Europe, 1940. In a stunning blitzkrieg, German troops invaded Denmark and Norway in April, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in May. The British force in France, cut off from its French allies, was evacuated from Dunkirk, leaving most of its equipment behind.
As Hitler's Panzers drove toward Paris, Winston Churchill, the new British prime minister, made a desperate plea. He secretly asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare an emergency and lend warships, aircraft, and other arms to...
John Stuart Mill has held the attention of the reading public of the Western world longer than any other 19th-century philosopher, with the notable exception of Karl Marx.
Each man is known as theorist of one central idea. Marx is read by his admirers as a champion of equality. Mill is read for his words on liberty, words that have contributed much to the debates of our own time about the freedom of dissenters, minorities, and women. He was always controversial. William Gladstone, the great Liberal...
On June 12, 1982, between 500,000 and a million Americans rallied in New York City's Central Park in support of a "nuclear freezev-a ban on all further increases in nuclear weaponry. The New York Times editorialized the next day that "hundreds of thou- sands of demonstrators. . . can't be wrong." Conservative columnist Joseph Sobran saw the great "freeze" demonstration rather differ- ently: "The rally was actually a broad coalition of people who hate the West and...
Not since the 1920s has the United States experienced such topsy- turvy economic change. During the current decade, the nation has witnessed a deep recession, a roaring bull market, instant Wall Street tycoons, bankrupt Texas oilmen, millionaire baseball players, a wave of farm foreclosures, Yuppies, and unemployed steelworkers.
George C. Beckwith of the American Peace Society, is "a sort of Delos, whither the best spirits of every party, creed and clime gather to blend in sweet and hallowed sympathy."
In making the case against war, the authors of the 64 essays invoke such au- thorities as Seneca (who found that, in conflict, "avarice and cruelty know no bounds") and Napoleon (warfare is "the business of barbarians"). One author protests that the military received 80 percent of the average...
, as Finnish diplomat Max Jakobson observed, emerges "only occasionally and for brief moments above the horizon of international news media.'? Yet Finland, with no more people (4.9 million) than the state of Wisconsin, maintains a unique position on the world scene: a prosperous Western democracy living next door to the Soviet Union. To Americans, says Jakobson, this looks like an Indian rope trick: "a clever thing to do, but not quite believable." Here, Keith W. Olson surveys the...
's national poet.
Two blocks away, patrons browse through the Academic Book Store. With 12 miles of shelves and a white marble interior, it is one of Europe's largest and most luxurious book outlets. Meanwhile, down at Market Square, at South Harbor, farmers hawk fresh fruits and vegetables under orange canvas tents. Out on the water, red- hulled ferries shuttle tourists and their cars to and from Stockholm, Travemiinde in West Germany, and other Baltic ports.
Nearby, at the Kappeli, a popular...
available to foreigners is second-hand and second-rate," wrote a senior Finnish diplomat two years ago in Foreign A) fairs. "As a result," he continued, "Fin- land is forever at the mercy of the itiner- ant columnist who, after lunch and cocktails in Helsinki, is ready to pro- nounce himself upon the fate of the Finn- ish people."
An English-speaking reader hungering for serious information on contemporary Finnish society soon finds himself on short rations. To be sure,...
onciling faith and reason in his massive Summa Theologica (1265-73), Thomas Aquinas ranks as one of the great thinkers of the eve of the Renaissance, the conservative revolutionary who changed in 40 years the whole intellectual outlook of the Christian world. He pressed for "rational investigation," "discernment of exceptional conditions," and "prudence." Italy's Umberto Eco, semiotics scholar and author of the popular novel The Name of the Rose (1983), offers a lively...
August 1920, the amendment had been ratified 36 states.
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In no other Western nation have organized women tried so hard so often to transform society. American feminists have sought not only to end inequities in voting, employment, property rights, and education, but also to reform men and, on occasion, to move both sexes toward a kind of "gender-blind" regime-goals few Euro- pean feminists have ever contemplated.
Today, after both successes and unexpected failures,...