the "literacy environment" of the home, the mother's own level of education, and her educational expectations for the child. (The father's back- ground mattered much less.) The quality of schools also made a difference, but a con- siderably smaller one.
A third facet, reading com- prehension, is more compli-cated. But schools and families seemed to be able to compen- sate for each other's failings. In the 1980-82 study, all chil- dren-including those from the worst homes-who had ex- cellent...
Africa has endured an economic catastrophe that dwarfs the Great Depression. Starting from stark poverty, it descended during the past decade into unbelievable deprivation. Famine, war, and civil strife became commonplace, and even AIDs was visited upon the Africans. By 1990, Africans in most of the 46 black-ruled nations below the Sahara were poorer than they had been 30 years before Yet all is not misery. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes here, Africans in their disillusionment...
I got the news during a brief visit to the United States in September 1988. Don Bonifacio, the finance minister of Equatorial Guinea and my closest colleague, had been fired. I figured that it must have had something to do with the recent coup attempt. The plotters were partly motivated by fears of the free-market reforms Don Bonifacio and President Obiang Nguema Mbasogo had been pushing to shore up the country's crumbling economy, reforms that threatened the backdoor enterprises of many...
Seek ye first the political kingdom, "and allthe rest shall be added unto you," exhorted Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first head of state and Africa's premier nationalist.
Now more than 30 years and some 70 coups later, all the rest has not been added-and some things even have been subtracted from Africa. Today, its per-capita income is lower than it was 30 years ago, and 70 percent of the world's poorest nations are in Africa. In his recent Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent...
n the liberal democracies of the
West, and in a growing number of
other nations, the "public" and its
"opinion" are fixtures of modem
life. Indeed, it is hard to imagine
how culture and politics ever man- aged without them. The highbrow poet, the pulp novelist, the classical musician, the rock star, the avante-garde filmmaker, the director of TV sit-coms: All of these produc- ers of "culture" need an image of the "pub- lic" and its expected reaction, wh...
the almost daily eruption of new disputes over the very things that most agitated our forebears: rights. Does Madonna have a First Amendment right to have her steamy rock video aired on television? Is there a right to life? A right to abortion? Do the homeless have a right to shelter? Here, historian James H. Hutson recalls the equally difficult time Americans had sorting through rights before fram- ing the Bill of Rights; legal scholar Gary McDowell casts a critical eye on the proliferation of...
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For more than a decade, Americans have been reliving the birth of the United States through bicentennials: those of the Declaration of Inde- pendence, the Constitution, and now, finally, the Bill of Rights. But this past is also kept alive by the almost daily eruption of new disputes over the very things that most agitated our forebears: rights. Does Madonna have a First Amendment right to have her steamy rock video aired on television? Is there a right to life? A right to abortion? Do...
' e are living in the midst of America's second great age of rights-or perhaps its first age of rights rhetoric. Scarcely a question now comes before the American public without some fundamental issue of rights being invoked. There is said to be a right to life and a right to die, and a right governing virtually everything that might occur between the exercise of these two prerogatives. There are said to be women's rights, gay rights, and handicapped rights, a right to work and a right to smoke, t...
THE BILL OF RIGHTS
since the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission opened for business in 1966. Americans have been benumbed by celebra- tions of big historical events. The indifference that one detects toward the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights is also evident in the scholarship on the origins of that document. Until the 1950s, scholars largely ignored the subject, with the result that, according to one expert, there is no good book on it.
What writing there has been on the birth of...
e was the dominant politi-
presidential performance from Franklin D.
cal figure of the 1960s. He
Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan showed that
challenged us to wipe out
Americans consistently ranked Johnson
poverty, to end racial seg-
near or at the bottom of every category.
regation, and to win a
Asked which of these presidents made
morally confusing war in
them feel proudest of being an American,...