In another part of the world, it would have been a straightforward public-works project. A highway was too narrow to handle the increasing flow of traffic, so the authorities brought in heavy equipment to widen it.
Tag Archives: history
Mikhail Gorbachev
In 1985, when the first rumblings of Gorbachev’s thunder disturbed the moldy Soviet silence, the holy fools on the street–the people who always gather at flea markets and around churches–predicted that the new Czar would rule seven years. They assured anyone interested in listening that Gorbachev was “foretold in the Bible,” that he was an apocalyptic figure: he had a mark on his forehead
Swing States
If you took a jazz-history course before 2000 or so, you almost certainly listened to The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. Long out of print, the Collection has finally been supplanted
Winston Churchill
The political history of the 20th century can be written as the biographies of six men: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
"I Have Seen The Promised Land"
The triumphs of the Montgomery bus boycott and the March on Washington with its stirring “I Have a Dream” speech, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts and the winning of the Nobel Peace Prize were all behind Martin Luther King Jr. when he began the last and perhaps loneliest year of his life in January 1968
Is Windows Nokia’s Lifeline?
Nokia’s Stephen Elop certainly has a way with words. In February, in what might have been the most brutally honest corporate memo in decades, the recently installed CEO compared his company to an oil worker trapped on a burning drilling rig, facing a terrible choice
Art: Man v. Man
Is there an underlying theme that runs through the history of art, from the figures scratched on walls of prehistoric caves to splashes and forms on contemporary canvases?
A People’s History of Sports
A People’s History of Sports in the United States By Dave Zirin The New Press; 268 pp.
What’s Wrong with Notre Dame Football?
College football may seem like a religion to Americans, but to many American Catholics the University of Notre Dame football team is the incarnation of their faith in sport. Yet, apart from the battle for the college football national championship, the biggest biggest news in college football this season has been the continued decline of Notre Dame.
How One Army Town Copes With Post- Traumatic Stress
In retrospect, disneyland wasn’t an ideal family-vacation spot for Mark Waddell, a Navy SEAL commander whose valor in combat hid the fact that he was suffering from severe mental trauma. The noise of the careening rides, the shrieking kids–everything roused Waddell to a state of hypervigilance typical of his worst days in combat.