In a small study, researchers trained third, fourth and fifth graders to use literary techniques such as perspective shifting, counter-factual (what if) thinking and causal (why) thinking to improve creativity in dealing with difficulties.

The techniques helped kids come up with new, creative and practical ways to solve problems, said Angus Fletcher, lead author of the study and a professor of English at The Ohio State University and member of the university’s Project Narrative.

“There are concerns about the resiliency of American children in the wake of COVID-19 and this sense that many kids are having a hard time in school and in life,” Fletcher said.

“Creativity training can help kids come up with a second plan when things aren’t working out for them.”

The study was published recently in the Journal of Creativity.

Fletcher said the program used to help kids in this study was similar to one he and his colleagues used successfully with the U.S. Army – and which resulted in Fletcher receiving the Public Service Commendation Medal, the fourth-highest public service decoration that the Army can bestow upon a civilian.

The researchers did two separate studies involving students attending a summer camp in a Columbus suburb.

In one study, 32 students were split into two groups.  In the control condition, the children were told to identify a special quality about themselves. They were told this was their special power that could help them solve any problem.

In the creative condition, the students were told to think of a friend who did something special and think of them as their “creative friend” who could help them solve any problem. This type of creativity training is called perspective-shifting, in which the kids look at a problem through the eyes of someone else.

“When you ask people to shift their perspective and imagine receiving advice from a friend, you get a lot more creative and effective solutions to problems than just trying to solve the problem yourself,” Fletcher said.

And that’s what the study found. In one part of the study, teachers identified a problem that was challenging for their students – for example, not being able to go to a friend’s birthday party because you’re going to be out of town with your parents.

Students also thought about a challenging problem in their own lives.  Some problems that were mentioned included “my brother has a communication disorder,” “my dad has to be away for two months” and “my sister bullies me.”

Results showed that without the perspective-shift training, fewer than half of the students were able to provide a solution to the age-typical problems and almost none were able to provide a solution to their own problems.

But 94% of those who were trained in perspective-shifting provided a solution to both.

Judges (who were trained teachers) also rated the children’s solutions on creativity, as assessed by how surprising or unique the solutions were.

With the intervention, the average creativity score was 6.44 out of 10 (moderate creativity) compared to 3.05 (low creativity) for those who did not receive the perspective-shifting intervention.

These results showed how creativity training could boost children’s sense of self-efficacy – the belief that they had some control and power over their own lives, Fletcher said.

When considering their own problems, most of the children who received the intervention came up with a potential solution. But 15 of 16 children in the control group essentially gave up, Fletcher said.  They either said they didn’t know how to fix their problem, or displayed some version of magical thinking, such as saying they could become a superhero.

A second longitudinal study involving 28 students in the same camp was designed to test the effects of a five-day, 10-hour narrative creativity curriculum on creativity, self-efficacy and resilience.

In addition to perspective-shifting, the students were also trained in other narrative creativity techniques, such as causal thinking, Fletcher said.

“If children can’t solve a problem, we train them to back up and think about what they are trying to accomplish – the why problem,” Fletcher said.

“Step back and say why does this matter? We often find that if you think more broadly about what you are trying to accomplish, and why it is so important, then you can see there are other ways of getting what you want.”

At the end of the curriculum, the students were presented with age-typical problems similar to the first study and also examined one of their own problems.

In order to test resilience, the researchers provided an unexpected challenge when the children presented their proposed solution to their problems: they told the kids it wouldn’t work. 

Results showed that every student who took the five-day curriculum was able to provide a second solution to both the age-typical and personal problems.

“With this training, the children were unfazed by being told their first solution didn’t work. They came up with a second plan, which is a good test of resilience,” Fletcher said.

And the second solution to the problems averaged higher creativity scores from the judges – 7.5, which indicated moderate to high creativity, compared to 5.45 for their first solution.

Second solutions also scored higher on utility, which is how likely they are to succeed in the real world.

Fletcher said this study provides a hopeful message: There are things we can do to help children cope with their problems.

“We are at this moment in our society where our kids need help. We found that before this training, kids had this propensity to just give up when faced with problems. That could lead them to get angry, or embarrassed that they can’t solve their problems, or look for adults to offer solutions.”

What narrative creativity training can do is teach children there are ways to approach real-life problems that don’t have easy answers, he said.

Fletcher said that kids can learn creativity through the arts, such as literature and theater, if they are done the right way. Rather than just asking students to analyze works of art, teachers can have students imagine themselves as different characters, explore new perspectives and engage in why and what-if thinking.

“The ability to use this type of thinking can’t be assessed via standardized tests.  But it is still very important and can help children use and grow their creativity to solve real-world challenges,” he said.

Fletcher conducted the study with Ohio State colleagues Patricia Enciso, a professor of literature for children and young adults in the College of Education and Human Ecology, and Mike Benveniste, also of Project Narrative.

“Historians generally don’t get these big grants,” she said. “It really was a thrill.”

Newell’s award was part of nearly $3 million in grants from the Mellon Foundation announced last month. Among them was a $1.9 million award to the Department of African American and African Studies.

The remainder supports Newell’s research on the civic engagement and voting rights of African Americans and Native Americans from 1780 to 1920 and a second project offering educational pathways for incarcerated students at the Ohio Reformatory for Women co-led by Mary Thomas, associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Tiyi Morris, associate professor in the Department of African American and African Studies.

Newell will use the funds to create a history undergraduate research lab, something common in the sciences but much less so in the humanities.

“Students want lab experience. They want research experience,” Newell said. “The idea of working on collaborative original research at a high level, we grabbed that from the sciences. Historians also do research that is game-changing, so let’s use that concept, too.”

