The American Enterprise articles from March 1998

The American Enterprise archives from March 1998

Twang-town headliners mull country music in the '90s. (Nashville, TN, musicians and music industry executives)(Interview)
March 1, 1998... Country music is big business. Each week, more than 45 million Americans listen to country radio stations, an audience that outnumbers the second-rated radio format by 7 million people. There are more country stations -- 2,505 -- than any other...

Norman Rockwell: great American artist?
March 1, 1998... Norman Rockwell is the most popular American artist of this century. The themes of his work define a turbulent period that opened with barefoot boys lazing away summer afternoons in the countryside and ended with their sons stepping cautiously...

Clueless: why the elite media don't understand America.
March 1, 1998... Over the past 30 years, America's population and economy have shifted decisively away from the Northeast, as powerful new economic and cultural centers have emerged in the West and South. Yet as businesses and people have fled from the...

Nashville rides a wave and wonders where it's heading.(Cover Story)
March 1, 1998... To people not attracted to its music, Nashville has long seemed a cultural curiosity -- a source of lachrymose songs delivered by men decked out in cowboy hats and women with a taste for elaborate hairdos. * Country music is the defining image...

Why do boom towns boom? It's the culture, a trip to Nashville reveals.(Cover Story)
March 1, 1998... Entrepreneurs seeing Nashville for the first time usually do so through the windshield of a rented car. Maybe they come down to scout for the right place to base their business, or just to take a job with hopes of starting their own company...

A waltz through Tennessee politics. (Cover Story)
March 1, 1998... "The mayor of Nashville being an Upstate New Yorker who went to Harvard -- this would have been impossible to imagine 30 years ago," says Nashville-based book publisher John S. Sanders. Mayor Phil Bredesen is indeed a stark example of the...

The land where religion is hip. (Nashville, TN) (includes related article on orthodox Jewish rabbi)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1998... Unless you've driven down one of Nashville's seemingly endless streets of churches trying to find the one with the Christian ballet while your car radio is tuned to a Christian rock station, you just haven't had the Nashville religious...

The row on music row. (Nashville, TN, music industry) (includes exerpt from Johnny Cash's autobiography and related article on gospel music)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1998... Sara Evans is hoping three is a charm. For the third time in her 26 years, this Missouri farm girl has come here chasing her dream: to become a country music star. * Evans is one of thousands seeking just part of a business worth more than...

A classroom tour of Nashville. (Nashville, TN)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1998... Today, the most forward-looking school reformers are the advocates of a return to an old-fashioned "core curriculum." Building on the findings of researchers like E. D. Hirsch (author of Cultural Literacy) the backers of a core curriculum...

The down and out are headed up in Nashville. (welfare program in Nashville, TN)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1998... Spend any time talking to poverty-fighters in Nashville and two facts stand out. First, Tennessee's welfare rolls have been reduced by nearly a third over two years. Second, for poor people who want to become independent, many people in...

Car town. (auto industry in Tennessee) (includes related article)(Cover Story)
March 1, 1998... "I've done a right smart bit of travelin', and the best place to live is middle Tennessee." So says Pete Johnson, owner of a "meat and three vegetables" restaurant in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Apparently Pete's affection for his region is...

The glory of the ordinary. (sermon, Christ Church, Nashville, Tennessee)
March 1, 1998... If you're not careful, warned the prophet Isaiah, you'll miss God when he comes to earth -- because He "will have no beauty that we should desire Him." He will arrive a long way from the throne, on the farthest outpost of the Roman empire,...

A new brainstorm from the left. (liberal proposals to equalize income)
March 1, 1998... With all the politically motivated copying of conservative ideas going on recent years, you might wonder what would happen if liberals ever acquired enough political power to enact the agenda of their dreams. The Stakeholder society, a new...

A Nashville chronicle. (short history of Nashville, TN)
March 1, 1998... Having sent men with unfortunate names like J. Carlton Loser and Bill Boner to Congress, is it any wonder that Nashville is best known for its cultural, rather than political, riches? But losers and boners aside, Nashville exudes history. ...

Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time.
March 1, 1998... In introducing his magisterial biography of Daniel Webster, Robert Remini laments the creeping historical illiteracy that threatens to engulf Webster and his contemporaries. All the more reason, then, to be grateful to Professor Remini, the...

John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life.
March 1, 1998... In introducing his magisterial biography of Daniel Webster, Robert Remini laments the creeping historical illiteracy that threatens to engulf Webster and his contemporaries. All the more reason, then, to be grateful to Professor Remini, the...

Shaping a Nation: Twentieth-century American Architecture and Its Makers.
March 1, 1998... Twenty years ago, American architecture seemed poised for a dramatic recovery. Bauhaus-style Modernism, which had imposed a stern rigidity on much of the country's corporate and institutional architecture, lay as fallen and shattered as Humpty...

Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class and Justice in the Origins of America.
March 1, 1998... Thomas G. West aims at nothing less than re-establishing the moral authority of the Founding Fathers against the orthodoxy of today's revisionist historians. These critics assert that our nation was founded not on self-evident truths about...

Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities.
March 1, 1998... Disinterested observers of higher education today must be puzzled. On the one hand, trenchant critics, beginning with Allan Bloom and The Closing of the American Mind, have sounded powerful warnings against the assault on the great works of...

Downsizing the U.S.A.
March 1, 1998... In this proposal for a decentralized United States, Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon throw many rhetorical bones to their allies on the Left, yet occasionally sound like conservative communitarians. The authors believe that local...