Russel B. Nye, Univ. of Chi- cago, 1966, cloth & paper) or the latest, two-volume exercise, A NEW AGE NOW BEGINS: A People's History of the American Revolution Page Smith (McGraw-Hill, 1976).
These sweeping narratives are surpris- ingly alike in some ways. But where Bancroft, the founding father of Amer- ican history, writes stirringly of battles in "drum and bugle" style, Smith, equal- ly fascinated by war, is down-to-earth modern. Example: "The most pressing issue before the...
When Editor Russell Lynes published his light-hearted analysis in the February 1949 Harper's, Harry S. Truman had just been elected President in his own right, Gerald Ford was a freshman in Congress, and the median U.S. family income was $3,107. At the top of the best-seller list were Lloyd Douglas's religious novel, The Big Fisherman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe. Television was still a novelty.
Tongue in cheek, Lynes sought to gauge the social significance of "taste"...
A debate on major issues in resources and the future.
The nation's bicentenary has spurred a number of leading scholars to take another look at the American Revolution. Some have uncovered new data on social and economic life in colonial America. Others have sought anew to explain the Revolution's causes and effects, its leaders' strengths and weaknesses. Here, Sociologist Robert Nisbet discusses the Revolution's social impact.
the specialists vary widely. There are optimists like Geologist James Boyd who see technological solutions; pessimists like Systems Analyst Dennis Meadows, co-author of The Limits to Growth; and those in between like Nuclear Physicist Alvin Weinberg. In a lively "evening dialogue" earlier this year at the Wilson Center, these three men and their audience examined major issues that crop up in discussions of resources and the future. We present an abbreviated transcript of their debate,...
Other voices: a debate on resources and the future.
Donella H. Meadows, Den- nis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Wil- liam W. Behrens I11 (Universe Books, with Potomac Associates), has report-edly sold more than 2 million copies worldwide (375,000 in US. cloth and paper editions). LIMITS helped to spawn dozens of new books on growth (pro, con, exponential, sustainable, zero) and has been responsible for a renewal of interest in early Doomsday writers.
These include, most notably, T. R. Malthus, the British parson-economist whose pessimistic study,...
Robert A. Packenham
Since 1964, when the military took power for the first time in the twentieth century, two impressions of Brazil have been growing in the United States.
Businessmen and State Department officials, in particular, have seen in Brazil a growing industrial juggernaut, an emerg- ing regional power, a new force in Third World politics, and the strongest pillar of stability and anti-Communism in Latin America.
On the other hand, liberal politicians, journalists, intellec- tuals, and...
People in the United States, as James Reston once pointed out, will do almost anything for Latin America except read about it. Unless there is a coup in Chile, or Seiiora Peron flees Buenos Aires, it seems the Norteamericanos are not interested. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's two trips to Latin America this year got little attention, although he was visiting an area of growing concern to U.S. business and diplomacy. One of the countries he visited was Brazil, the biggest, most powerful na- tion to the South, and no longer a "client" of Washington on the world scene.
Thomas E. Skidmore on the historiog- raphy of Brazil, U.S. readers still do not have much general knowledge of the world's fifth largest nation.
A good reading list starts with broad histories and cultural surveys, followed books on politics, race, regions, the military, and selections from Brazil's own vivid literature.
But, first, back to coffee. Its impor- tance in Brazilian history, shaping both rural society and economic growth, cannot be overstated. No work in Eng- lish matches Affonso de...