Connecticut’s Religiously Intolerant History, Pt. 1

Fairfield’s Last Witch Trial

A woodcut illustration from Joseph Glanvill’s “Saducismus Triumphatus or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions,” published posthumously in 1681 in London. The book purported to provide proof of witches’ magical powers, and attacked skeptics of these abilities. Glanvill’s text would become influential during the Salem Witch Trials a decade later.Public domain image.

When the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life ranked states using data from its comprehensive 2007 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, only 57 percent of respondents from Connecticut and Rhode Island reported that they believed in God with “absolute certainty,” placing it second-to-last in the country. The state placed similarly low in all other rankings.

Today’s religious landscape is almost the complete opposite of what it was in the 17th century, when Connecticut was the quintessentially theocratic state. The Calvinists who founded the colony steeped their everyday lives in religiosity, and saw the tools of government as extensions of their god-given duty to secure religious purity in society. The Congregationalist Church was for more than a century the state-sanctioned religious institution; all other belief systems, including other sects of Protestant Christianity, were officially disenfranchised and unofficially derided as atheistic abominations.

Life in a theocracy could be difficult for those outside of the state church’s good graces. Those who broke with the sanctioned practices of the official belief system would be ostracized by the community. They could find themselves unable to participate in civic life. They could even be prosecuted under those state and local statutes that enshrined religious intolerance.

The separation of church and state was incrementally accomplished over generations, often as a reaction to specific policies that had negatively impacted Connecticut’s own residents.

‘By the lawe of God of this colony thou deservest to dye’

The Calvinists, who were variously called “puritans” and “pilgrims” (a reference to John Bunyan’s allegorical moralist tale, “The Pilgrim’s Progress’), were products of a Europe that had been torn apart a century earlier by some of the bloodiest sectarian wars the world has ever seen. They sought to establish a society where they could practice their own brand of religious fundamentalism without interference.

They also believed in education. The most prominent among them were men versed in laws and letters. They built the earliest colleges in the colonies. They kept up with the scientific revolution in Europe and the emerging value it placed on empiricism and induction.

This led to some strange combinations of belief and skepticism. Connecticut’s citizens thought that Satan had direct influence in the world, and that witches had gained supernatural powers by creating pacts with the evil being.

Connecticut’s government was at the forefront of witch persecution. Numerous trials took place in the state during the 1600’s, including the first recorded execution for witchcraft in the U.S. in 1647.

A state law making witchcraft a capital offense that was passed in 1642 explicitly referenced passages from the Bible: “If any man or woman be a witch, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death. Exodus xxii. 18. Levit. xx. 22. Deut. xviii. 10, n.”

By the end of the 17th century, however, colonial jurisprudential culture had shifted, placing a greater emphasis on evidence that made witch trials increasingly difficult to prosecute.

In 1692 – the same year as the famous Salem witch trials – a new wave of witchcraft accusations from threatened the lives of several Fairfield County women.

The troubles began when Katherine Branch, a servant in the Stamford home of former selectman Daniel Wescot, started having epileptic-like “fits.” Wescot suspected Branch was possessed by witchcraft, and soon Branch began naming names: Elizabeth Clawson of Stamford. Mary and Hannah Harvey, Mary Staples, and Goody Miller, all of Fairfield. Finally, Mercy Disborough of Compo, now part of Westport. Several of the accused were known to have had rocky relationships with the Wescots.

The initial investigation called for a committee of five women to examine the accused for “devil’s marks.” These were marks supposedly placed on the witch’s body by Satan so that he could drink the witch’s blood. If a birthmark was considered suspicious, a pin would be stuck through it to see if it would bleed. If it didn’t, the woman might be a witch.

Clawson passed this first examination, but Disborough did not.

A special trial was set up on Sept. 14 in Fairfield. Bills of indictment against Clawson and Disborough were presented to a grand jury, while charges against the other women were dropped. Disborough’s indictment, transcribed by Secretary John Allyn, said she had “familiarity with satan the grand enemie of God & men & thes by his instigetion & help thou hast in a preternatutal way afflicted & don Harm to the bodyes & Estates of sundry of their Ma[jesties] subjects…for which by the lawe of God of this colony thou deservest to dye.”

Clawson and Disborough had both pleaded not guilty to the crime. To determine if they were actually witches, the jury needed more evidence. The accused women agreed to be tested by having their hands bound to their legs and being tossed into the water, the theory being that water would refuse to accept a witch. If they floated, it was evidence of guilt.

On Sept. 15, the two women were given the water test. According to Allyn’s notes, several witnesses testified that they both floated.

Meanwhile, a contingent of Clawson’s friends from Stamford rallied to her defense. Seventy-six people signed a letter vouching for Clawson’s good character.

The jury deliberated, but was unable to come to a conclusion in either case, and decided to send the case to the General Court in Hartford (then the state’s highest court).

The ministers of the court, who had plenty of experience with the prosecution of witches and were aware of the hysteria sweeping through Salem, were not convinced at all by the evidence. They returned their official opinion on Oct. 17 with four findings:

1. "The endeavor of conviction of witchcraft by swimming is unlawful and sinful, and therefore it cannot afford any evidence.”

2. "Unusual excrescences found upon their bodies ought not to be advanced as evidence against them without the approbation of some able physicians.”

3. "Respecting the evidence of the afflicted maid (the witness claimed to have been bewitched)…we cannot think her a sufficient witness; yet we think that her affliction being something strange, it well deserves a further inquiry.”

4. "As to the other strange accidents—as the dying of cattle, etc., we apprehend the applying of them to these women as matters of witchcraft to be upon very slender and uncertain grounds."

