Foredestined! A silken fervor caressed them, a flame consuming beautiful Star Lamont and dashing Captain Troy Stewart in a wave of ripening desire beneath the southern sky.
Foresworn! Across a fiery landscape scorched by the fury of slave revolt and the tumult of war-across the oceans and across the years-theirs is a story of surpassing grandeur, from a moment's shipboard encounter through a lifetime of everlasting love.
Forever!
Everywhere one turns these days the paperback stalls sport t...
By April 1865, the Southern planters' dreams of perpetuat- ing slavery in an independent republic had vanished. Secession had cost the South a quarter of a million men dead and nearly $3 billion in slave property when three and a half million black laborers were freed. As some Southern anti-Secessionists had prophesied, the Civil War ended in the destruction of the "pecul- iar institution" it was intended to make secure.
Before Appomattox, the planters had identified the South's entire...
Eight or nine years ago, during a classroom discussion of the federal government's retreat in the 1870s from its commit- ment to protect black civil and political rights in the South, a student offered a remark that remains etched in my memory. "This time," he said, "the story will be different." Having grown up during the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, his genera- tion, he asserted, was "more enlightened" than its forebears and would make sure that no backsliding...
the Literary Guild-of Claude G. Bowers'
THE TRAGIC ERA: The Revolution after Lincoln (Houghton Mifflin, 1929, cloth; 1930, paper), the Southern view reached its widest audience.
To rebut Bowers' popular anti-Negro, antiradical, anticarpetbagger, anti-scalawag book, black historian W. E. B. Du Bois six years later published his ground-breaking work, BLACK RECON- STRUCTION (Harcourt, 1935; Kraus re- print, 1976).
Du Bois's radically different-some thought alarmingly radical-interpreta- tion garnered...
public agencies and private institutions
"Religion in America"
The Gallup Opinion Index (no. 145), prepared the American Institute of Public Opinion, 53 Bank St., Princeton, N.J. 08540. 118 pp. $3.25.
Many social commentators have as- sumed that the age of "permissive- ness" and relaxed moral standards has prompted Americans to abandon their churches. But according to a Gallup survey, a strong religious climate still exists in the United States.
Some 38 percent of all...
A comic, detached ambivalence lies cism. (Still, he found the Church's at the heart of Evelyn Waugh's work. Index of forbidden books a "conven- He immersed himself in the glitter- ient excuse for not reading Sartre.") ing, sordid swirl of prewar England He came out of a Victorian middle- but at the same time believed it class family but chose the high life would be "very wicked indeed to do among the titled rich, the merely anything to fit a boy for the modem rich, and the leisured...
Were our Presidents right or wrong tions-and others-remain elusive,
in involving the United States in subject to debate likely to be re-
Vietnam? Did our leaders adopt the newed with each generation of histo-
best strategy for fighting the war? rians, as after other U.S. wars.
Were they genuinely seeking a corn- From the vast literature dealing
promise peace? with Vietnam, only a few dozen
The answers to these big ques- books covering the origins, conduct,
The Wilson QuarterlyISpring 1978
178
and ou...
Rights to personal autonomy and privacy are nowhere expressly guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. Yet in recent years the Su- preme Court, and lower courts as well, have upheld both the claims of individual citizens to a generalized "right to be let alone" and more specific demands for greater control over the uses made of personal information. Judges and legislators have not always found it easy to balance rights of individual privacy and autonomy against competing interests, such...
During the last decade, the right to personal privacy has gained the status of a central social value in America. This new emphasis is, of course, related to the long-standing American belief in personal freedom and the basic dignity and worth of the individual. But the more immediate cause has been public anx- iety about the increasing dominance of government, corpo- rations, and other large bureaucratic organizations-and fears of what these organizations may do with the vast amounts of personal...