The Public Interest articles from September 1998

The Public Interest archives from September 1998

Is America an experiment?
September 22, 1998... Some of the most valuable work in the field of American history these days is being done by the men and women who restore and preserve historical sites. Though such work is often disdained as antiquarian or subscholarly by academic historians, it...

Does immigration harm the poor?
September 22, 1998... Partly as a result of reforms undertaken in the 1960s, the United States is currently experiencing the largest sustained wave of immigration in its history. Each year, the United States admits between 700,000 and 900,000 legal immigrants;...

The limits of campaign spending limits.
September 22, 1998... Political indignation engenders constitutional excess. Such was the case in 1974 when Congress, hot with anger over Watergate, delivered a beating to First Amendment rights with a set of new provisions to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA)....

Washington versus school reform.(School Report, part 1)
September 22, 1998... "Promiscuous" is an overused word in Washington these days, but it aptly describes the trend in federal education policy - both at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and on Capitol Hill. The 1990s have seen the wanton transformation of innumerable...

Getting serious about school discipline.(School Report, part 2)
September 22, 1998... In April 1998, a 15-year-old female student at Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, New York, was upset because her social-studies teacher, Dawn Jawrower, had telephoned her parents to express concern over her poor academic performance. The student...

Civic education reconsidered.(School Report, part 3)
September 22, 1998... We are approaching the end of an era in educational philosophy. From the middle of the 1960s until today, the reigning orthodoxy among educational theorists has been one of hostility to civic education, understood as the attempt to inculcate an...

All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s.
September 22, 1998... The Peace Corps' wonder years Asking a former Volunteer to review a history of the Peace Corps is like asking a former GI to review a history of World War II. You're likely to get a lot of war stories. I will try to keep myself in check, but...

Women's Words: Essay on French Singularity.
September 22, 1998... If a man's word is his bond, what of a woman's? Are the words of women - whether promises or not - less credible or less weighty? Mona Ozouf does not think so. She proposes to take women at their word, not all women (that might indeed be...

One Nation, After All.
September 22, 1998... Alan Wolfe has long been one of America's ablest sociologists. With his latest book, he emerges as one of our most important public intellectuals as well. In two years spent talking with middle-class Americans in eight communities around the...

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws.
September 22, 1998... Gun law is one of those areas of public policy - others are education, welfare, and crime fighting - in which national and local dialogue have sharply diverged. In each case, the "expertise" of the national elites who set federal policy is being...

My First Book of Biographies.
September 22, 1998... When Christopher Columbus kissed the ground of the new world in 1492, he was on terra firma; five centuries later, of course, we find the great navigator on shaky ground. Under the weighty dictates of what is known as political correctness, the...

Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans.(Children's Review)
September 22, 1998... When Christopher Columbus kissed the ground of the new world in 1492, he was on terra firma; five centuries later, of course, we find the great navigator on shaky ground. Under the weighty dictates of what is known as political correctness, the...

A First Book in American History.(Children's Review)
September 22, 1998... When Christopher Columbus kissed the ground of the new world in 1492, he was on terra firma; five centuries later, of course, we find the great navigator on shaky ground. Under the weighty dictates of what is known as political correctness, the...

Making Thirteen Colonies.
September 22, 1998... When Christopher Columbus kissed the ground of the new world in 1492, he was on terra firma; five centuries later, of course, we find the great navigator on shaky ground. Under the weighty dictates of what is known as political correctness, the...

The Minute Boys of Lexington.(Children's Review)
September 22, 1998... When Christopher Columbus kissed the ground of the new world in 1492, he was on terra firma; five centuries later, of course, we find the great navigator on shaky ground. Under the weighty dictates of what is known as political correctness, the...

The Minute Boys of Bunker Hill.(Children's Review)
September 22, 1998... When Christopher Columbus kissed the ground of the new world in 1492, he was on terra firma; five centuries later, of course, we find the great navigator on shaky ground. Under the weighty dictates of what is known as political correctness, the...

Across the Lines.
September 22, 1998... When Christopher Columbus kissed the ground of the new world in 1492, he was on terra firma; five centuries later, of course, we find the great navigator on shaky ground. Under the weighty dictates of what is known as political correctness, the...

Money for Nothing: Politicians, Rent Extraction, and Political Extortion.
September 22, 1998... Economists have never agreed about how to deal, theoretically, with government regulation of the marketplace. They have attempted to account for, or to dispute, the need for such regulation and to examine the motivations and incentives of those...