Word: breadth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Slippery Statistics. Traditional historians already regard the sociologists and statisticians now invading their discipline as so many Visigoths likely to ruin the already declining quality of written history, substitute accounting for breadth of vision and insight, and eventually relegate old-school historians to peripheral pursuits like intellectual history. In the past, the humanists have managed to hold off the invasion with light scholarly musket fire. Statistics and averages are misleading. (Everyone knows the story of the nonswimming statistician who drowned in trying to wade a river with an average depth of three feet.) Sociologists are well known for expending...
...that seemed aimed as much to Mitterrand's crestfallen leftist backers as to his own supporters on the right, Giscard said: "I have understood in this campaign that you wanted change. You will not be disappointed." Giscard also promised French voters that they would be "surprised at the breadth and rapidity" of the changes he would bring to France after 16 years of conservative Gaullist rule. Those changes will begin to take shape this week, when the new President announces his choice for Premier and holds his first meeting with a Cabinet that will include some young faces...
...more violence than we really do." Indeed, despite some isolated improvement, most prisons are still better equipped to punish prisoners than to rehabilitate them. Official prison structures remain more likely to make new criminals or harden old ones than to reform anyone. Thus the new breadth of the schools for crime is especially critical in determining how a prisoner will turn out. And if a convict's rage against imprisonment is mixed too explosively with warped philosophies of justification, the results can be frightening instances of terrorism...
Given the breadth of his sample, Degler has little time to explore his subjects' intellectual evolutions. Yet these, too, seem basic to his thesis that the Southern environment bred a peculiar type of reformer. He mentions in passing that many of them, although native to the region, studied outside the South. James Madison Wells, a wealthy Louisiana planter who became a radical Republican when the War began, attended a Cincinnati law school, and there are some Yale men among the dissenters. Were they stranded from the South's social and intellectual confines after their leaves of absence? Degler also gives...
...self-reliance. Yet by demonstrating their disenchantment with their public officeholders-large numbers of whom will surely be turned out this fall-the people are also creating a power vacuum at the national level. Says Bill Moyers, the former presidential press secretary who now travels the length and breadth of the land to find material for his weekly television journal: "I find the country up for grabs...