Scholastic Update articles from May 1990

Scholastic Update archives from May 1990

On the brink of unity. (West & East Germany)
May 4, 1990... AFTER DECADES OF FORCED SEPARATION, the nations of East and West Germany are rushing headlong into a merger. A year ago, the prospect was unthinkable. But the flight of thousands of East German citizens to West Germany last fall forced open the...

A brand-new superpower. (reunified Germany)
May 4, 1990... A reunified Germany will be the richest, most powerful nation in Europe. With a total population of 78,236,000 and a total land area of 137,743 square miles, the new Germany will straddle central Europe, linking the nations of East and West....

Anxiety and hope: for many Germans, the dizzying pace of reunification is both frightening and disorienting.
May 4, 1990... On the night the Berlin Wall fell last November, thousands of ecstatic East and West Germans poured into the streets of Berlin in a spontaneous demonstration of joy. "We are one people! We are one people!" the crowds chanted, in the hope that...

The politics of reunification.
May 4, 1990... For years, politics in East Germany began and ended with the Communist party, The one-party state outlawed opposing political groups and did not permit free elections. But the collapse of Communist rule in East Germany set off a wave of...

Hitler's rise to power. (Adolf Hitler)
May 4, 1990... How could a madman and a gang of murderous thugs take over a modern, enlightened nation, slaughter millions of innocent people, and wage war against most of Europe? It's one of the most puzzling questions of the 20th century. The answers...

The missing years: as a teenager, Sara Matuson struggled to survive the Holocaust.
May 4, 1990... During the 1930s, a little girl named Sara Matuson grew up in the small city of Savli, Lithuania. Sara, her older sister Hanna, and their parents lived in an elegant apartment with balconies, servants, and a garden in back. While her...

Haunted by the past: forty-five years later, Germans young and old are still grappling with the legacy of the Holocaust.
May 4, 1990... Eight years ago, when she was a high school student in West Germany, Edith Raim and three of her classmates set out to discover what went on in their county of Landsberg during the Holocaust. They didn't expect to discover anything...

Security questions: will a reunified Germany decide to join NATO or the Warsaw Pact, or become neutral?
May 4, 1990... The imminent reunification of Germany is forcing the world to ask how a single, giant Germany might fit into Europe without dominating its neighbors. The question is especially tough, because German unification involves dismantling...

Going for the gold: a team combining East and West German athletes could be the one to beat in the 1992 Olympics.
May 4, 1990... With the unification of East and West Germany inevitable, the world will have to contend not only with another economic superpower, but with a sports giant. At the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, East Germany took 102 medals,...

Charlie the Kid: Charlie Korsmo in Dick Tracy. (interview)
May 4, 1990... Blam! Blam! It's Dick Tracy to the rescue! Next month, this comic-strip hero jumps off the page and into theaters with the new film Dick Tracy. The movie stars Warren Beatty as Tracy, Madonna as Breathless Mahoney, and Al Pacino as Big...

Here to stay. (rock and roll)
May 18, 1990... In october 1956, Senior Scholastic magazine- UPDATE's immediate predecessor-printed a short article on a curious new teenage craze called "rock and roll." "Rock and roll," the text explained, "is a violent, sound-shattering type of music,...

One nation under a groove. (record industry statistics)
May 18, 1990... In the beginning, many people taught rock and roll would never last. But the music has proven to be more than just a passing fad. Innovations in sound and recording technology, as well as the development of massmarketing techniques, have...

Here comes Judge. (garage band trying to become a successful rock group)
May 18, 1990... Getting rick. Getting famous, Getting girls. Like millions of young people everywhere, Matthew Pincus, Sam Siegler, and Lars Weiss, three members of a band called Judge (pictured above), dream of the benefits of becoming the rock stars. ...

The roots of rock.
May 18, 1990... Pop music today is a multibillion-dollar industry; most rock records take months to make and involve a small army of producers, engineers, and editors. But it wasn't always such a production. Rock and roll started as a kind of music that kids...

Coming up the hard way. (rap)
May 18, 1990... A bass drum beats in the darkness. When the lights come up, four camouflage-clad men stand on-stage. With their military-style berets, dark sunglasses, and realistic-looking toy machine guns, they seem more like a tactical strike force than a...

X-rated rock and roll. (includes related article)
May 18, 1990... State legislators around the nation are spending a lot of time these days listening to 2 Live Crew, Ice-T, Guns N' Roses, and Ozzy Osbourne. No, they're not members of the Middle-Aged Politicians' Rock and Roll Fan Club. And they're not...

The world of MTV.
May 18, 1990... At one minute past midnight, on August 1, 1981, an unseen television programmer announced the coming of a cultural revolution: a cable TV station devoted solely to popular music. "Ladies and gentlemen," said the voice, "Rock and roll." ...

Pop music's new women's movement.
May 18, 1990... Pop Music's New Women's Movement On April 21, the top four albums on Billboard's weekly charts belonged to Bonnie Raitt, Sinead O'Connor. Janet Jackson. and Paula Abdul. The collective success of those artists was unprecedented: it marked...

Let freedom rock. (rock music in the Soviet bloc)
May 18, 1990... The first rock music I heard was the Beatles," recalls Boris Grebenshikov, perhaps the single most popular rock singer in the Soviet Union today. "I was wildly excited at the thought that young people had created something so powerful, so...

Can music really change the world?
May 18, 1990... Can Music Really Change the World? In the world of today's rock stars, it's hip to have a social conscience. Protest songs have always been a mainstay of rock and roll. But the past several years have produced a rash of special musical...