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High School Student Proves “No Irish Need Apply” Signs Existed
- LoSboccacc 11y agoWell one had to say the whole premise of 'couldn't find evidence thus fact didn't exist' was fishy even before the article started digging out the evidence that reseaecher somehow missed.
- lotharbot 11y ago> "the whole premise of 'couldn't find evidence thus fact didn't exist' was fishy" Not really. The one thing he's correct about is that, if NINA was a real and widespread phenomenon, it would show up in certain pieces of documentation of the era -- newspaper want ads, for example (we actually have fairly large archives from the relevant era; it's not like something from thousands of years ago where it's plausible that no documentation would have survived.) His problem was that he didn't look deeply enough, and once he drew the initial wrong conclusion, he invented a totally wrong theory to explain it.
- raverbashing 11y ago> it would show up in certain pieces of documentation of the era True. I think what he assumed was that it would show in other types of documents (like discrimination lawsuits, news showing revolt of the Irish against this policy, etc) But I suspect this was very common and accepted, unfortunately.
- azernik 11y agoExcept that, as Fried, showed, it did. Not quite anti-discrimination lawsuits, since those laws didn't exist at the time, but there's an example of some Irish filing a libel lawsuit against a newspaper for printing a NINA advertisement, and of an Irish protest against the posting of a NINA sign at a mill.
- tankenmate 11y agoActually the mill was a different situation; the mill owner adverstised the jobs and large numbers came to apply, Irish and non Irish. The non Irish came armed (guns and knives) and forced the mill owner to put up a sign saying "No Irish Need Apply". The Irish being unarmed decided to leave the scene.
- Trombone12 11y agoFollowing the links from the OP, I see the first researcher states there are fewer than 2 NINA ads per decade in the Brooklyn Eagle, while following the example of the search I counted more than 8 ads in Brooklyn Eagle from the 1870ies before giving up the point as discredited. I wonder if the big reason for these completely different results in the underlying counting experiment is that the later research was done after ocr had improved so much that the searches had very different samples of the papers.
- jbuzbee 11y ago> he didn't look deeply enough, and once he drew the initial wrong conclusion, he invented a totally wrong theory to explain it. My reading is the opposite. He started with a theory and then did a shallow search to bolster his pre-conceived theory, ignoring or discounting any findings that didn't fit.
- dalke 11y agoI read about the "NINA" paper when it came out. This summary of the new historical research amply shows that the original thesis indeed needs "substantial modification". While it says nothing of the historical accuracy, the exchange between the two historians, quoted in the text, makes me lean much more in favor of the researcher behind the new work.
- rmason 11y agoIt's called researchers bias where someone so fervently believes something is true that it influences their research. NINA is a good example of an uncomfortable truth.
- briandear 11y agoSame could be said for human caused global warming..
- DanBC 11y agoYes. Even though the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is real and probably has human causes you do still find people in the pay of large fossil fuel companies who will deny the reality, and then a number of otherwise smart people who believe the shills. It's a fascinating (also frustrating) phenomenom.
- njloof 11y agoWell documented in the film "Merchants of Doubt." Many cut their teeth in the tobacco industry and went on to ply their trade in environmental denialism.
- kjs3 11y agoI see what you did there.
- ectoplasm 11y ago> I’m the PhD who wrote the original article. I’m delighted a high school student worked so hard and wrote so well. He's certainly not doing himself any favors with this condescending appeal to authority. In general, the exchange between Jensen and Fried is a perfect example of how to handle a nasty person with grace.
- mng2 11y agoYeah, yikes. Jensen is really piling it higher and deeper.
- raverbashing 11y agoWhy am I not surprised? I wouldn't put it past the fact that the high schooler probably knows how to google better than the "phd" "Jensen attracted a lot of attention because he did not just write that the NINA signs did not exist, he said the Irish were and are delusional, that in order to sustain a sense of victimhood they had manufactured a group-wide lie of discriminatory anti-Irish ads and signs" Oh wow, lovely lad Another edit: "Wanted - A Middle Aged protestant woman... no Irish need apply" I think it would be hard to find an Irish Protestant at that time, no?
- zumtar 11y ago> I think it would be hard to find an Irish Protestant at that time, no? Belfast (and the whole of Ulster) was full of them.
- raverbashing 11y agoI know that, I'm more wondering what was the amount that immigrated to the US (in relation to Catholic Irish)
- zumtar 11y agoI don't have exact numbers to hand but I am sure the numbers of Protestant Irish emigrants was very high. Poverty throughout the counties was common and they wanted to find a new and better life just as much as their Roman Catholic neighbours did.