The General Court did not choose to question whether witches actually existed, but they did demand a higher standard of evidence than the trial in Fairfield had produced.

The group in Fairfield reconvened, and on Oct. 28, found Clawson innocent. Disborough, however, was convicted.

In the first half of 1693, petitioners on behalf of Disborough approached the General Court, calling the decision against her illegal. The Court appointed a commission consisting of Samuel Wyllys, William Pitkin, and Nathaniel Stanley to review the documents of the case.

The commission, reaffirming the General Court’s earlier skepticism, acquitted Disborough and decided that further witch trials should be avoided altogether. They cited the horror that had occurred in Massachusetts the year before, saying that the epidemic of litigations in Salem were “warning enof, those that wit make witchcraf t of such things wit make hanging work apace.”

No witches were convicted in Connecticut after that, though a few trials continued to take place until 1697. Many citizens still believed that witches walked among them, consorting with Satan and possessing children. The law against witchcraft was never repealed; instead, it was quietly expunged from later revisions of public acts.

Disborough escaped execution. She faded into relative obscurity, popping up only occasionally in public records from the early 1700’s. She had been subjected to dangerous and humiliating tests, put in jail and sentenced to death, but had narrowly managed to gain her freedom. In this early test of state-sanctioned religion, Connecticut had taken a small step toward reform.

Part 2: Anglican Infiltration

Part 3: (Coming soon)

Relics of Industry: The Rapidayton Gas Pump

This rusting Rapidayton gas pump stands in front of an unused building at the end of my street in Fairfield.

Rapidayton pumps were once common in the East and Midwest. They were produced by the Dayton Pump & Manufacturing Co. in Dayton, Ohio.

The company was started in 1908 by Frank M. Tait, a master of utilities throughout the first half of the 20th century. Inspired by his early interaction with Thomas Edison, Tait took over what would become the Dayton Power & Light Co. in 1905. At one time or another, Tait managed public utilities all over the U.S.

Rapidayton pumps ended after the company was changed in 1955 to the Tait Manufacturing Co. The assets of the Dayton Pump & Manufacturing Co. were used to create the Frank M. Tait Foundation, which sits today on North Main Street in Dayton.

The year that this pump was installed is unclear. There are only three digits available for the total purchase price, meaning the pump was built with the assumption that a full tank of gas would never cost more than $9.99.

Photographs by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

IBM strategist advocates ‘new mindset’ for corporate communications

IBM Communications Strategist and former business journalist Steve Hamm talks to UNH gathered students in the Vlock Center for Convergent Media Dec. 7 about the new opportunities that global communications are opening for businesses and media. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Corporations are shifting away from talking about themselves toward sharing ideas with people around the world, IBM Communications Strategist Steve Hamm on Dec. 7 told a class of University of New Haven students in the Laurel Vlock Center for Convergent Media in Maxcy Hall.

Hamm spoke to communications majors taking a copy editing course taught by adjunct Professor of Communications Mike Bazinet about his view that both journalism and public relations in the U.S. are broken at a time when a flood of disorderly information has created a great need for writers’ narrative talents. He urged the students not to be pessimistic, saying that there are also more opportunities than ever for positive change in both fields.

“The landscape has been utterly transformed in just a matter of years,” he said. It’s shocking – just shocking.

Hamm should know. He worked in journalism for decades before joining IBM two years ago. He wrote for the Bristol Press in Bristol, Conn., the San Jose Mercury News, and Businessweek. He has written several books, most recently publishing a book honoring IBM’s centennial anniversary. He also writes for IBM’s “A Smarter Planet Blog.”

Hamm witnessed the decline of Businessweek firsthand, from being the top business publication in the world in the late 1990s to when it “essentially went out of business” in 2009. He said he changed roles because he knew that journalism was struggling and he wanted to work with a large organization where his writing would have more influence.

Hamm said, though, that there are also problems emerging in corporate communications, precisely because of its relationship to journalism.

“The old model was: you strategize around finding a journalist interested in telling your story, invest time to develop a relationship with them, understand the market, build stories, pitch them, and then they’d be published,” he said.

Increasingly, Hamm said, journalism has lost its emphasis on explanation and narrative. He said that stories on business news websites like Marketwatch.com are a jumble of sometimes-contradictory snippets without any kind of depth.

“In a world of tremendous complexity, we’ve got news in tiny bits,” he said.

One of the things that Hamm and his colleagues at IBM have been working on to overcome the collapse of in-depth reporting is to recreate deep conversations about ideas through newer media, such as social networking sites. To do that, corporations are expanding their focus of constituents as shareholders and customers to include governments, universities, other companies – and employees.

That is one of the aims behind “A Smarter Planet Blog” and its related Facebook page, “People for a Smarter Planet.” Both sites include discussion with writers and researchers who work for IBM, but also bring in perspectives from all over the world.

One recent innovation was to have “Smart Fridays,” during which people studying interesting phenomena explain their research through a series of posts on the Facebook page. In one recent series, a researcher showed that the height of high-heeled shoes fluctuates with the economy. In hard times, heels tend to get higher, while in prosperous times they get lower.

The conversation, while not specific to anything that IBM does, generated about 1.4 million hits in a few hours.

Hamm sees these types of crossover conversations as a positive step for corporate communications. “One thing corporations must do is say, ‘here’s our knowledge,’ and become a hub around networks to create a feedback loop of learning and influencing. These are the most valuable things in the world, where value can be created.”

Hamm said that no one, including IBM, has quite figured out how to take full advantage of the explosion of information technologies available. That is why it is vital for people from different walks of life to share ideas with one another and try new things.

“Communication is not the frosting on the cake. It is the cake now,” he said. “It is part of the core of what societies need to advance.”

