User talk:Sammy Houston

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[edit] Welcome

Hello, Sammy Houston, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type {{helpme}} and your question on your user talk page, and someone will show up shortly to answer. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, you can sign your name on talk and vote pages using four tildes, like this: ~~~~. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Cornell Rockey 05:30, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to our encyclopedia. Wikipedia has a Manual of Style that should be followed to maintain a consistent, encyclopedic appearance. Using different styles throughout the encyclopedia, as you did to Brown University, makes it harder to read. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. DMacks 07:26, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Your edits to Ivy League

Your additions are not appropriate. This is an article about the Ivy League, not Brown University. Thus adding long passages about what people at Brown have done and are doing is tangentially relevant at best. --C S (Talk) 05:04, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Your criticism is inappropriate. The addition submitted concerns important historical features of the emergence of the universities which comprise the Ivy League and contribute to public understanding and Wikipedia readership understanding of the Ivy League and its historical origins.

As a reader, I have no better understanding of what important historical features are being discussed nor how this contributes to understanding of the Ivy League's origin (which was established well after the Civl War). What is clear to me is that almost 100% of your writing is discussing Brown's recent activities on some issue related to slavery and Brown's origins. --C S (Talk) 05:15, 15 April 2007 (UTC)


As a reader, it is readily apparent that you could not possibly have read the important historical documents embedded in PDF format within this new submission and which have garnered the attention of scholars throughout the Ivy League as well as at Oxford and Cambridge universities, all of whom are interested in fresh scholarship into the deep historical links between several members of the Ivy League and the Triangular Trade. Perhaps your lack of familiarity with these links stems from Cornell's foundation following the abolition of slavery, the slave trade and an entirely different phase in the history of the Ivy League institutions. Feel free to place a notation in the submission indicating that it is historically impossible for Cornell to have participated in the Triangle Trade. That would be a useful contribution to knowledge of the Ivy League. (Moreover, your calculation of percentages is deeply flawed if you believe the new submission is 100% related to exclusively one of the Ivy League universities. The number of Ivy League institutions which this new area of scholarship concerns remains to be determined.)

What are the "several members of the Ivy League" you mention? It is not mentioned anywhere in your edits. You say I am incorrect about my supposition about your edits mostly describing Brown; however, that is in effect what most of your edit is about. I can see sentences here and there where you try to imply that this is somehow representative of the Ivy League. For example, you state that the President of Brown gave a speech as a "representative of the Ivy League", something which is undoubtedly incorrect and reveals something of your bias. Yet you also say now that the number of Ivy institutions you are referring to "remains to be determined". So it seems clear that you are trying some sort of extrapolation of the Brown data, but you don't really have anything you can say about other Ivy schools. As such, it is inappropriate to add it to this Ivy League article. When scholars have a better determination as to what institutions this "new area of scholarship" applies to, then feel free to expand the appropriate articles as needed. --C S (Talk) 05:31, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict)By the way, you are being silly in your assumption that I am somehow motivated to revert you because I am trying to defend my alma mater. I reverted you because your edits are biased and speculative and give undue weight to a matter which so far only Brown has been involved in. Note that you haven't even named any other Ivy schools besides Brown (and now Cornell, to emphasize that Cornell is not involved!). In fact, as you recent edit make clear ("may be revealed by inquiry into the historical foundations of other institutional members of the Ivy League"), this is at current time a Brown matter, which explains why your additions are mainly about Brown. Once you delete all the paragraphs about Brown, what's left? Some speculative sentences that there "may" be similarities with the origins of some other schools. By the way, you do realize that there may be such issues with other old American non-Ivy schools (especially ones in the South)? It would be just as inappropriate to start editing articles about associations those schools are a part of. --C S (Talk) 05:52, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Again, it is apparent that your knowledge of the Triangular Trade and its connections to the foundation of possibly 7 out of the 8 Ivy League universities is limited. The point of this report was to document those connections for one (1) member of the Ivy League. Much of the data in the report concerns personnages connected with the history of some of the other Ivy League institutions. The fact that Brown has recently published an important report on this subject does not mean that the historical evidence did not exist prior to the publication of the document. I suggest you do some research to satisfy your apparent skepticism of historical fact, starting with the report provided in the latest improvement to this article on the Ivy League. There is already research available on the connections between Harvard and Yale and the Triangular Trade. Neither of us is a professor of history. The submission offered here is factually accurate. If you want to embellish the submission with factually correct additions concerning the connections or lack of connections between each of the other seven members of the Ivy League and thr Triangular Trade, feel free. That is the point of Wikipedia - to provide accurate contributions to the dissemination of knowledge through multiple contributors. Those who wish to do the research necessary to supply pertinent data concerning Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, and Dartmouth are free to do so. I am not being paid to improve the completeness of Wikipedia.

President Ruth Simmons is a president of the Ivy League. She was invited to participate in the Bicentary colloquium at Cambridge in her capacity of president of Brown and as a president of an Ivy League institution, all of which have long standing historical ties with Cambridge. Therefore, it is accurate to state that Dr. Simmons spoke as a "representative" of the Ivy League, particularly since there exists no official "representative" of the Ivy League. I will happily change the characterization to "unofficial" representative.

Without providing any subtantiation for the purported absence of scholarship on the subject, you state:

When scholars have a better determination as to what institutions this "new area of scholarship" applies to, then feel free to expand the appropriate articles as needed.


Again, the submission I made is well documented and factually accurate. Feel free to make your own contributions to the article on this subject concerning Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, and Dartmouth if you wish to do so.

It is documented, factually accurate, but not about The Ivy League, which is what the Ivy League article is. If it were about slavery across all Ivy League institutions and had some relevance to them as a group, then it would be notable and relevant to the topic of the article, not just notable and relevant to "some topic somewhere". DMacks 17:06, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Wrong. The submission does concern The Ivy League, just as an article submission concerning Oxford and not Cambridge concerns Oxbridge or an article about one of the constituent members and not about other members still concerns the Ivy League. See the campus newspaper columns in any of the Ivy League colleges for examples of the relevant logic. The sections devoted to coverage of the Ivy League do not require coverage of all 8 constituent members to claim, appropriately, that the article in question covers events in the Ivy League.

Please refrain from repeatedly undoing other people's edits, as you are doing in Ivy League. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing Wikipedia. The three-revert rule (3RR) prohibits making more than three reversions in a content dispute within a 24 hour period. Additionally, users who perform a large number of reversions in content disputes may be blocked for edit warring, even if they do not technically violate the three-revert rule. Rather than reverting, please discuss disputed changes on the talk page. The revision you want is not going to be implemented by edit warring. Thank you. Please use Talk:Ivy League to discuss changes rather than repeatedly reverting without discussion. -- Rbellin|Talk 04:05, 17 April 2007 (UTC)