Over the past several years, the news from the Netherlands has caused many Americans to wonder: Whatever happened to the sturdy Dutch? At The Hague, thousands of citizens have demon- strated against their government's belated decision to allow its allies to deploy NATO cruise missiles on Dutch soil. In Amster-dam, squatters have tossed rocks and bottles at the police. In the capital, sex shops and cafes that openly sell marijuana do a brisk business. In Utrecht, demonstrators greeted John Paul...
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
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Oman
- When Oman's English-educated Sultan Qabus visited the White
House in April 1983, President Reagan genia...