Opinionator | Draft: The Right to Write

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

I sat on a panel once with another novelist and a distinguished African-American critic, to discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The critic said, "Of course, as a white woman, Stowe had no right to write the black experience." The other novelist said lightly, "No, of course not. And I had no right to write about 14th-century Scandinavians. Which I did."

The exchange made me wonder: who has the right to our stories?

For centuries, African-Americans couldn't fully participate in the literary conversation, since for many of them literacy was forbidden. Why wouldn't they resent the fact that their stories were told by whites? But does this mean that, as novelists, we can write stories only of our own race, our own gender, our own subcultural niche?

Stowe used other people's stories as sources, but what drove her to write was her own outraged response to slavery. She has the right to that response. Isn't it better that Stowe wrote her book, instead of staying respectfully mute because the stories were not hers to tell? It was the narrative strands about the black experience that gave the book such emotional potency, and made it such a powerful abolitionist force.

Who owns the story, the person who lives it or the person who writes it?

My novel "Sparta" is about a young male Marine, a member of a closely guarded and tribal culture. The military is famously proprietary about war writing: they've earned the right to their experience, just as African-Americans have, and everyone else, for that matter. But does that mean only the members of a group can tell its stories? How far does ownership go?

Most comments I've received from veterans have been positive, but during a radio interview someone wrote in by email: This woman has never been in combat and knows nothing about it. He was both right and wrong: I've never been in combat, but, actually, I do know something about it. I've learned about it, not by being there, but in another way that writers learn: by paying attention.

Doing research for "Sparta" I talked to vets. I asked them what had happened and how they felt. I listened as they talked and laughed and faltered and wept, and I wove their stories and feelings into my book. A few appear in my novel just as they were told; most appear only through the feelings the story invoked.

But do I have the right to write about a firefight in Falluja, if I wasn't there? Does it demonstrate respect and admiration for the soldiers, and show evidence of their importance in our culture? Or does it insult those who risked their lives, if I take literary possession of that experience? Am I exploiting other people's experience for my own ends? What are my own ends, anyway?

Fiction writers aren't in this for the money, since most of us don't make any money. So what are we doing, messing about in other people's lives?

We're doing what fiction writers have always done: trying to investigate the world, explore human experience, render precisely what it means to be alive. We're trying to give voice to everyone on the planet. And who has the right to do that? Do I have the right to write my version of your story? And how does exploitation get into this discussion? Because the word suggests ignorance and deception, an imbalance of power.

When Leo Tolstoy wrote "Anna Karenina," he was drawing on a local real-life tragedy: a young woman, jilted by her lover, threw herself under a train in despair. But he also drew on something more personal: His married sister had an adulterous affair and an illegitimate child. She was abandoned by her lover, who left her to marry another woman. She grew desperate and suicidal and wrote anguished letters to her brother. Did Tolstoy have the right to tell her story? He changed it to suit his literary needs, and used her desperation for his own purposes. But what were those purposes?

I don't think Tolstoy was exploiting his sister, quite the reverse. I think he was voicing his own pain and desperation. He was driven, not by a narcissistic urge for literary gain, but by deep empathy for his sister. His response was not, "I can use this," but "I can't bear this." Writing was a way to relieve his own pain. This was a deeply compassionate response.

Empathy is the opposite of exploitation. It's empathy that allows a writer to feel her way into someone else's experience. A great writer like Tolstoy will feel a character's life as his own; he'll enter fully into that consciousness, and his responses will reverberate through his work. A great writer will use a narrative because she finds it moving, or compelling, troubling or heartbreaking or exhilarating. What drives her is empathy, not voyeurism.

Some of the greatest war writers were not soldiers: Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, the blind Homer. They entered the world of war through compassion, not combat. We judge them by their work, not their military service. And we benefit from that work; they have widened our understanding of war.

Writers are trying to reach some understanding of the world, and we do this by setting down stories. We draw on our own experience, but, since that includes everything we encounter, this means drawing on others' stories as well. Shakespeare didn't limit himself to writing about the life of an uneducated actor from Stratford-on-Avon. He felt he had the right to write about anyone – kings, queens, fools, servants, any age and any gender, any background, any race. Many of his stories came from other sources, but he imagined the lives and the minds of these characters so completely that he earned the right to tell their stories.

