National Forum

In an increasingly homogenous world, little seems to remain unique to a country except climate, topography, and remnants of museum culture. The television programs and films we watch, the things we buy, the food we eat, and the beverages we drink, even...

Stephen E. Ambrose. D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, $30.00.Since its appearance in 1959, war correspondent Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day has been the popular American account of the...

Robert and Jon Solomon. Up the University: Re-creating Higher Education in America. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing company, 1993. 312 pages. $24.95.Up the University is a set of reflections about a multitude of practices and problems confronting...

Culture, to many people, was still rooted in the past, in the observations of British poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, who in the middle of the nineteenth century defined culture as "the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said...

Consider the following statistics:ITEM--NATIONAL AVERAGEChildren living in poverty--20%Children in single parent homes--23%Children with unwed mothers--25%Children with teenage mothers--12%Infant mortality--10%School drop-outs--25%Adult illiteracy--3%Incarceration...

"The enemy of art is what passes for good taste." --Walter HillWhen people learn that I teach a college course in popular culture, their responses often go something like this: "What in the world is an English professor doing teaching Batman [or Schwarzenegger...

As an experimental biologist-turned-English professor, I have more than a passing interest in popular fiction about science. I mean fiction like Robin Cook's 1989 Mutation or Michael Crichton's 1990 Jurassic Park, to which I'll return a bit later. Such...

"We were searching for definition in our lives..." --Eric von Schmidt & Jim RooneyWe are currently experiencing a folk music revival. However, many of the artists enjoying the swell of popularity that has attended it are loathe to admit they are...