<p><span class="deck">The fiercest struggle going on in education is about who owns the past. Passionate multi-culturalists say that traditional history- teaching has brushed out minority ethnic identities. Their opponents say that radical multi-culturalism leads toward national fragmentation.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">For 150 years, a crenelated Gothic Revival castle in Connecticut has housed an art collection that was astonishing for its time, and remains so.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">After half a millennium, we scarcely feel the presence of Spain in what is now the United States. But it is all around us.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A distinguished scholar of American literature discusses why, after a career of study and reflection, he believes that Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman are bad for you.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">World War I made the city the financial capital of the world. Then, after World War II, a very few audacious painters and passionate critics made it the cultural capital, as well. Here is how they seized the torch from Europe.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Wynton Marsalis believes that America is in danger of losing the truest mirror of our national identity. If that’s the case, we are at least fortunate that, today, jazz’s foremost performer is also its most eloquent advocate.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><lead_in> ALBERT MURRAY SEES AMERICAN CULTURE AS AN</lead_in> incandescent fusion of European, Yankee, frontier, and black. And he sees what he calls the “blues idiom” as the highest expression of that culture. </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The word emerged during the Depression to define a new kind of American adolescence, one that prevailed for half a century and may now be ending.</span></p>
