The Wire-Cutters – April 26

Last night’s well-attended discussion of T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain was lively and spirited, and produced a strong consensus among those who hadn’t read any of his other works that they would do so.

Next up, and the last of our current series of discussions sponsored by the Kansas Humanities Council, will be Mollie E. Moore Davis’s classic The Wire-Cutters – the very first novel to portray nineteenth-century cowboy life in a serious vein.

First published in 1899, The Wire-Cutters presaged a new kind of storytelling, soon to become familiar to readers internationally: the Western.

Copies of The Wire-Cutters are available at the circulation desk. Our discussion, led by Wichita State University’s Phillip D. Thomas, will be at 7 pm on Monday, April 26th.

Haysville Counts

1930 Census (National Archives)

Next week, the Haysville Community Library will be hosting two separate evening classes on the lower level, each training 18 canvassers for the US Census Bureau. Once trained, these canvassers will fan out across the area to get us as close to a 100% count in the 2010 Census as they possibly can.

It’s a matter of vital importance to all citizens of Haysville, since the disbursement of funds and the arrangement of political districts, among numerous other important considerations, are all dependent upon the population count determined by the census. (For the hundreds of millions of dollars disbursed to Kansas on the basis of census counts, see this 12-page report from the Brookings Institution.)

As of today, Haysville’s participation rate is 74%, slightly above the US average of 66%, but trailing that of Derby (77%) and Mulvane (76%). The current participation rate for Kansas as a whole is 70%, and for Sedgwick County 68%. (To track the changes on a daily basis, see the US Census Bureau’s Take 10 Map.)

Nationwide, 538 counties (as of April 6) had met or exceeded their participation rates from the 2000 Census. Sedgwick County is not among them. Nor has Haysville exceeded its 2000 participation rate.

For a detailed analysis of current census participation rates – especially in metropolitan areas — see this analysis from the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York.

For more on the 2010 Census and its importance, see our earlier posts Make It Count and Kansas Population: Anticipating the Census.

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