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Operating theories are more or less concealed in the structure of all historical writing. They are readily discerned when the theories are comprehensive and at variance with generally accepted ideas, as in the case of Thomism or Marxism. They are hard to detect when like Spencerianism they conform closely to the mores of American life. Writers may honestly deny in this latter case that they have any special theory; they are simply recording the "facts" from a "common-sense" viewpoint. But since theory must be either implicit or explicit, it is better for scholarly purposes that it should be explicit. Carefully formulated theory restricts unconscious bias, gives meaning to otherwise formless data, and is more likely to reveal unexpected relationships.

Dwarfing all debates over civil rights policy and race relations during the three decades since 1964 has been the storm over affirmative action. Critics have argued that affirmative action in practice has meant requiring racial quotas, and hence practicing "reverse discrimination" against innocent (usually white male) third parties. This has been done, critics contend, in the name of a law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that explicitly prohibited racial preferences. Proponents have countered that racism is so deeply rooted in American culture and institutions that mere nondiscrimination will perpetuate the injustice of the past. There is abundant evidence to support both contentions. The purpose of this essay is not to weigh the evidence and determine which side is correct. Ultimately such profound disagreements are not resolvable by logic and evidence alone, because they hinge on divergent assumptions about human nature and the purpose and limits of government. My more modest goal in this essay is to use the insights of history to understand why civil rights policy evolved in this dual fashion following the breakthrough legislation of 1964–68, and to try to assess the consequences.

AbstractRecent studies have found that race, work history, postprison employment, and recidivism are intertwined, suggesting that race and work history may shape the employment–recidivism relationship in nuanced, yet underexplored ways. Additionally, the literature has yet to settle on what kinds of employment patterns matter most for recidivism. These issues are especially important to resolve given contemporary concerns about mass incarceration and racial disparities among citizens returning from prison. To investigate these questions, we analyze administrative prison records, unemployment insurance (UI) quarterly data, and a recidivism follow‐up documenting multiple failures for approximately eight years. Frailty models, which address unobserved heterogeneity among those prone to multiple recidivism events, reveal that establishing a recent work history unlocks the protective effect of employment, and that the relationship between postprison employment and recidivism does not vary by race. We also find that being sporadically employed is as protective as being more consistently employed. Our findings imply that employment contributes to racial disparities in recidivism via racialized barriers to labor market participation rather than via differential effects. Our results further suggest that addressing barriers to employment, especially for those with no work history and those facing racialized barriers to labor market entry, could significantly reduce recidivism.

This study is concerned with the effectiveness of individual user performance for an extended self-tutoring task in a time-shared computing facility. The investigation is an experimental case history of one individual (the author) following the TINT self-tutoring user manual from beginning to end in the SDC Q-32 Time-Sharing System at a Teletype console. (TINT is a user-oriented dialect of JOVIAL, an interpretive language adapted to time-sharing with many self-teaching features.) The methodology featured measurement of natural user behavior in which the user served as his own control in successive console sessions. The sample included 1,861 user input commands collected over 18 hours at the teletypewriter terminal. The quantitative results revealed some evidence for systematic learning and reinforcement effects; there were progressive tendencies toward higher productivity and lower error rates with increasing TINT experience. The qualitative findings revealed that the numerous and diversified exercises facilitated familiarity with the elements and the varied services of the TINT system. The chief drawback was exclusive reliance of the tutoring method on literal reproduction of the text by the user at his console. The paper concludes with recommendations for more genuine interactive involvement between the user, the central system, and self-tutoring aids.