A Statistical Cookbook as Novel: “Historical Statistics of the United States”

Cows and methane

Food and statistics collide in this infographic!

My father reads cookbooks as if they were novels, from beginning to end, looking through every corner of every ingredient list, watching the story’s protagonist move past the dangers of broiling until being served up on a platter with roasted carrots and a garnish of kale and a melon slice.

For him, it’s a literary journey. To me, it’s just a cookbook.

That’s sorta how I felt about the library resource entitled “Historical Statistics of the United States”. I thought, “I bet it’s just a pile of statistics.” But I was wrong. The “Historical Statistics of the United States” [hereafter referred to as “HStUS”, pronounced “Hostuss” which makes me hungry] is a resource that is full of essays that transform HStUS from a statistical dump into a rich text about American history, sociology, and economics [I don’t mean to demean statistics by using the word “dump”, but I must confess that I find raw statistical data without context as exciting as rotting vegetables].

Each subtopic explored in HStUS is accompanied by a contextual essay. Each essay provides the following information:

1- Details on how the data was compiled using statistical tools and methods;
2- Descriptions of the subject matter that explain and provide context;
3- How the data informs the bigger picture of change across time.

As an example, let’s look at the essay that accompanies the 15 tables of statistics in the subtopic “Family and Household Composition”.

1- The essay begins with an explanation of the data and the problems associated with data about “Family and Household Composition”:

The Census Bureau published minimal statistics on families and households until 1940, focusing mainly on the size distribution of households. Even for the period since 1940, the official published statistics on the subject are minimal…During the past two decades, new microdata samples of historical censuses have become available. These data are collected in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), a coherent national database describing the characteristics of 55 million Americans in thirteen census years spanning the period from 1850 through 1990…

In addition to problems caused by shifting census definitions, statistical series can also be distorted by changes in census processing. In particular, Ruggles and Brower argue that because of errors in tabulation procedures, published statistics on subfamilies from both the census and the Current Population Surveys are unreliable. Accordingly, the statistics relating to subfamilies that are presented here are derived entirely from the IPUMS.

Okay, if you’re like me, that’s not the most thrilling text you have ever read, BUT it does provide a riveting account of how the authors worked the data.

2- The essay then provides a conceptual context in the section entitled “Trends in American Living Arrangments”:

Within the preindustrial family economy, older-generation men exercised control over the means of production. Women and younger-generation men provided labor in exchange for food, shelter, and economic security. The decline of farming, the rise of wage labor, and the growth of mass education fundamentally shifted the balance of power within American families. First, the rise of wage labor among men reduced the importance of agricultural and occupational inheritance by providing opportunity for young men. Second, the rise of wage labor among women curbed the control that husbands and fathers exercised over their wives and daughters…

Hence, the transformation of the economy made the transformation of the family possible. The changes in the family were not, however, purely economic; little would have happened had there not also been profound attitudinal changes. It is not especially useful to debate whether the economic or cultural changes were primary; both were essential.

3- Within this discussion, the essay’s author provides statistical support and links to the relevant data:

The changing marital status of mothers with children under 18 years old is summarized in Figure Ae-C. From 1880, when marital status was first recorded in the census, until 1950, the overall percentage of young children without married mothers declined slightly from 11.6 to 8.8 percent. The percentage of children with divorced or separated mothers more than doubled during this period, but that increase was canceled out by a dramatic decline in the percentage of children with widowed mothers. From 1950 to 1990, however, the percentage of children residing with never-married mothers rose sixteen-fold. Simultaneously, the percentage of children with divorced or separated mothers continued to rise. By 1990, about one quarter of all children was residing with a single mother.

The increase in single parenthood is a consequence of the rapid rise of divorce, separation, and unmarried fertility (Table Ae507–513). The causes of these changes have been vigorously debated. The traditional explanation is that rising female labor force participation weakened marriage. Writing in 1893, Emile Durkheim pointed to the sexual division of labor as a source of interdependence between men and women, producing what he called “organic solidarity.” Durkheim warned that if the sexual division of labor receded, “conjugal society would eventually subsist in sexual relations preeminently ephemeral” (Durkheim 1960 [1893], p. 60).

Maybe this text will never be feted on the New York Times Best Seller List, but I find the essays in HStUS compelling.

For those of us whose brains shut down when they come within twenty feet of a table of numbers, this libary resource can be a valuable tool for staying awake while researching statistical data.

I feel that the essays in HStUS are excellent examples of how to provide contextual information in a discussion of statistical analysis. They would be of benefit in classes concerning history, sociology, as well as statistics.

Below you will find some images that show the assorted topics and sub-topics that are described in HStUS.


“Historical Statistics of the United States” can be found by…
Going to the library’s main website (http://www.library.millersville.edu) >
Scroll to the bottom and click on “Articles and Databases” >
Click on “All Databases by Title” in the right hand column >
Scroll down to the “H” section>
You’ll find the link to “Historical Statistics of the United States” in the middle of that section.

If you have any questions about using this resource, please feel free to contact me at nathan.pease@millersville.edu.

