in American reaction to the Holocaust

I have just come across the announcement of a symposium that was held in NYC this past Saturday that may answer some of your questions about FDR's inaction on the plight of European Jews during World War II. I only wish I could have gone! Here's the posting copied and in its entirety:

"New research on President Frankin D. Roosevelt's controversial views regarding Jews and other minorities will be presented by scholars at a conference in New York City on September 18, 2011.

The conference, "While Six Million Lived: America and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1939," is the ninth national conference of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.  It will take place on Sunday, September 18, 2011, at the Fordham University School of Law, 140 West 62 St., New York City, from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Highlights of the conference:

10:00 am - Dr. Rafael Medoff on "FDR, 'Jewish Blood', and Immigration"

10:45 am - A ceremony honoring the leaders of the Virgin Islands for their 1939 effort to aid

Jewish refugees;  U.S. Rep. Donna Christensen (D-Virgin Islands) will accept an award and speak.

11:15 am - Prof. David S. Wyman on "The Search for Havens"

1:00 pm -  "Cartoonists and the Plight of German Jewry, 1933-1939," a panel discussion with cartoon historian Craig Yoe and illustrator Sal Amendola

2:30 pm - Prof. Laurel Leff on "The American Medical Community and Jewish Refugee Doctors"

3:30 pm - Prof. Stephen Norwood on "American Universities and Nazi Germany"

Dr. Ari Babaknia, the eminent physician and scholar, will chair the conference. Prof. Thane Rosenbaum, scholar and novelist (and Fordham faculty member) will serve as Master of Ceremonies.

For more information, please call the Wyman Institute at 202-434-8994 or visit www.WymanInstitute.org." '


I have contacted the conference organizer to see if I can get access to the papers presented. I'll update you as soon as I hear anything. Research that uncovers new ways of considering the actions of historical actors is always exciting!

The most abused word in the English language: "there's"

I have posted about this before, but I feel the need to do so again.

What is it with people--educated people, even professional broadcasters--using the singular verb "there's" followed by a clearly plural word? Here's an example I just heard on National Public Radio that sent me running to my computer and this blog:

A highly regarded reporter was just telling the studio broadcaster about what's happening in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is on the scene and was describing the aftermath of the recent attacks. Here's what she said:

"There's several bodies on the floor."

Now, this has become so commonplace in the last ten years, that nobody (except me and a few other grammarry-types) even notices.

"There's several bodies"?  I'd love to ask this reporter if she would ever say "There is several bodies." The answer, of course, would be "no."

You might think I'm making a mountain out of the proverbial mole-hill here (pardon the cliche), but if you use that type of language, don't you sound a bit less than educated? Why would you choose to do that, just because everyone else does, when you could choose to say it correctly (and just as easily) like this:

"There are five bodies on the floor." It doesn't take any longer.

Whenever you hear this type of thing--and I promise that if you listen for it, you'll be shocked at how widespread it is--and once you realize how terrible it sounds,  you'll stop doing it. It's not hard and doesn't cost anything.

And there are my thoughts for the day.

Ten Years After 9/11 might be a good time to reflect on what has changed.

While the 9/11 attacks are still very fresh in the minds of most people in my generation, I have come to realize that most of my students were very young in 2001 and have different memories of that fateful and terrible year.

I recall my daughter, who was an undergrad at UMass Amherst at the time, telling me that there was so much in-class discussion of the tragedy in the days following, that students were starting to get tired of it all. They were more eager to have instructors get back to the necessary coursework than to have yet-another session for students to express their feelings.

And so I have assumed that most young people today would feel the same way and would roll their eyes at much commemorative tenth anniversary talk--until I realized that most students today were much younger than my daughter at the time--and that they have very different memories.

Since I teach constitutional and legal history, I thought it might be interesting for my students to learn what has changed in our legal world since 9/11. So, here I present an article from today's New York Times (please note that I have italicized the title--that's what you should do, too) by Adam Liptak, a noted constitutional writer, talking about how much has changed in these last ten years relative to civil liberties. Liptak concludes that: "criminal law itself changed surprisingly little in the wake of the attacks. What did change was how law enforcement conceived its mission." 

So, those of you interested in law school, and those of you interested in a career in law enforcement, this should be of particular interest to you. Read on!