A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we're struck by something. The thing is to pay attention, to be ready for radical empathy. If we empty ourselves of ourselves we'll be able to vibrate in synchrony with something deep and powerful. If we're lucky we'll transmit a strong pure note, one that isn't ours, but which passes through us. If we're lucky, it will be a note that reverberates and expands, one that other people will hear and understand.

Roxana Robinson, a novelist and biographer, is the author, most recently, of "Sparta."

A version of this article appears in print on 06/29/2014, on page SR8 of the NewYork edition with the headline: The Right to Write.

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Opinionator | Bedside: What ‘Nurse Jackie’ Gets Right About the E.R.

Bedside is a series about health care from a nurse's-eye view.

A lot of nurses hate the Showtime series "Nurse Jackie," which will wrap up its sixth season on Sunday evening. Actually, to be precise, they hate the show's lead character, the emergency department nurse Jackie Peyton. There's much to dislike: She is an adulterer, a liar, an unreliable mother and, most significantly, addicted to prescription painkillers. (That's hardly giving anything away, but be warned: spoilers ahead.)

Many nurses will tell you that Jackie's addiction makes the entire profession look bad. Lives are at stake in hospitals, and health care requires constant multitasking and focused attention. A nurse — or doctor — tanked up on OxyContin is likely not only to do a poor job, but also to place patients in jeopardy.

Still, I see the show differently: Despite the fact that Jackie is a seriously flawed human being, the show itself is a standout portrayal of nursing, when TV almost always gets nursing wrong.

Nurse Jackie, played by the gifted Edie Falco, has enviable clinical judgment and an unshakable commitment to patients. But, like many addicts, she lies and sometimes steals to maintain her habit. Married with two daughters at the show's start, she gets clean at the beginning of season four, but not before her marriage has broken up. At the end of season five she relapses after a year of sobriety, and she uses drugs throughout season six. "You're toxic!" Jackie's sponsor tells her.

But I praise the show because its clinical portrayals of nursing are realistic and mostly positive, in contrast to almost every other medical program on television. TV hospitals are almost exclusively staffed by doctors. These physicians diagnose and prescribe, as all medical doctors do, but also hang IVs, take blood samples, keep an eye out for crises by checking on patients at all hours and sit with those patients in need of a little extra T.L.C. In real hospitals, those jobs are almost always done by nurses, and "Nurse Jackie," true to its name, shows that.

The show also keeps the clinical focus on the nurses, who are all very capable. Zoey Barkow (Merritt Wever) and Thor Lundgren (Stephen Wallem), the R.N.s who work alongside Jackie, are likewise highly skilled, relate well with patients and act as integrated parts of a team, just like the best hospital units do in real life.

But Jackie is the best of them. She is "the vein whisperer," a sobriquet I've actually used for a nurse I know who's great at starting IVs. She's respected enough that the head of the department tells her to keep an eye on a doctor coming off probation. And it's Jackie who, realizing that a suddenly quiet infant is no longer breathing, hurries a physician to the bedside to rapidly insert a breathing tube. This is all real nursing, and we rarely see it on television.

Past seasons suggested that Jackie's at-work drug abuse didn't affect her job. That might push the limits of plausibility, but then I've worked with a nurse who was addicted to narcotics — and stealing them from the hospital — and none of us had any idea. Nevertheless, I was concerned at times that the show's writers were too committed to the idea of Jackie's just barely keeping her balance to deal with the obvious ethical issues raised by her addiction.

The season that is just finishing was different, though. In an early episode, Jackie, high on OxyContin, doesn't hear the call of "clear" before a defibrillator goes off, and the electric shock knocks her out. The penultimate episode shows Jackie snorting crushed Oxy in the hospital bathroom, then giving a patient 100 times the ordered dose of intravenous insulin — a potentially deadly mistake that Zoey, Jackie's protégé, catches and corrects.