The Year of the Protest

2011 has been the stage for a resurgence of a classic tactic for political reform: the protest. Although there are rallies of varying sizes around the world each year, few have had the numbers or tenacity to wield significant influence. This year, though, they provoked the toppling of governments, the breakdown of civil society, and violent suppressions that sometimes backfired. The last time such a wave of demonstrations gripped so many countries at once was during the student movements of 1968, more than 40 years ago.

Here is a month-by-month look at key moments in some of the year’s protests:

January: Tunisia

Tunsia was the first – and perhaps the most successful – uprising in what later became known as the Arab Spring. Civil activists began protesting against government corruption, unemployment and restrictions on freedom after the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010. Bouazizi had committed the act because of treatment he had received by a municipal official. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced to resign on Jan. 14, and peaceful elections were held in October.
Public domain photograph.

February: Egypt

In this Feb. 4 photograph, protesters flood the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, to call for the end of President Hosni Mubarek’s 30-year rule. Millions of protesters, many of them utilizing social media to organize their movement, held a stand-off against Mubarek’s regime for several weeks. Mubarek announced he would step down on Feb. 11, after members of Egypt’s military began refusing to crack down on demonstrators. The military, after taking over the provisional government, sparked a new wave of protests that claimed similar abuses under the new regime. Mubarek now faces trial for premeditated murder, and several rounds of contentious elections are under way.
Photograph courtesy of Al Jazeera/Jamal Elshayyal. Some rights reserved.

March: Yemen

Protesters march on the university in the capital of Sana’a in Yemen on March 1, 2011. Inspired by Tunisia, Egypt and other nearby movements, demonstrations in Yemen began over similar concerns about government corruption and unemployment. Yemenis were also upset over proposed changes to Yemen’s constitution to extend the length of terms for the president and legislators. President Ali Abdullah Saleh originally rejected demands from the protesters. But after months of crackdowns and defections, the government was left in shambles, and Saleh signed an agreement on Nov. 23 to resign within 30 days.
Photograph courtesy of Al Jazeera English. Some rights reserved.

April: India

It all started with activist Anna Havare announcing that he would undertake a “fast until death” beginning April 5 that would last until India’s government enacted substantial corruption reforms. Hazare’s supporters, undertaking the practices of nonviolent resistance first championed by Gandhi, began a series of protests in New Delhi and elsewhere that called for the passage of the Jan Lokpal bill, which, if enforced, would further many of the protesters’ goals. Hazare was arrested in August, but mass outrage ensued, and he was released again and allowed to continue his hunger strike. The bill finally passed at the end of August, and Hazare ended his fast, though he has continued to push for more reforms.
Photograph courtesy of Pranav21391. Some rights reserved.

May: Spain

High unemployment, new austerity measures, and a government that people feel is more responsive to business interests than average voters sparked major protests in May throughout Spain that have been referred to as the 15-M Movement. The largest demonstrations took place as elections neared in May. The President of the Regional Electoral Committee of Madrid declared the gatherings illegal, but that increased the discord. In this picture, tens of thousands of protesters gather in Puerta del Sol in Madrid on May 20 to camp out until after the end of the elections, in which the ruling Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party lost to the populist People’s Party.
Photograph courtesy of Fotograccion. Some rights reserved.

June: Greece

Greek debt was at the center of the Euro crisis this year. The country’s sovereign debt problems resulted in the passage of numerous austerity packages in exchange for bailouts and protections from other European nations. The collapse of the Greek economy was met with violent reactions from citizens, who began a series of strikes and protests in May. The anti-austerity demonstrations became more and more pronounced, reaching a crescendo in June, when the Greek parliament voted to accept the European Union’s plans to put the financial system back in order. In this June 6 photograph, people gather in Syntagma (Constitution) square outside the parliament building.
Photograph courtesy of Protonotarios. Some rights reserved.

July: Malaysia

The Malay people are not well-known for mass demonstrations. But there has been growing unrest in recent years to the ruling coalition in Malaysia, Barisan Nasional, which has won every federal election since 1957. Tens of thousands of sympathizers with minority and opposition groups, organized by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (known as Bersih), marched in Kuala Lampur on July 9 to demand elections reforms. Only limited protesting is allowed in Malaysia, and there were threats of police intervention prior to the march. Water cannons and tear gas were used to disperse protesters, of whom 1,600 were arrested. In November, the lower house of Malaysia’s parliament passed a ban on street demonstrations that was roundly condemned by pro-democracy groups.
Photograph courtesy of Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved.

August: Chile

Students have been protesting Chile’s private education industry, asking for greater investment and control by the state in public education. Several waves of contention have swept the country. The first was in reaction to a proposal by then-Education Minister Joaquín Lavín’s proposal to increase funding for non-traditional universities, which have been known to exploit legal loopholes to make profits. More proposals followed, with each bringing a new wave of demonstrations. On Aug. 25, unions organized a major strike and protest that they estimated drew about 600,000 protesters throughout Chile in response to crackdowns on students and reforms that they said fell short. These marchers were in Pichilemu that day.
Photograph courtesy of Diego Grez. Some rights reserved.

September: Libya

Rebel supporters celebrate the fall of Libya’s capital, Tripoli, to anti-Gaddafi forces on Sept. 8. The country’s uprising began in February as part of the Arab Spring, then devolved into a civil war that drew the backing of NATO. Throughout the year, rebels and Gaddafi allies battled from city to city, with both sides seeing early victories. Finally, the rebels captured the remaining holdout cities. They found Gaddafi hiding in Sirte in October, and, in a controversial move, killed him without a trial.
Photograph courtesy of Ammar Abd Rabbo. Some rights reserved.

