It was a warm fall Sunday afternoon. A day for watching football on television or going for a walk in the still-green Virginia countryside. The last thing the security guards at the Pittston Coal Company’s Moss 3 preparation plant were …
In early 1981, as the Reagan administration was getting under way, its first cultural controversy began. Nancy Reagan wanted new china for the White House. The cost of the china was the problem. The Lenox pattern with a raised gold …
The land around the Fernald uranium processing plant in southwestern Ohio is rich enough to grow most anything. But for the plant’s neighbors the standing joke is that pumpkins are the crop to raise: “They don’t need a candle at …
There is something fundamentally wrong in the country, and the country knows it. It is not that families sit around the dinner table talking about deindustrialization and federal deficits and the new underclass. It is rather that people feel what …
It was not the speech Martin Luther King planned to give. He wanted his contribution to the March on Washington to be brief, “sort of a Gettysburg Address.” He would, he knew, be following a long list of speakers. A …
The sun is barely up when the old man taps on the McDonald’s door. “We’re open in a few minutes, sir,” a young countergirl answers. The old man points to the McDonald’s cap he is carrying. He is the “new …
The New Park Pizzeria in Howard Beach, Queens, is not a place you go to if you’re looking for trouble. It’s too small and too neat, and so close to Cross Bay Boulevard, the main street in Howard Beach, that …
I n the summer of 1964 July was “Hospitality Month” in Mississippi. But as the volunteers and staff of the Mississippi Summer Project began settling into the countryside, what they found waiting for them was, as one volunteer put it, …
AUSTIN, MINNESOTA: 6:15 and they have at last dropped off the wood for the fire barrels. But until the sun comes up, nothing is going to be enough to keep us warm. The picket lines left the Austin Labor Center …
Drive down Route 49 as it takes you through the coalfields of southern West Virginia and into Kentucky, and what catches your eye before anything else is the beauty of the land. Even in the late summer the trees are …
When the Selma crisis began, 20 years ago this spring, the country was ready for it. Before Selma there had been the Woolworth sit-ins, the freedom rides, and in 1964 the Mississippi Summer Project. By the time Selma began, the …
For a while it seemed as if it would take less than a decade to put Vietnam behind us. It was not just that we had finally signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam, but that debate over the war had ceased to be …
In 1983 Ronald Reagan did as president what he had never been able to do as an actor—he had a significant impact on the movie industry. Not that the president got the Reagan equivalent of PT-109 produced or that his …
“Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat.” The monument Robert Lowell had in mind when he wrote those lines was Augustus St. Gauden’s Civil War Memorial of Colonel Robert Shaw and his black troops, but in 1984 …
A decade ago Tom Wolfe coined the term “radical chic” to describe what he regarded as a trendy identification of the wealthy with the poor. Wolfe’s 1970 essay focused on a benefit for the Black Panther party, and what he …