Still, Zoey worries whether Jackie is dangerously impaired at work. Alerted by Zoey, Gloria Akalitus (Anna Deavere Smith), the nurse-administrator of the department, tells Jackie that she risks losing her nursing license if she doesn't attend rehab. Jackie tries to make a desperate getaway but crashes her car on the way to the airport, forcing open her suitcase filled with drugs. The episode ends with her mug shot being taken.

It's a sad finale, what I hope is the low point for a nurse I like and even admire. But the nurse in me also felt gratified. The show might be fiction, but I still don't want to see Jackie taking care of patients if she is high. A nurse hooked on opioids feels like the ultimate on-the-job betrayal; as Zoey tells Gloria, "I'm worried about her, and I'm worried about us."

Showtime has renewed "Nurse Jackie" for a seventh season, and many nurses will be watching closely. The show has done a great job of keeping Jackie's personal flaws and professional skills more or less separate, and fans love it; now it needs to take a risk by throwing the two together. Jackie's commitment to patients has to include being clearheaded and safe on the job — or else not do the job, even though she's so great at it.

That's what we nurses ask of ourselves. And even though some of us fail, surely it's fair to ask the same from the one TV show that really "gets" nursing, when so few others even try.

Theresa Brown is an oncology nurse and the author of "Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between."

A version of this article appears in print on 06/29/2014, on page SR5 of the NewYork edition with the headline: What 'Nurse Jackie' Gets Right About the E.R..

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Opinionator | Private Lives: Speaking to My Father in a Dead Dialect

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

The 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico believed that as a civilization progressed, it lost touch with its creative origins. An ancient warrior would never declare "I'm angry"; he would wax metaphorical with "my blood boils." The Roman poet Horace went a step further, believing that when words died they took memories with them. Just as forests change their leaves each year, so, too, do words: new languages "bloom and thrive" but only after "the old race dies."

Growing up, I could feel the language of my parents wither and die like autumn leaves. They had immigrated to the United States from Calabria in the late 1950s and continued to speak the dialect of their poor southern Italian region, but it was a tongue frozen in time by exile and filled with words that no longer existed in their homeland.

After a decade in America, my father decided to buy a fancy car. The Italian for a car is "una macchina," and the Calabrian equivalent is "'na macchina." But in the car-crazy suburbs of postwar America, an immigrant such as my father was bound to defer to his host nation. He went to the Chevy dealership and asked for "'nu carru." The Calabrian "'nu" sounds like new, and "carro" means cart. But the dealership knew what he meant, and sold my father a maroon 1967 Chevy Impala. He bought it the year that I, his first American child, was born.

My father's dialect flourished only in fits of anger: "mala nuova ti vo' venire" ("may a new harm befall you"), when you annoyed him; "ti vo' pigliare 'na shcuppettata" ("may you be shot") and "ti vo' brusciare l'erba" ("may the ground beneath you combust") when you really got under his skin. It's difficult to translate these makeshift phrases. Better just to imagine them uttered by a man who could pick up a small backyard shed.

My mother faced her own herculean linguistic challenges. There were no freezers in her Italy, so when she wanted to preserve goods on ice, she talked about "frizzare," to freeze, rather than the standard "congelare." When her six children got the best of her, she threw her hands up and added an extra vowel to the ends of her Americanized words. We washed our clothes in a "uascinga mascina," vacuumed the carpet with a "vachiuma cleena," and drank lemonade on the "porciu" — the porch.

My parents' skirmishes with standard Italian were nothing compared to the all-out war they waged on English. They would answer calls for their sons by saying "she's a no' home." I took this gender-bending as an assertion of my individuality, my access to a world that separated me from all the other kids on the block. I may have lived in a three-bedroom ranch just like everyone else, but we were different. My family had no need to worship the idols of the second- and third-generation immigrants, with their cries of "mamma mia." When my father swore at me in Italian, he did so out of anger and not nostalgia.

This authenticity extended to the table. While my friends with grandparents from Sicily talked about Italian food, my parents produced it. Each year they churned out hundreds of jars of preserved peaches, pears and tomatoes; gallons of red wine; and bushels of cucumbers, peas and potatoes. Plus the showpiece crop, squash.