Undergraduate students will work with Newell and three other scholars who received their doctorates from Ohio State – Noël Voltz, John Bickers, and Deondre Smiles – to create biographies of African American and Native American activists who worked to secure or maintain civil rights before the modern Civil Rights movement in the United States.

“Battles for voting rights, battles for other civil rights, battles for Indigenous sovereignty, these are very relevant stories for today,” Newell said. “Many of the issues we talk about from the past, in terms of restrictions to the exercise of citizenship, are still being engaged today.”

This research model presents a special opportunity for students, Newell said. The subjects of the biographies are not well-known – so digging will be necessary.

“You’re a detective,” she said. “You are looking through material to make connections and figure out what was going on, figure out how one event moves on to the next. It’s surprising that some of these changes, these laws, go back to a single person’s petition. We want to teach students and get them excited about the art of historical detection and storytelling.”

After the lab’s first year, Newell hopes to invite students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities and tribal colleges to participate. If the lab is successful, she believes other institutions will follow Ohio State.

“I think the main reason we got the grant is this undergraduate lab,” she said. “I hope it will outlive the project and continue to be part of the history department here, and that other universities will see this model and adopt it.”

The other Mellon grant, of $480,000, will support the Liberation at the Margins Collective (LAM), a group composed of Ohio State faculty, staff and students and incarcerated people at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW).

LAM is part of a larger project led by Thomas and Morris, the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project (OPEEP), which began in 2019. The project, which is available across Ohio State’s multiple campuses, seeks to expand prison-based education.

Classes are currently taught at ORW, Southeastern Correctional Institution and Richland Correctional Institution. Ohio State faculty and students travel to their assigned prison for classes on-site. Each class is a mix of incarcerated and non-incarcerated individuals.

OPEEP has five areas of focus, said Morris: individual courses, the embedded degree program (which will allow incarcerated people at ORW to earn a degree while in prison), work on Ohio State’s campuses around justice-involved individuals, re-entry after incarceration, and research. 

“The LAM Collective fits under the embedded-degree program,” Morris said. “We want to do collaborative research with [incarcerated students]. We want to build and develop their research skills, both so they can support the research that Mary and I are doing, and so they can produce individual research projects.

“We also hope they will then serve as ambassadors and recruiters and build an internal leadership cohort in support of the embedded degree at ORW,” Morris added.

Ohio State is the only Big Ten school that teaches at women’s prisons, Thomas said.

“We’re members of the Big Ten Consortium for Higher Education in Prison. There are more men or people who identify as men in prison, but I don’t believe that number of programs is proportional. It’s a very small number.”

The grant money provides Thomas and Morris the resources they need to treat OPEEP as part of their current jobs, instead of a much-beloved side project.

“[Receiving these funds] is affirming,” Morris said. “You know you’re doing good work.”

“We’ve been doing really lonely work for the last year to build the program,” Thomas added. “Now we’re able to have the affirmation and the time to actually be able to put in the work.”

Demand for OPEEP programming has only grown, both professors agreed. The Mellon funds will allow for further expansion of course offerings.

“There’s a real hunger for a wide variety of courses to be offered,” Thomas said. “Being able to offer some science classes, in addition to humanities, is one of our goals.

“[Incarcerated individuals] don’t get a lot of choice, whether it’s what they’re able to eat or the programming they’re involved in,” she added. “So, having some course choices can be pretty impactful.”

The event was held Oct. 28 at the Ohio Union and presented by the College of Arts and Sciences’ Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies.

The seminar honors a longtime supporter of manuscript studies at Ohio State and the namesake of the university’s new Virginia Brown Endowed Chair in Latin Palaeography, said Frank Coulson, Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of Classics.

“All of our speakers, like many of us here in the room, have a personal connection to and memories of Virginia Brown, whose legacy we are commemorating today,” Coulson said.

Brown was a senior fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto from 1970 to her death from pancreatic cancer in 2009. She mentored Ohio State scholars and others who study ancient texts around the world and was an innovator in fragmentology – the study of the remaining fragments of manuscripts, said keynote speaker Anna Grotans.

“There are fragments of manuscripts around the world that need to be pieced together very carefully,” said Grotans, associate professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Ohio State. “I can see Virginia smile that the era of fragmentology is approaching, and very quickly.”

Modern technology can facilitate the scanning of ancient texts into digitized formats, ensuring that the texts endure for generations to come and making them accessible for analysis by scholars in various parts of the world, Grotans said.

“Thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls were made available online in 2014,” thus enabling scholars who previously had little to no access to the ancient Hebrew artifacts to contribute to their study, she said.

Luisa Nardini, a University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music professor who describes herself as a Virginia Brown mentee, said the marriage of antiquity and today’s technology can help contemporary society learn from the past.  

“Digitization would certainly facilitate more discoveries,” Nardini said. “We could at least attempt at indexing (ancient manuscripts) for the campus database.”

Marjorie Curry Woods, University of Texas at Austin professor emerita, said providing wider access to ancient manuscripts will enable undergraduate students to understand the relevance of studying historical documents.  

“You can read the complex things if you approach them slowly and carefully and you read them more than once,” she said. “I think that there’s a way that we can be encouraged to use more of our complex material that we look at as scholars and we think students don’t have access to or couldn’t read … but they often can. And they feel like they’ve actually accomplished something.”

“When we think about civil rights goals, we often think about somebody like Jackie Robinson and him breaking into the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945 and breaking the color barrier, de-segregating or integrating major league sports. … That is the beginning of something,” said Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at Ohio State. “It’s not the end.”

Jeffries’ presentation, “No Struggle, No Progress: Social Justice Organizing in the 21st Century,” kicked off the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’s Spring 2022 Biweekly Forum Series. The online forums are free to attend and begin at 11 a.m. every other Thursday.

