David J. Armor, in The Public Interest (Summer 1992), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 530, Washington, D.C. 20036.
The bad news about the lives of many blacks living in America's cities is all too familiar: drugs, crime, joblessness, family breakdown, and, many ac- counts, failing public schools. Yet, in the face of these oft-reported woes, black students in America over the course of the 1970s and '80s posted sub- stantial gains in math and reading achievement, according to the National Assessment of...
birthright, manumission, or the purchase of their freedom. Of those, 3,775 blacks, living mostlv in the South, owned a total of 12,760 slaves. The vast majority of these masters had no more than a few slaves, but some in Louisiana and South Carolina owned as many as 70 or 80.
In most cases, Bumham says, the motive for ownership appears to have been benevolent. MosShepherd, for instance, manumitted by the ~irginia legislature for having provided infonna- tion about an insurrection in 1800, bought...
William A. Galston, in Raritai~(Winter 1993), Rutgers Univ., 31 Mine St., New Bmnswick, N.J. 08903.
John Dewey (1859-1952) is regarded some ad- mirers as America's uncrowned philosopher-king, the man who defined and popularized a civic reli- gion of democracy. In his long career, Dewey struggled to liberate philosophy from metaphysics, became the fountainhead of progressive thinking about education, and emphasized what he called "the religious meaning of democracy." But, con- tends Galston,...
William A. Galston, in Raritai~(Winter 1993), Rutgers Univ., 31 Mine St., New Bmnswick, N.J. 08903.
John Dewey (1859-1952) is regarded some ad- mirers as America's uncrowned philosopher-king, the man who defined and popularized a civic reli- gion of democracy. In his long career, Dewey struggled to liberate philosophy from metaphysics, became the fountainhead of progressive thinking about education, and emphasized what he called "the religious meaning of democracy." But, con- tends Galston,...
the beginning of the 20th century, however, the rise of a "con-sumer" society was accompanied a new emphasis on personality. According to the new ideal, Fox writes, "adulthood was open- ended, always still to be grown into, and ever subject to renegotiation."
According to Fox, it was not, as some historians have insisted, that personality displaced character, but that the two were merged. And the merger was carried out partly under the auspices of Protestant thinkers. Thus Henry...
Bev Littlewood and Lorenzo Strigini, in Scientific American (Nov. 1992), 415 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017-1111.
Occasional computer failure is a familiar fact of modem life. The usual result is inconvenience, a day's work lost or a rile destroyed. When comput- ers are used in critical applications, however, flaws in the software can spell disaster. During the Per- sian Gulf War, for example, the Patriot missile sys- tem failed to track an Iraqi Scud missile that killed 28 U.S. soldiers. The...
Lynn Abbott, in American Music (Faf1992), Univ. of LU. Press, 54 E. Gregory Dr., Champaign, 111. 61820.
Mention barbershop quartet, and a Gay Nineties im- age of dapper white barbers and- their patrons har- monizing together comes to mind. The impression that barbershopping is a white tradition was fos- tered for decades the Society for the Preserva- tion and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, founded in 1938 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Abbott, an independent scholar, strikes a dissonant...
Lynn Abbott, in American Music (Faf1992), Univ. of LU. Press, 54 E. Gregory Dr., Champaign, 111. 61820.
Mention barbershop quartet, and a Gay Nineties im- age of dapper white barbers and- their patrons har- monizing together comes to mind. The impression that barbershopping is a white tradition was fos- tered for decades the Society for the Preserva- tion and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, founded in 1938 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Abbott, an independent scholar, strikes a dissonant...
the early-20th-century avant- garde for having embraced aca- demicism. Picasso, however, took a different view of the older mas- ter. "Renoir's struggle during his last decades to bridge the gap be- tween his early work and the Western classical tradition with- out jettisoning his pioneering contributions to Impressionism," Fitzgerald writes, "provided a model for Picasso's own effort to broaden his art without turning his back on Cubism."
The strange pattern of Picas- so's...
1927-when movie producers reluctantly ap-proved a Hays associate's list of "Eleven Don'ts and Twenty-Six Be Carefuls" for filmmakers-re- formers were also supporting legislation to ban "block booking" and thus let local exhibitors refuse movies they found offensive. Independent exhibi- tors, struggling with large, studio-owned theater chains for survival, joined the reformers.
At that critical moment, Couvares writes, "a powerful ally appeared from the unlikeliest quar-...