Staige D. Blackford

Here's a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal. If the United States remains "the only major economic power dogmatically committed to free market economics" warns Charles Maechling, Jr., it "will then find itself in recurrin [...]

If not the greatest, William Faulkner ranks among the foremost American authors of the 20th century, as attested by the Nobel Prize for Literature he received in December 1950. Faulkner created many notable literary characters, one of them being Lu [...]

Although he attained eminence as a literary critic, as editor of The American Mercury, and as the author of many books, H.L. Mencken was first, foremost, and finally a newspaper man. Or, as the sage of Baltimore told Henry Wallace at the Progressive [...]

It was Hemingway's longest and most popular novel about a war that once evoked emotions both fanatic and fierce. Yet today the causes and circumstances of what the Spanish once called nuestra guerra ("our war") are largely forgotten even in Spain it [...]

It has now been just over a half-century since Margaret Mitchell first introduced the world to Scarlett, Rhett, Melanie, Ashley, and all the other inhabitants of a land Gone with the Wind. And by this time in 1936 her epic of Georgia during the Civi [...]

ANTHONY Powell's twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time has been hailed in some literary circles as an English Remembrance of Things Past. A somewhat different view is presented by Richard Jones in this issue. Mr. Jones is himself the author of [...]

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan late in 1979, some Western analysts felt the invasion might have been prompted by Russian fears of an Islamic rebellion among the non-Russian, Moslem residents of the U.S.S.R., many of whose lands were forci [...]

The story of the Southern Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's was largely written by Martin Luther King, Jr. and his forces of nonviolence, but the Movement did not attract black Southerners only. Though not large in numbers, there were white South [...]

To many Americans, Sicily is infamous for being the home of the Mafia, and that is about the extent of their knowledge of the ancient island off the southwest tip of Italy separated from the mother country by the Strait of Messina. The largest islan [...]

At the time radical Abbie Hoffman committed suicide in April 1989 by taking an overdose of phenobarbital, Stephen J. Whitfield was in Grenoble, France completing a book on The Culture of the Cold War, which Johns Hopkins University Press is publishi [...]

The conservative philosophy, not to mention the political clout, of the Reagan administration appears to have called all in doubt about American liberalism. To some, such as neoconservative essayist Peter Shaw, liberalism has been in retreat for se [...]

With the onset of autumn, football reigns supreme in the hearts of millions of our countrymen. It is not only a sport, a fall festival, a weekend way of life; it is also a billion-dollar business. Football is perhaps the most obvious manifestation o [...]

Fifty years ago next month—in November 1930—a symposium was published by twelve Southern writers who called themselves Agrarians. The symposium was entitled I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, and among those contributing p [...]

The scholarly world was recently shocked by allegations and admonitions of plagiarism from three of the country's most prominent historians, namely Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Joseph Ellis. At the same time, two other historians, Mic [...]

Scholar and traveler Russell Eraser is a direct descendant of Alexander Fraser, first commander of the U.S. Coast Guard and skipper of one of the last clipper ships before the age of steam. He sailed on the brig Lawrence around Cape Horn in the mid- [...]

Paul Duke began his career as a journalist in 1943 when, as a high school student in Richmond, Virginia, he took a job as an announcer at a local radio station for the princely sum of $30 a week for 50 hours of work, and the work never really let u [...]

Just over a year ago—on June 3, 1989—the tanks clattered into Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the guns began to chatter, and China's short-lived experiment in democracy came crashing to a terrible and tragic end. "This is not the West," said, in Aud [...]

As the New Year opens, polls, politicians, and pundits are gathering statistics, mapping strategy, and laying groundwork for the elections of 1986—congressional, gubernatorial, and local. Moreover, they are also keeping an eye out to the horizon, [...]

ON June 26, 1975, the lights of democracy went out in India as Mrs. Gandhi imposed her now famous Emergency. Since that time, thousands of Indians have been jailed and the Indian press virtually muzzled. One of the publications to perish under the E [...]

Maxwell Perkins has rightly been called an "editor of genius," partly if not largely because he was willing to gamble that today's unknown author can become tomorrow's toast of the literary town. Thus he bought an at-the-time risqué work from a Min [...]

Ever since the days of Atlanta editor, Henry Grady, in the late 19th century, a "New South" has been proclaimed just about every time a Southern newspaper reporter is promoted to columnist. But the "New South" is likely to be replaced by the "Globa [...]

