Round-up: Did violence decline in history?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

How Politically Diverse Are University Faculty? Shiri Siddiqi and Michael Regnier review recent studies on the political views of US academics. They note that such studies have produced ratios of liberal to conservative faculty ranging from as low as 2:1 to as high as 82:1. While liberals and leftists are substantially overrepresented in academia, the most comprehensive studies tend to show lower levels of imbalance.

Education and Skills during the first Industrial Revolution in England. Alexandra de Pleijt and colleagues examine the contribution of education to the Industrial Revolution in England. Analysing new data at the parish level, they find that the expansion of schooling lowered barriers to entry for apprenticeships in occupations that required reading, writing and arithmetic. It therefore played a crucial role in early industrialisation.