War and Money in Ngram Viewer

The second and fourth authors have been inviting Intro to Applied Analytics and Statistics 1 students to use the Ngram Database to explore historical topics of their choosing. This is the first article derived from this exercise. The first author examined the historical relationship between war and money from 1775 to 2005 in the American English corpus. This is followed by an examination of the 3-gram “cost of war” in the American English and British English corpora. Specific to the analyses presented here several military and economic events are discussed. More specifically, both economies and wars are somewhat unpredictable, with wars being more so. Through this exercise, more experience with statistics and a greater appreciation of history are achieved

Black Swan Years in American English, French, German, Hebrew, and Russian

The Ngram Viewer database has been used to study history and culture, primarily by examining the frequencies of words, within a single or two languages (corpora). We examined numbers instead (specifically years) across five different corpora. The years were 1799, 1865, 1917, 1945, and 1948. The corpora were American English, French, German, Hebrew, and Russian. Our analyses suggest that these years reverberate in specific languages more than typical years, and therefore our approach can be used to identify years with significant historical impact, within and across languages (and by extension countries) and therefore may be useful in the field of comparative histor