Society articles from January 1997

Society archives from January 1997

The urban future. (growth in global urban population)
January 1, 1997... The United Nations Population Fund's 1996 State of World Population reports states the following: Urban population is 2.6 billion, 1.7 billion in developing countries. Urban population is growing faster than world population as a whole....

Can the social historian get it right?
January 1, 1997... "History was my passion, kings strutting about and armored ranks of men." So recalled John Reed of his absorption in historical narratives as an adolescent. "The things men have done," the Greenwich Village rebel repeated over and over again to...

History standards are not fixed.
January 1, 1997... The original National Standards for History in the Schools, published by the National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS) at UCLA in the fall of 1994, provoked widespread denunciation (including from Bill Clinton and Bob Dole). Even the...

National standards for history judged again.
January 1, 1997... The National Standards for History in the Schools has been a battleground for what the young should know about the nation's past and the globe's history. Its first edition was widely criticized by moderates and conservatives alike as...

Better than alternatives. (revision of the 'National Standards for History in the Schools')
January 1, 1997... The revised version of National Standards for History in the Schools is far from perfect, but it is a vast improvement over the original version that was issued in the fall of 1994, and it is a vast improvement over the social studies programs...

Hitler's willing executioners. (interview with Harvard University professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen)(Interview)
January 1, 1997... Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Interviewed by Maurice Wohlgelernter WOHLGELERNTER: What initially arrested my curiosity about Hitler's Willing Executioners, was, among other things, my own abiding interest in Holocaust literature. Doctoral...

The heavy hand of export controls.
January 1, 1997... Over the past three decades, the importance of international trade to the U.S. economy has grown dramatically. The share of exports and imports (including services, such as banking and transportation) has grown from roughly 10 percent of gross...

Ambiguity and unity in Jefferson's thought. (Thomas Jefferson)
January 1, 1997... Some have called the quality of ambiguity in Jefferson crafty and worse - the deliberate aim of being all things to all men. That is an unjust view. Jefferson knew, of course, that every scrap of his letters was bound to be circulated and might...

What is left and what is right in Germany?
January 1, 1997... One day during the 1930s, Boris Pasternak, the writer, received an eerie telephone call: Stalin was on the line. Pasternak at first thought the call was a prank and put the phone down. Stalin called again. He wanted to know what Pasternak...

Scholarship, teaching, and culture.
January 1, 1997... A few months ago, I had occasion to reread some of the writings of the Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, and there came irresistibly to mind two limericks by Ronald Knox that I had memorized as an undergraduate. With their help, I had...

The civil society sector.
January 1, 1997... The twentieth century has been a time of immense social innovation. Paradoxically, however, one of the social innovations for which the twentieth century may deserve to be best known is still largely hidden from view, obscured by a set of...

Israelis settle in Los Angeles. (California)
January 1, 1997... For the past quarter of a century, Israelis have constituted one of the major groups of Jewish immigrants to enter the United States. Unique among all Jewish immigrants to this country in that they have a real possibility of returning home,...

Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences.
January 1, 1997... This report is a product of the Gulbenkian Foundation's "Portugal 2000" project, a series of conferences and research tasks "concerning the possible or probable trajectories of the Portuguese nation at the dawn of the twenty-first century." A...

Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences.
January 1, 1997... Reviewed by Bennett M. Berger Reading committee documents has a well-deserved reputation as a cure for insomnia. This one is different, and intends to be. But, as the saying goes, one should be careful what one asks for for fear of getting...

Competing Solutions: America Health Care Proposals and International Experience.
January 1, 1997... The debate over health care reform in the United States is producing a surging literature, if not a great deal of progress on the ground. However, Competing Solutions, by Brookings Institution scholar Joseph White, is a must-read for anyone...

Getting the Boot: Italy's Unfinished Revolution.
January 1, 1997... Matt Frei is a BBC reporter in Rome, and like most foreigners who settle in Italy for a few years, he is intrigued by the goings-on, and he has been there just long enough (four to five years) to permit himself the conceit of believing he has...

The End of Affluence: The Causes and Consequences of America's Economic Decline.
January 1, 1997... In the late 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith described how economic growth was making American families affluent while the provision of public services remained woefully inadequate. Galbraith then argued that rising private affluence provided the...

John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism.
January 1, 1997... Alan Ryan tells us in his Preface that he first thought of writing about Dewey twenty years ago and that when he came to doing it he found himself in the midst of a plethora of books about Dewey. This apparently did not discourage him. He...

The Populist Persuasion.
January 1, 1997... We are in a transition time, trying to shape our language to new laws and social problems, including an unprecedented wave of new immigrants. These new citizens must be reached if social order is to advance. How much of our history and culture...

Under My Skin, Vol. I of Autobiography.
January 1, 1997... Autobiographies link the public to the private realm since most of those who write them tend to be, for one reason or another, public figures. Almost anybody in the limelight can make a successful claim on our interest if he promises a guided...