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A Survey of Papers from a Conference on Popular Culture

When Euro Disnevland ovened near Paris this year, many French intellectuals were far from pleased. One writer, Jean Cau, sounding a little like Donald Duck at his angriest, called the theme park "a horror made of cardboard, plas- tic and appalling colors, a construction of hard- ened chewing gum and idiotic folklore taken straight out of comic books written for obese Americans." And novelist Jean-Marie Rouart grimly warned, &...

Garry Wills, "The Words America" in The Atlantic (June 1992), 745 Boylston St., Boston, Mass. 02116.

Jonathan in Gov- Grow It Must ~~n~(Mar. 2300 Ste. Washington,

1992), N St. N.~l., 760, D.C.

Politicians with their eyes on the mayor's office or the governor's mansion often promise to cut overgrown governments down to size. For all such campaign talk, however, state and local government employment--which now stands at more than 15 million--has risen about 20 percent over the last dozen years. [The ranks of the 3.1 million federal civilian employees, by contrast, increased by only 0.6 percent in...

Jonathan Walters, in GOV-Bureaucracy: erning (Mar. 1992), 2300 N St. N.W., Ste. 760, Washington, D.C.Grow It Must 20037.
Politicians with their eyes on the mayor's office or the governor's mansion often promise to cut overgrown governments down to size. For all such campaign talk, however, state and local government employment-which now stands at more than 15 million-has risen about 20 percent over the last dozen years. [The ranks of the 3.1 million federal civilian employees, by contrast, increased...

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PERIODICALS
tice Earl Warren and Justice William Brennan. According to biographer Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower privately said on a number of occa- sions that he wished the Supreme Court had upheld Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) instead of overturning it in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 decision declaring segrega- tion in public schools unconstitutional. After Eisenhower left office, he frequently said that his biggest mistake had been appointing War- ren to the court. For...

James E. ~oodby, in The

A New Munich

Washington Quarterly (Spring 1992). Center for Strategic and In Yugoslavia? International Studies, 1800 K St. N.W., Ste. 400, Washington,
D.C. 20006.

After Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in June 199 1, the Serbian-led Yugo- slav Army, supported Serbian militias, swept into Serbian-populated areas of Croatia, and civil war broke out between Serbs and Croats. For months, the European Community (EC) tried to stop the fighting-but without succe...

James E. ~oodby, in The

A New Munich

Washington Quarterly (Spring 1992). Center for Strategic and In Yugoslavia? International Studies, 1800 K St. N.W., Ste. 400, Washington,
D.C. 20006.

After Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in June 199 1, the Serbian-led Yugo- slav Army, supported Serbian militias, swept into Serbian-populated areas of Croatia, and civil war broke out between Serbs and Croats. For months, the European Community (EC) tried to stop the fighting-but without suc...

1886, Labor Day celebrations were taking place throughout the country.
The rising labor movement had little diffi- culty persuading local, state, and (in 1894) na- tional legislators to add Labor Day to their offi- cial calendars. But few employers were eager to give workers the day off. "Consequently, for nearly two decades Labor Day was a virtual general strike in many cities," Kazin and Ross write. "In New York City, where many shops and factories remained open during the early...

some as likely sources for economic rejuvena- tion."
Until the mid-19th century, small businesses were the norm in the United States, with thou- sands of them producing and distributing most of the country's goods and services. But 1914, one-third of U.S. industrial workers la- bored in firms with 500 or more employees, and another third worked in companies with 100 or more. Yet small firms-by developing market niches or supplying goods to larger in- dustrial firms-remained significant right...

Martin King Whyte, Does Dating Work? in Society (Mar.-Apr. 1992), Rutgers-The State Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.

The history of courtship in America begins with the Puritans (enough said), proceeds to the modest sexual revolution of the 18th century and the counter-revolution of the 19th, and then arrives, around the turn of the century, at the familiar practice called "dating." According to University of Michigan sociologist Martin King Whyte, however, all those centuries of ro- m...

Martin King Whyte, Does Dating Work? in Society (Mar.-Apr. 1992), Rutgers-The State Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
The history of courtship in America begins with the Puritans (enough said), proceeds to the modest sexual revolution of the 18th century and the counter-revolution of the 19th, and then arrives, around the turn of the century, at the familiar practice called "dating." According to University of Michigan sociologist Martin King Whyte, however, all those centuries of ro-...

IODICALS

Continued fiom page 16
baccalaureate degrees, reports Manhattan Col- lege sociologist Kevin Dougherty. These stu- dents tend to be less academically skilled, less ambitious, and from poorer families than stu- dents entering four-year institutions. But sev- eral studies have found that even students with similar disadvantages who begin at four-year schools are more likely to wind up receiving bachelor's degrees than their counterparts at community colleges.
The reason for the difference, a...