Of all of Thomas Jefferson's myriad of interests, none was more profound and lasting than what Robert A. Ferguson calls his "lifelong obsession" with Monticello. Jefferson began construction of the house on the "Little Mountain" in 1768 and left the [...]

This spring marks the 40th anniversary of a court decision that began the end of an era—the era of segregation, the era of "separate but equal" where the races were separate but anything but equal if you happened to be a black Southerner. It was o [...]

No war involving Americans has been more written about than the Civil War of 1861—65. And no one—not even Douglas Southall Freeman, Bruce Catton, or Shelby Foote, three of the war's outstanding 20th-century chroniclers—has written so tellingly [...]

As the American Medical Association has long proclaimed, Americans enjoy higher standards of medical care than the rest of mankind. And American medical technology is continually exploring and expanding along the frontiers of science. Yet, as doctor [...]

As the nation enters its third cenury and as the 20th century draws to a close, Americans find themselves facing problems of unprecedented complexity and magnitude—critically short supplies of energy, the population explosion, the clash between th [...]

However much they may have disagreed on such matters as the ERA amendment, the economy, or human rights, there was one banner around which both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan rushed to rally in the 1980 presidential campaign—the banner of increase [...]

MICHAEL NELSON hardly needs an introduction to VQR readers having previously written an article on Frank Sinatra and another on Garrison Keillor among other contributions. His essay, "The Good, the Bad, and the Phony: Six Famous Historians and Their [...]

In his examination of "the mystery of modern art," Paul Barolsky concludes that this mystery "ever eludes us" and that "our obsessive detective investigation of it . . . will never be finished." It is also an investigation which Mr. Barolsky has [...]

Richard Jones made his debut as a VQR contributor in the summer of 1976 with an essay entitled "Anthony Powell's Music: Swan Song of the Metropolitan Romance." The Music referred to Powell's multivolume saga, A Dance to the Music of Time, a series o [...]

Although it may seem like only yesterday, a quarter of a century has now elapsed since Lyndon Johnson began the escalation of American involvement in South Vietnam. Indeed, to the generation that has come of age in the 25 years since 1965, the Vietn [...]

Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain is the title of Fred Hobson's latest book (published in 1983 by Louisiana). A good part of telling and explaining in the centuries since Jamestown has involved the Southern impulse toward violence a [...]

Of all the wonders of this technological age, few have arrived more swiftly or wrought more changes than those of communications. Where it once took weeks or months to send a message around the globe, it is now but a matter of seconds. Where televis [...]

In matters of the mind, Freud undeniably was a pioneer, opening hitherto untrodden paths into the realm of the subconscious. In matters of the spirit, however, the father of psychoanalysis did not display the vision of an explorer. Rather, as Robert [...]

Comparing the serious fiction written about Washington to that written about New York is rather like comparing a bungelow to the Empire State Building. Yet, one contemporary author whose literary reputation largely rests on the stories and novels he [...]

As Edwin M. Yoder noted in the letter accompanying his essay on "Star Wars," it has now been more than a decade since the demise of Washington's last afternoon newspaper, The Evening Star. The Star shut down on August 7, 1981 after 129 years of publ [...]

Of an apparently ageless ailment of mankind Nietzsche lamented, "Against boredom even the gods themselves struggle in vain." Schopenhauer reached a similar conclusion: "The most general survey shows us that the two foes of human happiness are pain a [...]

Called a latter-day Rome by some, denigrated as a one-company town by others, and always a center of controversy, modern Washington, D.C.bears about as much resemblance to the capital city of the Founding Fathers as the 747 jet airliner to the Wrigh [...]

Richard M. Nixon is still very much in the eyes—though hardly the hearts—of his countrymen. Having presented his version of the Watergate scandal on television with David Frost, the former President is now completing his memoirs, which few expec [...]

In this age of specialization, this era in which the Ph.D. degree is the required union card for admittance to any English department worthy of the name, the career of R.P. Blackmur seems more extraordinary than ever. Here was a New Englander who ne [...]

"Here's a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal." Wars unfortunately have been part and parcel of American history, and two that loom large in our recent past are Vietnam, the only war Americans have ever lost, and World War Two, perhaps o [...]

Lord Acton and Sir Richard Southern were Englishmen of different centuries and different religious denominations—the one Catholic, the other Protestant—but they shared a common calling and became among the most respected historians of their res [...]

The Cold War may now be history, but it is not destined to be history that is little noted nor long remembered. The books about it may never equal those about the American Civil War, but scholars will be examining every aspect of this peculiar ideo [...]

