Society articles from September 1998

Society archives from September 1998

Young adult Catholic survey. (religious beliefs)
September 1, 1998... The results of a survey conducted by William Dinges, Dean R. Hoge, Mary Johnson, and Juan L. Gonzales, Jr., which appeared in Commonweal (July 17, 1998), suggest that religious identity for young adult Catholics rests on three basic elements:...

The U.S. white population is shrinking.
September 1, 1998... The white non-Hispanic population in the United States is shrinking, according to a health statistician at the University of California at Berkeley. The decline is substantial - approximately 3.6 percent per decade, or a loss of 9.5 million...

American and Chinese ways of discovering truth.
September 1, 1998... Americans wear black for mourning. Chinese wear white. Westerners think of dragons as monsters. Chinese honor them as symbols of God. Chinese civilization has often shown such polarities with the West, as though each stands at extreme ends of a...

The affirmative action paradox.
September 1, 1998... In a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine John Hope Franklin, the distinguished black historian and chairman of President Clinton's Initiative on Race, observed plaintively: "We're always talking about blacks as a group and whites as...

Who rules now? American elites in the 1990s.
September 1, 1998... Arguments about the structure of power in the United States have a long history and range from Marxist and Marxist-influenced populist interpretations such as those of C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff through various "new class"...

Brain dysfunction and criminal violence.
September 1, 1998... Paradigm shifts within any single discipline radiate outward toward (as well as inward from) adjacent disciplines rather slowly, at least as those disciplines are represented in the academy and in the trappings of academic structure (scholarly...

The future of homelessness.
September 1, 1998... The past decade has made clear that homelessness is not simply a passing phenomenon requiring heroic volunteer efforts on the part of a few until the temporary crisis passes. Yet that has been the predominant response to the problem. Both...

The incoherence of the new science policy.
September 1, 1998... Calling for a new science policy in October 1997, Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, focused on information. He observed that modern science is, "so inundated with its own technical knowledge, that it's almost...

Reforming the welfare state.
September 1, 1998... The Modern American welfare state was born during the most serious and far-reaching crisis ever to affect the American economy, the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although there were undoubtedly some elements of political expediency informing...

The dysfunctionality of monopolies.
September 1, 1998... In March 1998, it has seemed that it could not be long before the whole of British industry was merged into a single company. The new Glaxo Wellcome Smithkline Beecham Barclays NatWest would be advised by Deutsche SBC Warburg Dillon Reed Morgan...

R.H. Tawney and scholarship. (economist Richard Henry Tawney)
September 1, 1998... A reissuing of any of the works of Richard Henry Tawney is an auspicious event for scholarship and for scholars both. Auspicious for scholars for in his person, R. H. Tawney provided a model of what a committed, public-oriented intellectual...

The price of progress.
September 1, 1998... However violently we may disagree about the quality of life in America a generation ago, it is not hard to recapitulate a few simple points of reference that most of us share: For better or worse, it was a simpler time. Leaders led, at home, at...

The normality of extremism: the Ku Klux Klan revisited.
September 1, 1998... Most Americans are familiar with the Ku Klux Klan as a secret and exclusively white order of Southern vigilantes that terrorized former African American slaves and their Northern allies following the Civil War. It is also commonly known that...

McNamara's Vietnam War reconsidered. (Robert McNamara)
September 1, 1998... W. W. Rostow For seven years, Robert McNamara and I were colleagues in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It is difficult to describe the ties that were formed as a result of our facing together the series of crises that confronted the...

Becoming American, Becoming Ethnic: College Students Explore Their Roots.
September 1, 1998... By Thomas Dublin, ed. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press Reviewed by Nazli Kibria Current demographic trends underscore the status of the United States as a multiracial society. By the middle of the 21st century, whites are expected...

Questions of Cultural Identity.
September 1, 1998... By Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 198 pages Reviewed by Nazli Kibria Current demographic trends underscore the status of the United States as a multiracial society. By the middle of the 21st...

Caught in the Middle: Korean Communities in New York and Los Angeles.
September 1, 1998... By Pyong Gap Min. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press Reviewed by Nazli Kibria Current demographic trends underscore the status of the United States as a multiracial society. By the middle of the 21st century, whites are expected...

American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture.
September 1, 1998... By Joane Nagel, Oxford and New York: New York University Press. 298 pages Reviewed by Nazli Kibria Current demographic trends underscore the status of the United States as a multiracial society. By the middle of the 21st century, whites...

Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States.
September 1, 1998... By Juan F. Perea, ed. New York: New York University Press. 342 pages Reviewed by Nazli Kibria Current demographic trends underscore the status of the United States as a multiracial society. By the middle of the 21st century, whites are...

Immigrant America: A Portrait, 2d ed.
September 1, 1998... By Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 369 pages Reviewed by Nazli Kibria Current demographic trends underscore the status of the United States as a multiracial society. By the middle of the...

Full House.
September 1, 1998... By Stephen Jay Gould. Harmony Books, Crown Publishers, New York, 1996, 244 pp $25.00 Reviewed by Marion J. Levy, Jr. and Roger S. Pinkam In academia three levels of folk may be distinguished. There are scholars' scholars, pundit scholars,...

Occupation and Disease: How Social Factors Affect the Conception of Work-Related Disorders.
September 1, 1998... By Allard E. Dembe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996 Reviewed by Carolyn L. Wiener As the number of injuries considered to be work-related has risen dramatically in the twentieth century, health care providers, insurance companies,...

Death of the Guilds: Professions, States and the Advance of Capitalism, 1930 to the Present.
September 1, 1998... By Elliott A. Krause. New Haven: Yale, 305 pages, $40.00 Reviewed by Donald W. Light At a time when most of the professions face challenges from within and without to their training, practice and contributions to society, Elliott Krause...