Talk:Richard J. Jensen

Fried Article

There seems to be an edit war going on about whether Fried's article was published. Hopefully this clears things up. Toddst1 (talk) 18:38, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

Nope. The issues are the use of Seventeen magazine as a reliable source for claims of scientific fact, the use of OR in the use of "nevertheless" and the lack of any use of Jensen's detailed published rebuttal. Not to mention the snark in the current wording. Collect (talk) 21:39, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

My edit summary was pretty clear

To editor Display name 99: I reverted you and I'm not sure why you failed to understand why I removed that material originally. I know it's a hobby for some to kick Dr. Jensen on this issue. You need to come up with better sources for these claims, not just re-state what Miller claims. Chris Troutman (talk) 14:19, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Chris troutman, I apologize. I only saw the edit summary in which you wrote "again, source takes Miller)." That did not seem clear to me at all, which is why I re-added the material. But seeing your previous edit summary, and reading your explanation here, I see that it makes sense why the material should not be included. Display name 99 (talk) 15:11, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Well, I don't understand why that material's been removed. If it's not presented here, then it should be incorporated into the No Irish Need Apply article. YoPienso (talk) 18:01, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Yopienso, I suppose you could re-add the material so long as you make it clear that it is only what Miller claims, and don't present it as absolute fact. That seems to have been the main issue. Display name 99 (talk) 13:44, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Am I reading the same edit as everyone else? It covers a statement that Jensen used as an attack against Miller, but the paper is by Fried, and is notated such with "Fried's paper provided numerous example[sic]" (that typo probably should be cleaned up when it's put back in). This seems to be completely legitimate content. Morty C-137 (talk) 14:33, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Let me clarify a point. In 2003 on a discussion in an email list called "Irish-Diaspora" I assumed that Miller was Catholic & Irish and said he was writing inside that heritage in filiopietistic fashion. I did not actually say he was Irish or Catholic. (I'm Catholic myself.) [what i said in 2003: I want to get beyond the filiopietistic "inside" histories" of ethnic groups as typified by Miller's own work. As long as you study only your own group you're likely to be trapped by myths. Kerby was trapped by the NINA myth and can't seem to extricate himself.] When the facts were pointed out I publicly apologized to him on March 17, 2003. My mistake was that I had misread his 1985 words which seemed to say he was Irish himself at Kerby A. Miller (1988). Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. p. 7. when he emphasized "My own instinctive affection for that country" [Ireland] and six lines later where he warned about "Those notions with which we have vainly combated those processes or attempted to obscure their unhappy consequences" --which I misread as applying to him and to all Irish. Rjensen (talk) 16:29, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Isn't it inappropriate for the subject of an article to be trying to write about themselves on wikipedia? Morty C-137 (talk) 16:32, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

No, Rjensen may make suggestions on the talk page as per WP:AUTOPROB. On that note, however, it is concerning that you're advocating for the inclusion of contentious negative material in the article of someone you're currently in content disputes with at United Daughters of the Confederacy and Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Cjhard (talk) 16:48, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Morty C-137, as stated above, biography subjects can contribute to discussions on the talk page in order to correct what they perceive as deficiencies in the article. But you are correct in saying that they are not supposed to be making any major edits to their actual biographies. But they can suggest them.

Rjensen, can you provide a reliable source for your statement on "filiopietistic "inside" histories?" If you can, I think we can probably change the first part to this:

"In previous discussions where Professor Miller had question Dr. Jensen's findings, Miller claimed that Dr. Jensen had accused Professor Miller of bias because he was an "Irish-American and a Catholic." Specifically, Jensen had warned about the myths surrounding filiopietistic 'inside' histories. In actuality, Professor Miller is neither Irish nor Catholic."

