Articles
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The Ways and Means of Holding on in the Highlands
If one only had an aviator cap of thin, fine leather, with earflaps and a chin strap that one snapped in a gesture of importance while settling into the feed trough, er, cockpit, one could shout, “Contack!” (an important aviator word) with a
Bill Brock’s Global Visions
Former U.S. Trade Representative William Brock and John McDonnell, the chairman of McDonnell Douglas Corp., were talking at a business conference in southern California about two years ago when the conversation turned to the company’s future. McDonnell Douglas, a $17 billion-a-year enterprise, was
How the Soviets Destroyed a Sea in Thirty Years
Muynak, Uzbekistan – In this frightened town, life has always meant fishing. Men’s faces are leathered by lifetimes on the Aral Sea; their arms thickened by the weight of countless nets hauled from the waters. The women’s hands are scarred from millions of
When Post-Cold War Worlds Collide: Chemical Weapons Destruction Meets Environmental Politics
Richmond, KY-Across gently rolling grassland just east of Clark-Moores Middle School, the Lexington-Blue Grass Army Depot sprawls in sad tribute to a national security agenda that is no longer relevant. Since the early days of the Cold War, the 15,000-acre installation has sheltered
Living at Home: Money and Migration
Photos and text by APF Fellow Dorothea Jackson The Old South Carolina highway that snaked through the first wave of the Blue Ridge Mountains ends now in Lake Keowee. Literally, just short of where a covered bridge used to span the formidable green
How It Was: The Bedrock of the Appalachian Dilemma
Photos and Article by APF Fellow Dorothea Jackson. It is spring and along the Daniel Boone Parkway, between London and Hazard, Kentucky, yellow wildflowers bloom from the fractured stone faces of mountains that have been dynamited open for the passage of the road.
The Quiet Renewal of the Japan Chip Pact
When Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Linn Williams entered the White House Cabinet Room late in May of 1991, he was feeling both exhilarated and apprehensive. Just a few days earlier, he had completed months of delicate negotiations renewing the U.S.-Japanese agreement governing trade
Understanding America’s Poverties and Drowning Mothers
Michael Harrington once wrote that one ought not to talk about “poverty” but about poverties. He meant there are so many ways of being poor that no single description or analysis can apply to them all. The same thing is true of homelessness.
The Fulcrum that Could Rock Russia and Iran
Photos by APF Fellow James Rupert BAKU, Azerbaijan–In the western Azerbaijani town of Agdam, Fazil Gassimov is a respected man. He is a former school director and collective farm manager who wears his 52 years, like his sweater vest and tweed jacket, with
Tending the Dragon’s Fire: Shall We Bake, Steam or Baste Our Obsolete Chemical Weapons?
From the air over the whitecaps of the central Pacific, Johnston Atoll looks like an aircraft carrier scuttled in a green lagoon. Two miles long and a half-mile wide, the concrete-and-coral island stands about six feet above sea level. Its dominant feature, an
The Suffering of Guatemala’s Indigenious People
A noticeable hush fell over the small crowd of Guatemalan indigenious people. They watched in horror as forensic anthropologist Luis Miguel Alonso painstakingly unearthed the body of a young Indian boy killed in a massacre in 1983. An evangelical priest gives a eulogy
The Future of Black Colleges and Universities
LINCOLN UNIVERSITY, PA.-Strolling across Lincoln University’s bucolic campus, set in southeastern Pennsylvania roughly equidistant from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Wilmington, Delaware, tempts a visitor to populate walkways, classrooms, playing fields, and the chapel with some of its most famous alumni-Langston Hughes, the poet and
The Failed Crusade Against Airbus
George Prill liked to work on a large scale. As president of Lockheed’s international aircraft unit, he tried to make an unprecedented deal for the sale and production of L1011 jetliners with the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s. Later in the decade, he
The Strange State of Soviet Central Asia
Photo by James Rupert TASHKENT, U.S.S.R.-On the night last August that masses of Muscovites undid the Bolshevik Revolution, most people here in the Soviet Union’s fourth largest city appeared not to care. On the flickering television image from Moscow, 1700 miles away, a
Outlawing Chemical Weapons
How intrusive searches and disposal problems are hampering talks toward an historic ban on possessing war poisons. At the sound of approaching aircraft, Farouk Abdullah, an elder in the northern Iraqi village of Ekmala, squinted up at the brightening summer sky. It was
How AIDS has Changed Gay America: Illegal drug networks, revamped sex clubs and a new culture of caring
Photos by Marc Geller The first time I saw Jim Corti was in Miami, on a hot, sticky night in May 1989. We were both seated in the restaurant at the Howard Johnson’s motel on the north edge of the city, a rather
Aftermath of a Massacre in Guatemala
The highland village of Santiago Atitlan continues to hold monthly masses to commemorate the 14 citizens killed and 24 injured when soldiers fired into a crowd that had gathered to protest an earlier shooting of a resident by drunken soldiers. A 30-year conflict
Tropic of Illusions
Takashi Shida bent down in a field of soy beans, briefly disappearing in the sea of pea green stalks that swelled off toward the flat horizon. Surfacing again, he brandished a plant better than a yard long. He grasped it firmly and, as
Re-Inventing the Wheel
The story of the disability rights movement could be written about Marilyn Hamilton’s impatience. It would start the summer day in 1978 when Hamilton crashed her hang glider nose down into the side of a California Sierra mountain. Her spinal cord was bruised
The World’s Armies Agree: Gas Masks Are Here to Stay
WASHINGTON-For Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, it would have been a hellish dream come true-allied ground troops pinned down by Iraqi forces and pummeled with chemical rockets and artillery. At his briefing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Feb. 27, the fourth day of the