September 7, 2011
Civil Liberties Today
By ADAM LIPTAK

There is a place for alarmism when threats to civil liberties are concerned. Too much worry about our freedoms is better than too little, particularly in the face of a government shrouded in wartime secrecy after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But there is also a place, a decade later, for sober reflection. By historic standards, the domestic legal response to 9/11 gave rise to civil liberties tremors, not earthquakes. And even those changes were largely a result of reordered law enforcement priorities rather than fundamental shifts in the law.

Consider the USA Patriot Act, which was short for this Orwellian mouthful: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. The law, more than 300 pages long, sailed through Congress seven weeks after the attacks with scant dissent. It quickly became a sort of shorthand for government abuse and overreaching.

The Patriot Act undeniably expanded the government’s surveillance powers and the scope of some criminal laws. But this was, in truth, tinkering at the margins and nothing compared with the responses of other developed democracies, where preventive detention and limitations on subversive speech became commonplace.

“In comparative perspective, the Patriot Act appears mundane and mild,” Kent Roach, a law professor at the University of Toronto, writes in a new book, “The 9/11 Effect: Comparative Counter-Terrorism.”

The story is different as one moves beyond domestic criminal law. Detentions at Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary renditions and brutal interrogations all tested the limits of the appropriate exercise of government power in wartime. The American government held people without charge for almost a decade, engaged in torture as that term is understood in international law, and sent people abroad for questioning to countries known to engage in what everyone must agree is torture.

But criminal law itself changed surprisingly little in the wake of the attacks. What did change was how law enforcement conceived its mission.

Almost immediately after the attacks, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft announced “a new paradigm.” Preventing terrorist acts, he said, was now more important than punishing crimes after the fact. There were echoes here of “Minority Report,” the 1956 Philip K. Dick story (and 2002 movie) that depicted a world in which the police catch criminals before they can act, based on their thoughts rather than their actions.

The new paradigm encouraged the arrests of people thought to be dangerous for, as Mr. Ashcroft put it, “spitting on the sidewalk,” or for immigration offenses, or as material witnesses. It increased surveillance of religious and dissident groups. It ramped up the use of a law barring even benign support for organizations said to engage in terrorism, putting pressure on activities long thought to be protected by the First Amendment. And it inserted informants into Muslim communities, giving rise to a culture of suspicion and charges of entrapment.

The number of people directly affected by these changes was, in the greater scheme of things, small. The indirect chilling effect on free speech, association rights and religious freedom was impossible to measure. But by the standards of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Palmer raids of 1920, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the McCarthy era, the contraction of domestic civil liberties in the last decade was minor.

Arrest Early, Charge Broadly

As they generally have in the past, the courts acquiesced in the government’s efforts to combat terrorism. True, the Supreme Court placed some limits on the executive branch’s ability to hold prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. But decisions in criminal and immigration cases tell a different story.

“The courts have been failing terribly,” said Susan N. Herman, the president of the American Civil Liberties Union and the author of “Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy,” which will be published in October.

The Supreme Court, she said, routinely refuses to hear cases in which lower courts uphold the government’s position in cases involving national security. “They’re not interested in civil liberties challenges,” she said of the justices. “They’re only interested when the government loses.”

The goal of stopping terrorism before it happens caused federal law enforcement officials to make early arrests and then to rely on charges that required little proof of concrete conduct. Prosecutors often charged defendants accused of involvement in terrorism with conspiracy or “material support” of groups said to engage in terrorism.

Those laws were already in place, said Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas. “The difference is,” he said, “they just weren’t being used.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, things changed. In just the first five years, prosecutors charged more than 100 people with providing material support to terrorist groups. That support often took tangible form, like providing weapons, and it generally seemed directly linked to the advancement of violent ends.

But some prosecutions were based on sending money to groups that engaged in both humanitarian work and violence. And last year, in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court ruled that it could also be a serious felony merely to urge terrorist groups to use peaceful means to resolve disputes. Such speech, the court said, amounted to material support and could be made criminal notwithstanding the protections of the First Amendment.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, stressed that the material-support law applied only to speech directed by or coordinated with terrorist groups. People “may say anything they wish on any topic” without running afoul of the law, the chief justice said, so long as they are speaking independently.

Aggressive use of material support and similar laws, critics responded, chipped away at two principles that had been thought settled for about half a century. One was that mere membership in a subversive organization cannot be made a crime. The other is that the abstract advocacy of even the violent overthrow of the government must be tolerated under the First Amendment.