Many news stories have appeared in recent months about the rising expectations of the various ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union. Then, too, the Soviet Union is confronted by the threat of Moslem fundamentalism among the myriad followers of Moham [...]

The source of genius has long been disputed, with one contention being that its root lies in madness and another that its origin stems from a temperament of exceptional serenity and stability. In his VQR essay, British psychotherapist Anthony Storr [...]

A new year seems a propitious time to survey the international scene, and thus VQR's first issue of 1978 contains three articles dealing, respectively, with the future role of U.S. diplomacy, detente, and Scotch-Welsh nationalism. America's place in [...]

When the second issue of the VQR appeared in the summer of 1925, one of its contributors was a North Carolina newspaperman named Gerald W. Johnson. Mr. Johnson was to remain a VQR contributor for the next half century, with his last article appearin [...]

Although America is the world's only superpower, the course of its foreign policy is by no means sure or certain. Indeed, diplomatic historian Norman Graebner finds that President Clinton's "chief foreign policy legacy was a nation more divided on m [...]

Of all the writers to come out of "the Southern Renaissance" in the early part of this century, William Faulkner stands as first and foremost, even though many of his works were out of print at the time he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in [...]

Like abolition in antebellum America, abortion today is an issue about which few U. S. adults are neutral. While the conflict between freedom of choice and right to life has not resulted in a civil war, it has disrupted communities, destroyed relati [...]

This year this nation observes the 200th anniversary of its birth under what is now the world's oldest Constitution. And this spring, John Seelye looks back to an early opus in praise of our Republic and of its discovery in a New World by Columbus, [...]

Whatever the outcome of the 1984 presidential campaign, the first item on the next president's agenda of foreign policy will be—as it has been for more than three decades now—America's relations with the Soviet Union, Those relations have been t [...]

Now, nearly 15 years since that dreadful day in Dallas, the "fleeting wisp of glory" that was known as Camelot-on-the-Potomac has vanished into the mists of memory. And the legend that was John F. Kennedy is not holding up too well in the glare of r [...]

From Homer's "wine dark" to Melville's "great shroud" to what author John Seelye deplores as "the most trivialized ocean yet invented"—that of Jaws— the sea has both fascinated and frightened man. And it has loomed large in literature from the t [...]

Conventional Republican wisdom decrees that Ronald Reagan deserves a place on Mount Rushmore alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Not so, argues Robert Erwin in his retrospective look at Mr. Reagan's career as governor o [...]

Having described personal forays through Sicily (autumn 1994) and Scotland (spring 1996), seasoned traveler Russell Fraser now turns his discerning eye to the ancient country of France in his latest VQR essay, concentrating on Burgundy and its splen [...]

Just as Mallory yearned to climb Mt. Everest, "because it's there," so men have gone to the moon—and may some day reach Mars—because they are out there. Space explorers are driven by the same urge to make the unknown known that impelled Columbu [...]

As Ronald Reagan flies off into the California sunset after eight years in the White House, as George Bush succeeds the nation's first two-term president since Eisenhower, the assessments of the Reagan administration begin. One such assessment—tha [...]

In VQR's Autumn 1961 issue, writing about what he called "the annealing of the South," Leslie W. Dunbar, then executive director of the Southern Regional Council—the first biracial organization in the region—observed: "Now the land of fitful som [...]

THE American emphasis on self-reliance necessitates the refusal to be involved in time." So observes Quentin Anderson at the outset of his essay on four 19th-century American writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Henry James. In his discussion of [...]

For some years now—and particularly since the Reagan administration came to power—politicians and pundits have been bewailing what they view as a precarious decline of American power. President Reagan has discovered a "window of vulnerability" t [...]

"China's never really been out of my mind since I first went there ten years ago," writes scholar and traveler Russell Fraser about his experiences in China during a trip last year. His recent visit is recounted in his latest travel essay for VQR. P [...]

Of all "the boys of summer" who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the late 1940's and the early 1950's, none displayed more character or courage than Jackie Robinson, grandson of a plantation slave, son of a Georgia sharecropper — and the African [...]

As Sanford Pinsker observes at the outset of his examination of "America's Conspiratorial Imagination," no one "doubts that conspiracy theory is a sure-fire moneymaker. Indeed, for those who specialize in new installments of "Who Shot JFK?", conspir [...]

The question of whether there are any limits on scientific research has assumed an ever larger magnitude as scientists have devised ever more lethal means of annihilation and probed into the fascinating field of genetics. Some scientists assert ther [...]

