Most Americans now date the nation's current, unsolved energy problems back to 1973-the time of the Arab oil embargo, OPEC price increases, and gas lines. Yet both the long-term question of
U.S. energy supplies and the much-debated remedies of the 1970s surfaced repeatedly in Washington after World War 11. The failure of successive Presidents and Congresses-from the Truman days through the Carter era-to devise a coherent na- tional energy policy is a complex political story. Duke econo- mist...

With the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman became President of the United States on April 12, 1945. He faced a host of challenges. First, he had to see World War I1 through to victory. Later, he had to oversee the economy's con- version to peacetime, promote a stable new world order, and contain Joseph Stalin's ambitions in Europe and the Mideast.
As it happened, these preoccupations coincided with a little-publicized development: The United States was suddenly no longer self-sufficient...

President Richard
M. Nixon's request to Congress for $2.2 billion in arms for Israel, the seven-member Organization of Arab Petroleum Producing Countries brandished the "oil weapon" and ordered an oil em- bargo against the United States.
In early November, the Arab oil ministers, whose govern- ments together controlled 60 percent of the noncommunist world's proven reserves of petroleum, agreed to cut production to 75 percent of the September 1973 level.
On Christmas Eve 1973, OPEC raised...

The United States emerged from World War I1 with a new appreciation of the importance of energy to the nation's sur- vival. It had participated in the first fully mechanized war in history. In the view of the State Department's Charles B. Rayner, testifying before the Senate in 1945, the Allies won be- cause the United States had oil in abundance; Germany and Ja- pan fought for it in Baku and Kirkuk, in Burma and Indonesia, and they lost because they were unable to capture it, or to cap- ture it...

ENERGY:
There are many under-investigated subjects in academe. Economic his- tory-as opposed to economic theory or policvmaking-is one of them. he gap "is apparent to anyone look- ins for com~rehensive accounts of
u.S. and foreign development of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy. Histor- ical treatment of these topics tends to be superficial, heavily biased, or unreadable. We offer a few excep- tions here.
Study in Power (Scribner's, 1953), historian Allan Nevins's sympathe- tic, two-v...

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Indonesia
As many specialists see it, Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, has become a major test of the capitalist West's ap- proach to economic development. Others disagree. Resource- rich Indonesia is the only Asian member of OPEC. Despite 7 years of high oil revenues and 15 years of Western aid and ad- vice, its economy lags far behind those of Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore. Here, Benedict Anderson traces the country's past, focusing on the tumult that led to th...

INDONESIA From 1854 to 1862, the English natu- ralist Alfred Russel Wallace, friend and rival of Charles Darwin, toured the East Indies in search of evidence for the theory of evolution. The archipelago, he wrote, seemed to have "a climate, vegetation, and animated life altogether peculiar to itself." Wallace's work in classifying flora and fauna led him to perceive the is- land chain as "a connected whole." Yet in his chatty travelogue, The Malay Archipelago (Harper, 1869;...

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"United States National Interests in the Middle East: A New Approach for the 1980s."
Prepared for the International Security Studies Program, The Wilson Center, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560. 16 pp.
Author: Les Janka
In a controversial paper presented at the Wilson Center, Janka, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1976 to 1978, argues that American energy security and reduced Soviet in- fluence in the Middle E...

Leo Tolstoy's reputation rests primarily on two great novels- War and Peace and Anna Karenina-written during his middle years. But Count Tolstoy was a man of unconventional beliefs. A would-be social reformer in tsarist Russia, ever at war with himself and his family, he died in 1910 trying to escape home, fame, and fortune. Critic Martin Green looks at the evolution of Tolstoy's disruptive ideas, which came to influence, in turn, Ma- hatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Although most people would r...

In 1940, poet T. S. Eliot, then a London editor, commissioned historian Muriel St. Clare Byrne to undertake the first annotated edition of England's illuminating 16th-century Lisle Letters -the personal and official correspondence of Arthur Plantagenet (Viscount Lisle), his wife, and his friends. The product of Byrne's scholarship will be published, in six volumes, on May 31, by the University of Chicago Press. The 3,000 Lisle Letters cover the most memorable seven years (1533-40) in the reign...