One year the local paper took a photo of my father and his prizewinning, five-foot-long gourds. Sensing he was on display, he stayed silent for the whole shoot. He didn't understand how feeding your family could translate into a human-interest story. But make no mistake: he was proud to have created such a prodigious vegetable, and he made sure the part in his hair was just so when the picture was snapped. His face was wrinkled, and he had to lean on his cane when he reached for the prize gourd. He was only in his 60s but old age had been forced upon him prematurely by a massive stroke that paralyzed most of his left side.

My father struggled to explain to the photographer how he grew his vegetables. He had only Calabrian words for the plants, procedures and tools. Each of his children had attained some form of higher education and, with it, freedom from the strife and poverty that had chased him from Italy. We now found his background primitive and remote. He had translated or "carried over" both a family and a dialect. After all this, he believed it was his right to talk about his squash on his own terms. Around the time of the photo, he poured a cement base for a picnic table near his garden. Before it dried, he signed it with a branch: P.L. Nato Acri 1923. Pasquale Luzzi, born in Acri, Italy, 1923. He died just months later, at the end of summer in 1995. In the obituary, my father's passion for gardening was listed as his "hobby," a word that didn't exist in his Calabrian.

After his death, I would hear my father's voice but didn't know how to respond. When I imagined myself speaking to him in English, it sounded pedantic and prissy. Answering in Italian was no less stilted, either when I tried to revive my Calabrian or when I used the textbook grammar that was unnatural to both of us. I had so much to tell him but no way to say it, a reflection of our relationship during his lifetime. Without his words, I was losing a way to describe the world. Memories suddenly mattered more than ever before, and I didn't know if I could find the language to keep them alive.

Dante wrote in his treatise on language that though men and women must communicate with words, angels can talk to one another in silence. Speaking with someone who has died is similar. You learn early on that it is best to concentrate on the person you've lost with as little verbal clutter as possible. Perhaps this Calabrian I now speak with my father is the truly dead dialect, the language that neither changes nor translates.

When I think of him now, I see him digging in his garden, unearthing the ficuzza, Calabrian for his beloved fig tree, from its winter slumber and propping it up for the coming spring. But once I put a word to this picture, once this "ficuzza" becomes a "fico," standard Italian for fig tree, he will have left me. This is when mourning becomes memory, and when it's time to say goodbye to a language and a person I knew all too briefly.

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Joseph Luzzi teaches at Bard and is the author of the forthcoming memoir "My Two Italies," from which this essay was adapted.

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Op-Talk: What It Takes to Legalize Sex Work

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Citizen of the State of New York

In what is being portrayed as the new front on the immigration debate, New York State lawmakers are considering a bill that would grant state citizenship to some noncitizen residents — including undocumented immigrants — allowing them to vote and run for office. Is this a good idea?

Rose Cuison Villazor, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, suggested this discussion.

Read the Discussion »

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Opinionator | The Great Divide: Gaming the Poor

The Great Divide is a series about inequality.

In a referendum in November, voters approved as many as seven new casinos to join New York State's existing nine gambling facilities. And New York is hardly alone. In recent years, 23 other states have legalized and licensed commercial (as opposed to Native American) gambling facilities. In the casino-dense Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, where 26 casinos have opened since 2004 and at least a dozen more are under development, most adults now live within a short drive of one.

Not surprisingly, the closer casinos come to where people live, the more likely people are to gamble at one. As casinos have spread into de-industrialized cities, dying resorts and gritty urban areas, the rate of gambling participation has grown among lower-income groups.

In America's increasingly two-tier economy, casino industry leaders realized that they didn't have to cater exclusively to well-heeled consumers in order to rake in profits. Payday lending, rent-to-own stores, subprime credit cards, auto title loans and tax refund anticipation loans all evolved to extract high profits from low-income groups. And the newly established state-licensed casinos have their methods, too.

A research team from the University at Buffalo and SUNY Buffalo State has conducted studies that offer new evidence of the exploitative effects of casino gambling on lower-income Americans. For example, the researchers found that the rates of casino gambling participation and frequency of visits have increased among lower-income groups. Easy access to casinos is a key factor. Living within 10 miles of one or more casinos more than doubles the rate of problems from excessive gambling. Another factor is easy access to slot-machine gambling. Women and the elderly have become more likely to gamble in recent years, partly because of a preference for nonskill slot-machine gambling.

