The purpose of this blog has been, and remains, to explore all things, technology, culture, society, etc, of the approximate 1890 to 1920, more or less (adding, probably, something like 50 years on either side of that). I stray from that a lot, as any reader very well knows, but I tend to come back to it.
Recently I've been running 1916 is century delayed real time so often that a person could be excused for thinking it was the 1916 day by day blog, or something like that, but it isn't. I've been doing that do the centennial of the Punitive Expedition. Once that story basically concludes the near day by day entries will slow down as well, to the likely relief of everyone who stops in here, but some of the newly added features that are basically slice of life type entries will likely keep on keeping on, maybe.
Anyhow, in keeping with this, I've found that there are a couple of other sites that run 1916 in delayed real time, one of which is Reddit's 100 Years Ago Subreddit. I like it, and I post quite a few of the entries here that are posted on the centennial of their happening as links there. But I read those entries over there was well.
Recently one of the moderators of that Subreddit posted an end of the year item noting that the murder rate in 1916 in the US was 145% of today's.
145%.
Now, this shouldn't surprise the readers here, but I still wonder to what degree we fail to appreciate that violence has really declined. Massively, in fact.
We have run a lot of items on this before, including, Violent society? andPeculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities. So this should not be a surprise to readers here. But what an impressive statistic.
And how interesting in terms of how we look at the world we live in. In terms of violence, in spite of spectacular examples to the contrary, this is about the best era there is to live in, unless of course you are a victim, in which case, no doubt, that's no comfort at all.
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