Derek Thompson has republished excerpts from an almost 100-year-old report on what the US was like in the 1920s. He includes some of the charts and summaries.
One hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.
The document is almost entirely forgotten. But today, for America's 250th birthday, I'm blowing the cobwebs off this sucker and taking readers inside its yellowed pages for a look back at what life was like in the U.S. exactly 100 years ago, when the U.S. was celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary.
Derek observes some interesting parallels between US society around both the sesquicentennial and the recent semiquincentennial.
A scanned version of Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends is available online having been scanned at the University of California back when scanning old material was still allowed, though there are paper copies there and elsewhere. For now.
(Score: 4, Touché) by SomeGuy on Monday July 06, @01:51AM (5 children)
What? Why is that? I would think scanning old historical material would be mandatory. Of course, making them available would be a separate issue.
Who to throw blame at? Copyright? AI? Donald Trump? All of the above and more?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 06, @02:35AM
Seems like a study paid for with tax dollars should be FOIAvailable... in a functioning government.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Monday July 06, @04:06AM (1 child)
Who to throw blame at? Copyright?
Yes, in part, though I also would partially blame legalized bribery [brennancenter.org], too. Click on that last link in the summary, the one to the Hathi Trust listing for the digital artifact [hathitrust.org]. Then try to load the document from one of the sites. Notice that a barrier pops up falsely claiming copyright encumbrance for a FOIA document? Most books scanned by Google, back when they were not evil, were out of copyright and some materials (such as the government report linked to in the summary) were never under copyright in the first place. Many of the rest were out of print and will never have an additional printing run, ever. However, the copyright cartel has zero interest in those facts, nor do the politicians effectively on their payroll.
There more details are available at The University of Michigan [umich.edu] (warning for javascript) which was one of the lead partners.
And that's just copyright. Don't get me started on illegal software patents, which are still getting granted despite being illegal, especially in the context of their impairment of 3D printing.
That aside, the story of Project Ocean is quite interesting and Google employed several scores of engineers to develop methods using LIDAR and dewarping algorithms and more. The article in The Atlantic touches on a lot of that.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Touché) by mcgrew on Monday July 06, @06:09PM
Many of the dangers of copyright law (except the BIG one, its length) are from people claiming copyright on things that simply cannot be copyrighted. For instance, anything 95 years older than its author's funeral, dance moves, recipes...
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday July 06, @06:04PM (1 child)
There is not and cannot be any law against scanning documents. There are laws against republishing without the author's consent. Most likely it means there was a school rule about using their scanners for any but certain purposes; in short, scholastic bureaucracy.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bentonite on Tuesday July 07, @03:38AM
The laws are about distributing copies and making copies without the *copyright holders* permission.
Despite it arguably being illegal, US copyright does restrict scanning documents, especially so if such process requires bypassing digital handcuffs (although, attempts to implement a digital guard on computers so far haven't been successful, thus it's difficult to enforce such restrictions, due to it being hard to determine that copies have been made, until such copies are distributed).
Schools often attempt to enforce such copyright restrictions, by ordering staff to guard copiers/scanners, just like the guards for copiers in the soviet union - when the school should not prevent learning, by restricting use of the scanner.
The author is often not the copyright holder, due to having surrendered the copyright to some business, or some business being able to claim such copyright - such companies usually forbid such authors from being able to distribute their own works, while even greedy authors (you only hear otherwise from the illogically greedy), don't have a problem with their old works being distributed, at no charge after the book has run its course in ~3-5 years, as such sharing works as advertising for their newer books.
You'll only ever hear complaints about copies being made of 5+ year old books by publishers and other insane cranks, who seriously believe that just because they once wrote a book, or they once paid (or didn't even pay) an author to write a book (that isn't a great book either), that they deserve to receive payments for the rest of their lives and then several generations of their decedents too (businesses and/or family members).
Too bad the copyright laws have been written by and are enforced by insane cranks.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @03:40AM (2 children)
Thanks for posting this, good stuff.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Monday July 06, @04:09AM
It would be fantastic, 100 years later, to be able to feed all 1500 pages at that fine-grained level, into an AI and let you explore what it says about US life in its various facets, and to match and contrast that with personal/first-hand and other accounts of the time.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mcgrew on Monday July 06, @06:24PM
Here's another one. [mcgrewbooks.com] Only Yesterday, An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen, published in 1933. Most of the italicized words in it are actually links to the referenced antique book, movie, or musical piece.
My Grandma was 17 in 1920 and told me things about that decade not in books, like the so-called "roaring twenties" only roared for the rich. Keep in mind reading it that when it mentions income taxes, before WWII you had to earn over four times the median income to owe any tax at all.
It reminds me of now, only instead of Prohibition we have ICE goons, and Trump and his cabinet are far more crooked than Harding and his.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06, @03:52AM (1 child)
U Michigan has an overview including an OCR'd Table of Contents, https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11974&context=mlr [umich.edu]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Monday July 06, @04:24AM
And the full text of Volume 1 is available via the University of California. See the first link in the last paragraph of the summary for a link to the first part. It seems that digital access to the second volume is no where to be found and false copyright warnings pop up when volume 2 links are clicked on.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by rst on Monday July 06, @09:06AM (2 children)
https://archive.org/search?tab=all&query=Recent+social+trends+in+the+United+States [archive.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Tuesday July 07, @05:33PM (1 child)
The Internet Archive is a great resource. However, it is not the only resource for Public Domain books/journals/etc. The referenced item at HathiTrust Digital Library: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b3111697 [handle.net]
Non-exhaustive list of public domain materials:
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday July 07, @05:35PM
Ahh..., I included the HathiTrust link to the noted source, not realizing that was the link they used, oh well.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"