The casinos' method is to induce low-income gamblers to make a huge number of small bets per visit, to visit the casino several times per month, or even per week, and to sustain this pattern over a period of years. The key to executing this method is the slot machine.

Most regional casinos are essentially slot parlors. Slot machines are nowadays sophisticated computerized devices engineered to produce continuous and repeat betting, and programmed by high-tech experts to encourage gamblers to make multiple bets simultaneously by tapping buttons on the console as fast as their fingers can fly. Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has written the definitive work on gambling-machine design, notes that as gamblers deepen their immersion, they become less interested in winning itself than in simply continuing to play.

Slots will accept bets in denominations as small as a penny — one reason they are attractive to small bettors. But even penny bets placed on each of multiple lines for each spin, after hundreds of spins, can result in large losses.

The goal, though, is not to clean out the gambler in a single visit; it's to provide an experience that will induce the gambler to prolong the time spent on the device. The slots achieve this by carefully regulating the rhythm, tempo and sound ambience of the play, while doling out occasional small wins even as the players' losses slowly increase.

One way these computerized pickpockets milk their customers is by generating "near misses," whereby the spinning symbols on the machine stop just above or below the winning payline. The feeling of having come oh so close to a win prompts further play.

A second goal is to ensure that gamblers visit more often and continue to do so over time. Through player loyalty cards and other marketing programs, casinos collect a vast amount of information on their customers. This enables them to devise customized strategies to get gamblers to adhere to this pattern of frequent play over long duration.

Casinos also gather information on their customers' worth, as well as their "predicted lifetime value." From this information, we might be able to calculate what percentage of customers come from the bottom half of median income distribution, as well as how much these low-income gamblers lose as a percentage of their income. We might also be able to tell how the regional casinos catering to lower-income gamblers are affecting income inequality in their localities.

The casinos do not, of course, disclose this information, and the states that share in the revenues generated through gambling losses do not press their commercial partners to do so. As a result, the limited data available to the public on the impact of casino gambling has been gathered by a few outside sources.

A large-scale survey of adults, conducted by the Buffalo group in 2000, found that lower socioeconomic and minority groups who visited casinos had more gambling-related problems, including financial difficulties. This suggests that their losses, as a share of their income, were greater than those in the upper income distribution.

Examining 15 types of legal gambling, the researchers came to a striking conclusion: Casino gambling had by far the most harmful effects on people at the lower end of the income ladder.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is the director of civil society initiatives at the Institute for American Values.

A version of this article appears in print on 06/22/2014, on page SR7 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Gaming the Poor.

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Opinionator | Disunion: An Explosion in Washington

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

The timing could not have been more eerily ironic. On June 17, 1864, an official read a letter thanking the girls and women who worked at Washington's federal arsenal for a donation to a monument for the 78 victims of a deadly 1862 arsenal blast in Pittsburgh. Then, just hours later, an explosion – like "a sudden flash of lightning," in the words of one survivor – went off inside the arsenal's 100-foot-long wooden laboratory.

Almost immediately, the fire engulfed the building at the south end of the arsenal where the women worked. The alarm was sounded, and some of the arsenal's 1,500 workers raced to help contain the blaze. Many ran from the scene, fearful that more blasts were coming as the fire spread. Indeed, the fire threatened to spread to the magazines, where several tons of gunpowder was kept. It took more than an hour to extinguish the fire.

The arsenal was located on "The Island," actually a peninsula jutting out into the Anacostia River, south of the Capitol. Frantic citizens descended upon the arsenal on the site desperate to know what had happened to their sisters, wives and daughters. Scores did not make it: The young women working in the east part of the building escaped by jumping from windows or fleeing through doors away from the fire, but a number on the west side, who were charging artillery shells, died immediately in the blast or were killed in the blaze.

A dozen or so women who were burned or injured in their escape made it to a tugboat wharf and were treated at the Armory Hospital, already filled with the wounded from the battles of Spotsylvania, the Wilderness and Cold Harbor.