The movements led by Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. centered on basic human rights, transcending the push for the abolition of slavery in the 1800s and the struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s, Jeffries said.

“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says anything about housing, nothing in the Constitution that says anything about healthcare, but these were also fundamental goals of movement activists. And that human rights component sadly gets lost when we only talk about civil rights,” he said. “It’s really important not only to reframe and rethink what it is that Black folks were fighting for, but to think about it in broader terminology.” 

Human rights movements consist of both mobilizing and organizing strategies, Jeffries said. Mobilizing often takes the form of high-profile events such as the 1963 March on Washington and the social justice protests that occurred throughout the summer of 2020. Organizing involves long-term strategies that seldom make headlines, such as civil rights activists’ grassroots outreach efforts, he said.

“What they were doing was knocking on doors, they were canvassing, they were holding mass meetings,” he said. “They were talking to people, asking them what they wanted and what did they need, and seeing how they can connect what (citizens) articulated as their needs and wants with the resources and expertise that they were able to bring to the table as organizers.”

Rather than a specific goal, human rights movements encompass a broad spectrum of issues that affect communities’ overall quality of life, Jeffries said.

“The Kirwan Institute has done some wonderful work with this issue of life expectancy,” he said. “For a person born in the ZIP code that is the Near East Side (of Columbus), which means that this person is likely African American, why is their life expectancy 61 to 64 years? While a person born or living just 10 miles away in Upper Arlington, which is 95% white, why is their life expectancy 81 to 85? It’s a 20-year difference.”

The stark contrast in the life expectancy of residents living in neighboring communities illustrates the inequities that human rights movements past and present have attempted to remedy, Jeffries said.

“It has everything to do, not with just that moment in which you’re tabulating statistics, but this longer history of the way in which we have segregated resources,” he said, “the way in which we have limited resources and access to the things that a person needs in life in order to live a full, healthy and long life.”

Registration and more information for upcoming forums. 

Analyzing modern problems through the lens of history was the topic of the Arts and Humanities Inaugural Lecture: Elizabeth Hewitt and Greg Anderson, held virtually and in-person at the Faculty Club on Oct. 26 by the College of Arts and Sciences. Professors Hewitt and Anderson said their research into early American literature and ancient civilizations provides a historical context to view economics, politics and many other aspects of contemporary life.

An English professor, Hewitt focuses her research and writing on pre-1900 American literature. Her latest book, “Explaining the Economy in the Early United States,” offers analyses of seminal economic texts of the 18th century, including Alexander Hamilton’s major economic policy reports.

Hamilton is considered one of the nation’s “founding fathers,” having served as the first United States treasury secretary. Hamilton is also one of the co-authors, along with James Madison and John Jay, of The Federalist Papers, a collection of articles and essays published in 1787 and 1788 to promote the ratification of the United States Constitution.

The writings of Hamilton and other historical figures can shed light on current economic trends, Hewitt said.

“We know that Hamilton laid out the major structures of our contemporary economic thought,” she said. “I felt as if Hamilton’s mode of explanation was, in fact, much more capable of allowing me to understand the economic system that was emerging at that time.”

Hewitt said she began writing “Explaining the Economy in the Early United States” during the Great Recession of 2008, and studying Hamilton’s writings provided insight into the historic factors that led to the 21st century global financial collapse.

“Part of what brought me to Hamilton was thinking about the economic crisis and trying to make sense of how we got to that place,” she said. “For me, it was so illuminating.”

Hamilton has been in the spotlight in recent years, thanks to the phenomenal success of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning musical of the same name. The production debuted on Broadway in 2015 and continues to play the Great White Way and tour the world. The hip-hop take on Hamilton’s contributions to history is credited with sparking renewed interest in American history and the founding of the U.S. democracy.

The newfound popularity of Hamilton – the man – is curious, considering that when Hewitt began writing her book, she found scant previous research by colleagues in her field about Hamilton’s work.

“You don’t find Hamilton in any anthologies,” she said. “Usually you find federalism blogs – that’s the extent of Hamilton.”

A history professor, Anderson specializes in ancient Greek societies, historical thought and critical theory. The Greek civilization of antiquity offers lessons on everything from how modern economies came into existence to how democracies function, he said.

“When we engage in practices of democracy, of liberal economy, knowledge practices on these campuses, what we’re doing is enacting this (ancient Greek) world, we’re making it, we’re living it, realizing it,” he said. “It is materialized as the world as we know it.”

The caveat, Anderson added, is that ancient civilizations must be analyzed with historical accuracy rather than modern terminology.

“The evidence that you’re going to be looking at from the past will actually be talking about it in their terms rather than in ours,” he said. “You’re not going to find the equivalent of a term for ‘economy’ or ‘private’ or ‘public’ or ‘secular’ or ‘religion’ or ‘state’ or ‘society’ in Greek language – you’re not. People may think there are rough approximations, but they’re rough.”

Anderson’s most recent book, “The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History,” uses ancient Athens as a case study for how to draw lessons from history.

“We have to try to make sense of these past experiences on their own terms,” he said, “which ultimately means we have to end up thinking of them as being distinct worlds of experience that are somewhat different from our own.”

The Inaugural Lecture series celebrates Arts and Humanities faculty who have been promoted to the rank of full professor.

But her story doesn’t stop there – in some ways, a whole new life, overshadowed by trauma, has only just begun, Ohio State University graduate student Morgan Podraza posits in an article published in the journal Horror Studies.

Consider actor Jamie Lee Curtis’ depiction of Laurie Strode in the Halloween film released in 2018, 40 years after her friends were murdered by Michael Myers on Halloween night. In that original film, she survived his attacks by wielding a knitting needle, a coat hanger and a knife that he dropped.

