BACKGROUND B
Perhaps the best long view of the
U.S. military is The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Mac-millan, 1973, cloth; Ind. Univ., 1977, paper). Russell Weigley describes the military-political ups and downs of American history from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the battles in Viet- nam. Some of Weigley's assertions are debatable, notably his thesis that, as its resources grew, the U.S. military usually came to favor an "anni-hilative"...
public agencies and private institutions
"Making Government Work: A Common Cause Report on State Sunset Activity"
Common Cause, Issue Development Office, 2030 M St. N.W., Washington, D.C.
20036. 12 1 pp. $3.00
Sunset legislation, which provides for
the automatic termination of govern-
ment agencies unless they are recre-
ated statute, is a growing response
to public resentment over lackluster
government performance.
First conceived by the Colorado unit of Common Cause in 19...
editors David Gergen and William Schambra look at polling's past and pres- ent; and analyst Everett Carl1 Ladd, Jr. offers his views on what Americans are thinking-and how their thinking has changed.
David Gergen and William Schambra
America, so it seems, is under siege. Armies of men and women, equipped with clipboards and pencils, sweep across the land, prying and probing into people's minds. The results are served up in hundreds of public opinion surveys for newspapers, TV networks, corporate m...
Much as a child's drawing of a neighborhood reflects his attitude toward the surroundines and his
"
own place in them, so a society's map of its geographical setting reveals, often in the same unconscious way, something of its sense of position in the world. The. cartography of the physical world is a cartography of the mind.
The Chinese, for example, from ancient times have depicted their country as the "Middle Kingdom," surrounded bv assorted "barbarian" lands, wh...
America, so it seems, is under siege. Armies of men and women, equipped with clipboards and pencils, sweep across the land, prying and probing into people's minds. The results are served up in hundreds of public opinion surveys for newspapers, TV networks, corporate managers, cabinet officers, and White House staffers.
Consider just a few of the questions that have been put to people in recent months:
Ã? DO you believe in Unidentified ~l~in~
Objects? George Gallup recently asked. (Fifty-seven...
Twenty years ago on a sunny hilltop Our patriotism was a medley of gal- near Salzburg, I came across a clump lant images and slogans: bulldog of people in musical-comedy cos-breed, Battle of Britain, Sink the Bis- tume, together with a camera crew marck, Britain Can Take It. And up to and a director in a big camel-hair some point in the late 1960s, we re- coat. "We are making a romance," he mained fairly proud of our past rec- told me, "about the court of Franz ord and cautiously...
Black people in the United States are usually referred to as a more or less homogeneous group-by sociologists, newsmen, government officials, even their own leaders. But the history of black Americans is really the history of three distinct groups, whose descendants have very different incomes and occu- pations, and even different fertility rates, in the 20th century.
The first of these groups is the ante-bellum "free persons of color," who in the 1830s constituted 14 percent of the...
the editors, following an introduction the Smithsonian Institution's Paul Forman.
by Paul Forman
Albert Einstein comwosed tributes to manv individuals but to only three men he hadnever met-~ohannei~e~ler
(d.
1630), who formulated the laws of planetary motion; Isaac Newton (d. 1727), who derived those laws from general dynamic principles and a law of universal gravitation; and James Clerk Maxwell
(d.
1879), who, by a mathematical formulation of Michael Fara- day's concept of a physica...