A death count was never conclusively reached: many fled in the chaos and never returned, while the remains of those who died were difficult to identify. Their hoop skirts, worn at the insistence of government officials to preserve the women's modesty and not distract the male workers, not only restricted their movement to escape, but held in place the fabric that so easily ignited. What was thought to be 17 to 19 bodies were laid out in five-foot boxes with as many as five sets of remains inside — body parts actually, on boards or in tin pans on the grass. A few were identified by scraps of clothing, a piece of jewelry or a shoe, but most were burned beyond recognition.

Arsenal blasts were common during the war: Alongside Washington and Pittsburgh, major explosions occurred in Richmond, in 1863, and Augusta, Ga., in 1864. And at each, the bulk of the victims were girls and young women. As in later conflicts, these jobs were filled by women because men were off fighting. The rolls of "government girls" – workers at the arsenal, as well as clerks, printers, sewers and munitions makers – swelled through the war.

Life for these women was hard: As a contemporary correspondent, Lois Bryan Adams, reported, they often were supporting severely wounded or disabled husbands and children. And while many made good wages – arsenal workers made $50 to $60 a month – they had a hard time keeping up with rampant inflation that reached a whopping 76 percent, and, according to the economic historian Elden E. Billings, was probably even higher in the capital. Rent, even in poor, remote suburbs like Georgetown, ate up at least $25 (though single women often boarded together), and another $30 went to food. A cord of wood to ward off the winter cold cost between $12 and $16.

Life was even harder for the countless girls who represented a large portion of the munitions-factory work force – "little indigent girls," in the words of a Confederate War Department clerk, J.B. Jones, very often Irish in the case of those killed in Richmond and Washington. It was one of the few ways they could earn a living other than prostitution. Yet they had no real standing in labor negotiations, unlike men.

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Disunion Highlights

Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive.

Despite their precarious existence, the women killed in the blast received a hero's funeral. The next day "the working men" of the arsenal adopted resolutions calling for the dead to be buried at Congressional Cemetery, to make arrangements for the families to attend the services and interment, to march from the arsenal to the cemetery in what one correspondent called "one of the most imposing and extensive funeral processions ever beheld in the national metropolis," have Roman Catholic and Protestant clergymen conduct the service and erect "a new and noble monument" on the cemetery's grounds to those killed in the explosion.

This was different from the funeral after the Pittsburgh blast, when the victims were buried in a mass grave. Washington could not do that. Like residents of Richmond, home front and battlefront had merged; the women were not soldiers, but they were not complete civilians, either. Some 200,000 soldiers camped in the capital, along with thousands of cattle ready to be sent to Ulysses S. Grant's army in Virginia. And by the summer of 1864, Washington had become a large receiving hospital with tents and temporary buildings erected all over the city to treat the casualties of the Union's Overland campaign. Near the arsenal were the Sixth Street wharves, where the wounded and those too sick to fight were landed.

Official Washington was forced to respond, too. A hastily called coroner's inquest traced the cause of the explosion to the decision by the arsenal's superintendent, Thomas B. Brown, to set out pans of red stars for fireworks to dry in the June day's heat too close to the building where the women were "choking cartridges," a process where a machine would attach the end of the cartridge to the ball. The coroner's jury found Brown, who had more than 20 years' experience as a "pyrotechnician," guilty of "carelessness and negligence and reckless disregard for life" in placing inflammable substances "so near a building filled with human beings."

As news of what happened spread, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ordered the government to pay the funeral expenses for the women who died that day. Stanton, President Abraham Lincoln and one of his sons would serve as "chief mourners" for the thousands who marched to the cemetery to join the thousands already there for the burials.

The next year, a 25-foot monument with a female figure symbolizing grief, inscribed with the names of 21 victims, standing atop was erected, near the western border of Congressional Cemetery, where 17 of them are buried. The four others were buried in Mount Olivet, the city's Catholic cemetery.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

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Sources: The Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, Va.); The Daily Chronicle (Washington); The Daily National Intelligencer (Washington); The New York Times; The Evening Star (Washington); L.B. Adams, Evelyn Leasher, eds., "Letter from Washington"; Brian Bergin and Elizabeth Bergin Voorhees, "The Washington Arsenal Explosion: Civil War Disaster in the Capital"; Elden E. Billings, "Washington during the Civil War and Reconstruction," Records of the Columbia Historical Society 1963-1965; Drew Gilpin Faust, "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War; Ernest B. Furgurson, "Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War"; Judith Giesberg, "Army at Home, Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front"; J.B. Jones, "A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Vol. 1"; Margaret Leech, "Reveille in Washington"; Allan Nevins, "War for the Union 1863-1864: The Organized War"; Association for the Preservation of The Historic Congressional Cemetery, Newspaper Clips (1860-1869).