The grownup Strode lives an isolated life in a fortress in the woods, always on the lookout for the looming threat of Myers’ return. Earlier in her adult life, viewers learn, her paranoia had rendered her an unfit mother in the eyes of authorities and her daughter was taken away.

In the article, Podraza, a PhD student in English, examines the representation of Strode’s trauma in the 2018 Halloween sequel to the 1978 original, and how the depiction of her struggle after survival – how she has been vilified and dismissed, but ultimately proven right – might offer trauma survivors the chance to see a bit of themselves on the big screen.

“The way this film specifically deals with cycles of trauma and their connection to the experiences of survivors was really important to me because I think it is indicative of how we talk about trauma and survivors of trauma even today, and ways that people are spoken about negatively – their trauma is not acknowledged or they’re not given an opportunity for healing,” Podraza said.

“We can use the final girl trope now to reimagine spaces for healing or futures for people with trauma. A survivor’s future will always include memories of that trauma, and it’s important to acknowledge that trauma exists and continues to affect the reality of people who experience it.

“They deserve happy, healthy futures, too. People don’t have to only be defined by the negative parts of this experience.”

Podraza’s scholarship centers on comics and animated film, but as a life-long fan of horror movies, she saw an opportunity to tie her interest in women-centered narratives and narratives of trauma to a favorite genre after the 2018 sequel release, which coincided with the #metoo movement.

When the sequel came out, Curtis herself called attention to the intersection of fiction and reality, telling Variety that she thought women battling their own trauma would be able to relate to Strode’s desperate attempts to convince skeptics that Michael Myers was still a threat: “It feels like a confluence of that frustration and that rise of empowerment has come together in this movie in a beautiful way.” Those promotional interviews resonated with Podraza.

“The scholarship hasn’t looked beyond the final girl’s survival and triumph. The final girl context has always been that she survived and that’s enough. Or she killed the monster and that’s enough. That’s fine, but that’s not how people’s experiences work,” she said. “Trauma is about the effects after the event is over.”

The final girl trope was defined by scholar Carol Clover in the 1992 book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. The Laurie Strode character was central to Clover’s definition of the trope, and while she emphasized that trauma helped characterize the final girl, the analysis stopped short of examining its effects.

Podraza cites scholarship in her article noting that survival of trauma itself is a crisis, that moving forward with life after a traumatizing event is also traumatic. The Laurie Strode character shows how this might look: Her obsession with protecting herself and others is tethered to her survival, and her outlook on life – a life saved by her own hand – remains grim because she’s convinced she is subject to a continuing threat.

An analysis like this isn’t intended to detract from the thrill of watching horror and slasher films, said Podraza, who advises her students to consume media for enjoyment first, and then re-watch or re-read the material with an eye toward asking critical questions.

“It’s perfectly fine to just enjoy media, but it’s always important to be aware of how media is framing experiences, especially experiences of people who are marginalized in any way. Survivors of trauma often are marginalized,” she said. “The danger is to absorb media and never ask questions about it – that means you’re not aware of how it’s structuring your own behaviors and habits.”

The franchise is slated to continue with the release of Halloween Kills in October and, in 2022, Halloween Ends. Based on the closing scene of the 2018 sequel, of Strode’s granddaughter holding a bloody knife that she used to defend herself, Podraza sees potential for a depiction of intergenerational trauma.

“The structure of the franchise implies the cycle will just continue,” she said, “and I am interested in how these concepts will perpetuate.”

Brian Padgett, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, had been working toward his PhD for nearly nine years. On March 20, his journey was set to culminate with his dissertation defense.

Padgett had long-ago purchased a flight from Hawaii, where he currently lives, to Columbus. He had also booked rooms on campus to use for his defense.

But with restrictions on in-person meetings amid the COVID-19 outbreak, Padgett and his defense committee had to get creative.

Rather than postpone his dissertation defense for weeks or possibly longer, Padgett and the committee decided to continue with March 20. He would defend his dissertation remotely from Hawaii as committee members from Columbus to Montana joined him live via Zoom.

It would be the Department of Anthropology’s first Zoom dissertation defense since the campus closure.

“An exponential level of stress ramped up after that,” Padgett said.

First, Padgett and the committee members had to make sure they had the correct technology in place. Per Ohio State rules, the group had to ensure that everyone could be seen and heard at all times.

Padgett, who originally prepared his presentation for an in-person setup, had to learn Zoom’s features to make sure he could still clearly articulate his points. On Thursday, the night before the defense, the committee tested their setup for the next day.

In the end, it all worked out smoothly.

“Our online doctoral dissertation defense was wonderfully smooth and engaging, fully allowing the flexibility for everyone to interact and discuss as though we were in the same room on campus,” said Clark Larsen, Padgett’s advisor and a Distinguished University Professor of anthropology. “Nothing can replace the face-to-face dissertation defense, but this was a very close second.”

Padgett spent much of the last two years writing his 500-page dissertation, “The Bioarchaeology of Violence During the Yayoi Period of Japan.” For the paper, he conducted research in Japan from 2016-17, staying in a tiny dorm room at Kyushu University. Using analysis of Japanese skeletal remains from 2,000 years ago, Padgett wrote about the potential origins, conduct and ramifications of violent conflict in prehistoric Japan.

On March 20, the dissertation defense began at 5 a.m. Hawaiian time (11 a.m. in Columbus).

First up was Padgett’s initial presentation, which lasted 40 minutes. After that, the committee asked questions. Padgett switched Zoom into gallery mode, where he could see everyone’s face simultaneously. At the two-hour mark, the committee held a private video chat, sequestering Padgett in a virtual “room” by himself.

