Steven Lagerfeld and Robert W. Hodge take a look at socialism in the U.S.
Middletown, published in 1929 by Robert and Helen Lynd, was the nation's first sociological bestseller. Together with a sequel, Middletown in Transition (1937), written during the Great Depression, it secured a reputation for Muncie, Indiana, as the archetypal middle American city. Muncie, rhapsodized the editors of Life in 1937, was "every small U.S. city from Maine to California," a place where pollsters and market re- searchers could flock to take the pulse of America.
Life claimed...
Unlike. many European writers, the American novelist rarely speaks of class. As Lionel Trilling once observed, "the great characters of American fiction, such, say, as Captain Ahab and Natty Bumppo, tend to be mythic.. .and their very freedom from class gives them a large and glowing generality." In the United States, he believed, "the real ba- sis of the [English] novel has never ex- isted-that is, the tension between a middle class and an aristocracy."
American novelists...
i children celebrating National Day (November 18). Omanis have rarely
failed to charm foreign guests. Writing in 1982, Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan noted their "delicate style of grace, tact, and humility, the quietness and control in manner and speech, the calm and gentle integrity that distinguish them, be they girls or boys, women or men."
WQ NEW YEAR'S 1987
48
Oman
- When Oman's English-educated Sultan Qabus visited the White
House in April 1983, President Reagan genia...
's Musandam Peninsula, a fissured mass of black rock. Deep fiords cut into the land, their sheer sides rising out of the water as high as 5,000 feet. Largely devoid of shrubs or trees, the peninsula's interior consists of rows of wind-worn ridges, interrupted only by jagged peaks.
Sovereignty over the Musandam, barren as it may be, has made Oman a nation of paramount importance. On a clear day, the peninsu- la's Shihuh tribesmen, herding goats near their stone huts, can gaze across the Strait of...
Thirty years ago, two new nations achieved independence from Brit- ain.One was prosperous Ghana in West Africa; it has since become a textbook case of Third World economic folly, official corruption, and chronic repression. The other, in Southeast Asia, was Malaysia (born as Malaya), which had just weathered a bitter communist guerrilla war. Largely ignored American headline writers, Malaysia's politi- cians quietly found ways to overcome deep-seated antipathies among its Malay, Chinese, and Indian...