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John Grady, a former editor of Navy Times and a retired director of communications at the Association of the United States Army, is completing a biography of Matthew Fontaine Maury. He is also a contributor to the Navy's Civil War Sesquicentennial blog.

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Room for Debate: How to Stabilize Iraq and Stop the March of ISIS

Conflicts in Syria and Iraq have converged into a widening regional crisis spearheaded by a powerful extremist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Sunni militants have mounted their boldest offensive in Iraq since the departure of American troops at the end of 2011, driving the military forces from territory north and west of Baghdad and taking the cities of Mosul and Tikrit with little resistance.

What can be done to stabilize Iraq and stop the march of extremist groups? What should the United States do to follow up on its military and economic commitments in the country?

Read the Discussion »

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Opinionator | The Great Divide: Stop Holding Us Back

The Great Divide is a series about inequality.

This month, more than three million high school students will receive their diplomas. At more than 80 percent, America's graduation rate is at a record high. More kids are going to college, too. But one-third of the nation's African-American and Latino young men will not graduate.

In an era when there is virtually no legal work for dropouts, these young men face a bleak future. It is not news that the students who don't make it out of high school largely come from our poorest neighborhoods, but the degree to which they are hyper-concentrated in a small set of schools is alarming. In fact, according to new research I conducted with my colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, half of the African-American boys who veer off the path to high school graduation do so in just 660 of more than 12,600 regular and vocational high schools.

These 660 schools are typically big high schools that teach only poor kids of color. They are concentrated in 15 states. Many are in major cities, but others are in smaller, decaying industrial cities or in the South, especially in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.

This seemingly intractable problem is a national tragedy, but there is a solution. In the high schools where most of the young men are derailed, the number of ninth-grade boys who desperately need better schooling and extra support is typically between 50 and 100. Keeping many or even most of those boys on track in each entering ninth-grade class in 660 schools does not seem impossible.

If we know where to focus our efforts, we can put strategies in place that have shown promise, particularly over the last few years. While early childhood is critical, the most treacherous time for young African-American and Latino men is from ages 11 to 21. At the very moment they are the most developmentally vulnerable, the response from schools, foster care, the health system and child protective services gets weaker, while the response from the justice system is harsher. Their family responsibilities grow, and their neighborhoods turn meaner. Their middle and high school experience becomes make or break.

But the secondary schools these students attend are not specifically designed for them. It is not unusual for up to half the students to miss a month or more of school, and often more students are suspended in a year than graduate. In a 22-school sample that we studied closely, nearly all ninth-grade students were either too old for their grades, had repeated ninth grade, needed special education, were chronically absent or had academic skills at the seventh grade level or below. The norm in this environment is to fail classes and then repeat ninth grade. But most students do no better the second time around. Either they drop out then or they may briefly transfer to another school before dropping out later. This is a highly predictable, almost mechanical course, which is why we call those schools dropout factories.

We have also learned that most students who eventually drop out can be identified as early as the sixth grade by their attendance, behavior and course performance, according to studies by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins, where I am the director, and the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. Using those indicators, it is possible to identify by the middle of ninth grade virtually everyone who will drop out. These young men are waving their hands early and often to say they need help, but our educational and student-support systems aren't organized to recognize and respond to their distress signals.

In 2008, my colleagues and I decided to focus on those struggling sixth and ninth graders. What if we reorganized entire schools with teams of teachers who shared a common group of students? What if we added more time for English and math and offered coaching for teachers and principals? What if we welcomed students to school, called them if they didn't show up and helped with homework? What if we used an early warning system that identified struggling students based on their poor attendance, behavior and course performance and then worked to get each student back on track?