Michael Schudson, in
HOW Clark Kent
Columbia Journalism Review (May-June 1992), 700 Journalism Learned to Fly ~ldg.,Columbia Univ., New York, N.Y. 10027.
The American news media emerged from the Watergate scandals with unprecedented power-founded, some press critics say, on il- lusions. As Edward Jay Epstein noted back in 1973, "What the press did between the break-in in June [I9721 and the trial in January was to leak the case developed the federal and Flor- ida prosecutors to the public."...

the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, etc., the hostile net- work commentators, the gen-
erally hostile White House The Nixon administration portrayed the news media as an inde- press corps, the hostile Con- pendent and hostile power, and many Americans were persuaded.
gress, etc."
-
As a result of the administration's attacks, Schudson argues, many Americans came to perceive the news media-whether admired or feared-as an independent source of power. And the perception of...

Michael M. J. Fischer, in New Perspectives Quarterly, (Spring 1992), 10951 W. Pico Blvd., 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, Calif. 90064.
Often depicted as medieval, patriarchal, and
unchanging, the Islamic world is beginning to
experience dramatic cultural shifts.
Less than two decades ago, notes Fischer, di- rector of Rice University's Center for Cultural Studies, music and sculpture and even chess were forbidden for Shi'ite believers in Iran; ra- dio, television, and movies were considered in- struments...

John Terborgh, in Scientific American (May 1992), 415 Madison Ave., New Of the Birds York, N.Y. 10017.

The trills and calls of thrushes, warblers, tana- gers, and other favorite American songbirds are heard less frequently in many cities and sub- urbs. A decline of the songbird population has been under way for decades. the 1970s, for example, the number of breeding birds in Rock Creek Park, in Washington, D.C., was only about one-third what it was in the 1940s, and species that bred there but w...

John Terborgh, in Scientific American (May 1992), 415 Madison Ave., New Of the Birds York, N.Y. 10017.
The trills and calls of thrushes, warblers, tana- gers, and other favorite American songbirds are heard less frequently in many cities and sub- urbs. A decline of the songbird population has been under way for decades. the 1970s, for example, the number of breeding birds in Rock Creek Park, in Washington, D.C., was only about one-third what it was in the 1940s, and species that bred there but...

the Infrared Astronomical Satellite. "Telltale streaks in the images," Cowen writes, "revealed the presence of giant, never-before- seen trails of dust particles associated with three comets that visit the inner solar system every three to seven years." The trails' pebble- sized debris was larger than the extremely tiny particles in the dust tails visible when comets move near the sun. That same year, the Euro- pean Space Agency's Giotto spacecraft flew within 605 kilometers...

acknowledging their sexual assertiveness," Small writes, "but we often stop short of ac- cepting that sexually assertive behavior might result in less than choosy behavior." Could it be that evolutionary biology is about to enter a postfeminist era?
Defeating "Revision, Rewriting, Rereading; or, 'An Error [Not] in The Am-
bassadors"' Jerome McGann, in American Literature (Mar.
The Master 1992), 304E Allen Building, Duke Univ., Durham, N.C. 27706.
"A curious error...

avoiding the English text altogether, which alone contained the 'reversed' chapters 28-29." But the Master, it appears, did not foresee what modern schol- arship can do.
Mapplethorpe "Art, Morals, and Politics" Robert Hughes, in The New York Review of Books (Apr. 23, 1992), 250 West 57th St., New York, And the Museums N.Y. 10107.
The Robert Mapplethorpe affair-the fierce controversy over the museum exhibition of his photographs of sadomasochistic homosexual acts-did much more than...

Berkeley spectacu- lar, since both, after all, are example[s] of Art Deco choreography."
Other writers, such as Ingrid Sischy and Kay Larson, took the therapeutic tack, and claimed that the Mapplethorpe images "teach us moral lessons, stripping away the veils of prudery and ignorance and thus promoting gay rights confronting us with the outer limits of human sexual behavior." Similar images of women be- ing degraded, Hughes observes, would not likely be greeted so calmly.
It is...

super- natural means), who uses magic to transform New York City into what seems like a utopia. But this Paradise, like the original, is flawed: The golem's sexual awakening unleashes chaos on the city and Puttermesser finally must bury her creation in the earth. "Too much Paradise is greed," Puttermesser concludes.
Ozick "wants to have it both ways," Krupnick says. "She gives and then she takes away, imag- ining the story and then destroying it before our eyes. Before...

deserting the Russian
Church and the "God-bearing people," the Russians-ap- peared often in his fiction.
But the Slavophile portrayal of the United States, Gleason says, was less important than the anti-Americanism of radi- cal intellectuals such as Peter Lavrov. Thoughts of the United States as the land of freedom were increasingly abandoned as the 19th century wore on. The corruption of the Gilded Age and the course of industri- alization made it seem to Rus- sian radicals that Americans...

Christian Democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte, and provided his government with up to $1.2 mil- lion a day to fight the war.
The Reagan administration's commitment ruled out an FMLN victory, but the U.S. Con- gress's refusal "to condone either an open alli- ance with the violent ultraright or intervention U.S. troops," says Karl, prevented the FMLN's total defeat. The war dragged on, cost- ing tens of thousands of lives and devastating the economy. By September 1987, opinion polls indicated...

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