George Washington Gets a 360

Eric Schultz

The annual review can be an uncomfortable event, but a 360-Degree Performance Review (the “360”) is one of the more harrowing proceedings that can befall a professional, business or academic. In a 360 you are asked to grade yourself against a series of attributes, everything from ethics to leadership to

Gilbert Stuart's 1797 portrait of George Washington

listening skills and coaching. Then, everyone in your “ecosystem” gets a crack at you, sometimes anonymously. This means your boss, often your boss’s boss or peers, your own peers and subordinates, and then some sampling of customers and vendors. Scores are averaged, and then you’re ready (or not) to talk with your boss about why you think your “collaboration with others” is an “8” while the 360 consensus shows it’s a “4.”

A good 360—and there is such a thing, when done well—will reinforce your positives and give you additional incentive to fix the things you generally knew were broken anyway. A traumatic 360, however, can disclose huge “holes” in your game, which quite often turn out to be the very things that are keeping you from being effective, or promoted. 360s are not done every year but, like a colonoscopy (not to put too fine a point on it), are appropriate for the occasional gut-check.

A month ago I was asked to meet with a group of senior executives who were about to receive the results of their first 360. This was a strong group who already knew themselves well, but there couldn’t help but be some anxiety. I was asked to talk specifically about my experiences with the tool—I’d been through a few—and try to put the practice in context as just another device that managers use to improve. My 360s were traumatic but positive: I learned that I never shined my shoes (at one extreme), that I was perceived as giving up too quickly on managers who failed (a gaping blind-spot in my game that I tried hard to repair), and that I should “be myself, but not too much myself”—the best piece of advice I ever got, and one I occasionally impart to others.

Christmas Creep and Other Joyous Holiday Traditions

[We repost this piece by Eric Schultz, which originally appeared on November 19, 2013.]
Eric B. Schultz

Not long ago, a friend sent me a video which featured a new holiday character, “Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus,” with a note saying how appalled he was with the way retailers had hijacked

the holidays.

I’m pretty jaded myself by holiday retailers. But even I’ve winced a few times this fall.  There was the Christmas wrapping-paper sale I stumbled upon in mid-October, for example, and the recent news that many large retailers would be opening their doors at 8 or 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening.  (Who’s going to eat cold turkey sandwiches with me?)  Now, I’d been introduced to the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus offering proof positive that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas had finally been smashed together into the twisted wreckage of one long retail extravaganza.

Remember the time when Christmas was simple and less commercial, when you could step out of your door into a Currier and Ives print.  No?  How about a $29 Thomas Kinkade “Memories of Christmas” print?  Precisely.  One of the greatest of all holiday traditions is recalling a holiday season—historian Stephen Nissenbaum reminds us in his superb book, The Battle For Christmas—that never existed at all.

Taking Google’s Ngram For a Spin

Eric Schultz

As part of a recent parents weekend at a fine New England educational institution, I had the pleasure of watching Peter Norvig,  director of research at Google, demonstrate Google’s Ngram Viewer (Ngram section starts around 9:30).  Released in December 2010, Ngram (Wikipedia tells us) is a “phrase-usage graphing tool” that charts the yearly count of selected n-grams (letter combinations), or words and phrases.  The Google database currently includes 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008 containing 500 billion words in American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese

Peter Norvig’s example that day illustrated the power of the Ngram database, comparing the word combinations “The United States is” and “The United States are.”

The result seems logical: the singular “is” becomes the dominant verb after the American Civil War.  This was a relatively straightforward example, however, and I should warn as you read through this article that you’ll need to channel a little of your inner art historian as the graphs become more complicated and require a longer look, often informed by a refresh on dates.  

I also need to warn that the Ngram tool is a little like a chain saw in the hands of a beginner; my graph does not look exactly like Peter’s (and I’m not sure the reason), everything is cap-sensitive, and there’s no simple facility yet (of which I am aware) for combining terms.  So, for example, one cannot search on “Franklin Delano Roosevelt” and “FDR” combined.

As my kindly doctor says, he won’t prescribe for an illness he cannot diagnose.  So, as a complete novice, I am not endorsing Ngram for serious historical research.  I have concluded, however, in a competition between Angry Birds and NGram, the latter is a far more fascinating diversion.