October: Occupy Wall Street

A group of protesters angered by income inequality set up camp in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, in the shadow of Wall Street’s skyscrapers. Hundreds of camps sprang up across the U.S. and the rest of the world. The occupiers were joined frequently for marches and demonstrations by others sympathetic to their causes. Their popularity spiked on Oct. 15, when coordinated protests were held in cities around the planet. A month later to the day, the encampment at Zuccotti Park was broken up by police. Camps across the U.S. and elsewhere were subject to crackdowns of varying severity, but protests and some camps continue.
Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

November: Syria

Sporadic protests inspired by the Arab Spring popped up in pockets of Syria at the beginning of the year. In March, mass demonstrations began taking place in opposition of the dictatorial rule of President Bashar al-Assad, the end of his Ba’athist Party’s control, and a lack of constitutional government. Assad's camp clamped down on protests with military force, serving only to ignite further uprisings and international concerns. In an unprecedented move, the Arab League approved near-unanimous sanctions against Syria in November. The United Nations estimates that about 5,000 people have been killed in the conflict so far.
Photograph by Syriana2011. Some rights reserved.

December: Russia

Tens of thousands of protesters demonstrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, over allegations of vote-rigging and ballot fraud in parliamentary elections by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia Party, which clung to its shrinking majority despite electoral dishonesty. Putin himself is running for president in an election set for March in 2012. Protesters light flares in the chilly Moscow darkness in this Saturday, Dec. 10 photograph.
Photograph by Pavel Golovkin, courtesy of Cryptome.org.

Read more about protests:

- Occupy New Haven: an Operation in Progress

- Occupying Wall Street After Dark

- Grassroots Astroturfing and Political Terrorism

The Strands of Zen in Western Culture

Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

The Japanese adaptation of Buddhism known as Zen can seem out of place in Western societies. Those who subscribe to cultural moral relativism believe that unique historical circumstances shape moral values in different cultures, and therefore there are no universally-shared values. They would suggest that the difficulty Westerners have in understanding Zen – particularly its avoidance of reason as a means of working out ethical issues - is evidence of that gulf in universal values.

To say that Zen eschews reason, however, is an oversimplification of the practice. If examined in its nuances, Zen does defy cultural relativism by appealing to numerous values that have appeared in cultures all over the world. Its elusiveness is not unique to peoples of the West – it is counterintuitive by nature.

Reason looms large in the traditions of Western philosophy. Plato and Aristotle both placed a man’s reasoning abilities in a position above other aspects of his character (1, 2). Zen appears to evade reason - to actively sabotage it.

Yet these philosophical expressions all have commonalities that become visible at a more granular level. Plato sees reason as a moderating force that promotes the best possible functioning of the other faculties; a man “will always desire so to attemper the body as to preserve the harmony of the soul (3).” The ultimate aim, to Plato (and Aristotle) is ultimately to live as fruitful a life as can be attained.

Zen’s goal, if it can be said to have one, is similar. T.D. Suzuki says that Zen moves one step beyond reason to break free of the mental constraints of abstract concepts and concentrate on “life as it is lived (4).” Zen does not deny reason a role in life. Suzuki says that practitioners have their own doctrines, but that these do not come directly from Zen, because Zen has no “sacred books or dogmatic tenets (5).”

Zen’s insistence on constantly breaking free from conceptual constructs has similarities to philosophical strains of doubt that have appeared throughout the millennia. In ancient Greece, Pyrrho of Elis first developed a form of systematic doubt that came to be known as skepticism. Pyrrho discovered that he could find vulnerabilities in every philosophical argument. According to Historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, he thought that “since we can know nothing for certain, we must behave as such…We thus stand aloof from life and thereby achieve peace of mind (6).”

Later skepticism integrated its processes into academic philosophy by introducing an important check on the assurance of any conclusion. Carneades of Cyrene made provisional belief acceptable by suggesting that, although nothing could be known, careful scrutiny could show that one conclusion was more likely than another (7).

Carneades’ caveat made it possible for academia and science to maintain their long-term intellectual flexibility. The provisional approach to knowledge admits that, far from being absolute, reason has limitations. It is a deeper concession that there are always more things we do not know than things we do know. It is also profoundly Zen, with echoes in the writings of Suzuki and others.

Other movements in Western cultures continuously strived to break free from old patterns of thinking. Freethinking, transcendentalism, and some elements of postmodernism all contain threads of doubt that, to varying degrees, challenge conceptual paradigms.

Hecht says that American’s introduction to Zen also had an impact on the development of psychotherapy as some eminent professionals, such as Mark Epstein, imported the practice of meditation (8).

Western ideas have also resonated with Eastern thinkers. The Zen story “Not Far From Buddhahood” specifically tells of a student reading a passage from the Biblical Book of Matthew to Gasan. Gasan’s response to the passage is, "That is excellent. Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood (9)."

It is nevertheless the case that Zen is difficult to understand. Yet Suzuki points out that this is not a problem that only Westerners encounter. Zen is, by nature, “extremely elusive as far as its outward aspects are concerned; when you think you have caught a glimpse of it, it is no more there; from afar it looks so approachable, but as soon as you come near it you see it even further away from you than before (10).”

All systems of doubt can be elusive. Hecht says that there is a narrative to doubt that involves communication and integration across cultures throughout history, including in the case of Zen. However, she says, the elusiveness of these traditions has commonly been portrayed in terms of a “mere collection of shadows on the history of belief (11).” Zen’s Western counterparts may be overshadowed by other philosophical systems, but they remain a robust and vital part of those cultures. And Zen itself is engaged in a productive exchange with that milieu.