If you can't provide a reliable source, we'll have to just go with "Miller claimed." How does this look to everybody else? Display name 99 (talk) 17:00, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Miller did not provide a reliable source for his incorrect claim about what I wrote in 2003. He misremembered it (I did not use the actual words "Catholic: or "Irish" about him. I kept a copy of my comments in 2003 and (above) provided a quote which meets the Wiki rules WP:SELFSOURCE. it states" Self-published or questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, especially in articles about themselves so this is an article about me and it applies. My complaint problem is that the edit here makes it sound like I'm anti-Catholic (actually I am and always have been a Catholic.) That really is negative and hostile and false...I have published on Catholic history for 45 years and no one has called it anti-Catholic. to include it violates WP:BLP rules that state Criticism and praise should be included if they can be sourced to reliable secondary sources, so long as the material is presented responsibly, conservatively, and in a disinterested tone. Rjensen (talk) 17:12, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

As for "filiopietistic" it means writing from inside the group's perspective. it does NOT mean you have to be an official member of the group. I suggest that Miller's statement that his history is rooted in "instinctive affection" for Ireland suggests he is working from inside the Irish perspective. See https://books.google.com/books?id=6nljz5N8JlUC&pg=PR7 Rjensen (talk) 17:27, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

I don't think it should be included at all. Even outside the massive issue of reliable sourcing, the information is far too trivial to include. When you reword it to remove the "In actuality" bit (which reads like a "Gotcha!" against Dr Jensen), the triviality of it all becomes evident:

"Professor Miller claimed that in previous discussions where he questioned Dr Jensen's findings, Dr Jensen accused Professor Miller of bias in the mistaken belief that he was an "Irish-American and a Catholic." Cjhard (talk) 17:30, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

want another gotcha? try this: I just discovered that in 2003 Doctor Miller wrote: "My grandmothers had told me stories about remote ancestors who migrated from Ireland to America in the 1700s" So both his grandmothers told him about his Irish ancestry. see http://www.jstor.org/stable/25122355 p 312. [comment from Rjensen]]

That essentially destroys anything left of Miller's argument that you were somehow anti-Catholic or anti-Irish in your statements following the publication of the article. It makes Miller's claim about not being Irish-American dubious at best. Because of that, I'm now in favor of keeping this part out altogether. However, Chris troutman also removed the following sentence from the article: "Since Fried's paper, other researchers have turned up additional examples, now numbering over 1,000." Does anybody see a reason why that shouldn't be in the article? I don't. Display name 99 (talk) 18:03, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

other examples over 1000.... well that includes non-ads, and ads for women which both Fried and I excluded. For men it's maybe 100 or 200 The "myth" was always about men. the number includes "hits" in over 15,000 different newspaper titles from all across the US over a 90+ year period. that works out for maybe 3 or 4 NINA ads (for a man) per year for the entire country--the ads for women were almost always for household help and were not placed by a business. In a word: that's rare. Try it yourself search for "Irish need apply" at this free government site http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles/ which indexes 5000 or so different newspapers. try browsing a state to see what kinds of "ads" we are counting--many hits are not ads. (the commercial sites have more papers but you have to get a trial membership). I bet it will take you a while to find one ad for a man. Rjensen (talk) 18:24, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Rjensen, point made. I typed it in and got "No Results." Display name 99 (talk) 18:30, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

please try again--you will get 1000 pages with "IRISH NEED APPLY" in quotes. or try http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/pages/results/?date1=1789&rows=20&searchType=basic&state=&date2=1924&proxtext=%22IRISH+NEED+APPLY%22&y=0&x=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1&sort=relevance Rjensen (talk) 18:40, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

OK I did it again using the second link. I found one for a man here in the second newspaper that I clicked on. In addition, why did both you and Fried exclude adds for women? Display name 99 (talk) 18:44, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

1) that's a quote from Mark Twain, not an actual ad to hire someone. 2) The myth was about men being humiliated by public signs on many many factories & stores. People at the time and historians since have agreed that Irish women dominated the job market for household help (in the big Northern cities where Irish Catholics concentrated ) so they were not hurting. The issue as I explain in the 2003 article was some families did NOT want Catholics working so close to their children. ("they will secretly baptize your baby as a Catholic!!" "they will teach them Catholic prayers!") Very few commercial jobs for women (in hotels, restaurants etc) had NINA. By the late 19th century Irish women were dominant as public school teachers. (they had longer careers because they married late or not at all.) Rjensen (talk) 19:03, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Questioning what you find a violation

You deleted a question for a violation about (the mechanism of polling) US president rank

Whatever questions your authenticity, just mute it. This complies with the first amendment.

