Talk:Lattimer massacre

NPOV

This article seems to be lacking in the NPOV department. (User:Daegred forgot to sign) 19:45, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Sensationalistic

I think the tone of this article is a little sensationalistic and emotionally-charged. I'm not a great writer but I think this article needs to be looked at. (at 15:45, 26 May 2005 EDT Anonymous User:65.167.23.134 forgot to sign)

Please, give some specifics. Proclaiming that an article is POV without any evidence to support your claim is essentially meaningless. Since I am the only substantial author of this article, there is a considerable risk that it is POV. I really would like to know what specifically you think is POV, so it can be fixed to improve the article.-Casito⇝Talk 20:38, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

I'll agree that there are some phrasings that suggest a particular POV. Here are some that struck me:

• "... an atrocity in which a sheriff's posse killed more than nineteen unarmed immigrant miners and wounded scores more."

Would it be incorrect to describe this as "an incident in which many unarmed immigrant miners were killed or wounded by a sheriff's posse during a labor dispute"? I'm not an expert on NPOV, but putting the actions of the posse in the active voice makes it seem less objective IMHO. Also, the fact that "scores more" were wounded seems less appropriate for the opening sentence of the article than perhaps later on, and it suggested a sense of outrage to me.

• Under Events > Lead-up, bullets described as "perfect for penetrating multiple ranks of demonstrators" is clearly emotional. Perhaps an objective remark about the increased lethality of such munitions would be in order, but this seems too inflammatory.
• Under Events > Massacre, it just seems to me like an anecdotal account without much corroboration -- and given the sides taken in the dispute, even the corroborating testimony of many witnesses from a given side is probably still biased. We all know that even body counts can rise and fall depending on who's counting the bodies. I think the article should underscore who reported the actions of the posse, et al., if known or if it could be reasonably inferred, e.g. "Miners reported that ..."
• "An unknown person, perhaps the sheriff" seems clearly POV -- either the person was known or he was unknown. There shouldn't be any implication of a certain identity, unless of course there's sufficient evidence to suggest it. If there is such evidence, include it.

This isn't an exhaustive list -- just the ones that caught my eye as I scanned through. Nice work on the article! Mcgrawcm 23:38, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

Modifications

• incident was my origional phrasing -- I added atrocity as a link to the atrocity/massacre article. There is a link to the same article later in the same paragraph, so I will restore the origional wording.
• This issue of the bullets is a bit tricker. Metal-jacketed amunition is actually less lethal against a single target since the bullets do not mushroom on impact. The added lethality here comes, however, from the rounds' ability to penetrate multiple targets. I did my best to neutralize the statement while still conveying this information.
• The body count of 19 is quite certain and can be found in any article on the subject. The number wounded, however, is more speculative, since many miners were too afraid to seek treatment at nearby hospitles. I will also try a few more tweaks to improve the POV of this secion.
• The issue of the unknown person is more a problem of summarization than my POV. I have expanded it to two sentences to explain.

Part of the problem is that the sources I had available were somewhat vague as to who said what. I presume that the major primary sources for this event were newspapers and trial testomony. The former is undoubtedly biased (as the yellow press ran the roost in those days), while the latter would shed light on several points of view. Unfortunatly, I don't really have the resources to track it down and read through all of the testimony. Furthermore, I suspect that most of the books written describing the event are written with a pro labor/slavic point of view.

The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission article (the first external link) is the most extensive, relativly NPOV, and a trustworthy source. I recommend it to anyone fact-checking or revising the POV of this article. On that note, someone other than me should probably go through and further neutralize the point of view of the article. As a decendent of Slavic miners in PA, I am passionate about researching and writing about their history. The downside is, of course, that I have a point of view about the subject. In contrast, however, I think that people tend to question this article because it is a seemingly signifigant event in American history that they have never heard about (Slavs sometimes seem like a "forgotten" ethnic group in the U.S.).-Casito⇝Talk 02:36, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

POV tag removal

I will assume from lack of responce that people approve of my modifications, and that people find the article to be more NPOV, thus I'm removing the tag. If you disagree, you won't hurt my feelings if you restore it. -Casito⇝Talk 3 July 2005 14:53 (UTC)

Inaccurate firearms information

The article claims that that metal jacketing bullets increases their lethality. This is incorrect; metal jacketted bullets are less lethal since the jacketing largely prevents expansion and thus reduces the amount of kinectic energy absorbed by the target as well as reducing the size of the bullet paths. The Geneva conventions even REQUIRE military forces to use full metal jacket ammo for precisely this reason.