[Nathan Pease is an adjunct Research Librarian at the McNairy Library and Learning Forum on the campus of Millersville University. In his spare time, Mr. Pease digitizes out-of-print vinyl records and plays “European board games” such as Targi, Pandemic, Dominion, among others. He also volunteers and works part-time atLancasterHistory.Org, also know as the Lancaster County Historical Society.]

Citation for the essay excerpts: Ruggles, Steven , “Family and Household Composition” in chapter Ae of Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, edited by Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Ae.ESS.01

[The image at the top of this blog, “Methane production of cows vs grass” by allispossible.org.uk, is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.]

“What in heck was that story about?!?”: Finding critical essays in a new resource, “The Literary Reference Center”

 

So you’ve just read a story for your English/literature class, and you have no idea what it’s about [or you have to write a five page paper about it, and you have no idea what to say]. What do you do?

The McNairy Library has several good databases that can provide you with essays and criticism about many works of literature.

The three that I would try first are…

1- Literary Reference Center– “This comprehensive full-text database provides a broad spectrum of information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and timeframes—to give students, professors, and researchers a foundation of literary reference works to meet their research needs.” [quote source: http://tinyurl.com/nckbxno]

2- Literature Resource Center– “Full-text articles from scholarly journals and literary magazines are combined with critical essays, work and topic overviews, full-text works, biographies, and more to provide a wealth of information on authors, their works, and literary movements.  Researchers at all levels will find the information they need, with content covering all genres and disciplines, all time periods and all parts of the world.” [quote source: http://tinyurl.com/bmxaoxj].

3- Literature Criticism Online– This database provides similar resources as the two above, but it targets juvenile and children’s literature.

These three databases can be found in the “L” section of our database list at http://www.library.millersville.edu/libguides/all-databases-title#L.

This blog post concerns the Literary Reference Center, because it is a new product to the McNairy Library.

To find it, navigate to the link for the Literary Reference Center… >
Go to the library’s main website (http://www.library.millersville.edu) >
Scroll to the bottom and click on “Articles and Databases” >
Click on “All Databases by Title” in the right hand column >
Scroll down to the “L” section>
You’ll find the link to the Literary Reference Center towards the bottom of that section.

When you put a story or book title into the search field, be sure to put quotation marks around it. That will insure that the “discovery service” [aka the “search box”, the “search engine”] will search for the title as a complete phrase rather than as a bunch of separate words.

As an example, put in good man is hard to find. That search produces 451 results, most of them about Flannery O’Connor’s story “A good man is hard to find”.

Results for "good man is hard to find" search. Notice the "Source Type" section of the limiters in the left hand column.

Notice in the left hand column that there are “limiters” [they limit the amount of results you get]. Scroll down to the “Source Types” section in the limiters and click on “Literary Criticism”. That will limit your results to essays that discuss the “meaning”, symbolism, literary constructs, language, affinities, etc., in the story.

Besides individual essays, you might also be interested in the general reception of a book or story. For instance, when the story was first published, how did people initially react to it? How do they react to it now?

To find that information, you should perform a search using the term “critical reception” [again, use the quotation marks to target records with that exact phrase]. For example, if you wanted to find out the critical reception of John Steinbeck’s work, you could do a search for “critical reception” AND Steinbeck [see image below].

"Critical reception" search

Another term that you may want to use is “critical insights”. It’s a subject term that is used and indexed in many of the library records for literature.

Also notice that when you perform a search in the Literary Reference Center, there are many different fields that you can search [see image below].

The list of searchable fields in the drop down list

Notice that there’s a field for “Authors Cultural Identity”. You can search this field for cultural identity, but as of today, August 28, 2015, there are only six (6, 5+1, 2×3, one less than seven) cultural identities indexed in this field:

1- African American
2- Asian American
3- Gay and Lesbian
4- Jewish
5- Latino or Latina
6- Native American

My guess is that in the future there will be a greater variety of “cultural identities” indexed in this database. But for now, you can use the six above.

Also notice in the list of searchable fields that you can search for “Literary Characters” and “Literary Locales” [a search using “Lancaster” in “Locales” brings up three resources, two about a misunderstood President and one about a chocolatier].

Also notice in the blue bar at the top of the page that there are additional resources under the “More” link, including a glossary. So if you don’t know what a literary term means, you can look it up in the glossary [see image below].

Resources under the "More" link, also showing entries in the glossary

To find other databases and resources for literary criticism, go to our resource guide for literature: http://guides.library.millersville.edu/literature.

If you have any questions using this database, or any other database in the library’s collection, or if you want to correct my grammar and/or spelling, or it you think that I need a haircut, feel free to contact me at nathan.pease@millersville.edu.

[Nathan Pease is an adjunct Research Librarian at the McNairy Library and Learning Forum on the campus of Millersville University. In his spare time, Mr. Pease digitizes out-of-print vinyl records and plays “European board games” such as Targi, Pandemic, Dominion, among others. He also volunteers and works part-time at LancasterHistory.Org, also know as the Lancaster County Historical Society.]

[The image at the top of this blog, “Self-Portrait in a group (José Almada Negreiros), 1925” by Pedro Ribeiro Simoes, is licensed under CC BY 2.0.]