“It was just me looking at a screen of me,” Padgett said. “I put on a timer and started sweating bullets. It took like 10 minutes, really, which isn’t very long, but I was like, ‘What’s taking them so long?  Oh, they hated me. This is it. My life is over.’”

But after those 10 minutes, Larsen popped back onto his screen and congratulated him. Dissertation defended.

It was just after 7 a.m. in Hawaii at that point, and Padgett couldn’t celebrate with his friends in Columbus like he originally hoped. But he poured himself a glass of bourbon he had been saving for just this moment and celebrated with his family instead.

Padgett is now using his Ohio State connections and research as a forensic anthropologist for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) in Pearl Harbor. In that role, he conducts analyses to find remains of fallen American soldiers who went missing in action during 20th-century wars and reunite them with their families.

Padgett, an Army veteran who fought in the First Gulf War as an 18-year-old, has wanted to work for the DPAA since the 1990s.

“Coming to Ohio State paved the way to getting my dream job,” he said.

But then again, the second most read story on the Ohio State News site in 2019 – viewed more than 90,000 times – was one that was published 16 years ago. That’s not a typo. The story first appeared March 7, 2004.

But it gets even stranger when you realize that the story was not about a blockbuster medical discovery or tuition announcement, but a book on European and African history from 1500 to 1800.

It only starts to make some hazy sense when you find out the title of the book: Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800. 

The Ohio State news story on the book is titled “When Europeans were slaves: Research suggests white slavery was much more common than previously believed.”

In the book, now-retired Ohio State University history professor Robert Davis used a unique methodology to estimate that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

A web search of the book and the Ohio State News story shows why their popularity has soared.

In an era of political polarization in America, much of which is related to issues of race, it appears that a portion of the political spectrum often termed the alt-right has produced its own particular take on the book and is sharing the story widely over social media. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center says the alt-right “is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.” 

The alt-right take on the book, in a nutshell: The fact that some white Christians were once held as slaves by black Muslims essentially excuses slavery in America.

This take on his work disturbs Davis, who was surprised when he was told about the recent popularity of the old Ohio State News story. He said that over the years he has regularly received emails and requests for interviews about the book, but he had no idea how much attention his book was receiving – and for what reason.

The early attention for the book was much different.

“Thanks in good part to the original OSU news release, which was picked up by several wire services, there was a rapid and largely enthusiastic response all over the world to my book. Feature articles were run in major newspapers and magazines from Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy all the way to India, Malaysia and Australia. A French translation of the book even received a major prize from the Académie Française,” Davis said.

But even at the beginning, there were hints about what was to come.

“At almost the same time, I started being contacted by various right-wing broadcasters and conservative pundits who believed the book or the news release supported their own take on racial history. Some have specifically used it to back their claims that the slavery suffered by white European Christians somehow lessens or even negates the great historical horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from Africa to the Americas,” he said.

Some on the alt-right have gone so far as to assert that Davis’ findings that white Christians had themselves once been enslaved by black Muslims mean that Americans today need not be concerned about either African American slavery or its aftermath.

One Facebook page discussing Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters makes its message plain: “Never feel guilty about slavery in American again!”

“As time has passed and mainstream interest in my findings unsurprisingly began to fade, the commitment to this racialist interpretation seems to have only intensified, as especially people of the alt-right have taken to using my book – or at least the news release – for their own, unrelated purposes. And while I’d really like to distance myself from such use, or rather misuse, there’s not a lot I can do at this point,” Davis said.

He said that some people have begun taking one of his findings (about the number of Christians enslaved by Muslims) out of context and not really comprehending the whole book.

“I see the book as a kind of highway towards certain historical conclusions, but some people are getting off the first exit that has some information they can use, without seeing where the highway ends up,” he said.

It is telling, Davis said, that his follow-up book – which Ohio State News also wrote about – has not received nearly the attention of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters.

That’s probably because the second book (Holy War and Human Bondage: Tales of Christian-Muslim Slavery in the Early-Modern Mediterranean, published in 2010) spread its focus to include the North African Muslims taken as slaves by European Christians, as well as Protestants and Orthodox Christians enslaved by Catholics.

In that book, Davis estimated that more than 1 million Muslims were enslaved in Europe and 2 million Christians suffered the same fate in North Africa and the Near East. Jews also fell victim to slavers on both sides of the struggle, he pointed out.

It was in this book that Davis coined the term “faith slavery.”

“During this period, both sides, Muslims and Christians, had nearly equal power,” Davis told Ohio State News at the time. “It really was a clash of empires and taking slaves was part of the conflict.”

Even then, Davis was clear that the fact that some white Europeans were slaves did not mitigate or diminish the enslavement of 10 to 12 million black Africans who were brought to the Americas.

“That (argument) doesn’t make sense to me,” Davis told Ohio State News in 2010.

“Though faith and race slavery were both pervasive in those centuries, the enslavement of some white Christians can hardly balance the moral wrong of the slavery that other whites inflicted on Africans. Two such enormous wrongs don’t make anything right.”

Since the two books have come out, Davis has retired and moved to California, where he continues to research and write. He said he probably receives an average of two or three emails a month from people inquiring about Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters or the Ohio State news release.

He thought it must be normal for historians to be asked about their old research a few times a month, until he talked to another retired colleague.

“I mentioned something about how as a historian you must get these emails all the time about your research. And he said, ‘No, I don’t.’ That was when I started to realize my book was somewhat peculiar in that regard.”

Davis said he is still proud of the work with both books, particularly the methodology he developed to calculate the number of people who were taken as faith slaves.

Taking the best contemporary estimates of how many slaves were at each location at a given time, Davis calculated how many new slaves it would take to replace the ones who died, escaped or were ransomed.