This is the trait of Yale. You can't hide the sun by a sieve nor by wiki.  2001:8F8:1137:7C25:A9E1:8947:1B75:947C (talk) 02:21, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Fried controversy

What's the point of including an entire paragraph in this section that is essentially a conversation Jensen had with Fried in the comment section to an article? It's bizarre and doesn't sound the least bit encyclopedic.

Whoever wrote this seems to want to make the point that Jensen denied Fried found any evidence of physical signs, when in fact she did. You know this issue in scholarship was never about the actual existence of NINA, but rather a question of the nature and extent of anti-Irish hiring discrimination and how that relates to historical memory. The question of whether an Irish immigrant was more likely to encounter an actual NINA or more likely to hear about NINA in a song or gossip has never actually been settled, and to this day a number of historians still lean in Jensen's direction.

I think this paragraph should be removed or rewritten, and if rewritten covered more neutrally. Jonathan f1 (talk) 15:41, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

The myth I was trying to refute was that businesses often posted hiring signs on the factory or store :" help wanted no Irish need apply" (NINA). I said that such highly visible humiliating signs were rare--I never found any and the museums, archives and libraries I contacted had none. Fried never found any despite her claims. Many of her "ads" were not job ads at all. For example of a job ad she used a college yearbook humor page (It has an "ad" by a senior who advertises for a wife and NINA). She then turned to newspaper ads for men--NINA ads they did exist (I gave an example) but rare--less than one per 1000 job ads. She found fewer than 100 newspaper ads over a 90 year period nationwide--and most of her ads came before the Great Famine (Ireland) that began in 1845--that's when Irish Catholics started coming to US in large numbers. NINA was common in England and I argued that a British song about NINA became very popular in US in 1860s. By 1870 NINA was a very popular slogan with no connection to jobs--Mark Twain tells how a newcomer in a bar gives his Irish name and everyone calls out NINA! and he buys a round of drinks and everyone enjoys it. Research in employment records show the Irish were indeed hired and promoted like non-Irish. Irish did especially well in railroads, the #1 big business in USA in 19th century, and also in construction work. In 1850 the newly arrived Irish Catholic community was indeed poor. By 1900 Irish Catholic economic status was about the national average. After ww2 the Irish Catholics were well above average in jobs and income and education. Rjensen (talk) 18:48, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

I read Fried's paper some time ago and unfortunately no longer have access to it. Where were the actual locations of the NINAs she found? I'm asking because there's an article in Vox which claims RF's ads appeared disproportionately in New York City and Boston newspapers, starting in the early 1840s (which did indeed predate the Famine), and then claims most Irish immigrants were settled in these locations.

But this is not actually correct. David Doyle has produced statistics on settlement patterns of the Irish for the main period in question, 1850 -1870, and shows that most of them were concentrated in the mill villages and mining towns of the American interior[1]. This is consistent with the economic literature for the period which seems to agree that the US was not a major industrial exporter in the middle 19th Century (some 2/3rds of US exports were agricultural products), and most industrial output was shipped to American destinations rather than overseas. So industrialization was concentrated along the canals and railroad tracks, outside city limits, where transportation costs were cheaper.

So if it is true that most Irish immigrants were low-skilled laborers at this time (and all evidence indicates most were), then you would not expect them to be living in big port cities along the seaboard where few if any industrial jobs existed. And that's exactly what the evidence shows.

This implies that most immigrants would not have in fact encountered an actual NINA ad (or sign), simply because NINA was most prevalent in locations where only a minority of them actually lived. Doyle also shows that big cities were statistically unrepresentative of the American population: most native-born whites lived in designated rural districts in the 19th Century (which were not even connected to cities by economic networks). So one cannot really generalize about what "Americans" thought of Irish immigrants based on evidence in big cities -there were even less native-born whites in cities than there were immigrants.