To try to provide all that, we developed Diplomas Now, a partnership of three national nonprofits, which works with more than 30,000 students in 40 of the toughest middle and high schools in 14 big cities. (Although I am focusing here on boys, because they have lower graduation rates than girls, the program is coed.)

To evaluate our progress, MDRC, a social policy research organization, is conducting a randomized field trial. Initial indications are positive. In the 2012-13 school year, the program achieved a 41 percent reduction in chronically absent students, a 70 percent reduction in suspended students, a 69 percent reduction in students failing English and a 52 percent reduction in students failing math.

This is not an anomalous result. A recent study of public schools in Chicago shows that getting students back on track in the ninth grade leads to higher graduation rates and that African-American males in particular experience the greatest benefits when schools are reorganized to focus on ninth grade.

What do we need to do on a national scale? First, high-poverty secondary schools need to be redesigned with the special problems of their students in mind, with a focus on freshman year. In practice, this means starting new schools and transforming existing ones.

Second, early warning systems need to be instituted so that teachers and other committed adults can step in at the first sign a student is in trouble, whether it's cutting class, mouthing off or floundering in English or math.

Third, we should employ additional adults to support students who need daily nagging and nurturing to succeed, especially during the key transitional years in sixth and ninth grades.

We also need the larger community, including local businesses and faith-based organizations, to mentor students by showing them how to set goals, apply to college and acquire workplace skills.

This sounds expensive, but it does not have to be, particularly if we stop wasting money on failed strategies like holding kids back in high school. Asking struggling students to repeat a grade under the same circumstances almost guarantees the same result.

We are already paying a lot for failure. On average, holding a student back costs $11,000. The 660 high schools that produce half of African-American male dropouts spend more than $500 million a year to retain more than 46,000 boys and girls in ninth grade.

There is an unexpected path forward, the outlines of which are in view. We can provide our most vulnerable children with a better chance for adult success. They deserve no less.

Robert Balfanz is a research professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Education and the director of the Everyone Graduates Center.

A version of this article appears in print on 06/08/2014, on page SR5 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Stop Holding Us Back.

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Room for Debate: Did Colorado Go Too Far With Pot?

Learn to Make It Safer, but Keep It Legal

Ernest Drucker, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

As a consequence of the decades of criminalization of marijuana use we have almost no scientific basis for how it can be consumed safely.

Legalization Is Just Too Dangerous

A. Eden Evins, Center for Addiction Medicine

Companies with a profit motive can promote dependency, especially among the young, so they have a steady stream of customers.

California Has Already Shown Pot to Be Safe

Deborah Peterson Small, Drug policy reform advocate

Growers, sellers, edible manufacturers and regulators worked together to provide cannabis products while protecting public safety.

Marijuana Is Now Big Business

Kevin A. Sabet, Project SAM

A relentless marijuana lobby insists that these products are not especially attractive to children, yet continues to block controls on advertising, labeling, shape and color.

Problems Are Exaggerated in Unfair Coverage

Steve Fox, National Cannabis Industry Association

The problems associated with alcohol dwarf the problems associated with marijuana. Yet we do not see the same news coverage or question whether the industry should exist.

Shaping an Industry and a Policy Model

Joe Hodas, Dixie Elixirs and Edibles

Evolution and adaptation are happening at a speed that I don't think any other industry in history has emulated.

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Room for Debate: Segregation by Ability

Introduction

A 2012 fourth-grade "gifted and talented" class in New York City. Dave Sanders for The New York Times

New York City's schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, who as a principal eliminated her school's gifted classrooms, created a bit of stir recently by downplaying the importance of the city's "gifted and talented" programs. Earlier this year, she said she would like to see neighborhood schools "provide gifted practices to all students."

Should public schools offer these programs?

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Room for Debate: Can the Market Stave Off Global Warming?

On Monday, President Obama is expected to announce a plan to cut carbon emissions from power plants by up to 30 percent with the help of state cap-and-trade programs.

Cap and trade is one of the primary responses to global warming. It requires industries to have marketable permits to emit greenhouse gases. Reducing the permits would increase their price, lower emissions and stimulate innovation. Many say it has not worked out so well.

Is cap and trade the best chance for stemming climate change, or are other methods needed?

Read the Discussion »

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