Here’s a comparison I ran on the terms “one nation under God” and “one nation indivisible.”  Remembering that “under God” became a pressing issue in the 1950s and was signed into law by President Eisenhower in 1954, this graph again makes good sense.

Now let me offer something a little more nuanced, comparing the terms “George Washington” and “Abraham Lincoln” (and remembering that “President Washington” or “Abe Lincoln” might be good terms to one day combine in a total search).  The results are below.

What to make of this?  I would have bet that Lincoln had more sheer volume of mentions than Washington, at least in the last generation, but it turns out to be the opposite.  We can see increases at the time of Lincoln’s 100^th birthday in 1909, and Washington’s 200^th in 1932.  Beyond that, it appears that Washington really remains first in the hearts (or at least the publications) of his countrymen.  (To complicate the picture, when John Adams is added, he dominates both Washington and Lincoln for most of the 19^th century before falling behind permanently around 1900.)

Another graph shows the comparison of four wartime events and seems more straightforward, with the emotional force of Pearl Harbor clearly reflected in literature.

Having written about the history of air conditioning for United Technologies (“Weathermakers to the World,” 2012), I was curious to see what would happen when I tested the term.  Sure enough, the history of the technology was plotted on the screen, from its introduction to the public in movie theaters and department stores beginning around 1925, to its hyped status in the 1930s as a technology capable of pulling America out of the Great Depression, to its growth as the Baby Boomers returned from WWII and invaded suburbia.  

When the New York Times called America’s 1970 census “the Air-Conditioned Census,” it resulted in a decade of torrid press until air conditioning became a mature, more mundane topic.  As climate change becomes a persistent topic (and Google updates its Ngram data beyond 2008), we might well see another upsurge in “air conditioning” literature.

I graphed a small sample of American historians, just to get a sense for the push and pull of various interpretations.  (I could see this as the dreaded final exam in a History class, with the simple instructions: “Comment.”)  

Remembering that every “John Fiske” (historian, philosopher and other) ever written about is contained in the Ngram results, I leave it to my professional historian friends to make sense of this chart.  I might add only that, knowing the world a bit as an entrepreneur, the emphasis on Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis beginning in the 1980s is not surprising, as he is the adopted historian of the high-tech crowd.

Finally, as some of this writing was done with the World Series raging, I wanted to compare the Cardinals and Red Sox. Being a lifelong Sox fan, I was overjoyed to learn that the recent separation in press shown by Ngram accurately fortold the results of the on-field competition.

Accessing History: A “Laboratory” at Gettysburg

Eric Schultz

I was fortunate in early July to attend three days of the 150th commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg, including a number of events sponsored by the Gettysburg Foundation. It was busy, colorful, sometimes somber but always tropical, a good reminder of what conditions were like in July 1863.  The battlefield itself, nearly 6,000 acres and sometimes called the “symbolic center of American history,” is both inspiring and beautiful. 

The 150th commemoration included a retelling
of the battle and featured first-person accounts.

Events included a spectacular retelling of the battle (focused on first-person accounts), and the grand opening of the Seminary Ridge Museum at which visitors could climb its historic cupola to get a bird’s eye view of the battlefield and town.

As I attended various gatherings, however, it struck me that Gettysburg was nothing less than a kind of living laboratory for how people access history.

For example, there were lots (and lots) of folks taking tours of the battlefield, often led by certified National Park Service guides.  To walk in the footsteps of soldiers and view the battle lines redefines history in a whole new way for many.  Likewise some of the largest groups could be found on Little Round Top, where Col. Joshua Chamberlain made his famous stand--a tribute not only to Chamberlain and his troops, but to the power of Hollywood and films like Gettysburg, capable of creating historical celebrities. 

The Greatest Migration of All

Eric B. Schultz

Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and you’ll hear one of several answers.  Most will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South who headed north and west, from

A Jack Delano photo of migrants
heading north from Florida, 1940.

World War I through 1970, seeking economic opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns.

There’s another group of historians who might describe the Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England. These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich insights for genealogists.  Since 1988 the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project, scheduled for completion in 2016.

