Recently added articles from Daedalus:
Foreword.
Mar 22, 2009 ... Long committed to supporting intellectual life in the nation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at the beginning of the new century decided to focus new effort on fostering the intellectual development of the next generation of scholars. Accordingly, in 2002 the Visiting Scholars ...
Torchlight parades for the television age: the presidential debates as political ritual.(Essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... During the 2008 vice presidential debate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was pressed by her Democratic rival, Delaware Senator Joe Biden, and moderator Gwen I fill to reply to a question she had previously ignored. The chipper Palin, who thrived on the perception of being persecuted, ...
Health media & global inequalities.(Essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Since its emergence in the nineteenth century, public health has primarily been the charge of nation-states acting to maintain the health of populations. (1) In addition to taking steps to prevent disease, governments deploy the rhetoric of health and "hygiene" to police the behavior and ...
What does it mean to be an American?(Essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... It is often said that being an American means sharing a commitment to a set of values and ideals. (1) Writing about the relationship of ethnicity and American identity, the historian Philip Gleason put it this way: <Pre> To be or to become an American, a person did not have to be ...
Anti-intellectualism as romantic discourse.(Essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... When I told friends that I was heading off to a doctoral program in U.S. intellectual history, they either seemed mystified - "Do we have an intellectual history?" - or found the entire proposition somewhat funny: "American intellectual history!? Isn't that an oxymoron!?" More skepticism ...
The intellectual foundations of the modern American fiscal state.(Essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... At the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. system of public finance underwent a dramatic structural transformation. The late-nineteenth-century system of indirect national taxes - associated mainly with the highly partisan tariff and regressive excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco-was ...
Pragmatism & the lessons of experience.(Essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Experience has lessons to impart. Its ability to teach, however, turns on our willingness to learn. Attending to the lessons of human experience brought American pragmatists of the nineteenth century to a new conception of philosophy, one that embraced the fallibilism that had long defined ...
The rise & fall of new left urbanism.(Essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... The pillars of the "urban renewal order," shorthand for an interlocking set of social policies since the 1940s, were crumbling fast by the 1960s. Urban populations, especially in Western Europe, the United States, and Canada, suddenly no longer wanted the variety of once progressive-minded ...
Risking Ralph Ellison.(Critical essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... When Ralph Ellison said that "the joke [is] at the center of the American identity," he also meant that the joker is at the center of American life. In a rapidly changing liberal society, with fluctuating standards and values, the joker is an "American virtuoso of identity who thrives on ...
Reconciling American archaeology & Native America.(Essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Shortly after William Bradford and his fellow pilgrims arrived on the eastern shores of the New World in the cold autumn of 1620, a small group of men set out to make a "full discovery" of the snow-covered land. (1) After some days of wandering the unknown rivers and hills, they grew ...
Looking out, looking in: competing organizational interests & the proliferation of Soviet WMD expertise.(weapons of mass destruction)(Essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s raised concerns about the security of its nuclear weapons. (1) In response, the United States joined forces with countries of the former Soviet Union, especially Russia, as well as the European Union and other states, to create a series ...
Rebalancing American foreign policy.(Essay)
Mar 22, 2009; ... The United States faces unprecedented foreign policy and national security challenges. (1) Conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global war on terrorism, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the increasing assertiveness of Russia, the growth of Chinese military power, global climate ...
General Benjamin Butler & the threat of sexual violence during the American Civil War.(Report)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Scarlett's breath came back to her as suddenly and painfully as after a blow in the stomach. A Yankee, a Yankee with a long pistol on his hip! And she was alone in the house with three sick girls and the babies! As he lounged up the walk, hand on holster, beady little eyes glancing to ...
From speaking in the fall.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2009; ... <Pre> Was that the river? No, it wasn't the river, oh, it was the sink.We don't need a known reason, I say, we can have our own ones; we don't even have to know what they are; they're from before all this, they're from before everything, from when the universe ...
Divinity.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2009; ... <Pre> No angel blazing in rapture above my bed, you have been as common as a swing set, and I have been the child running toward you from the sandbox. I felt your heart beating in the white tunic I wore at mass and watched the priest pass you out in little wafers of bread ....
Excerpts from discipline.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2009; ... <Pre> On CNN a girl's fingers slack, empty of weapons. Behind her, shrapnel fires. My mother says, O, holy, O, O, and then presses her lips together like a snake. Our purposeful living spaces made from taciturn rooms. Entire houses of trapped utterances - mouths saturatedwith ...
Ophelia to the court.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2009; ... <Pre> My shoes are unpolished, my words smudged. I come to you undressed (the lord, he whispers smut, that man, he whispered that). I bend my thoughts, I submit, but a bird keeps flying out from my mind, it slippers your feet and sings - barren world, I have been a ...
The new lustration.(Poem)
Mar 22, 2009; ... <Pre> Last night I heard faint music moving up through the floor. The feeling I could be one who falls asleep and dreams some brave act and wakes to actually do it through me flapped, brief breeze through a somnolent flag. Across the room my cell phone ...