How do we know when something starts or when a new phenomenon becomes a major trend? We don’t have a “big bang” theory for the “second wave” of the women’s movement. The common wisdom has been that it began when …
Walter A. O’Brien, Jr. Photo courtesy of Julia O’Brien-Merrill On a clear, chilly day in November 2004, then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney stood inside a large white tent set up on the brick plaza outside Boston City Hall. Romney wasn’t there …
Barry Gewen’s review of Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise (Winter 2008) contains a factual error that illustrates the flaw in his argument. He describes the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood” as having a “pentatonic melody”—a melody restricted to five notes—which …
Since September 11, 2001, we have been fighting the so-called “war on terror” without the active participation of all three branches of government. For the first several years, a very aggressive president acted alone, without Congress or the Supreme Court. …
In early September 1968, American feminism announced its arrival to the nation, when a hundred women demonstrators from New York traveled down to Atlantic City to disrupt the Miss America pageant. The protest on the boardwalk was more or less …
A Dubious Normalcy
A well-known political scientist once declared that the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power. The simple question—single-payer or not—conceals major differences over whether to frame the health care issue primarily as an economic question or a …
From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City by Nathan Glazer Princeton University Press, 2007, 310 pp., $24.95 Like many utopian visions that someone is crazy enough to attempt to realize, modernist architecture has always …
Here’s a secret, the kind we hardly acknowledge to ourselves. But first, you may be wondering who this “we” is, on whose behalf I am writing. In truth, I am not sure. Maybe it is the Jews. But the problem …
Nineteen-sixty-eight has become a political myth that won’t go away. The debate on its interpretation continues and continues. The year marks a historical break, comparable to the beginning of the cold war or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Making …
One Sunday morning in December 2007, some three hundred extreme nationalists dressed in black uniforms marched in military formation through a Hungarian village, protesting against what they called “Roma [Gypsy] delinquency.” They then gathered at a rally, where speakers demanded …
[T]he hospitality of southerners is so profuse, that taverns are but poorly supported. A traveler, with the garb and the manners of a gentleman, finds a welcome at every door. A stranger is riding on horseback through Virginia or Carolina. …
It was opposition to the Vietnam War that filled my time and occupied my mind in 1967 and ’68. I was one of the organizers of Vietnam Summer in ’67 and then of the Cambridge Neighborhood Committee on the War …
A blooming industry among pundits, journalists, historians, and others celebrates, although more often deplores, America as “a consumer society.” One prize-winning historian has described the country as “A Consumer’s Republic,” suggesting that consumers own the place. Another argues how consumers …
It’s impossible to look back on the sixties without thinking, What a time that was! Politics and culture intermingled in a heady mix, the personal was political and the political personal; every act—whether demonstrating against the Vietnam War, smoking dope, …
