Politico: Angela’s campaign secret: Be Merkel

In mid-March, Merkel’s Christian Democrats were in a virtual dead heat with center-left Social Democrats (SPD), with each group garnering just over 30 percent in the polls. As of Sunday, Merkel’s party was 12 percentage points ahead of the SPD at 38 percent in the latest poll by Emnid, a German polling institute.

Her secret? Stay the course. In an era when many politicians are driven by the latest approval ratings, Merkel’s almost stubborn refusal to change direction has set her apart. Though Merkel is known to be a close watcher of polls, she uses them to identify the long-term direction, rather than daily strategies. [...]

With the refugee crisis seemingly under control, in Germany at least, the party that most benefited from it — the far-right Alternative for Germany — has seen its support drop. While the AfD’s troubles have been exacerbated by extremist comments by some of its leaders and party infighting, falling refugee numbers have all but robbed it of its core cause.

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Vintage Everyday: 30 Amazing Photos of Militia Women during Spanish Civil War in the 1930s

The Spanish Civil War, widely known in Spain simply as The Civil War or The War, took place from 1936 to 1939. The Republicans, who were loyal to the democratic, left-leaning and relatively urban Second Spanish Republic, in an alliance of convenience with the Anarchists, fought against the Nationalists, a Falangist, Carlist, and largely aristocratic conservative group led by General Francisco Franco.

Although the war is often portrayed as a struggle between democracy and fascism, some historians consider it more accurately described as a struggle between leftist revolution and rightist counter-revolution. Ultimately, the Nationalists won, and Franco then ruled Spain for the next 36 years, from April 1939 until his death in November 1975.

A photo collection shows the strength of Republican militia women during Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939.

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Atlas Obscura: What’s A Woggin? A Bird, a Word, and a Linguistic Mystery

One of these people was Paul O’Pecko, the Vice President of Collections and Research at Mystic Seaport. “You know how once somebody mentions something to you, the piece of information seems to jump off the page when you are not even looking?” he asks. This quickly happened with woggins. As soon as Lund’s network was alerted, more mentions from ship’s logs began flooding in. A Sag Harbor vessel sailing in 1806 “kild one woglin at 10 am.” New Bedford sailors from 1838 describe “wogings in vast numbers & noisy with their shril sharp shreaking or howling in the dead hours of the night.” In a 1798 diary entry, Christopher Almy of New Bedford writes of “one sort the whalemen call woggins,” which have stubby wings. When they move over the rocks, he says, they “look like small boys a walking.” [...]

But the mystery was only half solved. Penguins, as we understand them, live in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet sailors in the north were also getting in on the action, reporting that they had “caught 10 wogens” or “saw wargins.” “Whalemen were noticing them before they went far enough south to see true penguins,” says Lund. [...]

Michael Dyer, another librarian from New Bedford, had found another major clue: the notebook of a schoolboy named Abraham Russell, decorated with a careful sketch of a “Sea Waggin found on the banks of Newfound Land.” The drawing looked as though it had been traced from a particular illustration of a great auk found in a popular navigational guide. Further finds reinforced this theory, and finally, the group of detectives nailed it down: A southern woggin is a penguin. A northern woggin was a great auk.

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CityLab: The 100-Year-Old Penalty for Being Black

It’s 1880. The Civil War ended 15 years ago. Three years ago, federal troops withdrew from the South. Now, children of black and white workers of similar economic standing are able to climb up the economic ladder at the same pace. So by the start of the next decade, the median black worker earns more than around 30 percent of the nation’s labor force.

Of course, that scenario isn’t real. It’s a counterfactual from a new working paper published in the National Bureau for Economic Research, by historian William J. Collins and economist Marianne H. Wanamaker. In reality, black workers reached that 30th percentile milestone a full 100 years later, in 2000.

In the paper, Collins and Wanamaker set out to understand the mechanisms that drive a wedge between the incomes of blacks and whites from one generation to the next. Their big finding is this: Between 1880 and 2010, whites showed much higher rates of upward mobility than blacks—even if their parents started from the same economic position. “There is a specific penalty for black people, which is independent of whatever income their fathers earn,” Wanamaker tells CityLab. “And that has been constant over 100 years.” [....]

According to the researchers, the parents’ education and location mattered, but did not fully explain the divergent mobility of their children. What did have some bearing was the differences in“human capital”—the skills and knowledge that a worker contributes in the labor market. But the source of that disparity leads us back to square one.

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CityLab: Defining European Identity in a Divided Europe

On May 6th, the European Parliament opened the House of European History in Brussels. This museum will dig into the topic of European identity, a concept that predates the European Union itself. A permanent exhibition—in all 24 of the EU’s official languages—shows the timeline of European history beginning with the 19th century, leading visitors through the events of the 20th century and ending with a search for a better, united Europe after the World Wars. [...]

Research suggests that many EU citizens don’t view their national identity and a bigger European one as being mutually exclusive. Instead, those identities may be mixed together in a way that has been described as the “marble cake model.” According to a study by the political scientists Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, around 40 percent of EU citizens imagine themselves holding an exclusively national identity, while around 50 percent identify as belonging to a certain nation as well as being European. A much smaller group, which Adrian Favell calls Eurostars, identifies as exclusively European. Members of this group “wanted to leave behind their national label as citizens of a certain country and to live freely as individuals in a cosmopolitan world within Europe,” Favell says. [...]

Who’s least likely to embrace the idea of a European identity? Stöckel found it was the citizens who felt least represented by the mainstream political parties in their home countries. “Those who only hold a national identity are those who also trust elites much less. This is where the divide plays a role,” Stöckel says. For these citizens, “Europe is a threat to their national identities, to the sovereignty of their countries,” he explained. That tension plays out, for instance, when voters choose candidates based on their stance on immigration.

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