All the fanfare and furor over the actual arrival of the year George Orwell picked as the title for his frightening novel has obscured the fact that 1984 has another significance, this one being historical rather than literary: it is the 70th annive [...]

A retired American diplomat living in Paris, John Bovey returned to his native land last fall. His return aroused the reflections expressed in his eloquent essay, as Mr. Bovey explained in a recent letter: ""Boats Against the Current" is an abbrevia [...]

Twenty years ago—incredible as it I may now seem—a visitor to Atlanta, the city then boasting that it was "too busy to hate," would have found one small hotel (in the convention Mecca of the region) and only two or three restaurants to which whi [...]

Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion has been as popular with contemporary radio audiences as Amos and Andy, Fibber McKee and Molly were in the 1930's and 40's, a mixture of music and dialogue as down home as fried chicken and apple pie. The [...]

During Virginia's short-lived era of "Massive Resistance" to school desegregation in the late 1950's, no area of the Commonwealth resisted more massively-or longer-than Prince Edward County, where the schools were closed not for days or weeks but for [...]

With the collapse of communism, with the rolling back of the Iron Curtain and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, American diplomats look to "fresh woods and pastures new" with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. President Bush proclaims a [...]

As the Cold War recedes into history, as four decades of high-blown rhetoric (brinkmanship and all that) and downright distortion ("evil empire" and all that) subside, the world appears to be entering a new era. With Gorbachev and glasnost at the he [...]

We're About to Launch a Costly and Crazy Arms Race in Space." So proclaimed a headline in the Sunday "Outlook" section of the Washington Post last fall. Yet, as Clayton R. Koppes clearly shows, the militarization of America's space program did not b [...]

A lifelong student of international relations, Adda B. Bozeman is concerned by the tendency among Americans in general and American political writers in particular to "assume, without supporting evidence, that one of OUR morally preferred words and [...]

The 1982 elections are just a few weeks away, and American voters once again are being subjected to barrages of bombast from all sides of the political spectrum. And if Campaign "82 is dominated by the economic issue of Reaganomics, it is also infus [...]

Just as December 7, 1941 goes down in our history as a "day that will live in infamy," so May 7, 1915 John Milton Cooper, Jr. calls "a shock of recognition" reverberting among the American people. On that spring day, now more than 85 years ago, a Ge [...]

As Townsend Ludington observes at the outset of his essay, John Dos Passos was a member of a remarkable literary generation that came of age in the 1920's, and 1996 marks the centennial of Dos Passes' birth. Mr. Ludington is hardly a stranger to the [...]

A historian Gordon S. Wood observes at the outset of his essay, George Washington "no longer seems to be first in the hearts of his countrymen" or even first among historians. Mr. Wood then goes on to present a convincing case for Washington being " [...]

Even though the region known as Dixie has lost much of its distinctiveness during what some have called the homogenization of the South, its life and literature continue to command attention. And individual Southerners continue to stand out for thei [...]

As William Attwood observes in this issue's lead essay, few Americans over 30 years old have forgotten where they were and what they were doing on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. Nor ar [...]

On May 17, 1954—25 years ago this spring—an era ended for the American South, the era of "separate but equal," as the United States Supreme Court recognized reality and declared unconstitutional a doctrine that in effect kept black children sepa [...]

In this, the 200th anniversary of his election as the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson has not had a very good year. What with Sally Hemings and all that, he has once again become the subject of controversy. Yet, as Esmond Wri [...]

With the 1996 presidential election just a few months away, historian John Milton Cooper, Jr. examines the records and reputations of previous 20th-century presidents and finds that all have had their ups and downs—and that all since Franklin D. R [...]

As Janet McNew observes at the outset of her discussion of the current curriculum controversy— a.k.a. political correctness—in American higher education, "ferment over what knowledge is most important to teach is not. . .new." Indeed, The Ba [...]

Even though he died a quarter of a century ago this year (Nov.22, 1973), Oxbridge don C.S. Lewis remains a publishing phenomenon: his books now sell some 2,000,000 copies a year in Great Britain and this country. Moreover, of the 100 entries under L [...]

Alough it may seem like only yesterday, two decades have now elapsed since "the long, hot summer" of 1963, a summer in which the American civil rights movement reached its high-water mark with a peaceful protest march in Washington on August 28 in w [...]

To many Americans, the name Andalucía may well sound like a new brand of perfume or something equally exotic, enchanting, and totally unfamiliar. Proud of our own history, we should well be humbled by that of Andalucia, whose past is as old as trag [...]

