In a quaint Easter day speech delivered in 1943, Eamon de Valera, patriarchal prime minister of the Irish Free State (it became the Republic of Ireland in 1949), described his cherished vision of a self-sufficient nation—replete with comely maidens, cozy …
Harvey Swados’s On the Line appeared in the fall of 1957, barely noticed among the long-running best sellers of the day, By Love Possessed, Peyton Place, and On the Beach, or among the works of fiction that were just beginning …
The following comment, slightly abbreviated, is reprinted with the author’s permission from the New York Post. In their new incarnation, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda talk brightly of “a new political era” in which California Gov. Jerry Brown—subject to change …
There is an increasingly widespread feeling in Congress, among informed sectors of public opinion and, surprisingly, even among many strategic analysts, that U.S. nuclear forces have grown far beyond any rational purpose, that we have far more than we need …
Israel’s political and social life is still reeling from the impact of two seemingly contradictory developments unforeseen by even the most knowledgeable pundits: first, the end of 30 years of Labor’s hegemony in the 1977 elections, and second, Sadat’s visit …
In the past 25 years the number of working women in America has nearly doubled. Today 55 percent of women aged 18-64 are part of the labor force. Still, despite the efforts of the women’s movement—and much general lip service—women …
“Is Quebec still part of Canada?” asks the traffic policeman in Boston. The New York Times quotes an administrator of multicampus Antioch College as opposing a “Canadian solution” to his troubled institution. There seems to be an idea abroad that …
E. P. Thompson is best known as the social historian whose magisterial The Making of the English Working Class has had an enduring impact on the writing of labor history on both sides of the Atlantic. His biography of William …
This March Britain’s Labour government fell in a vote of no confidence after months of industrial strife. Ford machinists, truckers, local-authority manual workers, social workers and civil servants had battered and broken the government’s wage guidelines. Five years ago Heath’s …
The death of Jayaprakash Narayan—known to his compatriots and throughout the world simply as JP —brings to an end a life that spanned every important event in 50 years of Indian history, ranging from the struggle for independence to the …
Surface storms that shake up Indian politics, such as the one that uprooted Morarji Desai’s government last year in mid-July or the more recent one over the year-end elections, are the only events in India’s politics that catch the world’s …
The name Gröfaz, says Professor Craig in his well-written history of modern Germany, “is ugly enough to belong to some mythical monster, some twisted goblin embodying evil.” It was the anagram of the title “Greatest Fieldmarshall of All Times,” which …
This is an exercise in empathy with that highly articulate group of white Southerners, mostly writers, who were strongly committed to justice for Negroes and who appealed for support—it was not forthcoming—from what they believed was a reservoir of racial …
Behind the facade of Soviet ideology, there is a tremendous longing for the clear, pure word of truth. That, more than anything else, is the driving force behind the upsurge of literature, in typescript and carbon copies, emerging in all …
Editors: Was the article “Africa: War and Revolution” in the spring issue of Dissent submitted to any member of the editorial board with some knowledge of Africa? If so, I find it hard to understand how such obvious anomalies as …