References:

1. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Sir Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee. (Plain Label Books, 1955) chap. ix
2. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by David Ross. (Oxford University Press, 200) Book X, chap. vii, 194
3. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Sir Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee. (Plain Label Books, 1955) chap. ix, 573
4. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. (Grove Press, 1954) Chap. ii, 45
5. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. (Grove Press, 1954) Chap. ii, 38
6. Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) Chap. i, 41
7. Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) Chap. i, 43
8. Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) Chap. x, 473
9. Senzaki. “Not Far From Buddhahood.” 101 Zen Stories. (Kessinger Publishing, 2004) 16
10. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. (Grove Press, 1954) Chap. ii, 43
11. Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) Introduction, ix

Tips on Arguing: Primary and Secondary Sources

When you’re conducting research for an essay, a debate, or a report, you will often come across multiple sources of information about the same event or topic. How can you tell which of these to use?

One of the most tried-and-true methods for “ranking” information is to distinguish between primary and secondary sources.

A guide to research published by the University of Maryland says that primary sources “are from the time period involved and have not been filtered through interpretation or evaluation. Primary sources are original materials on which other research is based.”

Examples of primary sources include things like eyewitness accounts, photographs, newspaper articles from the time and place you’re researching, and physical objects (bones, pottery, coins, and so forth).

Primary sources are considered the gold standard in all academic research, as well as in journalism. The reason is simple: if you get your facts second-hand, you have no way to be sure that they’re accurate.

Secondary sources do have uses, though. Encyclopedias like Wikipedia are considered secondary sources; they pull information together from primary sources to give an overview of a topic. In this way, secondary sources can help someone to learn the basics of a new subject.

These kinds of sources are also great places to get commentary and analysis, because they often draw from multiple viewpoints or discoveries and make connections between ideas.

The quality of a secondary source can be tough to judge, which is why citations are so vital. If there are references, then the reader can go back and look at the primary sources that were used to find out whether or not the secondary source is accurate.

A simple example is Wikipedia’s entryfor “primary source.” The first sentence of the entry says, “Primary source is a term used in a number of disciplines to describe source material that is closest to the person, information, period, or idea being studied.” After that, there appear two citations: one links to the University of Maryland’s definition. You can go to the original definition, and see that although Wikipedia’s wording is slightly different, the idea is accurate. You can be confident in this case that Wikipedia didn’t just make it up or leave out important information.

As the entry goes on, it offers more citations – 31 in all, plus links to other outside sources, similar entries, and so on. This robust suite of references is what makes Wikipedia a valuable tool, because you can find hundreds of primary sources collected in one place.

Teachers have probably warned you against citing Wikipedia. They’re right to do so, but not because Wikipedia is deceitful or inaccurate (it does occasionally make mistakes, but so does everyone). The reason you shouldn’t cite it is that it is academically lazy not to read the primary sources for yourself.

Sunrise on the Housatonic

The sun rises over the opposite banks of the Housatonic River from the Stratford boat launch as clouds roll across the sky, refracting the light. The reflection turns the waters a purplish hue, streaked by birds plying the river in the distance. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Undermining Journalism

How the Media's Attempt to Adapt Could Kill it Instead

The heart of the New Haven Register's newsroom remains a place of active collaboration, for now. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

CNN laid off approximately 50 editors, librarians and photojournalists in a surprise announcement on Nov. 11 as part of a three-year restructuring effort seeking to bring the company in line with changes in “technology and workflow.”

“Technology investments in our newsrooms now allow more desk-top editing and publishing for broadcast and online,” Jack Womack, the company's SVP of domestic news operations, wrote in a note to staff explaining the layoffs. “This evolution allows more people in more places to edit and publish than ever before.”

Womack continued that CNN management had considered the impact of user-generated content, social media and CNN iReporters (who create content based on prompts that the news agency provides) as part of the assessment.

CNN's layoffs are hardly shocking. They are only the latest in a decade-long series of changes to the American media landscape that have squeezed professional journalists into smaller and smaller corners. The closing of foreign bureaus, the shift to 24-hour online news cycles, and the increased reliance on “citizen journalists”: these are all symptoms of a systemic problem with the structure of news gathering and reporting.

The near-consensus is that under the current business model, the expense of producing news is too high to be sustainable. The solution for many agencies has been to trim - or sometimes gut - the newsroom while filling the gap with content created by nonprofessionals.

In that context, CNN's move to outsource its news function to unpaid users makes a certain sense. Video and audio recording technologies are now prolific and familiar to millions of people. Although the production quality of a video shot on an iPhone may not be polished enough for an advertiser's needs, they are perfectly suited for the two-minute throwaway story that a cable news agency can use to keep itself fresh on a slow day. Moreover, it is cheaper and faster than sending a reporter out into the field to cover an event that may be over by the time she or he arrives.

The layoffs prompted a satirical reaction from “The Colbert Report” host Stephen Colbert, who pointed out that CNN iReporters do not get paid.

“They get something even better: badges. Which I assume are redeemable for food and rent,” he said. He went on to promote his own user-generated video feature, which included footage of a colonoscopy, a goat, and a man waiting for a bus.

Colbert's comedic commentary revealed a darker side to this kind of corner-cutting. Volunteers, as eager as they may be, have different incentives guiding them, some of which may be suspect. Even those who mean well often lack the legal, ethical and technical knowledge of paid professionals. And with fewer trained reporters and editors responsible for curating content that they have not generated themselves, the depth, accuracy, and credibility of news can more easily be undermined.

The danger in cutting corners is that it can undercut the very relevance of journalism altogether.