American higher education, as James Axtell notes at the opening of his essay, has been called "the envy of the planet." Yet, beginning in the late 1980's, America's colleges and universities particularly the elite universities have been praised and [...]

With this issue, The Virginia Quarterly Review celebrates its 75th anniversary having first appeared in April 1925.But the establishment of such a journal had long been a dream of Edwin A.Alderman, the first president of the University of Virginia ( [...]

There is a special section in VQR this spring, a section devoted to the translation of poems ranging from ancient Rome to 20th-century Russia and including Portugal's greatest modern poet whose poetry appeared not only under his own name— Fernando [...]

Peru, home of the Incas, is one of the oldest civilizations in the Americas, but its capital, Lima, reminds Russell Fraser of present-day Detroit—"nice residential quarters on the city's outskirts, big hotels in the center, in between a vacuum wai [...]

In an age haunted by the specter of a nuclear holocaust, World War II sometimes seems as long ago and far away as Agincourt, as distant as Blenheim, at one with Trafalgar and Waterloo. Yet it was only slightly more than four decades ago that millio [...]

THROUGHOUT the 20th century, the United States has pursued two diverging goals in foreign policy. On the one hand it has sought stability and the status quo, and on the other it has sought, in Wilson's words, to "make the world safe for democracy," [...]

If hailed by the critics, exhibits of modern art have, all too often, bemused, bothered, and bewildered the average viewer. What the expert proclaims as a masterpiece is, in the eye of the ordinary beholder, merely a mess. This is particularly true [...]

With this issue, summer 2003, an era comes to an end at the Virginia Quarterly Review, the era being the span of the current editor's editorship. It has been a long and rewarding tenure, but the time comes to retire and move on. As this era ends, it [...]

As Americans enter a new century, and a new millennium, it seems fitting to cast an eye on American freedom, past and yet to come, as Michael Kammen has done in his VQR essay. As one of America's most distinguished historians, Professor Kammen is w [...]

As America enters another presidential election year, conservative Republicans dominate Congress, and in the once Solid South, Democrats now belong on the endangered species list. With Democratic defection and dissolution a national trend, native Ne [...]

Amid all the hoopla and hurrah evoked by the U.S.'s winning role in the Gulf War, there stands a latter-day Forgotten Man, namely the American veteran of the Vietnam War— that prolonged conflict which cost this country more than 50,000 dead in con [...]

The individuals involved in the making of a writer cannot always be clearly discerned. In the case of novelist, short story writer, and poet George Garrett, however, they stand out as clearly as the Elizabethan England he restored to life in his nov [...]

FROM the conference tables down at Foggy Bottom to the place where CIA men dwell, from the dreary briefing rooms Pentagon brass know so well, U.S.policy-makers daily assemble with their pointers raised on high. Yet there is some question about how t [...]

As we enter the last 20 years of the 20th century, we may well ponder whether the next two decades will once more witness a world plunging into war, perhaps the final holocaust of a planet whose centuries of conflict make history seem but a record o [...]

George Garrett was a good friend of Staige Blackford's for many years and for many issues published, as he often lent his help with proofing, editing, reading, as well as contributing many times. He is the Hoyns Professor Emeritus at the University [...]

Although Michael Nelson turned out to be a political scientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and at Rhodes College in Memphis and has published several books on the presidency and national elections, his interest in Frank Sinatra, the subjec [...]

Since the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall six years ago this fall, American foreign policy has often seemed like a line from Pal Joey, namely "bewitched, bothered, and bewildered." Bosnia alone offers ample proof of that. In his [...]

The long, distinguished career of George F. Kennan began in December 1926 when he joined the Foreign Service. Even now in the twilight of his life, Mr. Kennan continues to be a presence in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, in some resp [...]

It has now been more than four decades since the birth of the atomic age, and the development of tit-wand better nuclear weapons has proceeded apace throughout the period. So much so that the United States and the Soviet Union now have enough Mutua [...]

In 1945, as World War II came to an end, the one-party South remained just that;—a solid bastion of the Democratic Party based on the premise of small vote, sure vote, white vote. Today the one-party, segregated South is at one with Nineveh and T [...]

The memoirs of most diplomats are usually greeted with a loud yawn by the reading public, and even those which enjoy a moderate success (e.g., Dean Acheson, George Kennan) are not what publishers consider blockbuster books. That, however, was hardly [...]