In his monumental What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 Daniel Walker Howe describes “one of the greatest migrations in America,” when Andrew Jackson encouraged white squatters from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee to move onto 14 million acres expropriated from the Creeks. By 1819 this flood of humanity had established Mississippi and Alabama. “The Alabama fever rages here with great violence,” one North Carolina farmer moaned, “and has carried off vast numbers of our citizens.” Never, Howe remarks, had so large a territory been settled so rapidly—though the peopling of the Old Northwest Territory was not far behind.

Why History Students Should Love Big Data

Eric Schultz

Spring 1976. Wilson Hall, Brown University. The late, great Professor William McLoughlin has just informed his 85 students in “American Social and Intellectual History” that they are to write their first paper. All he has given us is the title: “The Age of Jefferson and Adams.” We groan. Then he adds: “Keep it to three pages or less. Double-spaced.” We smile. Three pages? How hard can that be?

“If you make the margins too wide,” McLoughlin adds, “I’ll mark you down a grade.”

Needless to say, nobody got an A on that paper, or so the good professor informed us. There may have been a B or two. Not me. It was all I could do to contain my flowery opening paragraph to a single page. Some of us recovered slightly in round two, wherein we committed “The Age of Lincoln and Calhoun” to three, double-spaced pages. Some retreated to organic chemistry and other more reasonable challenges.

Little did I know, but I had just been introduced to Big Data—though it would take 35 years to earn that name. Take an endless, insurmountable, seemingly disconnected pile of information, separate the grain from the chaff (or, as my engineering buddies would say, the signal from the noise), and tell a concise, compelling story about what it all means.

Promises Made

Eric Schultz

Brian Williams recently featured a story on the NBC Nightly News about the bureaucratic nightmare that has more than 900,000 American veterans awaiting disability benefits from the government. The Veterans Administration is promising to have the backlog cleared by the end of 2015, but for now, the average wait time is 273 days.

After hearing this I had a flashback of sorts and walked downstairs into the basement, past the water softener and over by the Christmas ornaments to find the musty blue Rubbermaid tubs filled with my King Philip’s War notes from over twenty years ago. 

Sure enough, there was the file marked “Veterans.”  I began leafing through it. In December 1675, 696 Massachusetts Bay soldiers mustered on Dedham Plain, thought to be the present Hyde Park section of Boston. They were to march south and meet with soldiers assembling in Plymouth and Connecticut colonies to form a thousand-man army and attack the Narragansetts in their large fort at today’s South Kingston, Rhode lsland. It would become one of the most deadly and controversial events of the war, in part because both sides suffered so many casualties and in part because the Narragansetts had remained scrupulously neutral.

Stressed Much? You’re In Good Company

Eric Schultz
.

Earlier this month, the American Psychological Association released a study called Stress in America, concluding that Millennials, 18 to 33-year-old

From "Science Nation - Teens and Stress" (NSF)

Americans, along with Gen Xers (34-47), are the most stressed generations in America.  On a scale of 1-10, the average American defines a healthy level of stress as 3.6 but feels a level of 4.9.  Millennials and Gen Xers are at 5.4, a level the study concludes is “far higher than Boomers’ average stress level of 4.7 and Matures’ [67 and over] of 3.7.”

Thirty-nine percent of Millennials say their stress has increased in the last year, while 52 percent report having lain awake at night in the past month due to stress.  “Millennials and Gen Xers are most likely to say that they are stressed by work, money and job stability, while Boomers and Matures are more likely to be concerned with health issues affecting their families and themselves,” the study concluded.

The Ageless Protestant Work Ethic

Eric Schultz

In March of 1895, a reporter for The New York Times visited with “Aunt Betsey Saunders” on the occasion of her 105th birthday.  Her husband and sisters long dead, Saunders had sought refuge at the Norwalk Almshouse many years before.  (The more or less appropriate description for the resident of an almshouse was “inmate.”) The planned birthday celebration included a “generous dinner” and peppermint drops which, the reporter assured his readers, would satisfy old Betsey as much as if she had received a diamond-studded coronet.

