Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science George Lakoff is among the handful of current faculty members in the United States to have successfully recast himself as a significant figure in national politics. Though his views place rather far on the progressive left, he has, unlike some other scholar-activists, focused most of his…

Little that occurs in contemporary academic geography will surprise members of the National Association of Scholars, for a large part of the field has joined the other humanities and social sciences in the bawdy saloon of progressive politics, cultural nihilism, and subjective epistemology. That geographers are in there roistering with the…

With the current economic slump possibly the deepest since the Great Depression, interest in the subject of macroeconomics has reignited, and the number of students majoring in economics has increased during the last two years. While this would appear to be good news for educators in the economics field, the profession is nervous about more than…

Although the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) never became a major player in American political life, it was a significant participant in mainstream politics and the trade union movement in the 1930s and 1940s. It has also been the focus of sustained attention by historians. An online bibliography of scholarly writing about domestic American communism…

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn entered the world stage in the 1960s, the West interpreted him without preconceptions. Then the West turned against him with a vengeance. The great exception to this turn was France--"France!"--where virtually all of his writings appeared in translation and where intellectuals took instruction from him on the nature of…

The year 2008 saw the death of one of the towering figures of the twentieth century, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. More than any other single man, Solzhenitsyn helped morally delegitimize what had seemed the unchallengeable monolith that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. His life is a standing example and inspiration to those American…

Nothing says "the sixties" like the word "revision," and, in keeping with those times, the fledgling feminist art movement dismissed hard-won mastery as "mere skill" and snubbed the canon of Western art as evidence of male dominion over the criteria for legitimacy and achievement. In debunking the myth of the Great (male) Artist, the women's…

What is the cause of crime? One can find answers in many places: in Genesis, in the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare, in Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and "Brothers Karamazov." The many answers include impiety, appetite, rage, and even the lure of transgression itself. For many, religious and poetic insights still offer the most…

Globalization has brought more and more peoples and societies around the world into contact with "international" standards of law, commerce, and communication. That process has also enabled a number of formerly underdeveloped societies to experience extraordinary patterns of economic growth, especially in the last third of the twentieth century.…

This article presents an interview with Professor David Popenoe, author of the controversial book "Disturbing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies" (1988). Popenoe heads the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, where he taught sociology for forty-five years until his recent retirement. Here, Popenoe discusses his…

This article is an autobiographical account of a remarkable childhood. In this essay, David Steiner, the Klara & Larry Silverstein Dean of the School of Education at Hunter College in New York, chronicles his early years and his road to Oxford. David is the son of George Steiner, the polymath who has scathingly denounced Western societies for the…

This author is best known for her 1998 book "Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism," in which she defended a woman's right to choose the role of homemaker, despite feminists' depiction of this role as parasitic and inferior. In this article, Graglia revisits these themes, and explains why she feels that many of the attributes of the…

In this article, the author explores the attempts by academic theorists to replace the conception of marriage as a "natural" institution with the idea that marriage is defined by the state, and is therefore open to whatever transformations the state may choose to impose. This claim, which began in law schools and philosophy departments, eventually…

In 1996 the author conducted an intensive study of twenty current family textbooks published in the United States, the results of which appeared in an academic journal article and a nonacademic report in 1997. The study included practical "functionalist" marriage and family textbooks and more academic sociology of the family books; these works…

In this article, the author reviews several books on world history from the 1920s to the 1940s. These include books authored by a diverse group: H.G. Wells, "Outline of History" (Macmillan, 1920); James Henry Breasted, "Ancient Times, A History of the Early World" (published in 1916 by Ginn and Company and largely rewritten in 1935); M.…