by Maryann O. Keating, Ph.D. In a pre-digital age, a municipal department of public assistance was swamped with paper files generated by open welfare cases. In the summer of 1968, graduate students, including this writer, were hired to summarize files, documenting home visitations, onto standardized forms. Each analyst was expected to evaluate each case on its capability in: 1) providing personal income; 2) maintaining a household; and 3) managing or seeking appropriate care for medical…

A FAVORITE QUIP comes from the provost at my daughter’s college. In a moment of candor during freshman orientation he told us parents that there is only one thing in the world that is exactly as it seems — “professional wrestling.” I would add to that, “political proposals to fix imbalances of any sort in advance of an election year.” The governor has set the defining issue of our decade the retraining of 55,000 “lost” young…

by Leo Morris Eli Whitney is one of my favorite forgotten giants of American history. Not completely forgotten. He invented the cotton gin. Many Americans know that about him. But that is the sum total of their knowledge. And his life was so much more consequential than that. Most people can only dream of having an enduring impact on the human condition. He did it twice. Without even trying. Yale-educated and from one of the best New…

IF YOU HEARD Gov. Eric Holcomb’s comments on economic development in his “second” State of the State address last night, you realize you’re on your own. He’s not going to help. Your community and your business will have to work out its fortune in its own way. You will be lucky if state government doesn’t actually impede your efforts. That’s why the foundation has launched a statewide campaign to do something direct and effective — repeal local business personal property taxes. We…

by Fred McCarthy Nothing like good news if in fact it is good news. We’re talking about the announced anticipation of the addition of another large hotel — 800 to 1,000 rooms — in the downtown area of Indianapolis. Which might or might not include a super-sized ballroom that the city needs. It seems the ballroom might be handled by extension of the convention center itself. This is a little uncertain because of the inclusion…

by Leo Morris “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” That sentence has been stuck in my head for as long as I can remember. By making it the last line of his great “Among School Children,” William Butler Yeats was summarizing his belief and the theme of the poem that we cannot understand a life by its parts but must consider the whole of it and, further, that we should not dwell on…

by Mark Franke 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation. Andrew Pettegree (Penguin House, 2015) Having just passed the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation, numerous new books on the period and Martin Luther have been published. One that takes a modern approach to the man and the movement is Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation by Andrew Pettegree (Penguin House, 2015). Pettegree, a Reformation scholar at the University…

by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. This year is the 100th anniversary of a key U.S. Supreme Court case on civil and economic rights. Buchanan vs. Warley (1917) overturned racial zoning ordinances in Louisville which prohibited whites selling and blacks buying homes in white-majority neighborhoods. (On November 29th, the city dedicated a historical market at 37th and Pflanz to commemorate this.) The NAACP organized a test case to challenge the law. (Charles Buchanan was the plaintiff—a white…

by Leo Morris “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe when the legislature is in session.” Contrary to accepted wisdom, Mark Twain didn’t say that, although it sounds like something he should have said. It was included in the opinion issued by a New York magistrate in 1866, chiding a lawyer for bollixing up the case of a will because he hadn’t paid attention to provisions dictated by the last session of the state’s…

by Leo Morris On reading that Indiana lawmakers are considering lowering the compulsory school age from 7 to 5 years old, I immediately went into full fuddy-duddy mode. “I didn’t need to go to any silly kindergarten classes, so I don’t understand why children today need to. I started out in first grade and turned out just fine. Whatever is this world coming to?” But the mistake made by Old Fogies is that we believe the…