- kevingadd 11y agoJensen attracted a lot of attention because he did not just write that the NINA signs did not exist, he said the Irish were and are delusional, that in order to sustain a sense of victimhood they had manufactured a group-wide lie of discriminatory anti-Irish ads and signs. He said that believing that No Irish Need Apply Signs existed was the Irish equivalent of believing in leprechauns. Here is what Jensen wrote more than a decade ago: If this is a remotely accurate characterization, it baffles me that Jensen's work would have found a home in a journal or that he would have felt comfortable expressing those views in public. How profoundly emotional and unscientific (not to mention vile and insulting) Such a claim is extremely complicated (defying occam's razor) and implies some sort of conspiracy that is at the very least questionable without sound proof. The idea that such claims would have not been aggressively debunked in the past is pretty questionable, as well. The seemingly trivial task of finding evidence to support the existence of these ads makes me wonder if Jensen did any research at all. Was he just grinding his racist axe, and did the scientific community give him a pass on it because they didn't care?
- DanBC 11y agoIt's especially baffling because he accepts that newspaper ads saying "no irish need apply" were common, but that the signs on the buildings did not exist. Even if that's true it's weird to then say that Irish people were delusionally perpetuating their victimhood.
- task_queue 11y agoIt isn't so weird if he delusionally accepted his hypothesis from the get go.
- baking 11y agoIf the signs did not exist, it is delusional to say they were common.
- packetized 11y agoI cannot recall such an elegant and well researched response to such a load of whale shit.
- Turing_Machine 11y agoIt's really interesting that, at least at that time and in that place, there appeared to be more employment discrimination against Irish than African-Americans. I noticed that several of the job ads would accept "colored" applicants, but not Irish. Edit: "that" -> "than".
- dylanjermiah 11y agoI'd be careful, you're going against the carefully crafted rhetoric here.
- djur 11y agoAt the time, black people were stereotyped as servile and easily pressed to work, while the Irish were stereotyped as pugilistic, unreliable layabouts (and, to some, sinister Papists).
- Turing_Machine 11y agoI had noticed that several of the ads also specified Protestants.
- rangibaby 11y agoThere was a joke about this in Blazing Saddles https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0BcQTIr4c https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0BcQTIr4c
- justwannasing 11y agoAt one time it was true for Hungarians, too. Oh, no. Don't tell me this is going to be trending now.
- gilgoomesh 11y agoWebsite has slowed to a crawl. Here's Google's text cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:23zU9KHvzmkJ:www.longislandwins.com/columns/detail/high_school_student_proves_professor_wrong_when_he_denied_no_irish_need_app&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:23zU9KH...
- aaronbrethorst 11y agoIt's not exactly hard to prove that this used to appear in newspapers all the time. A 10 second search on the LOC website shows a ton of examples of this phrase appearing in papers across America: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/pages/results/?state=&date1=1836&date2=1922&proxtext=%22no+irish+need+apply%22&x=0&y=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&rows=20&searchType=basic http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/pages/results/?stat... Professor Jensen should be ashamed of himself for failing to conduct even the most trivial searches for this information.
- unstabilo 11y agoYou didn't read the search results. Those are not ads, but articles mentioning the phrase, at least on the first page (20 articles).
- azernik 11y agoNews articles mentioning the phrase were exactly what Jensen claimed would have appeared if the signs existed, and whose absence he claimed proved the non-existence of these signs. Fried just took the additional initiative of going directly to the newspaper ads, which are primary sources indicating discrimination, rather than the secondary sources of newspaper articles talking about the discrimination.
- DanBC 11y agoHe accepted that ads were discriminatory. His original paper mentions job ads. His claim was about signs in windows or on buildings. The fact that he accepts the ads were real makes his claim that Irish were delusionally propagating a myth of oppression even harder to understand.
- DonHopkins 11y agoHis research is as sloppy as his proofreading. I can see him sputtering and fuming as he angrily types out that last condescending reply to her.
- randyrand 11y agoAshamed? Lol I think he'll be just fine.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoJensen: "No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs." How on Earth did anyone take this man seriously? Is he a visitor from an alternate universe where segregation never happened?
- dspeyer 11y agoIt is weird that this exact phrase kept getting used against the Irish and not other discriminated-against groups. Nothing for Poles, Slavs, Italians, Russians... Or at least that's what I'm finding on the LoC search. A few "No Jews Need Apply", but only a few, and those aren't job listings. Probably not a particularly important mystery, but weird.
