Two hundred years ago, Captain James Cook circled Antarctica, saw that it was ice-covered, and lamented that man would "de- rive no benefit from it." But European and, later, American ex- plorers still pushed south, driven what one of them called the "Intellectual Passion"-the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. By the end of the 19th century, Antarctica was the last un- charted territory on Earth. Today, the geography of the conti- nent is less mysterious; scientists probing...
's continental shelf may contain sizable reserves of oil and natural gas, perhaps matching those of Iran. And fishing fleets have already begun harvesting krill, the shrimp-like creatures, high in protein, that flourish in Ant- arctic waters. For the 14 nations with direct interests in the con- tinent, the payoff may not be far away.
Politically, Antarctica was sliced up like a pie before the end of World War 11, with wedge-shaped national claims radiating from the South Pole to the coast. Britain...
Peter John- son and a spare text Creina Bond and Roy Siegfried help to establish a sense of place, even if that place is al- ways shifting. Place a wooden stake at the South Pole, the writers ob- serve, and it will stay there for a mo- ment only: "Tomorrow the ice will have crept [several] centimeters."
Man got to know Antarctica slowly. One of the best accounts of the early voyages of exploration is Quest for a Continent (McGraw-Hill, 1957) by New York Times science editor Walter Sullivan....
"I don't care who does the electing," New York's William Marcy
"Boss" Tweed once remarked, "just so I can do the nominating."
Since the 1980 election, a number of leading scholars, under the
auspices of Duke University, the Wilson Center, and other in-
stitutions, have been taking a hard look at the U.S. presidential
nominating process. Their conclusion: It is too erratic, too time-
consuming, and too vulnerable to manipulation by minority fac-
tions. Partly...
The most important development within American Protestantism since the early 1970s has been the ascendancy of the evangelicals, a phenomenon that most journalists have described only in political terms, thereby contributing generously to public misunderstanding of the forces behind the evangelical "revival."
On October 11, 1962, Pope John XXIII solemnly convened the Second Vatican Council. Roman Catholicism has not been the same since. In the United States, nuns have traded in their religious habits for skirts, slacks, and Gucci bags. Priests appear in public dressed in shirt and tie; many of them openly differ with church authorities on such issues as birth control and di- vorce. Lay people occupy prominent positions in religious ser- vices. English has replaced Latin as the language of worship.
So...
Since the late 1960s, American Jews have been uneasy. This uneasiness is surprising; perhaps it is unwarranted. After all, probably no Jewish community in world history has been, at the same time, so numerous, so prosperous, so influential, so secure, as have American Jews during the past 30 years. American Jews have surpassed in these respects the remarkable position achieved by the Jews of Germany in the Weimar Republic. Tak- ing account of their much smaller numbers (one percent of the German...
LIGION IN AMERICA
"The religious history of the Ameri- can people [is] one of the grandest epics in the history of mankind. The stage is continental in size, and the cast is produced by the largest trans- oceanic migration and the most rapid continental dispersion of people the world has ever seen."
As Sydney E. Ahlstrom proceeds to show in his two-volume A Religious History of the American People (Yale, 1972, cloth; Doubleday, 1975, paper), a traveler making his way from Bos- ton to...