Jesse Jackson is an important figure in American politics and a 1984 presidential candidate who stands ready to repeat that race in 1988. Nonetheless, Jackson is not a credible, legitimate, or desirable leader for black America, argues black Yale political …
According to a new public opinion poll conducted for the Sunday Times of London, “South African whites are increasingly unhappy with the apartheid system and a majority want the nationalist leader Nelson Mandela freed from prison.” Even as the sound …
When compared to men like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Malcolm X seems no more than a thorned bud standing in the shadow of sequoias. Given national recognition by television in 1959, Malcolm X was just beginning to realize …
He looks like Central Casting’s idea of an organizer. Domenic Mario Bozzotto, president of Local 26, is bearded, olive-skinned, tieless, with the bravura and streetcorner patois of a Damon Runyon tough guy, but also the sweetness of a parish priest. …
Having failed at reducing unemployment, reviving the Middle East peace process, stopping the burgeoning national debt and controlling the arms race, the Reagan administration has evidently decided to take on something it can handle: pornography. Last summer, to much fanfare, …
Lionel Trilling wrote with a remarkable assurance. Too much assumption of authority can make a critic seem remote or bullying, but Trilling’s essays were never so. His attitude towards his reader was always a genial one, to use a word …
A sense of the inevitable has clouded all discussions of the industrial crisis confronting our nation. Policy analysts of divergent opinions have found common ground in the view that the steel industry cannot and should not be saved. Most see …
Certain changes in the USSR’s domestic and foreign policy, the swift replacement of high-ranking leaders, the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, and, of course, the Chernobyl disaster have riveted all attention, causing little notice to be paid to the recent changes in …
Cultural historians, like other historians, are forever in search of transitional periods, moments when historical change occurs so dramatically that long-term developments are encapsulated in almost self-explanatory words and images. U.S. cultural historians locate one such period somewhere in the …
Democracy has returned to Argentina against a backdrop of profound changes in international and national life. To cite but a few: the intensification of power-bloc rivalry; revolutionary changes in the technology of information; the realignment of world views; high-tech militarization; …
In Louisiana this past year, two seemingly disparate political events took place: the election of Sidney Barthelemy, a black Democrat, as mayor of New Orleans; and the endorsement of the Reverend Marion G. (Pat) Robertson’s bid for the Republican presidential …
In 1971 the A. H. Robins Company purchased the rights to market the Dalkon Shield, an intrauterine device. The doctor who developed it and conducted the original research on its effectiveness and safety was an owner of the company that …
Before the 1950s, southern history was, for the most part, a provincial backwater of American historiography. Only in its role as protagonist in the sectional controversy and the Civil War did the South receive much attention from mainstream interpreters of …
Writers on the left have generally looked upon religion from two opposing perspectives. Beginning in the nineteenth century socialists influenced by Marx’s writings tended to regard religion as a species of “false consciousness” that must be extirpated before the working …
For many Americans Kurt Waldheim’s resounding victory in Austria’s run-off presidential election last June (he received nearly 54 percent of the vote, after finishing just shy of a first-round win) illuminated the dark side of a country more famous for …
