Daedalus articles from March 2006

Daedalus archives from March 2006

A republic divided.(Abraham Lincoln's opnion for democracy and liberty )
March 22, 2006... Abraham Lincoln said in the House Divided speech that this nation could not endure half slave and half free. It would become all one thing or all the other--all free or all slave. Then he asked, "Have we no tendency to the latter condition?"...

Revolution in the humanities.
March 22, 2006... Successive revolutions during the past century have energized the sciences in often thrilling ways. Given the evidence for dramatic change apparent in new discoveries, new inventions, and new solutions to recognizable problems, the educated...

Humanities from classics to cultural studies: notes toward the history of an idea.
March 22, 2006... Those intellectual pursuits and academic organizations that we think of as constituting the humanities are today undergoing a course of change that is entirely in consonance with their history. The idea of the humanities, in point of fact,...

American literature: a vanishing subject?
March 22, 2006... Some fifty years after the political establishment of the United States, the concept of an American literature barely existed--an absence acknowledged with satisfaction in Sydney Smith's famous question posed in 1820 in the Edinburgh Review:...

Comparative literature in question.
March 22, 2006... Comparative literature is at once a subject of study, a general approach to literature, a series of specific methods of literary history, a return to a medieval way of thought, a methodological credo for the day, an administrative...

History's postmodern fates.(history education)
March 22, 2006... As the twenty-first century begins, history occupies a unique, but not an enviable, position among the humanistic disciplines in the United States. Every time Clio examines her reflection in the magic mirror of public opinion, more voices ring...

The practice of art history in America.
March 22, 2006... "... the moment just past is extinguished forever, save for the things made in it." --George Kubler, The Shape of Time (1) As the name for a discipline, 'art history' enacts a syntactical clash every time it is uttered or...

The quest for a black humanism.
March 22, 2006... In the "Autobiographical Notes" that preface Notes of a Native Son (1955), one of the most impressive collections of essays ever compiled by an American writer and still one of the most important meditations on race of the twentieth century,...

Law & the humanities: an uneasy relationship.
March 22, 2006... In 1930 Judge Learned Hand, widely regarded as one of the most distinguished judges in our nation's history, spoke to the Juristic Society at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In his address, "Sources of Tolerance," he told his...

American philosophy in the twentieth century.
March 22, 2006... In 1900, Europe was the philosophical center of the world, as it was the center for science and scholarship in all fields. America was a province--in philosophy there were few teachers and few students. It was to Europe one went for advanced...

Unsent Dedication.(Poem)
March 22, 2006... This is your book. You know this and do not know. My book, but yours. I cover my tracks, your tracks, but the forest wind blows the cover, fickle dirt over the path, our path: those days in Marburg, the nights. ...

A death in the family.(short story)(Short story)
March 22, 2006... At the moment that young Ronnie Kennealy was struck and killed on Route 111 in a hit-and-run accident, Lupe Hernandez was hiding in one of the dozens of old bathtubs littering the sloping field that dead-ended into the roadway called Route 246....

On the peace process in the Middle East.
March 22, 2006... George W. Bush never set out to be the president who would remake the Middle East. During his campaign for the presidency in 2000, he spoke of pursuing a "humble" foreign policy and expressed doubt about nation building. According to one of his...

On judgments of truth & beauty.
March 22, 2006... Poets and scientists alike often assume that beauty and truth are two sides of the same coin.* From John Keats's famous assertion that "beauty is truth, truth beauty" to Richard Feynman's belief that "you can recognize truth by its beauty and...

On scientists as professionals.(Letters to the Editor of Daedalus)(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... February 20, 2006 To the Editor: An egregious example of the ongoing misunderstanding between scientists and society is on view in the Summer 2005 issue of Daedalus, devoted to the professions, in which scientists are not even...

On Social Security & the aging of America.(Letters to the Editor of Daedalus)(Letter to the editor)
March 22, 2006... February 27, 2006 To the Editor: In "Measuring Social Security's financial outlook within an aging society" (Daedalus, Winter 2006), Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters set forth a concise and clear account of the standard financial...