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Full-Text Articles in History
Unhealed Cultural Memories: Styron’S Nat Turner, Shaun O'Connell
Unhealed Cultural Memories: Styron’S Nat Turner, Shaun O'Connell
New England Journal of Public Policy
William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel about the leader of a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, was highly praised after its publication in 1967. Then African American essayists in William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond took issue with the novel and rejected Styron’s asserted right to reimagine Nat Turner’s life and to assume his voice, claiming their rights of racial heritage and historical accuracy to castigate Styron for his offensive presumption. That distant argument of unshared assumptions and crossed purposes between high-minded and hypersensitive artists and intellectuals of another day may throw refracted …
Beyond The Party-Group Continuum: Massachusetts Interest Groups In The 1980s, John C. Berg
Beyond The Party-Group Continuum: Massachusetts Interest Groups In The 1980s, John C. Berg
New England Journal of Public Policy
Studies in the 1960s determined that Massachusetts had strong parties and weak interest groups. In the 1970s and 1980s, as the Republican Party shrank, party competition declined, conflict with the Democratic Party grew, and interest groups gained more importance — and probably will remain important despite the Republican gains of 1990. However, group conflict and citizen mobilization, including increased use of the initiative and referendum, create a situation of interest-centered conflict rather than interest-group dominance as traditionally conceived. This article, based on a 1987 survey of state legislators and legislative aides, plus a summary of recent Massachusetts political history, assesses …
Boston School Desegregation: The Fallowness Of Common Ground, Robert A. Dentler
Boston School Desegregation: The Fallowness Of Common Ground, Robert A. Dentler
Trotter Review
This essay scrutinizes the book by J Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, to assess whether it presents a valid and reliable account of the issues, people, and events it chronicles. The substantive core of the book is shown to be the politics of Boston public school desegregation. The parts played by the three families in this event are dramatically portrayed but cannot be corroborated and are not interpreted. The parts played by five major policy leaders, when tested against other evidence, are found to be distorted, questionable legends woven in …