Richard J. Jensen

Not to be confused with Richard Jay Jensen (born 1943), emeritus Professor of Communication

Richard J. Jensen, 2012

Richard Joseph Jensen (born Oct. 24, 1941) is an American historian, Wikipedian, and Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Chicago from 1973 to 1996, known for his work on American political, social, military and economic history as well as historiography and quantitative and computer methods.

Biography

Born in South Bend, Indiana, Jensen obtained his BA in Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame in 1962. He moved to Yale University, where in 1965 he obtained his MA and in 1966 his PhD in American studies under supervision of C. Vann Woodward with the unpublished thesis, entitled "The Winning of the Midwest: A Social History of Midwestern Elections, 1888-1896."

After graduation Jensen started as Assistant professor at the Washington University in 1966. In 1970 he moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he became Associate Professor of History, and from 1973 to 1996 Professor of History. In 2008 he became Research Professor at Montana State University Billings. Over the years he has been Visiting professor at the University of Michigan in 1968, Harvard University in 1973, the Moscow State University in 1986, and at West Point in 1989-90.

From 1971 to 1982 Jensen has also been Director of the Family and Community History Center, Newberry Library. From 1977 to 1982 he was President of the Chicago Metro History Fair. And from 1992 to 1997 he was Executive Director at H-Net. Jensen served on the editorial boards of six scholarly journals,, most notable The Journal of American History and the American Journal of Sociology.

Jensen was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1962, a William Robertson Coe fellowship in American history in 1963, and a Boies fellowship in 1965. He also received the Rockefeller Foundation/Bellagio (1983), the U of Illinois, Senior Scholar (1985-88); a Fulbright Fellow (to USSR, 1986); a ACLS Senior Fellowship (1987-88); and the James Harvey Robinson Prize for Teaching from the American Historical Association (1997).

Work

The Winning of the Midwest, 1965/71

In the "Winning of the Midwest" Jensen tells a social history of election in the Midwestern United States from 1888 to 1896. Jensen (1971) explained:

The critical years from 1888 to 1896 saw the birth of a new political style in the United States and the emergence of new patterns of voting. From close balance in 1888 to Democratic hegemony (1890-92) to a Republican landslide in 1894 and a final realignment of voting patterns in 1896 which made the Midwest and the entire nation basically Republican until the New Deal, The Winning of the Midwest traces the revolution which produced the modern era of American electoral history.

Illinois: A Bicentennial History, 1978

In 1978 Jensen's "Illinois: A Bicentennial History." by Norton, New York in its States and the Nation series. In the 1979 book review in the Indiana Magazine of History, Martin Ridge noted, that in most books in that series had "been greeted by the scholarly community with tolerance at best and ridicule at worst. Too personal, brief, episodic, and unanalytical to be good history, they were relegated to that wide readership known as the popular audience. Richard J. Jensen's book is an exception." And more specific:

Jensen explains Illinois' history in terms of modernization theory. He emphasizes personality types: the southerners who invaded the lower part of Illinois and who constituted a predominantly traditionalist element, and the northerners, predominantly modernists, who settled north of where Interstate 70 is now located. Jensen also attempts to relate the traditionalist-modern model to ethno-religious groups (the Jews do not fit). He also postulates a postmodern model with evidence derived for the recent past. All of this is heady stuff for a book in a series funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and intended to provide narrative history or biography.

Hoffmann (1978) further explained, that Jensen had chosen to organize the book around one central theme. According to Hoffman (1978)

To 'unify' the book, to choose and shape the historical data around a single theme, Jensen posits the continuity since the American Revolution of certain 'general attitudes,' which he calls 'traditional' and 'modern.' Traditional refers to 'a psychological outlook of people who are comfortable with things as they were, who distrust strangers and progress for progress's sake. The traditionalist relies on family ties and authority figures, such as 'the priest in religion, or the boss in politics.' Conversely, the 'modernist' is 'future-oriented, upwardly mobile,' and an exemplar of 'strict self-disciplined internal motivation, as against values rooted in family loyalty or religious authority.'(Jensen (1978. p. 30).