Born in Saugatuck (part of modern Westport), Connecticut, in 1790, Betsey was still mentally sharp, had good hearing and carried on a lively conversation with the reporter.  In a year when Babe Ruth, Buckminster Fuller, and J. Edgar Hoover were born, she remembered the death of George Washington and announced optimistically that she expected to live to be at least 106.

Unsafe in Candy Land

Eric Schultz

Recently, while researching material on an entrepreneur who launched her candy business at the turn of the twentieth century, I bumped into a series of newspapers articles that reminded me that the past really is a foreign (and often dangerous) land.

In 1900, America’s candy manufacturers boasted $100 million in invested capital and an annual business in candies and sweets that exceeded that of beer, wine and liquor combined.   A British newspaper declared that Americans “make their sweets as we make our bread, practically for a day’s consumption.”  In the days before the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, this extraordinary demand for all things sweet attracted swindlers, quacks and crooks.

The damage done was fathomless.  I uncovered article after article about children sickened and killed by adulterated candies throughout the 1890s and early 1900s.  Techniques used by manufacturers were often beyond the pale. Some candy was found to contain fusel oil (an ingredient used at the time in lacquer solvents). Other manufacturers cut their honey with glucose, brightened candies with the use of aniline colors (used in the manufacture of the precursors to polyurethane), and added terra cotta (a clay more often used to make bricks) for bulk and color.  In 1900, the Committee on Manufactures of the U.S. Senate found that condensed milk was among the most commonly adulterated products--except for perhaps extracts of fruit and vanilla, so suspect that only one manufacturer was even willing to allow a factory inspection.

When Do We Forget?

Eric Schultz

We were sitting round this past Thanksgiving and I asked our assembled crew what day November 22 was, besides Thanksgiving.  Everyone looked stumped.  So I added, “49 years ago?”  One of our 55+ did the math and announced that it was the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.  She remembered the day vividly.

In fact, it was a day that we would never forget.  One, it appears, we are now rapidly forgetting.

Intrigued, I checked data from the US Census Bureau and did some arithmetic, making the assumption that someone would have to have been about 5-years-old at the time (or 54-years-old now) to have a “resonant” living memory of the Kennedy assassination. In big, round numbers, then, the 54+ age demographic represents about 25% of the United States’ 2012 population. 

So, at least one reason we fail to remember the Kennedy assassination is that only 25% of us have any real memory of it.

I did the same rounded historical math for the sinking of the Titanic, Pearl Harbor, the first moon walk, the Challenger Disaster and 9/11, just to pick a few of our more vivid cultural memories.  I discovered the percentage of the American population with “resonant living memory” in 2012 would be as follows (again, in big, round numbers): 

• Titanic (95 years or older): There are 70 thousand centenarians, so under 1% of the U.S. population remembers. 

• Pearl Harbor (76 years or older): About 7 to 8% of the population remembers. (My dear departed father would have been 79 years old this year, and when he heard on the radio about Pearl Harbor he hid under his bed—6,000 miles from Hawaii.) 

• Moon walk (48 years or older): About 33% of the population remembers. 

• Challenger Disaster (31 year and older): About 45% of the population remembers. 

• 9/11 (16 and older): About 75% of the population remembers.

The Day the Archives Walked in the Door

Eric B. Schultz

Alan Lomax (left) with Richard Queen of Soco
Junior Square Dance Team at the Mountain
Music Festival, Asheville, North Carolina,
mid century. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

I loved Randall’s latest post, which mixed music and archives, and reminded me how tricky it can be to capture and preserve historic “sound.”  It also brought to mind the story of Alan Lomax (1915-2002), one of America’s great music folklorists and archivists.  From 1937 to 1942, Lomax was a director in the newly-formed Archive of Folk Song in the Library of Congress, eventually collecting and preserving thousands of important and unique field recordings.

In 1938, Lomax sat Jelly Roll Morton (Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe 1890-1941) down in a small auditorium at the Library and asked him if he knew how to play “Alabama Bound.”  Morton was in the twilight of his career, many years removed from his formative days in New Orleans, and prone to invention—including a birthday that made him old enough to have, as he proclaimed, “invented jazz.”  Lomax was skeptical of Morton in particular and of jazz in general, which he saw at the time as a destructive force threatening to overwhelm his beloved American folk music.