Features

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution, by Alfred F. Young. Beacon Press, 288 pages, $15.00. Alfred F. Young seeks to illuminate the American Revolution by examining the life of George Robert Twelves Hewes, a rank-and-file tradesman whose name appears with peculiar frequency in early American documents. What led a poor […]

The American Prospect Volume 11, Issue 12. May 8, 2000 Care, Charity, and Profit Robert Kuttner Thy Kingdom Dot Com Paul Starr Devil in the Details: scandalous book reviews; for God and Ford; The Taxonomist; those poor […]

On the Mount Rushmore of our collective memory, the faces of many of the nation’s founders loom as large weathered archetypes–unchanging men of granite who shaped the American Revolution and the new republic. In reality, of course, these individuals were complicated and sometimes less than admirable. Gore Vidal, in his novel Burr, famously capitalized on […]

Accustomed as we have been to periodizing history into decades, we’re in for some confusion now: What are we supposed to call this decade? The zeroes? The Os? The aughts? We have no precedents to guide us, since nobody in the past century seems to have spoken in terms of decades until the 1920s, or […]

Aliens are still poking around on television, though by now you’d think they’d have found what they were looking for, and God has certainly been holding His own on TV lately, what with angels and miracles and the like. But now, finally, dead people are making something of a play–or, rather, the people that dead […]

My son Paul and I watched the fourth game of the 1998 American League Divisional Series from seats between home and first that had been provided by my other son, Theo. At the start of the eighth inning, with the Sox clinging to a 1-0 lead, Jimy Williams decided to replace Derek Lowe, who had […]

Remember the Beardstown Ladies? Their “common sense” investment guide became a best-seller in the mid-1990s. The story of these 16 small-town women who formed an investment club in the early 1980s and reportedly beat the market over a 10-year period titillated middle-class consumers eager to share in the bull market, while vindicating a mistrust of […]

A decade after Abbie Hoffman had first set the hairstyle for a generation, he showed up on a television talk show with a radically short haircut and the explanation that, once Tab Hunter was wearing his hair long, Hoffman knew it had come time to cut his own. By this logic, now that an off-Broadway […]

Our cover story this issue is an investigation of ResCare, a national corporate chain that runs group homes for the disabled and the mentally retarded. As Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn document in sometimes gruesome detail, deinstitutionalization has come full circle, from notorious state-run warehouses like Willowbrook, to community institutions run by nonprofits, and now, […]

In 1984 I traveled to Berlin. Walking past Checkpoint Charlie, the famous American outpost on the border between East and West, made the Cold War tangible. Yet at the same time, having seen so many pictures and movies that focused on Berlin made me feel that I was playing the role of extra on the […]