Within these constraints according to Hoffmann (1978) Jensen provided "a balanced account of the state, keeping Chicago in proportion to downstate, and the whole in alignment with American history - as 'a' microcosm of the Union, not 'the' microcosm... his Illinois is not Chicago writ large or America writ small. For state history, that is no mean achievement."

H-Net

H-Net, short for "Humanities & Social Sciences Online," is an interdisciplinary forum for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. It had began in 1992 as an initiative by Jensen at the History department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to assist historians "to easily communicate current research and teaching interests; to discuss new approaches, methods and tools of analysis; to share information on access to library catalogs and other electronic databases; and to test new ideas and share comments on current historiography."

Nowadays H-Net is organized as an international consortium of scholars in the humanities and social sciences and its networks are hosted by Michigan State University.

No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization, 2002/03

The article that has gotten the most attention is "No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization," published in the Journal of Social History, Dec. 2002. Jensen (2002) summarized the article as follows:

Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare. The slogan was commonplace in upper class London by 1820; in 1862 in London there was a song, "No Irish Need Apply," purportedly by a maid looking for work.

And furthermore:

The song reached America and was modified to depict a man recently arrived in America who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the culprit. The song was an immediate hit, and is the source of the myth. Evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish--on the contrary, employers eagerly sought them out. Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.

Professor Jensen's thesis was rebutted in No Irish Need Deny: Evidence for the Historicity of NINA Restrictions in Advertisements and Signs Journal of Social History first published online July 4, 2015 ( See Oxford Journal of Social History) by Rebecca A. Fried. she writes, “the documentary record better supports the earlier view that Irish-Americans have a communal recollection of NINA advertising because NINA advertising did, in fact, exist over a substantial period of United States history, sometimes on a fairly widespread basis.” Both Professor Jensen and Fried herself appeared to argue their points in the comments section of an article run on the piece by the website irishcentral.com Also see; Wanted advertisement displaying the qualification “No Irish need apply.” The New York Herald, Vol. XXVIII Issue 186, Page 11. 7 July 1863.

Selected Publications

Jensen coauthored or edited 21 scholarly or popular books, and written 45 scholarly articles. Books, a selection:

• Jensen, Richard J. The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896. Vol. 2. Richard Jensen, 1971.
• Jensen, Richard J. Historian's guide to statistics : quantitative analysis and historical research. 1971.
• Jensen, Richard J. Illinois: A Bicentennial History. Norton, 1978.
• Jensen, Richard J., Jon Thares Davidann, and Yoneyuki Sugita, eds. Trans-Pacific relations: America, Europe, and Asia in the twentieth century. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003.
• Smith, J. Douglas, and Richard J. Jensen. World War Two on the Web. 2nd edition, Rowman & Littlefield, World War Two on the Web.
• Carter, Alice E., and Richard J. Jensen. The Civil War on the Web: A Guide to the Very Best Sites. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Articles, a selection

• Jensen, Richard. "On Modernizing Frederick Jackson Turner: The Historiography of Regionalism." The Western Historical Quarterly (1980): 307-322.
• Richard J. Jensen, "Historiography of American Political History." In Jack Greene, ed., Encyclopedia of American Political History (New York: Scribner's, 1984), vol 1. pp 1-25
• Jensen, Richard. "Six Sciences of American Politics." Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 17.3 (1984): 108-117.
• Jensen, Richard J. "'No Irish Need Apply': A Myth of Victimization." Journal of Social History 36.2 (2003): 405-429.
• Jensen, Richard. "Military history on the electronic frontier: Wikipedia fights the War of 1812." The Journal of Military History 76.4 (2012): 523-556.

External links

• Jensen's Web Guides, 2007-12
• Richard J. Jensen Presentation at Wikimania 2012: WikiCulture and Community VI: Improving Wikipedia III.