Of course history involves a lot more than going through newspaper archives and speculating about advertisements. Information needs to be contextualized and your point about the yearbook is not invalid -a yearbook note that appears to have been a gag cannot be counted as legitimate hiring discrimination. This seems to have been an attempt by Fried (or Miller) to pad the list. Jonathan f1 (talk) 13:34, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

In terms of newspaper ads, for the period 1840 to 1916 Fried reported 28 from New York city, 12 from Boston and 15 from other cities). Total=55. The 28 NYC ads include 20 from one paper The Sun in 1842, and 8 in all other NYC newspapers 1842-1916. The Sun 1842 ads were mostly placed by two persons who ran employment shops --they did not hire anyone but a person who wanted a job paid 25 cents to enter a room where employers (who paid 50c) gathered to hire day laborers. (1842 was before the large immigration of Irish Catholics which began with the famine of 1845 to 1848) Ignoring 1842: for actual newspaper ads for real jobs she has about 30 from 1843 to 1932 nationwide. One every three years nationwide. I call that very rare. About a third of her "ads" did not involve enployment at all. Rjensen (talk) 14:16, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

So these were predominately big city newspapers at a time when, from 1840 to at least 1880, most of the American Irish did not live in these cities, and when the native-born stock was even less urban than the Irish. This is the fallacy of arguing from distinctive minority populations to majority ones. The big rush to the cities didn't happen until the end of the 19th Century and by the time the population was more urban than rural NINA had already disappeared from the historical record.

There is a historian in Ireland, Liam Hogan, who did some checking on Fried's work and seems to agree with you on this point. He searched Chronicling America (801 newspaper titles, 5.2 million pages), California Digital Newspaper Collection (600,000 pages), Newspapers.com (113 million pages), and found 239 unique NINA ads in the US. That is not only rare, it's extremely rare.

He also checked for NINA signs/placards that were hung outside businesses, but could find no evidence or references for these.

He does not, however, agree with your point about memory. He thinks that the phenomenon could've been incredibly rare but still a real historical memory. He nonethless concluded,

"But the dramatic lack of evidence re: signs/placards confirms [Jensen's] thesis on that aspect, it's mythical."[2]. Jonathan f1 (talk) 14:47, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

thanks--re memory: The irish remember the song--it was sung maybe a million times a year in scores of thousands of bars and many other gatherings. PS Liam Hogan's report can be read online here. Rjensen (talk) 15:59, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

I think the media discourse turned the memory aspect into a peripheral issue to the question of how extensive/rare NINA was, so it probably doesn't matter if Hogan disagrees with you about memory but agrees with you on signs. And many of these journalists didn't distinguish between newspaper 'ads' and physical 'signs' or seem to understand why this distinction isn't trivial -there's a great difference between an ad buried in the back of a newspaper and a big sign displayed in a public space. A lot of people commenting on these articles seemed to equate the NINA phenomenon with the "no blacks" signs in the Jim Crow South, which is a gross distortion of history. Jonathan f1 (talk) 17:04, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Why are you even editing your own page? 186.28.62.20 (talk) 23:54, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

He is not editing his own page. He is (understandably) concerned with the unfair treatment he received in the popular press and how that's being reflected in his biography. The journalists commenting on Fried's work were not historians and didn't seem to understand basic aspects of Jensen's argument and why Fried's paper didn't address any of that. Merely citing a few dozen NINA ads without any historical context is not an adequate refutation of any of the points Jensen made in his original paper. If Fried were a professional historian and not a girl in grade school her paper would've been received by scholars as sloppy guesswork and would've faded into obscurity among the many thousands of research papers that are published annually. Jonathan f1 (talk) 20:44, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Fried controversy (again)

I see the section was trimmed down but I'm going to have to object to the way this is worded:

"Fried's paper provided examples of "No Irish Need Apply" in newspaper archives, contesting Jensen's thesis that there was no evidence of the same"

Jensen did not say there was "no evidence" of NINA in "newspaper archives", and the only people who keep repeating this are the ones who have never read his paper. Here's his thesis[3]. Can someone show me where he denies the existence of NINA ads or grounds his case on whether or not these job ads existed? In the first line of the abstract he frames his argument:

"Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare."

It's the omnipresent "signs", not "ads", that he was addressing. He admits to NINA ads for women, claims NINA ads for men were rare, and does not discount the possibility of NINA signs existing, but claims they were rare if they existed at all. In what way did Fried refute any of this? What she produced was a compendium of men's NINAs from newspaper archives, but whether or not the number she found disputes the idea that they were 'rare' is questionable. It's also misleading to use language like "Jensen's thesis" -the ads were peripheral to his thesis, which was zeroed in on the physical signs/placards. Jonathan f1 (talk) 20:43, 31 October 2024 (UTC)