The Shrinking Newsroom

Al Santangelo, news editor at the New Haven Register, has witnessed first-hand the slow collapse of the traditional newsroom.

Half of the offices of the Register are empty, like miniature ghost towns built out of cubicles. The business department is gone. The former design office is an empty room. The award-winning sports department used to stretch across one end of the newsroom, but now consists of four desks and a television.

Santangelo says that the newspaper makes a profit of millions of dollars each year. Yet it could still face further consolidation. There is talk of ditching the newsroom. Reporters would file stories remotely. Instead of printing the paper in-house, production of the actual paper would be outsourced to another location.

His workplace is being stripped in part because the paper's parent, the Journal Register Company, filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Two years later, the Journal Register Company is trying to rebuild its profitability under what CEO John Paton, who took over after the bankruptcy, calls a “digital first, print last” model.

When the Register was under family ownership, which lasted until the 1980's, the amount of money his paper makes would have seemed profitable. As part of a conglomerate driven by shareholder interests, however, the question shifts from one of absolute profitability to whether those profits are rising or falling. It also matters less how an individual publication is doing; profitability for the company is determined by the sum of its parts. In the The Journal Register Company's case, that's more than 350 multi-platform products in 992 communities.

“Not all of those publications make money,” says Santangelo. “Unfortunately, the ones that do end up subsidizing the others.”

The Journal Register Company released a chart Nov. 28 with its vision for the reorganization of the New Haven Register. It's not all bad news: a dedicated investigative reporting team will be created, and several dedicated beats are being added.

Much of the reorganization, though, is reminiscent of the shift that CNN and other news agencies have taken. It calls for aggregation of statewide content, linking out to other content providers, audience-contributed content, and partnerships with local outlets.

It is not likely that any of these steps will lead to much hiring. The investigative and beat reporting teams will be made up of long-standing employees who used to serve other functions in the newsroom, according to the Journal Register's press release.

For instance, the Register's former Business Editor, Cara Baruzzi, will be shifted to head up a new “breaking news team.” On top of covering the area's news, this team will also have responsibility for delivering “a Connecticut-wide curated breaking news report by linking out to other information sources – including The New Haven Independent, members of The Register’s Community Media Lab and sources traditionally viewed as competitors.”

The idea behind sharing content from competitors, says Santangelo, is to create a one-stop shop for the online reader, who would no longer have to jump around from source to source to find out what is going on in the state.

Santangelo is skeptical about the wisdom of that approach, however. He freely admits that such a sharing scheme allows other organizations to have the exact same breadth of content on their own sites. When asked what would prevent people from going to any of those other sources, he shrugs.

“Nothing. There's no loyalty on the Internet,” he says.

Just around the corner from the bustling newsroom at the New Haven Register, emptied cubicles sit in darkness. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Duplication and Verification

The practice of sharing news stories began long before the Internet. The Associated Press wire service is, in essence, a mechanism to allow papers to share news. It has become a staple of the newspaper industry because individual papers rarely have the resources to send reporters to faraway sites to cover every major breaking story.

The AP saves news agencies costs that might otherwise be prohibitive, and this is the key to its long-term success. However, it and other sharing schemes open news agencies to a potential worry: they cannot independently verify the content that they receive.

This trade-off was not much of a problem for newspapers with a local focus through most of the twentieth century. Many communities had multiple papers competing for the same audience, and they did not share with one another. This competition led to incentives for each paper to protect its reputation by being both fair and accurate. The wire services were mainly reserved for stories outside of the paper's coverage area.

The culture began to shift toward the end of the century. Cable news channels that ran 24 hours a day had more space to fill than they could with the amount of content they could afford to produce. Media mergers turned former competitors into colleagues and changed the profit motive.

Then the Internet put the pace of demand for continuous updates into high gear. For large media conglomerates, it simply made no business sense to send three or four reporters to cover the same story when one could run it across multiple platforms.

What makes business sense, though, is based on a monthly or yearly calculation often made by people who live out of state (or out of the country). The reputations of the old journalistic institutions were built on presumptions that they were integral to the communities in which they existed and would be around for decades to come.

In that old world, the unique observational capacities, background knowledge, and community ties of each reporter were valuable commodities. If a reporter from newspaper A wrote about the same event as a reporter from newspaper B, each paper could tout the different creative angle that its reporter would bring to bear on the story. The reader could compare different versions and learn things from one story that the other might miss.

More importantly, the reader could compare the facts in each story. If there was a contradiction, it would hurt the reputation of the paper that failed to properly vet its product. This created an incentive for both parties to be honest and careful about what they published.

In the brave new world of digital media, these incentives have largely disappeared. The encouragement of sharing to prevent story duplication leads news organizations to cite one another as a stand-in for independent verification, which can exacerbate the spread of misinformation.

This game of “telephone” blew up in the face of media professionals in June, when an unverified tip from police about a mass grave in Liberty County, Texas produced a rash of reporting by major media outlets the world over. The mass grave did not exist.

In an investigation by WNYC’s On the Media, it was discovered that the original story came from KPRC, Houston's Channel 2. Liberty County police called the station about a tip they had received from a psychic. They were planning to check it out. Someone in the newsroom posted to Twitter the following message: “Dozens of bodies have been found in Liberty County. Join us for KPRC at 5 p.m. for the latest information."

The Twitter post did not mention a source. Nor was it vetted; the news team had not yet visited the supposed grave site to verify the information.

From Twitter, Reuters picked up the story, citing KPRC as the source. The New York Times cited Reuters as its source. London’s The Guardian ran the Reuters version as well. SkyNews, the BBC and others also passed it around.

