Senator Barry Goldwater (R.-Ariz.), and Representative Bill Nichols (D.-Ala.), the measure was en- acted over opposition from the services. It made the JCS chairman the "principal mil- itary adviser" to the president, the Na- tional Security Council, and the secretary of defense. The other service chiefs were relegated to secondary roles and put di- rectly under the chairman. The military chain of command now runs from the sec- retary of defense through the chairman and then out to the...
"Free Land and Federalism: A Synoptic View of American Eco- nomic History" Peter Temin, in The Journal of Interdisciplin-ary History (Winter 1991), Tufts Univ., 26 Winthrop St., Med- ford, Mass. 02155.
From the mid-19th century to the mid- served as a model for other nations. But 20th, U.S. economic growth was among now, says Temin, an economist at the the wonders of the world. The modern Massachusetts Institute of Technology, business enterprises that emerged here "the special...
based on free la- bor," Temin notes. It also resulted in a na- tional government "strongly sympathetic to the growth of industry."
The big industrial corporations that emerged as the American System was be-
SOCIETY
ing transformed into mass production were "an American phenomenon," Temin says. Large companies in Europe were limited to a much narrower range of in- dustries. The American firms flourished in a favorable legal setting. Court decisions, for insta...
.
Unless their underlying assumptions are accepted, Searle says, the cultural leftists' explicit arguments seem weak. "From the point of view of the tradition, the answers to each argument are fairly obvious," he observes. Thus, "it is not the aim of educa- tion to provide a representation or sample of everything that has been thought and written, but to sive students access to works of high quality. [Education there- fore] is its very nature 'elitist' and 'hi- erarchical' because...
PERIODICALS
In the 1959 study in which Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman introduced the Type-A man to the world, they re- ported that men who have a sense of ur- gency about time and who are inclined to be competitive and hostile, are twice as likely to have a heart attack. Following up on that, Levine and his colleagues exam- ined the rates of death from ischemic heart disease (a decreased flow of blood to the heart) for their 36 cities. After adjusting for the median age of each city's popula-...
Robert W.
Radio Wars
McChesney, in Journal of Communication (Autumn 1990), Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19 104-6220.
In retrospect, commercial broadcasters' near-monopoly over the radio airwaves seems to have been almost inevitable. But it did not seem that way back in the 1920s and early '30s, says McChesney, a journal- ism professor at the University of Wiscon- sin, Madison. Although scholars have not stressed the fact, there was opposition to the...
Radio (NCER) with the aim of getting Con- gress to reserve 15 percent of the broad- cast channels for educational use.
But the opposition movement faced in NBC, CBS, and the National Association of Broadcasters, "one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington." FDR had more important battles to fight, and on June 18, 1934, he signed into law the Communica- tions Act of 1934 which created the Fed- eral Communications Commission and marked the effective end of the war over the airwaves....
Frank Lambert, in The Journal of American ~Ltory(Dec. 1996, 1125 Atwater, Indiana Univ., ~liomin~ton, Ind. 47401.
"Great and visible effects followed his preaching. There was never such a general awakening, and concern for the things of God known in America before." So wrote Anglican evangelist George Whitefield in 1740 in a third-person account of his own revivalist activities, cleverly advertising them means of an "objective" newspa- per article. But his puffery actually w...
Robert L. Wilken, in First Things (Dec. 1990), Inst. on Religion and Public Life, 156 Fifth Ave., ~te. 400, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Virtuous deeds "implant in those who pire, the use of written narratives of noble search them out a zeal and yearning that lives to teach virtue was well-established, leads to imitation," declared Plutarch (A.D. notes Wilken, a University of Virginia his- 46-120), whose Parallel Lives of noble torian. "Yet Christian hagiography. . . does Greeks and Romans...
illustrations, as when James cites Job for his patience. But such examples hardly constituted comprehensive biographies.
"Why, then, no lives?" asks Wilken. "The most obvious reason was that the gospels stood in the way. The supreme model for Christian life was Jesus.. .. At this early stage of Christian history, it would have been presumptuous to bring other persons into competition with the primal model." That changed, however, with the Council of Nicaea, called in A.D. 325...