The Humanitarian Law Project decision “is akin to the kind of criminalization in the McCarthy era of speech and guilt by association,” said David D. Cole, a law professor at Georgetown who represented the challengers in the Humanitarian Law Project case as a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

A second law already on the books, this one allowing the arrest and detention of material witnesses — people said to have evidence of others’ crimes — was misused, critics say, as a shadow preventive detention regime. Instead of using the law to make sure people with information about the wrongdoing of others would turn up to testify, these critics said, prosecutors used the law to hold people themselves suspected of links to terrorism.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Laws concerning immigration offenses were also used to detain people suspected of terrorism, according to a 2003 report from the Justice Department’s inspector general. The report said that the usual presumptions of the legal system were turned upside down after the attacks. People detained on immigration charges were considered guilty until proven innocent and were often held for months in harsh conditions after they were ordered released.

In decisions in 2009 and May of this year, the Supreme Court blocked two lawsuits seeking to hold Mr. Ashcroft accountable for what the plaintiffs said were abuses in the use of the material-witness and immigration laws.

“It should come as no surprise,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for a five-justice majority in one of them, “that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks should produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the purpose of the policy was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims.”

In the decade since the attacks, the government also became notably more aggressive in the use of informants and sting operations, sowing distrust in some parts of Muslim communities. In one such operation, an imam in Albany was ensnared in a fictitious plot involving shoulder-launched missiles and the assassination of a Pakistani diplomat in New York.

Defending the 15-year sentence meted out to the imam, Yassin M. Aref, prosecutors said the new paradigm of prevention justified the tactics. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has an obligation to use all available investigative tools,” prosecutors wrote in a 2007 appeals court brief, “including a sting operation, to remove those ready and willing to help terrorists from our streets.”

Protections ‘Seriously Diluted’

Not all new tactics in combating terrorism in the United States were based on existing laws. “In electronic surveillance, you did have a big change,” said John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who became known for his aggressive legal advice and expansive view of executive power as a Justice Department official in the Bush administration.

In 2002, for instance, a special federal appeals court, the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, granted the Justice Department broad new powers to use wiretaps obtained for intelligence operations in criminal cases. “This revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts,” Mr. Ashcroft said at the time.

After revelations concerning the warrantless wiretapping of international communications, Congress largely endorsed the program. Those legal changes, joined with striking advances in technology, have allowed the government broad ability to gather information.

“The Fourth Amendment has been seriously diluted,” said Professor Herman, who teaches at Brooklyn Law School. She added that she was struck by “the amount of surveillance that’s been unleashed with less and less judicial review and less and less individualized suspicion.”

Both the Bush and Obama administrations have been criticized by liberals as employing excessive secrecy and, in particular, for invoking the state secrets privilege to shut down civil litigation challenging things like rendition and surveillance programs. By international standards, though, the public has learned a great deal about secret government activities.

“That so many of the abuses committed by the executive in the wake of 9/11 have come to light is another sign of American exceptionalism,” Professor Roach wrote, “as manifested by the activities of a free press that is unrestrained by official secrets acts found in most other democracies.”

Opinions vary about whether efforts to fight terrorism in the United States have inflicted collateral damage on political dissent, religious liberty and the freedom of association.

“If you look at it historically,” said Professor Yoo, “you might say, ‘I can’t believe we’re at war,’ when you see how much speech is going on. Civil liberties are far more protected than what we’ve seen in past wars.”

Professor Cole was less sanguine.

“Since 9/11, the criminal law has expanded, ensnaring as ‘terrorists’ people who have done no more than provide humanitarian aid to needy families, while privacy and political freedoms have contracted, especially for those in Muslim communities,” he said. “On the one hand, the past 10 years have shown that criminal law can be used effectively to fight terrorism; on the other, it has also demonstrated that the demand for prevention can all too quickly lead to the abuse of innocents.”
 

Grammar Goody--Comma rules, part II

Yippee! Another comma rule.


Put a comma after an introductory phrase or clause. To wit:

Although she never put on her shoes before taking out the garbage, her toes managed to survive nicely without breaks or sprains. 

Without that comma after garbage and before her toes, you'd have a really weird couple of words there:

...garbage her toes...

That clearly would not be good or clear.

This rule used to be hard and fast. Now it's softening somewhat so you will see this type of comma not used sometimes when the introductory clause or phrase is short. But I advise you to ALWAYS put it in. It's never going to be wrong if you do.

So, I would write a sentence like this next one WITH the comma (even though it's not considered wrong to do so without it in some circles):


Although short, the clause was effectively placed and had maximum impact.

The bottom line on introductory clauses or phrases, always set them off from the rest of the sentence with a comma.