Maggie had nothing in the world but Mike and the twins and the other two little boys, none of whom could be considered anything of an asset. Mike had landed…

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Bayview, Texas, the Immigration and Naturalization Service Processing Center. The camp lies well to the north of the Rio Grande, covering 317 acres of the flatlands beside the Gulf of…

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Infinity is a disco in Lower Manhattan. It is 3 a.m. on Friday, the dead of night, but the evening is not yet half over and there are still two…

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The idea for the Civilian Conservation Corps sprang into action almost overnight, in March 1933, during the magnificent ferment of the first hundred days of Roosevelt’s New Deal. It became…

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There used to be the notion that Keats was killed by a bad review, that in despair and hopelessness he turned his back to the wall and gave up the…

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At 4:30 in the afternoon in the Admiral Benbow Inn in Jackson, Mississippi, Jimmy Carter sits opposite a dozen seventeen-year-olds, asking them to help him become president. “I grow peanuts…

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For the past six years the largest country in the world—with a quarter of the earth’s population—has been a blank space on the map of American foreign policy. For many…

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On the sixteenth of July, 1905, the steamer Roosevelt left New York Harbor for her northern voyage. Her course from the anchorage was noisy with the friendly greetings of every…

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I can remember as a child sitting upstairs in my bedroom and hearing my mother shout at the top of her voice that someone “colored . . . colored!” was on the…

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Most of the time, Americans seem to thrive on change. The meadow converted to a real-estate development is regarded less as a sacrifice to progress than a symbol of it.…

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We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons have, and is even less replaceable than a person, if we forget how…

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Within the next few years, the Congress of Industrial Organizations Political Action Committee may become the most powerful vote-herding and lobbying organization in the country. It now has prestige, cohesive…

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The first thing we did was build a bridge over Slough Creek, a pristine trout stream in the northern reaches of Yellowstone National Park. I felt strange—digging and hammering in…

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Mrs. Goode was a little toad of a woman, dark and fleshy-featured. If my mother had seen her, she would have said she looked like she had a “touch of…

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Before dawn I woke, shivering with cold. I had never been so cold in my life. While it was still dark, the bugle sounded reveille. We dressed as close to…

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He stayed drunk the first week. He paced up and down the apartment howling, and Mrs. Voltaire hid behind the stove. After a week he went back to the office…

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Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather — the talk of gardeners all over New England — but…

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I am an American woman but I had no opportunity until a few years ago to know women in America. Living as I did in China, it is true that…

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In a democratic state any propagandist will have rivals competing with him for the support of the public. In totalitarian states there is no liberty of expression for writers and…

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It was no coincidence that homosexuals migrated to San Francisco in the Seventies, for the city was famed as a playful place, more Catholic than Protestant in its eschatological intuition.…

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It was in the fall of 1941 that the question of atomic energy was first brought directly to my attention. At that time President Roosevelt appointed a committee to advise…

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Among the folk invited to Tony’s wedding were the Hardcomes o’ Climmerston — Stephen and James — first cousins, both of them small farmers. With them were their intended wives,…

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Lately it seems that politicians have made increasing use of the phrase “home rule.” The rash of rhetoric, which includes President Nixon’s reorganization plan to move government closer to the…

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During the depressed years of the Thirties a good many private schools went out of business. Others cut their faculty salaries back to levels which confirmed teachers in their suspicion…

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From “Verse,” which appeared in the December 1973 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete selection of poems — along with the magazine’s entire 167-year archive — is available online.

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On coming to America I had the same hopes as have most European immigrants and the same disillusionment, though the latter affected me more keenly and more deeply. The immigrant without…

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We are faced with two apparently irreconcilable facts in the South: the one being the decree of our national government that there be absolute equality in education among all citizens,…

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studs terkel: Your name is known to quite a few Americans these days. You let the country and the world know about a series of documents called the Pentagon Papers.…

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