NPR Staff, "The Voting Rights Act: Hard-Won Gains, An Uncertain Future," NPR, July 21, 2013

. . . . Congress also noted, however, that the Voting Rights Act was still needed, and it had

Fort Scott, Kansas, Tribune, August 6, 1965, p. 1 From the Google News Archive.

been used hundreds of times since 1982 to protect against discrimination.

But in his opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested it is a new era. "Our country has changed," he wrote for the majority.

But Rep. Lewis says race is still very much at the forefront.

"I think there has been a deliberate and systematic effort on the part of certain forces in our country to take the whole idea of race out of public policy," he says. "Race is involved in everything that makes up America, and we cannot escape it. We have to deal with it face on.">>>

John Paul Stevens, "The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent," New York Review of Books, August 15, 2013

In Bending Toward Justice, Professor Gary May describes a number of the conflicts between white supremacists in Alabama and nonviolent civil rights workers that led to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—often just called the VRA. The book also describes political developments that influenced President Lyndon Johnson to support the act in 1965, and later events that supported the congressional reenactments of the VRA signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, by President Gerald Ford in 1975, by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, and by President George W. Bush in 2006.>>>

"The Future of the Voting Rights Act," On Point, WBUR, June 27, 2013

The Voting Rights Act was the monumental achievement of the civil rights movement, a powerful federal response to racist policies like poll taxes and literacy tests that kept blacks home on Election Day. But that was 1965.

Today southern blacks vote at even higher rates than whites. So this week the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the law, freeing mostly southern states to change their election laws without federal approval. Guests: Vernon Burton, Kareem Crayton, and Ronald Keith Gaddie.>>>

John Fund, "A Civil-Rights Victory," National Review, June 25, 2013

The Supreme Court’s decision today to overturn a small part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is actually a victory for civil rights.  As the court noted, what made sense both in moral and practical terms almost a half century ago has to be approached anew. . . . Clint Bolick, director of litigation for the conservative Goldwater Institute in Arizona, says the demise of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act will also reduce the balkanization of racial gerrymandering that has become so popular lately. “Voting districts drawn on racial or ethnic lines divide Americans,” he says. “This decision helps move us toward the day in which racial gerrymandering becomes a relic of the past.”>>>

"New obstacles for voters," Baltimore Sun, July 22, 2013

If there were any doubt the Supreme Court erred badly in the term just ended by striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act designed to protect minorities' access to the polls in states with a history of voter discrimination, it's been dispelled by the swift reaction in states formerly covered by the law's pre-clearance requirement. Officials there have lost no time in using the ruling as a license to start discriminating again.

Barely two hours after the court declared unconstitutional Section 4 of the act, which determined which states were required to get Justice Department approval before changing election laws in ways that disproportionately affected minority voters, Texas' attorney general announced that a 2011 voter-ID law a lower court had blocked as discriminatory would go into effect "immediately." Over the next week, four more former pre-clearance states moved to tighten restrictions on voting.>>>

Craig Gallagher*

It's likely that if you have already applied and been accepted to graduate school to study history, you’ve heard it at least once. You’ll hear it plenty more times before you get that masters or Ph.D. in history you’re putting aside a lot of time and/or money to acquire.

In fact, if your decision to continue your education isn’t just about putting off the working world for a few years and is driven by a desire to change direction and start a new career, you’ll hear it so often that it will feel as though everyone thinks you’re running away to join the circus instead of pursuing another professional qualification.

I’m talking, of course, about that constant refrain that hangs over graduate school like a surly cloud at the moment: “There are no jobs!” Now, I don’t wish to debunk this statement with a much rosier picture of the job market than has hitherto been offered, because I can’t do that.

Not when respected publications like the Atlantic and the Chronicle of Higher Education have lined up to inform us that even seeking a degree in the sciences offers little economic advantage anymore in these straitened times, adding as an afterthought that the outlook for those who hold humanities degrees is downright bleak.

What I suggest, however, is that staying positive in the face of such bleak prospects is essential.

The fact remains that universities and colleges are still admitting graduate students to study history and are still training them to read, research, and write to a very high standard. Graduate students still get teaching experience, we still learn how to organize our time effectively, how to argue cogently and coherently and to condense vast amounts of information into digestible bites fit for any palate. We also learn to speak foreign languages.