- skeolawn 11y agoThere are likely some historical reasons. Here's a quote from The Times from 1860: If this [exodus] goes on, as it is likely to go on…the United States will become very Irish….So an Ireland there will still be, but on a colossal scale, and in a new world. We must gird our loins to encounter the Nemesis of seven centuries’ misgovernment. To the end of time a hundred million spread over the largest havitable area in the world, and, confronting us everywhere by sea and land, will remember that their forefathers paid tithe to the Protestant clergy, rent to absentee landlords, and a forced obedience to the laws which these had made. (The Times, quoted in The Nation, May 1860)
- aaron695 11y agoAustralian bricklayer employment ad says “No Irish” need apply (2012) http://www.irishcentral.com/news/australian-bricklayer-employment-ad-says-no-irish-need-apply-142442405-237434871.html http://www.irishcentral.com/news/australian-bricklayer-emplo... Totally irrelevant to the conversation other than perhaps the myths/realities/realities that become myths/myths that become realities perhaps traverse time. http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=irish+need+not+apply http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=irish+need+not+ap...
- nailer 11y agoAustralia's pretty backward about this stuff. E.g. example: someone on HN yesterday was saying Jeremy Clarkson (from the UK) wasn't old enough to remember the racist version of 'eeny meeny miny mo'. I remember it and I was born in Australia in the 80s.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- metasean 11y agoReminds me of a sign I saw in the Pueblo, Co train depot - http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/mix97-3.com/files/2015/03/Pueblo-Depot-Immigrant-sign-e1426613606220.jpg?w=600&h=0&zc=1&s=0&a=t&q=89 http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/mix97-3.com/files/201... For attribution purposes, the image is associated with an enlightening write-up, but that particular image isn't in the actual article - http://mix97-3.com/youre-never-too-old-for-a-spring-break-learning-experience/ http://mix97-3.com/youre-never-too-old-for-a-spring-break-le...
- bruceb 11y agoThe myth of bad treatment of returning Vietnam vets is something you see in the movies but apparently didn't really happen much: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2007/01/newsweek_throws_the_spitter.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/20...
- goodcanadian 11y agoI didn't think the existence of such signs was a contested bit of history. I guess you can find apparently qualified people espousing all sorts of nonsense.
- epochwolf 11y agoThere are people denying the holocaust. An event for which plenty of historical evidence exists. People will believe what they want to believe.
- goodcanadian 11y agoIndeed. That is exactly the example that popped into my head as well. It would not surprise me at all if there were even a few holocaust deniers with PhDs in history.
- Lorento 11y agoIt's funny how blind people are to the same thing happening today. Most employers openly refuse people based on their nationality and we are perfectly accepting of that, even enforcing it with the law! I wonder if people in another 100 years will think it's wrong to discriminate against people because of who their parents were.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago> Most employers openly refuse people based on their nationality and we are perfectly accepting of that, even enforcing it with the law! I assume you're talking about the H-1B visas, etc?
- njloof 11y agoIf this is a veiled reference to affirmative action, at least show the courage to say what you really mean.
- Lorento 11y agoI mean not allowing foreigners to work, even when they live in the country. Ironically, the public's distrust of the Irish and other foreigners has led to the law disallowing them at the border rather than individual employers at the job application. We don't allow Irish to freely enter the US and work today.
- mcphage 11y ago> Let me make one last point and then I promise I will shut up and give you the last word if you want it. You began this conversation by stating that the article “did not claim to find a single window sign anywhere in the USA.” I think we now agree at least that this is not correct. Many are specifically listed. Ouch. That's a serious burn.
- nl 11y agohistorians have not discovered reports of any in the United States, Canada or Australia. Oh really? Australia, 1862: http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/115763711?searchTerm=No%20irish&searchLimits=l-australian=y http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/115763711?searchTerm...
- bane 11y agoHere's what the signs look like for those interested, most appear to be from London. https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%22no+irish%22+window+sign&hl=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAWoVChMIlO-ynJeIxwIVQRo-Ch11AAx4&biw=1680&bih=965 https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%22no+irish%22+window+... Here's a reddit thread on the issue https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/3erkxv/nina_no_irish_need_apply_emeritus_professor/?sort=confidence https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/3erkxv/nina_no_i...
- kjs3 11y agoI've met a certain subculture of racists who like to point to articles like this and say things like "well since there were never NINA signs, discrimination against blacks couldn't have been as bad as it was". Reading Jensen you can see how he's a kindred spirit of such people. It's apparent he started out with "I think the Irish were lazy, violent and anti-American who need victim-hood to maintain their identity" and set to work to prove it.