In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald introduces us to the nativism that was so much a part of 1920s culture. “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged,” Tom Buchanan tells …
Thirty years ago in a 1965 speech delivered at Howard University’s commencement, Lyndon Johnson set out the terms on which his administration intended to pursue affirmative action. More than civil rights legislation was needed in order to achieve racial equality, …
This spring agents of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals staged the largest raid in the ASPCA’s 129-year history. Aided by thirty New York police, a dozen ASPCA agents swooped down on a converted movie theater …
It is called the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), and if enacted, it would end affirmative action in California. The state and its subdivisions would be prohibited from using race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin to discriminate against or …
If you have grown up as a baseball fan, you know that one of the cardinal rules of the game is that you root for your home team. It doesn’t matter if they are lousy and another team is better. …
In front of the Mississippi State Capitol, resting securely between the artillery that points toward Mississippi Street, is a statue dedicated “to the women of the Confederacy whose pious ministrations to our wounded soldiers soothed the last hours of those …
Like most New Yorkers I know, I regularly give to panhandlers. How much depends on how much change I have in my pocket, but my rule of thumb is a twenty-five-cent minimum. If West Side Cares, a new food-for-voucher program …
In my Upper West Side neighborhood in New York, the latest in-spot is a bookstore. That a bookstore should have such drawing power says much about my neighbors. But it also says much about the bookstore—a new Barnes & Noble …
Had he been killed in midlife, as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were, Cesar Chavez would be one of those 1960s figures whose name brings instant recognition and a lump in the throat. We would speak of him today …
When I think of Irving, I think of a Mets game we decided to go to on the spur of the moment one Sunday. It was a hot July day, Doc Gooden was pitching, and fifty thousand other New York …
Will it play in Peoria? If you think of the history of this town, where Lincoln and Douglas debated on the courthouse steps and Charles Lindbergh once flew the air mail, it seems like the right question to ask. But …
In the new television series “Sisters,” one of the main characters spends most of his time around the house in his bathrobe. He is not sick. He is not crazy. He is unemployed. Years ago, we would have imagined Archie …
Kitty Kelley doesn’t need defenders. The controversy surrounding her Nancy Reagan: An Unauthorized Biography has made her rich (or at least famous) for life. But as the controversy fades from the headlines, we need to take a second look at …
“The guy had a magic touch. He was a dream man. Under Reagan, you know, it was like anesthesia,” Harry Angstrom, the aging hero of John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest observes. Rabbit’s observation is shrewd, but as the 1990s—with an …
In November 1963 forty members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) gathered in the small Mississippi town of Greenville for three days of meetings. The result was a decision that would bring over one thousand volunteers—most of them white— …
