Paul Edwards, provides a vivid portrait of Ibo village life during the mid-1700s. Marriages were arranged, recalls Equiano, and most men took no more than two wives. When neigh- boring tribes raided Ibo villages for slaves, Ibo women fought alongside their men. Equiano remarks 'that the prisoners taken his tribe and kept as slaves fared better than those sold to Europeans; some of the Ibos' slaves had slaves of their own.
Equiano's autobiography stands alone among authentic early Nige- rian documents,...
"You can say all you want about foreign affairs, but what is really important is the price of hogs in Chicago and St. Louis," said the Governor of Illinois, William G.Stratton.
The setting for the Governor's remark was a post-midnight meeting in Vice President Richard Nixon's suite at the Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel in Chicago. Only hours before, the delegates to the 1960 Republican National Convention had unanimously chosen Nixon as their presidential nominee, and the candidate had now...
Boom ripple through the economy with unpredictable conse-quences. The biggest recent shift: an enormous increase in the number and proportion of women in the workforce, especially married women, that shows no sign of letting up. This develop- ment alone, claims Columbia's Eli Ginzburg, will change modern American society "more than the rise of communism or the harnessing of nuclear power." Perhaps. Economists' views vary. Here, Richard Freeman looks at the evolving "shape" of...
George Bernard Shaw may have amused London audiences when he wrote in Man and Superman (1903) that "home is the girl's prison and the women's workhouse," but theremark was slightly anachronistic even then. Millions of women in Britain and the United States were already working outside the home in shops and factories and as servants in the homes of people who flocked to Shaw's plays.
In the face of today's realities, the acerbic British playwright would probably have kept his mouth shut....
'If a man will begin in certainties," said Francis Bacon, "he will end in doubts." That could be the motto of academic re- searchers who have been studying American workers' values and attitudes, and how both affect the workplace.
Despite years of valiant effort, scholars have been unable to link cause and effect in explanations of workers' attitudes and behavior. For example, it is impossible to say with "scientific" certainty that workers with interesting jobs are better...
The first "official" study of poverty and joblessness in the United States was commissioned by the Massachusetts legisla- ture in 1821. (The report's authors suggested that the "sturdy beggar" and "profligate vagrant" be consigned to the work- house.) Interest in the subject waned during the five decades thereafter, when, as economist John Garraty has noted, rootless, out-of-work persons generally answered to the name of pioneers." Then, in the 1870s and '80s,...
"When men are employed," wrote Benjamin Franklin, "they are best contented." America was one of the West's first nations where, for lack of a leisured aristocracy, everybody worked for a living.
After independence from Britain, the U.S. urban work force consisted of the gentry (merchants, lawyers, ministers), "mechanics" (carpenters, masons, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, butchers), and unskilled workers (day laborers, free blacks, and, in the South, slaves).
Because...
public agencies andprivate institutions
"The Evolution of U.S. Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946-76."
United States Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kans. 66027.58 pp. $1 .OO Author: Major Robert A. Doughty, U.S. Army
The tactical doctrine of the U.S. Army changed several times during the period 1946-76 in response to various developments-improved conven-tional weapons, nuclear "hardware," guerrilla wars-but Army leaders and Pentagon policymakers consistently r...
the strong hand and visionary policies of Char- lemagne (742-814). Uniformity, rationality, planning-these were the watchwords of the day, reflected in the concept of St. Gall. Dating from the early 9th century, the Plan itself (a 30-by- 44-inch piece of calfskin now preserved in the library of a Swiss monastery) is a masterpiece of design, one of the great original documents of Western civilization. For hundreds of years, it held religious and secular architecture under its spell. More impor- tant...
No subject has so captured the imag- To be sure, they are full of sage ination of Americans as the decade of predictions and "words of learned the 1980s. With George Orwell's fate- length," like Goldsmith's parson. But ful 1984 just around the corner, when one probes for the scientific everyone anxiously wants to know underpinnings, one finds a common precisely what lies ahead. Coaxed by assumption running through all the prominent foundations and think predictions-namely, that one can...