Davis believes this is the best way available to make estimates of how many were enslaved, given the limited records of the time.

“Even rough calculations make it clear that Mediterranean faith slaving was not some minor phenomenon, a petty problem for people at the time, as has been assumed by many historians today,” Davis told Ohio State News in 2010.

After its moment in the spotlight when it was released, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters faded from view somewhat, until the rise of social media and the alt-right.

The first recent spike in readership of the story at the Ohio State News site occurred in February 2019, when more than 1,100 people viewed the story on one day. On a day in June, more than 5,000 people clicked on the story. Since then, more than 100 people a day have visited the story.

In 2020, it is still the sixth most viewed story on the Ohio State News website.

Davis said that while he realizes that issues of race in America have driven a lot of the interest in his book, he is reluctant to speculate too much about why the alt-right has embraced Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters.

“You’re moving outside my skills as a historian into sociology or political psychology. I’m not certain what motivates people. I just know that some people are using my research as a standard to rally around without really following it to its conclusions or trying to understand its implications,” he said.

“Then again, there have been only limited attempts among American academics to either develop or refute my findings, so perhaps non-academics interested in this subject feel they have nowhere else to go.”

Davis said he is realistic about how his books on faith slavery will be remembered, but he still hopes his research encourages people to remember a historical reality that has often been forgotten or ignored.

“Faith slavery played an important role in history. It deserves more attention.”

As for Davis, he has moved on to researching a topic that should be somewhat less controversial: He has begun writing a series of historical novels on 16th-century Italian bandits.

Researchers found that a source seen as biased may lose credibility with people, even if they believe the source is scrupulously honest.

That means untruthful – or “fake” – news isn’t the only issue for consumers.

“If you want to be seen as a credible source, you have to be objective, as well as honest and knowledgeable,” said Laura Wallace, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in psychology at The Ohio State University.

The findings are significant because most research has suggested that source credibility is a combination of trustworthiness and expertise, Wallace said. Bias had not been considered, or was viewed as part of trustworthiness.

“I use the example of grandparents,” Wallace said.

“Most everyone agrees that grandparents are honest. But if Grandma says that her grandson Johnny is the best soccer player around, most people will smile politely but not believe her. She’s obviously biased.”

Wallace conducted the research with Duane Wegener and Richard Petty, both professors of psychology at Ohio State. The study was published online today (July 8, 2019) in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The researchers conducted several related experiments.

In one study, 169 undergraduate students read a fictitious conversation between aid workers trying to decide how to allocate resources at the beginning of an Ebola outbreak in the Congo. They had to decide whether to allocate limited resources to Rutu, a rural area where the outbreak started, or Poko, a nearby city where the disease had spread.

The aid workers were all described as “highly trained.” One worker, Roger, advocated for sending aid to Rutu and for some participants was described as having worked in that area as a Peace Corps volunteer, which might indicate that he is biased. For other participants, this information was omitted, leaving no indication of bias.

After reading the conversation, participants completed a questionnaire in which they evaluated the aid workers’ proposals.

Results showed that when Roger was described as having a previous connection to Rutu, participants thought Roger was biased in his recommendation to send aid to Rutu, – even though they also thought he was trustworthy, an expert in the field, and likable.

As a result, study participants thought his suggestion to send aid to Rutu was less credible, but only when they were told he had previously worked there.

“The guys in this scenario are all trying their best to contain this Ebola outbreak, they all know what they’re doing, and they are all seen as very honest,” Wallace said.

“But people believe that Roger’s experience in one of these regions is affecting his judgment and that he just can’t see things objectively.”

This result shows that bias may damage credibility, just as untrustworthiness does. But that doesn’t mean that bias and untrustworthiness always have the same consequences.

“In the case of biased, but honest sources, the information they present might only support one side of the issue, but at least people can treat the information as useful for understanding that side,” Wallace said.

“Untrustworthy sources may never be that useful.”

In addition, the difference between a biased source and an untrustworthy source has a big impact if the source changes positions. In a separate study that has not yet been published, the same researchers found that when untrustworthy sources change their position, it does not make them any more or less persuasive.

“Untrustworthy sources are seen as unpredictable. You can’t tell what position they are going to take and it is not seen as meaning anything if they flip-flop,” she said.

But the study found that it was quite surprising when biased sources changed their positions on an issue. This surprise had a positive effect on persuasion.

“People believe there must be new evidence that is really compelling to get a biased source to change positions and take the opposite side,” Wallace said.

“So there are sometimes differences in how effective biased sources are compared to untrustworthy ones.”

Wallace noted that the researchers used novel topics in the studies so that participants couldn’t have pre-existing beliefs about them. As a result, the study can’t say how people with their own biases would react to sources with similar or opposing biases.

But, she said, previous studies suggest that people tend to believe that those who agree with them are less biased than those who disagree with them.

By Jay L. Zagorsky, The Ohio State University 

(Note: Zagorsky is currently at Boston University.)

John Adams believed the fourth of July should be filled with ‘illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.’ AP Photo/Richard W. Rodriguez

In the eyes of many Americans, the Fourth of July is a day for parades, barbecues and, of course, fireworks.

The tradition got its start at the beginning of our nation’s history after the Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia to write and sign the Declaration of Independence. A day after the Continental Congress adopted the declaration on July 4, 1776, John Adams – soon the second U.S. president – penned a letter to his wife Abigail, declaring that Independence Day “ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.”

One year later, Philadelphia celebrated the anniversary with fireworks – or “illuminations,” to Adams – plus a parade commemorating Independence Day.

So with that in mind, here are four fascinating sets of facts about fireworks.

Firework use is growing

Americans shoot off almost 1 pound of fireworks each year for every adult.