It needs to be kept in mind that these are transferable skills applicable to a variety of jobs. Sure, we can’t change overnight the fact that some potential employers will see “M.A. in History” and immediately move on to the next CV. But we can embrace the abilities we develop in such a way as to help ourselves, first and foremost, compete in a fallow economy.

And, let’s not forget, these are just the classic skills any apprentice historian will develop. As the discipline broadens and deepens to accommodate technological changes, new opportunities arise in the burgeoning subfield known as the Digital Humanities.

My point is, when you hear “There are no jobs!” don’t translate this as “I am hopelessly unemployable.” Hear instead, “What can I do, say, and work on to make sure I get one of those ‘no jobs’?"

*Craig Gallagher is a PhD Candidate in History at Boston College. His dissertation project focuses on transnational Scottish Presbyterian merchants, ministers, settlers and soldiers in the late-17th century Atlantic World. In spring 2013 he received a research grant from the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

Eric Schultz

Spring 1976. Wilson Hall, Brown University. The late, great Professor William McLoughlin has just informed his 85 students in “American Social and Intellectual History” that they are to write their first paper. All he has given us is the title: “The Age of Jefferson and Adams.” We groan. Then he adds: “Keep it to three pages or less. Double-spaced.” We smile. Three pages? How hard can that be?

“If you make the margins too wide,” McLoughlin adds, “I’ll mark you down a grade.”

Needless to say, nobody got an A on that paper, or so the good professor informed us. There may have been a B or two. Not me. It was all I could do to contain my flowery opening paragraph to a single page. Some of us recovered slightly in round two, wherein we committed “The Age of Lincoln and Calhoun” to three, double-spaced pages. Some retreated to organic chemistry and other more reasonable challenges.

Little did I know, but I had just been introduced to Big Data—though it would take 35 years to earn that name. Take an endless, insurmountable, seemingly disconnected pile of information, separate the grain from the chaff (or, as my engineering buddies would say, the signal from the noise), and tell a concise, compelling story about what it all means.

For the last year, you may have noticed, it’s been hard to escape stories about “Big Data.” In a world where everything can be measured—from your location to how well you sleep to how long you brush your teeth to all of your “Likes” on Facebook, Big Data is upon us with avengeance. Or, as it were, like a Cloud.

Some of you will be lifelong historians and wrestle with Big Historical Data for your careers. I happened to take a left turn into business school and ended up working at and running companies. In the process, I spent an awful lot of time pondering questions about marketing and strategy.

This is how strategy works: Take an endless, insurmountable, seemingly disconnected pile of information, separate the grain from the chaff, and tell a concise, compelling story about what it all means. Sound familiar? I’ve had to do that kind of work in everything from baby products to pet food to Red Sox baseball to the global perishable supply chain. I thank my lucky stars every day for Professor McLoughlin.

Now, we’re being told, in the emerging world of Big Data there will be more and more piles of the stuff lying around. Is there any group in the world better trained to make sense of it all—to wade confidentially into the sea of Big Data—than historians? It’s not just about monitoring, data gathering, and quantitative analysis. (Though a course or two in statistics is a good replacement for the Greek most of us got to skip, and get yourself over to the Computer Science building and spend a semester or two doing some simple coding, just so you can see how the other half will live their lives.)

But in the end, conventional data analysis falls short. When Chris Anderson (of “long tail” and “information wants to be free” fame) wrote that “[w]ith enough data, the numbers speak for themselves,” he was dead wrong. Causal analysis is an extraordinarily deceptive and nuanced thing. Data sets on their own are neutral and largely useless. Cobbled into relational information they begin to sing. But only when a storyteller comes along and provides context and human insight does Big Data really give up the goods.

Tom Friedman, author of The World Is Flat, believes that integration is the new specialty—that someone with a renaissance view of the world is more likely to spark an innovation than a pure engineer. If you are learning the craft of history, that could very well be you.

I do not know exactly what Big Data jobs will look like over the next generation, but I couldn’t predict a decade ago that there would be thousands of “app developers” or positions called “Chief Evangelist” or professional bloggers. I certainly didn’t know to put “Pope” and “tweet ‘in the same sentence. But I stand firm in the belief that God blesses the storyteller; it is he or she who makes data human, and our only real chance to use it like a tool instead of a club.