Lethality

The lethality link has been piped to stopping power; that article starts off by saying that "stopping power" is not the same as "lethality". Some clarification needed, please. Colonies Chris (talk) 09:14, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Regarding lethality quote, I edited the word Lethality to penetration, as I believe this is a more accurate and less inflamatory description of the effect of using full metal jacket ammunition. Theseeker4 (talk) 17:29, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Neutrality

This article seems really biased towards the strikers, and while that is where my personal sympathies lie, the article should be as neutral as possible. --Sultan Pepper (talk) 00:23, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Nation of Austria-Hungary?

While I'm not an expert and thus don't feel compelled to make an edit straight away, I find it highly dubious that it's possible to speak of a "nation of Austria-Hungary". A state or country maybe. A-H was a union of two nations, and it also annexed lands inabited by other nations, some of which considered this to be an occupation and actively fought against it. That's especially true of Poles who make the majority of the vitcims of the incident described. I don't think you can lump the citizens of the A-H state under the term "nation". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.232.234.3 (talk) 12:21, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Lead is copyrighted

The entire lead is copied almost word-for-word from the "Lattimer Massacre" entry in Massacring: Webster's Quotations, Facts and Phrases. Icon Group International, 2008. ISBN 0546713459. It has been changed to removed this text. - Tim1965 (talk) 19:03, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Icon republishes our articles. Dougweller (talk) 14:24, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Slavs?

The article states that one of the prevalent ethnic groups among the miners were Lithuanians, but the rest of the article refers to the miners in general as "Slavic". Lithuanians are not Slavs. Perhaps "Slavs" should be changed to a more accurate name ("non-English speakers"? "Central and Eastern Europeans"? "Recent immigrants?"). EugeneK (talk) 03:21, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

• I have a number of sources on this, and will need to double-check that. My sense of some of the citations is that "Slav" is used specifically (like when it says strikebreakers were Slavic). That's seemed an attempt to employers to create ethnic tension. I'm leery of using a more general term like "Central and Eastern European" unless the source justify it. So I will help check sources on that. (This article needs improving anyway. There is a lot of information just not included here.) - Tim1965 (talk) 14:34, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Name of Judge Presiding over Prosecutions.

The artlicle would benefit from naming the judge who presided over the prosecution of the Sheriff and Deputies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.68.196.238 (talk) 11:20, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Page numbers

Why is it that not a single page number appears in any of the citations in this article. Some of the books are cited multiple times, but the specific page numbers are never given. This is a problem. ---The Old Jacobite_{The '45} 13:00, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

number of deaths

The lede and infobox both state 19. The body of the article has two sets of lists from different sources; one lists 21 names, the other 19. The sources as are:

1. A list of 21 names from a contemporary newspaper (and a widely respected one), documenting the event shortly after it occurred. With all due respect to the notion that primary sources such as this documenting an historical event shortly after the fact can be prone to errors....

2. The list of 19 names, which comes from some book written by some dude, many decades later, who describes himself as 'not a historian' but a 'philosopher and theologian', and who apparently came up with said list not through the use of contemporary records but through 'known gravesites' (whatever tf that even means).

Which one of these things seems more likely to be accurate?? ffs... Should wikipedia lower its standards to those such as the second, then any Joe Blow could publish some book saying that the Nazis really only killed 100,000 Jews (or whatever) during the Holocaust, based on his assesment of known mass gravesites' or some similar fictitious claimed authority.

I will amend this. Firejuggler86 (talk) 14:41, 27 December 2020 (UTC)