Americans describe things as “constitutional,” and “unconstitutional.” They talk about the “Bill of Rights” and the “Second Amendment.” These descriptors seem like they should be timeless or, at least, in consistent use since the beginning of the USA.

For “constitutional” and “unconstitutional” that seems to be the case:

Note that both have been used pretty consistently since 1800. There haven’t been great fluctuations. Obviously, this is just one measure, but it seems that Americans have long thought about things as constitutional or unconstitutional.

The Bill of Rights, on the other hand:

Here, the story is different. Starting in the New Deal Era, mentions of the Bill of Rights in American books more than doubled, suggesting that as government grew, Americans became much more concerned about individual rights and their guarantees.

So too with specific amendments. The…

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Not being a constitutional scholar, I’m not entirely sure what to make of this claim:

“In a nutshell, almost everything ordinary Americans think they know about the Bill of Rights, including the phrase ‘Bill of Rights,’ comes from the Reconstruction period. Not once did the Founders refer to these early amendments as a bill of rights.”

Well…but:

There’s no sign of an uptick post-Civil War, and the phrase “bill of rights” has been used steadily throughout American history since 1800.

“Bill of Rights,” capitalized, shows a different pattern:

Here the jump is in the 1930s, not Reconstruction.

But how about the founders? A search of the Federalist Papers for “Bill of Rights” reveals 19 hits, including several lengthy discussions by Hamilton of the English Bill of Rights, the bills of rights in several states, and whether the nascent Constitution needs a Bill of Rights. …

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Using the invaluable running tab of votes kept by David Wasserman of the Cook Report, I did a map outlining turnout difference between 2008 and 2012. Blue states are where turnout was higher in 2012, red states are where it was lower. New Hampshire matched its 2008 turnout:

A few comments:

• The Atlantic seaboard states with large African-American populations (South Carolina to Maryland) increased their turnout
• Western swing states with large Hispanic populations increased their turnout and brought Utah along with them.
• The Upper Midwest came out in droves (excepting MI)
• New York and New Jersey saw substantial drops, likely due to Sandy
• Florida had nearly $170 million advertising dollars spent in it, which may have driven people to the polls (if only to get away from their TVs)

Notably of the swing states, Ohio turnout was down 2.23% from …

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The use of words and phrases, associated with presidential elections, over the last century, from the Google Ngram viewer:

More as I think of them.

UPDATE: Per tadlegler’s suggestion in the comments, “flip-flop”:

and, on my own, “vote fraud”:

Interesting.

UPDATE II: per chemstudent’s suggestion, “bipartisan,” and “campaign contribution:”

For some reason, I’m reminded of one of the great, surreal moments in Oscar history:

No empty chair, but, later in the show, Billy Crystal said: “Jack Palance just bungee-jumped off the Hollywood sign.”

Coalition fatalities in Afghanistan by month, since January 2010 (from here):

Fatalities, season-to-season, have been on a steady downward trend since their peak in 2010. Measuring victory and loss in counterinsurgencies in notoriously difficult (for an earlier discussion of this with respect to Iraq, see here), but by this measure and at the moment, the coalition seems to be winning militarily in Afghanistan. Whether that constitutes “victory” in the larger sense requires a much larger political, social, and diplomatic discussion.

As a follow-up to this post, I note this:

The Air Force has more drones and more sensors collecting more data than it has humans to interpret what the electronic tea leaves say. The glut of all that video and still imagery is “unsustainable,” says the Air Force’s top civilian — but it’ll be “years” before the Air Force digs its way out of it.

As the article points out, there are various levels of processing needed. There’s a need for an immediate triage of imagery for time-sensitive operations. If an American unit’s under attack, the imagery that might help them can’t go in the normal processing queue. But there’s also the general processing, that might yield information useful over the medium or long term.

More computers, please.

The sources available to historians jump exponentially for the post-1945 era. The rise of typewriters, copy machines, computers, and printers created a blizzard of paper that shows no sign of ending. Add into that all the electronic files, email, and the like, not to mention oral history recordings, and historians studying the years after World War II might be forgiven for having a thousand-yard stare and powerful bifocals. Google (which I am using as a generic word for search & indexing of all type. There goes the trademark) has helped some, but has its own problems.

Now comes the flood of video. The Air Force, the linked article notes, collects 6 petabytes (which is technical language for “Holy sh#$%$#%, that’s a lot of data”) of high-definition video per day. Such video could be remarkably useful for military historians (want to watch a combat engagement in real time?) but…

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(Part one here, part two here)

Having ended up with thousands of photographs from an archival research trip to Britain, I returned to the United States and realized that I had to figure out what to do with them. In essence, by using the digital camera, I had transferred the work of sifting, reading, and note-taking the sources from the archive itself to my home. What had been a concentrated effort in the archive, with multiple layers of seeking, finding, and judging all going on at the same time, had become more spread out.

The solution lay in both new tools and new methods. Unlike my earlier approach, I actually planned out ahead of time the process I was going to use to take notes. I would load the pictures into Scrivener, my writing tool of choice at the moment, and take notes on them directly into the program. That way I wouldn’t have to switch back and forth between photo…

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We’re having a nor’easter this weekend, here in the extremely eastern part of the American West. I had the grumpy-old-man thought that we didn’t have nearly as many nor’easters when I was growing up, grumble, grumble, aaarr, get off my lawn, you kids. So I went and checked, and oddly there’s some truth to the thought. From Google’s quite wonderful Ngram viewer, mentions of the word “nor’easter” from 1800 to 2008:

Meanwhile, the New York Times mentions “nor’easter” 254 times from 1851-1980, but 272 times since 1980. The word is being used more, though whether that means those kind of storms are more frequent? Unclear.

[UPDATE: A kind reader points out that a number of the more modern hits may come from the 1991 publication of Sebastian Junger's book A Perfect Storm, which uses "nor'easter" in its book description.]

But…grumble, grumble, aaarrr, get off my lawn, you kids.