And this figure has grown rapidly in recent years, from half a pound per adult in 2000. In 1976, the United States’ bicentennial, the figure was just one-sixth of a pound annually.

A reason for the big increase is the steady reduction in state prohibitions against individuals using fireworks. Today only Massachusetts completely prohibits individuals from owning and using any type of fireworks. The other states all allow usage in some form.

The most recent states to allow fireworks are New Jersey, Delaware and Iowa, whose new law legalizes fireworks around the 4th of July and New Year’s Eve only.

Fireworks are also illegal in many urban areas, like New York City.

Because states are now permitting individuals to purchase and possess fireworks, there has been a large shift from professional to amateur use. Back in 2000, roughly one-third of all fireworks were set off during professional displays, the kind that light the skies of cities around the world on holidays like New Year’s Eve and national celebrations. By 2017, professional displays comprised less than 10 percent.

Sparklers cause a large share of fireworks-related injuries. Maria Symchych/Shutterstock.com

Firework prices have fallen

Just because more regular Americans have been shooting off fireworks doesn’t mean prices have surged. The vast majority of the fireworks shot off in the United States are manufactured overseas, mainly in China.

Each shipment of fireworks brought into the U.S. includes a detailed invoice that shows the price the importer paid. These invoices show fireworks prices, after adjusting for inflation, are cheaper today than in the mid-1990s.

In 1996 it cost about $1.37 in today’s terms to import 1 pound of fireworks. By 2017 the price had fallen to just $1.13 a pound. That means pound-for-pound fireworks are less than half the price of the hot dogs many people are grilling this 4th.

Accidents and injuries

Fireworks are dangerous – hence the reason so many states had banned them previously.

And as we’ve exploded more bottle rockets, firecrackers and Roman candles, fireworks-related injuries have increased as well, though they are still far below the rates we saw back in the mid-1980s when cities and states began banning their usage.

Back in 1986, fireworks injured about 6.6 out of every 100,000 people. Since 1986, injuries have steadily fallen as government regulations made them safer. In 2008, the rate was down to 2.3 people.

But as states have relaxed restrictions, the injuries have started increasing again. The latest figures for 2017 show a rate of 4 people per 100,000.

In addition, there’s also a big gender divide in who suffers the most injuries. Men experienced about 70 percent of fireworks-related injuries for the one-month period from June 18 to July 18, 2017.

Beyond such statistics, however low, every year there are horrible stories of both children and adults being maimed and killed. So it’s always important to exercise caution when lighting what amounts to a low-yield missile.

Fireworks now must meet higher standards

One reason that injury rates have fallen in the first place is because of the federal government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission.

This organization regulates fireworks under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act. It banned the sale of the most dangerous fireworks, such as M-80s and cherry bombs, in the 1960s.

Today, it is working to lower injury rates again by requiring manufacturers to adhere to higher standards. In February 2017, for instance, the commission passed several of what I believe are common sense regulations for firework manufacturers to make their products safer.

For example, faulty fuses have caused many injuries, such as when some burned rapidly and ignite a rocket too quickly, preventing the holder from moving away in time. Other fuses actually take too long to ignite, leading people to investigate whether it needs to be relit just as the firework explodes in their face. So the commission now requires all fuses to ignite fireworks three to nine seconds after being lit.

The commission also now requires fireworks to have bases that are wider and support more weight so they do not tip over after being ignited. This prevents fireworks from firing off horizontally, becoming missiles that bounce along the ground and potentially hit spectators.

It also now bans hazardous materials like lead from the powder inside fireworks. This ensures people downwind from the explosions are not poisoned by breathing the smoke.

Common sense

As more states loosen restrictions on fireworks this Fourth of July, millions more people will follow the exhortations of John Adams and celebrate by shooting off “illuminations.”

But if you do plan to shoot off a few rockets or more advance fireworks, use some common sense, especially if children are around.

Whether you are lighting fireworks, watching them explode above you or just hiding from the noise, try to have a fun and safe Independence Day.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on June 29, 2017.

Jay L. Zagorsky, Economist and Research Scientist, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Researchers found that people best liked the heroes they rated as most moral, and least liked villains they rated as most immoral.

Antiheroes and morally ambiguous characters like Walter White – the chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin in the show Breaking Bad – were more complicated for people to rate on likability.

But across all of the character types, morality and likability were closely related to each other, said Matthew Grizzard, lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“Character morality is intricately tied to how much people like them,” Grizzard said.

“People still don’t like evil characters.”

The study was published online in the Journal of Media Psychology and will appear in a future print edition.

Scholars have long believed that character morality is linked to how much people like them, Grizzard said.

“But then in the 90s we started to see antiheroes get popular in our culture, in TV shows like The Sopranos and NYPD Blue, for example. Characters did bad things, but people still rooted for them,” he said.

“That got us thinking: Does charcater morality not matter anymore? Or does it matter and we’re just not seeing the whole picture?”

So Grizzard and his colleagues put this question to the test by asking 262 college students to think of characters they liked or characters they disliked.

All of the students were given descriptions of three character types – heroes, villains and “morally ambiguous characters,” or antiheroes. They were then asked to recall a fictional character in one of those categories that they either “really liked” or “really disliked.”

Some of the liked characters participants chose included Superman and Batman as heroes, Deadpool and Batman as morally ambiguous characters and The Joker and Voldemort as villains.

Some of the disliked characters also included Batman and Superman as heroes, Dexter Morgan (of the TV show Dexter) and Spiderman as morally ambiguous characters and The Joker and Voldemort as villains.

Participants rated how much they liked the character they chose and how moral they thought the character was on scales from 1 to 7.

