Essays

Essays | Autumn 1992
Why Brutus Stabbed Caesar

he study of history assumes
time and place, without
which a past event cannot be
understood. Both are neces-
sary, but are they sufficient?

The question arises because there are often inquiries that are clearly not couched, as the physical sciences are, in terms of timeless causes and effects but that we do not consider to be history-inquiries relating to geology, botany, and zoology, in which it is necessary to specify time and place. Such inquiries have indeed been sometimes described as...

Essays | Autumn 1992
American Finance

extension to manage, American business. That search, J. Bradford De Long argues, has been a hap- less departure from sound beginnings; Roy C. Smith, however, con- tends that it has helped to create a more competitive U.S. economy.
J. Bradford De Long

hey control the people
through the people's own
money," thundered future
Supreme Court Justice
Louis Brandeis in 1913.
Brandeis, then a Boston corporate lawyer and an adviser to Presi- dent Woodrow Wilson, was trying through a series of a...

Essays | Autumn 1992
What Morgan Wrought

arning ignored: This 1921 cartoon showed Wall Street operators fishing for suckers.
WQ AUTUMN 1992 16

A ican Finance
Michael Milken, the erstwhile junk-bond king who is now serving time in a federal prison, will likely go down in history as a symbol of the sins of the 1980sÃ?â??greed excess, and worse. Yet he also was the most significant figure in American corporate finance since J. P. Morgan. From Morgan's time to Milken's, financiers have sought the best way to finance, and b...

Essays | Autumn 1992
After The Ball

Roy C. Smith
he event will be long re-membered in the history of financial delirium. On the weekend of March 16, 1985, some 2,000 well- heeled "players" began de- scending on the Beverly Hills Hilton for the sixth annual Predators' Ball, sponsored by 38-year-old junk-bond impresario Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham Lambert. The assembled guests included oilman T. Boone Pickens and a growing list of other corporate "raiders," individual investors such as Saul Steinberg, and money...

Essays | Autumn 1992
BACKGROUND BOOKS

agreeing to locate the new national capital far from the perfidious money men of New York City, on the banks of the "Potoumac." And there in the national capital, two centuries later, the thread might end in today's recrimina- tions over the treatment of the "moneyed inter- ests" in the savings-and-loan crisis and other af- fairs. Between these two points the narrative would wind through the battles over the first and second national banks, the memorable as- sault on the "cross...

Essays | Autumn 1992
The Art of Building, Or the Building Of Art?

. On the comer of La Huerta Road was a miniature Rhine castle with tarpaper turrets pierced for archers. Next to it was a highly colored shack with domes and minarets out of the Arabian Nights. Again he was charitable. Both houses were comic, but he didn't laugh. Their desire to startle was so eager and guileless. It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly...

Essays | Summer 1992
American Intellectual Life, 1465-1992

Daniel Bell, the esteemed Harvard University sociologist who died recently at the age of 91, surveyed America's intellectual scene in this essay, which originally appeared in 1992.

Essays | Summer 1992
Land of The Great Silk Road

James Critchlow

ven before the official
breakup of the Soviet Union
in December 1991, Central
Asians began to reclaim
their history. In Alma-Ata,

capital of Kazakhstan, for example, civic leaders changed the name of one of their major thoroughfares from Gorky Street to Jibek Joly-Kazakh for what English speakers call the "Great Silk Road," the fabled trade route that ran through Central Asia in ancient times. The renaming was but one of countless syrn- bolic gestures in a process th...

Essays | Summer 1992
CARAVANS AND CONQUESTS

ven before the official
breakup of the Soviet Union
in December 1991, Central
Asians began to reclaim
their history. In Alma-Ata,

capital of Kazakhstan, for example, civic leaders changed the name of one of their major thoroughfares from Gorky Street to Jibek Joly-Kazakh for what English speakers call the "Great Silk Road," the fabled trade route that ran through Central Asia in ancient times. The renaming was but one of countless syrn- bolic gestures in a process that Uzbek hi...

Essays | Summer 1992
The Heavenly City of Samarkand

he many architectural
splendors of Samarkand-
the mosques, religious
schools, shrines, and mau-
soleums, sparkling even to-

day with glazed tiles in la- pis, turquoise, and gold-owe largely to the efforts of one man, the legendary con- queror known to the West as Tamerlane. A Turkicized Mongol from the Barlas tribe, Timur (1336-1405) ruled a vast empire that stretched at its height from India to Anato- lia and Damascus. Endowed with artistic vi- sion as well as military prowess, Timur la...

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