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AbstractWartime pressures to protect national military and security interests inevitably create threats to civil liberties. This essay reviews the abuses of the period, carried on by public officials as well as citizens who saw themselves as acting on their behalf. There was a remarkable range of targets—with few spies to find, broadly defined disloyalty sufficed. The attempt to create a unified, loyal culture extended to wide areas of the culture, such as the teaching of history, aided by volunteers. The public and private efforts brought ruined reputations, imprisonments, public shaming, murders, and awful behavior on the part of courts and citizens. These were bad times for civil liberties. This essay reviews the history and explores the legacies.

Before getting too upset about the initially eye-popping sums candidates spend to win elections, law professor (and current member of the Federal Election Commission) Bradley A. Smith advises us to put campaign costs in perspective. Americans, he notes, spent two or three times more on potato chips than on electing candidates in the mid-1990s. For Smith, the potato chip example is only one illustration that ought to settle fears about "obscene" and "runaway" campaign expenses. Perspective, however, is unlikely to move those convinced that big donors drive the political agenda. Convinced that money and politics is a far more nefarious combination than fat and salt, campaign finance reformers will no doubt carry on their search for new ways to limit spending and contributions, continuing the Progressive Era crusade to eliminate money's degrading influence on democracy.

Money in politics is a funny thing. By legend and cliché, money is the "mother's milk of politics," that which keeps party machinery working and campaigns running. It is also the focus of generations of suspicion and complaint. From the advent of the "spoils system" in the early nineteenth century to the PACs and "soft money" of today, there appear to be few takers for the proposition that money does not stain what ought to be the majesty and purity of politics. Money, unlike the suffrage, introduces inequality among citizens. Money gives its favored candidates and policies an unfair advantage for the public's attention. Money is the appearance, if not the fact, of corruption.

This group of essays came out of an attempt to address the "usually unasked," "bound to embarrass" question that Eric Monkkonen raised in his 1994 presidential address to the Social Science History Association. As both the social sciences and history have been reshaped in recent years by intellectual tendencies variously labeled "postmodernism," "poststructuralism," or the "linguistic turn," the never especially clear relationship between the social sciences and history has grown even more muddy. The essays that follow are drawn from two sessions of the 1998 annual program of the Social Science History Association. The sessions brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines and cohorts who held divergent ideas about the links between social science and history and different substantive agendas for explaining historical change. A mix of essays that highlight new methodologies for analyzing the past and pieces that offer explanations or remedies, the articles printed here point to some of the central issues in the debate about what social science history might mean today.

Education, at all levels, opens routes to achieve higher incomes, status advancement, and upward social mobility. The goal for most families is to present an opportunity for their children to receive a jump on acquiring knowledge to afford this achievement. Schools within our education system declare they offer a quality education for African American students. This concept will be examined along with the research that maintains schooling for African American students is deliberately sabotaged. To ensure success for all students, awareness and sensitivity to diversity issues should reflect the importance of presenting different cultural perspectives in education.

Little attention has been paid to the music for the stage shows that
accompanied the movies at the "picture palaces" during the 1920s, or to
the works played on radio broadcasts from the theatres (which began at
the Capitol, in 1923), or to the music performed at the light classical
concerts produced by the theatres (which the Capitol introduced, in 1927).


Some of this music was drawn from the standard Western repertory,
but much of it was composed or arranged each week. Among the extant
examples of this ad hoc music are works--several of them
on Jewish themes--by Leo Zeitlin (1884-1930), a member of the
Society for Jewish Folk Music. It is the career of this St. Petersburg
Conservatory-trained "child of the Pale" at the Capitol that is the
subject of this article.

"American political history, like military history, has never lost a popular audience. If anything, the appetite for books dealing with the nation's founding, its presidents, and elections has grown in recent years. Written by historians, academics in other fields, independent writers, and journalists, some of these books have sold very well. A few jumped from the printed page to film and theater. Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton inspired a hit Broadway musical. Though some films depicting presidents spun fanciful stories-at least one hopes no teachers had to correct student misconceptions about Abraham Lincoln dispatching vampires-others had a stronger commitment to the historical record. Since 2000, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush have been the focus of films with various levels of attentiveness to historical scholarship and box-office appeal. Teachers could do worse than Charlie Wilson's War as a tool for illustrating how Congress works. Even the more obscure and distant historical figures have had their turn: James A. Garfield's truncated presidency is the subject of a popular book and documentary"--