The best of enemies

The Cold War, which has defined the shape of the world for anybody younger than fifty-five, was in fact an anomaly. From the earliest years of our Republic, Americans and Russians viewed each other with something approaching amity. Now that the order established by the Second World War has so suddenly and spectacularly dissolved, John Lukacs looks at the two-hundred-year relationship between the two greatest powers on earth, with an eye to finding what seeds of the past may blossom in the future.

The multiculturalism flap

The fiercest struggle going on in education just now came boiling up with a suddenness that took most people wholly by surprise. The question is, simply, what we should teach our children about their past, and in a calm, judicious, but very tough-minded interview, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., explains why a great deal may be at stake.

Plus…

John Steele Gordon uses history to dissect the health-care crisis and discover how we got into such deep trouble so very quickly—and how we can get out of it again … for Black History Month, the grim and ultimately triumphant story of the First Kansas Colored, the first black troops to fight and die anywhere in the Civil War … our popular Winter Art Show, back again and better than ever, and filled with superb American paintings that you’ve never seen before … on the seventy-fifth anniversary of recorded jazz, the story of the not very good band that changed our culture—and a critic’s choice of the best jazz recordings of all time … and, to get 1992 under way in an atmosphere of plenty, more.