One newspaper that did not rely on the media’s rumor mill was the Houston Chronicle, which never said that the story was anything more than an unconfirmed report.

“I don't know how anyone in their right mind or with an iota of professionalism in their veins could have reported such a thing, absent any confirmation from anybody,” said Chronicle reporter Mike Tolson in an interview with OTM host Bob Garfield.

If the worldwide reporting debacle is any indication, Tolson and his colleagues represent a dying breed. The pressures are strong to get a story out now, without first placing a call to a local source for confirmation or sending someone down to check things out.

Many long-time reporters are all too aware of how the change of pace hampers their ability to vet stories. Hartford Courant reporter Christine Dempsey, who has been in the business for 25 years, said in a recent panel discussion with journalism students at the University of New Haven that she often feels uncomfortable with the quality of her fact-checking these days.

She said she had not made any major blunders she knew of. But, she added, “I’ve felt like I was walking a tightrope sometimes.”

Message Manipulation

Dempsey has a legitimate cause for concern. Time and resources are becoming increasingly scarce for smaller teams of editors and reporters, even as the amount of information they have to contend with is growing at an exponential rate.

At its heart, journalism is about selecting the most relevant information. The flipside is that, by necessity, some information is discarded or ignored.

Journalists have developed a number of ethical standards and rules of thumb to make the selection process easier. The system is not perfect, of course. The “equal time” rule may give people on different sides of a conflict a chance to have their views aired, but it can also create a perception of false balance. By giving the same space to mainstream and fringe views, the audience may come away with the perception that both views have similar factual weight or popular support.

These heuristic issues are troublesome, and journalists spend a lot of time debating about how best to resolve them. All of the possible solutions involve spending more time on stories.

Meanwhile, the newsroom is moving in the opposite direction. It is being facilitated in this process by individuals and groups with their own agendas who submit material designed to fit the mold of news production.

Public relations offices are notorious for writing stories “for” reporters, even though it violates the ethical standards of traditional journalism to reprint a press release verbatim. But overtaxed journalists can easily be lulled into believing that getting a slanted story out is better than not producing anything.

The UK charity Media Standards Trust developed a website called Churnalism.com in 2011 to combat the practice of reprinting press releases. Its “churn engine” allows readers to paste stories and find out how much of them are grafted from press releases.

Independent filmaker Chris Atkins developed some fake news releases of his own and sent them out to the press after speaking with Martin Moore, director of the trust. One story explained a new "chastity garter" that contained a microchip that would send text messages to a woman's partner if she was cheating on him or her. The story became “most read” on the website of the Daily Mail, and made headlines across the US and the UK before the hoax was revealed.

Slanted reporting need not come from outside sources. In the US, FOX News and MSNBC are well-known as mouthpieces for the political right and left, respectively. Though their audiences are smaller than the controversies that surround them, a growing proportion of the population turns to them for news that fits their views. The Internet is also a great boon for the echo chamber, in which people can seek information that confirms their preconceived notions without having their biases challenged.

Media fragmentation has led to a further erosion of an adherence to facts or fairness. The widespread adoption of these ideologically-driven approaches to reporting is relatively new, and determining their influence is a daunting task. Older people still overwhelmingly consume middle-of-the-road media from network television and newspapers. They may not agree with everything printed in their local papers, but they are used to formats that stress accuracy over assertion.

Veteran journalists like Dempsey and Santangelo are also loathe to violate the news gathering values they were taught. For the moment, they act as a bulwark against a tide of editorializing.

New Normal?

What about younger people, many of whom are growing up in a world where selective exposure is the norm? Can they distinguish between objectivity and spin, and do they care?

The relative prosperity of left- and right-leaning blogs and online news sites is one discouraging indication of a trend toward greater polarization. The Huffington Post is unabashedly liberal, while Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe have made their marks by promoting a conservative agenda.

Though politically partisan media has always been lurking on the edges of society, its new-found prominence has been accompanied by a remarkable willingness to dispense with standards of objectivity for the sake of rocking the proverbial boat. O'Keefe in 2009 sparked a national debate over what it means to be a journalist when he released a video purporting to show him and college student Hannah Giles getting advice from workers at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now devising ways to hide sex trafficking and and avoid taxes.

The corruption that O'Keefe and Giles uncovered may have been real. However, their methods of “news gathering” were disingenuous, unethical, and broke laws in several states.

Attorneys general in California and Massachusetts, the District Attorney's office in Brooklyn, and the US Government Accountability Office all conducted investigations into ACORN's actions. In the process, they reviewed the unedited versions of O'Keefe's and Giles's videos. In every case, they found the videos to be heavily doctored and thus absolved ACORNof any wrongdoing.

The truth did not matter to O'Keefe or Giles. They were out to attack ACORN for what they perceived to be a left-wing agenda.. They succeeded in devastating the organization, causing it to file for Chapter 7 liquidation in 2010. Most of its offices were closed.

O'Keefe was the mastermind behind the project, and he convinced Giles to pursue it with him to further her own career. When the story became a national sensation, she appeared on FOX News's “The O'Reilly Factor,” where host Bill O'Reilly called her an “undercover reporter.” He characterized ACORN's lawsuit against Giles as a “revenge play,” without ever offering the agency's rationale for its actions.

During the interview, a clearly excited Giles said she had always “wanted to be an investigative journalist.” Now, with the nationally recognized figure of O'Reilly validating her actions, she was surely convinced she had done what every good reporter should in the pursuit of a story.

And perhaps, with the new norm allowing newsmakers to violate every journalistic ethic, she will find a place to thrive. Such a norm would benefit the business owners, who know that sex and scandal pad the profit margins, regardless of how it's created. It would benefit public relations firms, because they can more easily infiltrate a media culture that doesn't concern itself with telling the whole story. It would benefit political ideologues, who prefer propoganda to balance.

