Those familiar with Central gan with the highest of hopes. In the early Asia's ancient history and days of the Bolshevik struggle, many native civilization might assume leaders in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and that the Soviet era-a mere other Muslim areas looked favorably upon 70 years of alien domina- Lenin's revolution. They saw it not so much tion-could have left few as the beginning of a new socialist era but
scars on people who since time immemo- as the end of Russian imperialist domina-
rial...
Imagine an American think-tank in operation in 1900. A generous
benefactor has given it a grant to
look into the future and contem-
plate the far-fetched possibility that
European colonial empires might become independent nations by the end of the 20th century. Looking at Asia, its re- searchers compare prospects for two large colonial regions-British India and Rus- sian Turkestan. Which would then have ap- peared to be a better candidate for success- ful evolution into a modem nation-state?
Consider t...
CENTRAL ASIA
0ne problem in the study of Central Asia is
defining the region's geographical limits.
A narrow but precise definition limits the re-
gion to the five former Soviet republics that lie
to the east of the Ural Mountains and the Cas-
pian Sea and to the west of China. But the defi-
nition can be expanded to include some or all
of the following: Chinese Turkestan, (Xinjiang
Province), Afghanistan, northeastern Iran,
Mongolia, Tibet, Azerbaijan, and the entire Eur-
asian st...
Things were different when I
was young. As I prepared, in 1962, to cycle from Ireland to India, no one thought to ask me if I was going in order to celebrate feminine auton-
omy, or to get my own country in perspec- tive, or to acquire heroic standing in the public eye. Nobody inquired if I was at- tempting to escape from a world in which I felt a misfit or to test or find or run away from myself. People just thought that I was crazy and made no further comment, Thirty years ago my sort of...
During the 1970s, Time and Esquire ran articles about the "healing energy" of pyramid power. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist bombarded the Great Pyramid at Giza with cosmic rays to discover its secrets. New Age devotees erected small pyramids in which to meditate and make love. Was this only one more passing fad? Perhaps not. Daniel Boorstin reveals that many respected figures in Western history-including Sir Isaac Newton and Napoleon Bonaparte-have been intrigued by the Egyptian pyramids. T...
Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and others now comprise eight percent of the U.S. population, yet have no clear collective Hispanic identity. Will they become a racial minority, an ethnic group, or some combination of the two?
the Univ. of Chicago's Grad. School of Public Policy and the Social Science Research Council, Oct. 1991.
Author: William Julius Wilson
In his much-noted 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged, Uni-versity of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson pinned on the economy much of the blame for the troubling rise in mother-only families among black Americans. Today, 5 1.1 percent of black children live in such families. In roughly half of those families the par- ents were never wed. Jobless- ness among...
w e who have lived through the recent fanfare surround-ing the bicenten- nial of America's Bill of Rights may
find it odd that the centennial of 1891 passed with virtually no ceremony and little, if any, recognition. Newspapers and periodicals, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, made no mention of the anniversary.
RIGHTS AND COURTS
Even the Congressional Record failed to ob- serve the date. Perhaps this lack of atten- tion by 19th-century Americans under- scores the greater...
Reviews of new research at public agencies and private institutions
"The Rural Underclass: Examination of Multiple-Problem Populations in Urban and Rural Settings."
Population Reference Bureau, 1875 Conn. Ave. N.W., Ste. 520, Washington, D.C. 20009. 25 pp. $5.
Authors: William t? O'Hare and Brenda Curry-White
The so-called underclass is usually assumed to be a strictly urban phenomenon: a poor, mostly black population living in impoverished inner cities and also displaying assorted...
Robert J. Donovan and Ray Scherer
s a young reporter for the
Richmond Times-Dis-
patch, Charles McDowell
was one of the first inside
witnesses to television's
impact on politics. sheer chance he observed at the Republi- can National Convention in Chicago in 1952 how people's reaction to what they saw on television influenced political deci- sions-a phenomenon that would pro- foundly change the workings of the politi- cal system.
The Republican convention in 1952 was the first at which te...