This put some participants in a difficult and unnatural position: They had to choose a villain they liked or a hero they disliked, Grizzard said.

“If there is really no connection between morality and liking, we should clearly see it here. But that’s not what we found,” he said.

The disliked heroes were rated as less moral than the liked heroes. The liked villains were rated as more moral than the disliked villains. And the liked antiheroes were rated as more moral than the disliked antiheroes.

“The more moral a character is, the more I like them. The more I like a character, the more moral I perceive them to be. It is nearly impossible to separate these factors,” Grizzard said.

It was most difficult for researchers to predict the relationship between liking and morality in the morally ambiguous characters.

These antiheroes show that it may be too simple to say that as characters increase in morality, they will always be more liked.

“This middle ground where the characters are somewhat good and somewhat bad are harder to predict. But even then, there is still some relationship between morality and liking,” he said.

Grizzard gives the example of Walter White, the main character in the show Breaking Bad, who starts producing and selling crystal meth to help secure his family’s financial future after he is diagnosed with cancer.

In many movies, the Walter White character would be the villain and no one would root for him, Grizzard said. But in Breaking Bad, White still is more moral than most of the other characters, so viewers root for him.

“It is a relative morality. Because all of the other characters are worse than he is, we have something to compare him to. We don’t exactly like him, but he is the best we can hope for in this show.”

Grizzard conducted the study with C. Joseph Francemone, a graduate student at Ohio State; Jialing Huang of Texas A&M University; and Changhyun Ahn, Kaitlin Fitzgerald and Jess Walton at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.

Intros that averaged more than 20 seconds in the mid-80s are now only about 5 seconds long, the study found.

Depending on what rocks your musical world, the popularity of streaming services might be to thank or to curse for a move away from the instrumental intro, said Hubert Léveillé Gauvin, a doctoral student in music theory at The Ohio State University. His study appears in the journal Musicae Scientiae.

And Léveillé Gauvin discovered that singers of the most recent successful songs hardly waste any time before mentioning the song title in the lyrics. Another change he found: Song names today are shorter than they used to be – often just a single word.Léveillé Gauvin spent a couple months listening to and analyzing songs that hit the top 10 from 1986 to 2015 and found a dramatic shift away from long intros. He also documented a marked increase in tempo.

This evolution is likely driven by what Léveillé Gauvin calls the “attention economy” of modern-day pop. And that means that artists get to the musical point more quickly in the interest of grabbing a fickle listening audience, many of whom tune in on Spotify, Pandora and other skippable services.

“It’s survival-of-the-fittest: Songs that manage to grab and sustain listeners’ attention get played and others get skipped. There’s always another song,” Léveillé Gauvin said. “If people can skip so easily and at no cost, you have to do something to grab their attention.”

Rather than looking for direct income on streaming services, artists are looking for something else –to drive listeners to their concerts or to other products they sell, he said.

“Artists and producers are shifting from having their songs as cultural products to having their songs as advertisements for themselves. Your product isn’t necessarily your song, it’s your personal brand,” Léveillé Gauvin said.

“We’re operating in an ‘attention economy,’ and attention is scarce and valuable.”

Léveillé Gauvin measured the tempo of 303 top-10 singles and found a clear trend toward faster-paced pop music in the last three decades. The average tempo increased roughly 8 percent. He compared the number of words in song titles and found more and more “one-word wonders” as the years passed.

When he analyzed how long it took for the lyrics to start, Léveillé Gauvin found that intros lasting an average of more than 20 seconds in the mid-80s have given way to intros that average 5 seconds today. And once the lyrics started, it took less time (by about 18 percent) for the first “hook,” which he defined as the song’s title.

“The really striking thing was the disappearance of the intro,” he said. “There was a 78 percent drop. That’s insane, but it makes sense. The voice is one of the most attention-grabbing things there is in music.”

To see the difference, look to 1987’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship and compare it to Maroon 5’s 2015 pop hit “Sugar.”

Starship takes about 22 seconds to reach the first lyrics of its mid-tempo song and doesn’t get to the hook until after Grace Slick’s voice enters the duet that Mickey Thomas started. The listener has heard well over a minute of music before learning that Starship will not be stopped.

“It’s also super 80s,” Léveillé Gauvin said.

Maroon 5, in contrast, gets to the point quickly in its one-word-titled up-tempo hit. The intro is half as long as Starship’s and Adam Levine is singing the hook “Sugar” within 40 seconds.

There are exceptions to the trend. Take Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know.” The 2012 earworm has a title almost three times longer than other chart toppers that same year. Its 20-second instrumental introduction was four times longer than average. And a listener waits two full minutes before the hook.

A fifth measure didn’t reveal any scientifically significant changes during the 30 years of music. Léveillé Gauvin thought it was possible that today’s songs would include more self-focused lyrics, but he did not see a pattern.

In a second study, Léveillé Gauvin evaluated data provided by Spotify to see if popular songs by a given artist were more likely to fit the attention-grabbing trend than less-popular songs released by the same artist. For the study, he looked at the most-streamed songs on Spotify and compared those to the least-streamed songs by the same artist.

He found no evidence of the “attention economy” hypothesis in that study.

Music continually evolves, driven by a variety of factors, and there’s no way to explain away all the changes Léveillé Gauvin saw based on streaming services and the “skip” button alone, he said.

But he believes they are certainly contributing.

“If you look back historically, technological changes have likely shaped the way people compose and listen to music for a long time,” he said, adding that the compact disc brought along an ease of skipping that was leaps and bounds ahead of vinyl or cassette tapes.

So, is this attention-driven shift a bad thing for pop music?

“It’s very easy to see this in a cynical way. It’s not necessarily a negative thing; it’s just the nature of the beast,” Léveillé Gauvin said.