The only question, then, will be: who will serve the public once the old guard dies off?

Greenhouse Gases Reach All-Time High

This NASA image shows the nearly ice-free McClure Straight in northern route of the Northwest Passage in August 2010. The famed passage was almost completely clear, with the exception of a band of ice in the straight (far left).
Image: NASA/GSFC/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team. Some rights reserved.

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide reached an all-time high of 389 parts per million in 2010 and rose at a faster pace than in previous years, according to a report issued Nov. 21 by the World Meteorological Organization, the U.N.’s weather agency.

The WMO's Greenhouse Gas Bulletin says that global CO2 levels are now 39 percent higher than they were at the start of the industrial revolution in 1750, when levels were at approximately 280 ppm. Those concentrations had remained relatively stable for 10 thousand years previously, according to climate researchers.

Carbon dioxide levels rose at a rate of 2.3 ppm between 2009 and 2010. That was faster than the average rate during the previous decade of about 2.0 ppm per year, and a significant acceleration compared to the average during the 1990s, when concentrations rose about 1.5 ppm per year.

The annual WMO report assessed the burdens and rates of several other greenhouse gases that are released by human activity, including methane and nitrous oxide. Methane is considered the second-most potent contributor to global warming. It increased 158 percent since 1750, from 700 parts per billion to 1808 ppb in 2010. Nitrous oxide increased 20 percent over the same period, from 270 ppb to 323.2 ppb.

“The three primary greenhouse gases are not only closely linked to anthropogenic activities, but they also have strong interactions with the biosphere and the oceans,” the report said.

WMO Deputy Secretary-General Jeremiah Lengoasa said in an interview with the Associated Press that although human emissions of greenhouse gases are directly related to increasing temperatures, there is a time lag between the two.

“With this picture in mind, even if emissions were stopped overnight globally, the atmospheric concentrations would continue for decades because of the long lifetime of these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," he said.

At least a small amount of that carbon will not be locked back into the earth for hundreds of thousands of years.

The WMO report comes on the heels of a summary report on risk assessment issued Nov. 18 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned that, under the groups “high emissions scenario,” the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world.

“Likewise, heavy precipitation will occur more often, and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their number will likely remain constant or decrease,” said Thomas Stocker, Co-chair of Working Group I in the summary.

Another study released in the Nov. 24 issue of the journal Nature provided the first evidence that the duration and magnitude of the current decline in Arcitic sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years. Previously, the extent of ice loss was only known for last four to five decades, and questions remained about how much loss was due to natural variability. The researchers used land-based core samples to develop climate proxies so they could estimate the extent of the ice over a much longer period. The results suggest that Arctic ice loss is indeed being driven by manmade warming.

It remains to be seen whether the slew of new studies will make a difference in the stalled international negotiations to develop a comprehensive strategy to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires next year. Governments begin meeting for the seventeenth meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on Tuesday in Durban, South Africa.

Countries met in Copenhagen in 2009 and again in 2010 in Cancún, Mexico to hammer out a new agreement, but made little progress toward a comprehensive treaty anything like Kyoto. The U.S., by far the highest per-capita emitter in the world, was the only nation out of 192 members never to ratify the treaty.

The Birds

A humongous flock of birds made a racket in the trees at the edge of Ash Creek in Fairfield on a cloudy afternoon this week.

When my wife and I heard the clamor from our kitchen, we went to the backyard to see what was happening. There we witnessed hundreds of birds perched on practically every branch of three or four trees, chattering with one another.

The chirping lasted for almost half an hour. Then, as suddenly as they had arrived, the flock took flight in near-unison, leaving only silence in their wake.

You can listen to a portion of the chirping and the moment of flight by clicking on the player below.

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Photographs by Valeria Garrido-Bisceglia.

Important Books: The Pilgrim’s Progress

Engraving from The Pilgrim's Progress, published in London, 1778. 

Pilgrim enters the wicket gate, opened by Good-Will. Public domain image.

John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century book is the allegorical tale of Christian, a humble pilgrim, on his journey from the town of Destruction to the Coelestial City, where God resides. In its day, this classic sold more copies than any other book except the Bible. It was particularly popular among the settlers of the colonies in New England, who commonly referred to themselves as "pilgrims."

Bunyan's book was meant to be a defense of his religious beliefs, and was written for the most part while he was in prison for refusing to conform to the mandated Anglican practices of the time. His Calvinist/Lutheran brand of religiosity assumed that it was the privilege of an elect group to enter into God's court - a group primarily composed of the poor and oppressed.

Many of his characters were meant to represent other sects of Christianity. He took frequent jabs at the Quakers and the Catholics. Over and over, The Pilgrim's Progress refutes the values of the elite culture of Bunyan's time, which was swiftly moving towards the naturalistic/materialist worldview that put England in a prime position for the Industrial Revolution.

The first book, which follows Christian exclusively, was so popular that imitations and fake sequels sprang up all over. There were some criticisms, though, concerning Christian's leaving his family behind (there were many women in Bunyan's congregation), as well as the esoteric nature of some of the symbolism used. In response to all these pressures, Bunyan wrote a second part, wherein Christiana and Christian's four children traverse the Way. This volume is typically included along with the first book in modern printings.

The second part attempts to explain the meanings behind Christian's travails while demonstrating the roles that women, children and others could play according to Bunyan’s theology. It suffers from certain faults, particularly in its allegorical style, which becomes strained and even nonsensical at times. Nevertheless, the two tracts are integral to one another. The first is captivating, and the second is necessary.