David

The Sum of the People

The 2020 census is still a year away, but the politics around it are in full swing. The NAACP has filed a suit claiming that the Census Bureau has insufficient funds to properly conduct the 2020 census, risking a massive undercount of blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities. And a federal judge has ruled that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross must sit for a deposition over the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. It’s going to be an interesting count.

As economist Andrew Whitby illustrates in The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, from the Ancient World to the Modern Age, the census has often been controversial. Its history also provides a surprising and incisive look at our attitudes about citizenship, ownership, and power.

With roots that go back thousands of years to China and the Fertile Crescent, the census has long reflected, as well as shaped, society. Its purpose has changed as our perspective on and trust in government have changed. It has been used for good and for ill. And today, as data is being collected about all of us, all the time, the history of the census intersects with some very contemporary debates.

The Education of Betsey Stockton

Born into slavery in Princeton, New Jersey in the waning years of the 18 th century, Betsey Stockton’s life illuminates how many different paths were taken from slavery to freedom. Stories like hers are each remarkable in their own way but very few of them are told. They are overshadowed by the much better known lives of people like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.

But that is changing as historians are bringing broader and more nuanced stories to light, as Gregory Nobles does in The Extraordinary Life of Betsey Stockton: An Emancipation Journey from Princeton, Around the World, and Back. Deeply researched and absorbing, the narrative follows Betsey Stockton as she traveled the complicated geography of race in the antebellum North.
Emancipated in her teens, Betsey Stockton left to join a missionary trip, on which she would be the first African American and the first unmarried female missionary to the Sandwich Islands. She would return to Princeton where she worked for thirty years as a teacher and community leader in the African-American community. Her accomplishments serve to highlight the extent of the inequality faced by free people of color in northern cities and college towns, where slavery had ended but racism persisted. The impact of her courageous work went well beyond the community in which she served.

Betsey Stockton is but one of the people who should have a more prominent place in our understanding of the struggle for equality. Though largely written out of history, as were so many women of her time, in The Extraordinary Life of Betsey Stockton, Nobles gives her story the attention it deserves.

Thanks For Everything (now get out)

A radical rethinking of how to make distressed urban neighborhoods more livable while preserving the residents’ ability to live there

When a distressed urban neighborhood gentrifies, all the ratios change: poor to rich; Black and Brown to white; unskilled to professional; uninsured to insured; food insecure to food secure. Vacant lots become condos, junkyards become parks, and trendy new restaurants open. But the people who originally lived there—enduring miserable conditions for years and working hard to change them—are gradually driven out. For them, the neighborhood hasn’t been restored so much as destroyed.

Focusing on the Olneyville section of Providence, Rhode Island, Thanks for Everything (Now Get Out) asks, Can we rebuild such neighborhoods without setting the stage for their destruction? Is failure the inevitable cost of success? The answer is based on years of interviews and on-the-ground observation. Joseph Margulies argues for innovative and practical strategies of self‑government and advocates for a new form of organization—the “neighborhood trust”—to give low-income residents ownership and control of assets to allow them to chart their own future.

Who’s Afraid of AI?

Computer programs can recognize human faces more reliably than humans. They beat us at board games, they bluff better than the best poker players in the world, and some of them can almost pass as human. At a breathtaking pace, machines are becoming better and faster at making complex decisions—even compared to us.

Machines have been getting constantly more adept since the 1960s. Until now, however, they have only assisted with the most repetitive routines of knowledge work. But with Artificial Intelligence, machines are making complex decisions that were once exclusively the province of human beings. Or to state it more precisely: if the data and the decision-making framework are correct, AI systems will make better decisions more quickly and less expensively than truck drivers, administrative staff members, sales clerks, doctors, investment bankers, or human resource managers.

Whoever wants to explore the opportunities and risks of this new technology first needs to understand the basics. They have to find a comprehensible answer to the questions: What is Artificial Intelligence anyway? What is it capable of today and what will it be capable of in the foreseeable future? And what abilities will people need to develop if machines continue to become more and more intelligent? In Who’s Afraid of AI?: Fear and Promise in the Age of Thinking Machines, Thomas Ramge seeks answers to those questions.

Information Hunters

The second world war would see an unlikely band of librarians, archivists, and scholars travel abroad to aid the Allies’ cause. Galvanized by the events of the war into acquiring and preserving the written word, as well as provide critical information for intelligence purposes, they set off on missions to collect foreign publications and information across the continent. They travelled to neutral cities in search of enemy texts, followed a step behind advancing armies to capture records, and seized Nazi works from bookstores and schools. When the war ended, they found looted collections hidden in cellars and caves. Their mission was to document, exploit, preserve, restitute these documents, and even, in the case of Nazi literature, to destroy them.

While armies have seized enemy records and have taken rare texts as booty throughout history, it was only in World War II that collecting books and documents became an American war aim. In her fascinating work, cultural historian Kathy Peiss reveals how book and document collecting became part of the new apparatus of intelligence and national security, military planning, and postwar reconstruction. Focusing on the ordinary Americans who carried out these missions, she shows how they made decisions on the ground to acquire primary sources that would be useful in the war zone as well as on the home front.

These collecting missions also boosted the postwar ambitions of American research libraries, offering a chance for them to become great international repositories of scientific patents, literature, and historical sources. Not only did their wartime work have lasting implications for academic institutions, foreign-policy making, and national security, it also led to the development of today’s essential information science tools.

Illuminating the growing global power of the United States in the realms of intelligence and cultural heritage, Peiss tells the story of the men and women who went to Europe to collect and protect books and information. Her narrative broadens and enriches the debate over the use of data in times of both war and peace.

David

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