James R. Moore
Charg� d�affaires, a.i.
Embassy of the United States

NEW YEAR�S DAY:

Like many countries around the world, America celebrates the new year on January 1st, the first day on the American calendar. Americans celebrate New Year�s eve, the night leading into the first day of the new year, in many different ways - the most famous of which is the lowering of a large illuminated ball on top of a skyscraper in New York City�s Times Square. Although many Americans celebrate New Year�s eve by attending such displays, most Americans spend the evening with family and friends, usually at celebratory parties, and often watch the public displays on television instead. Both public and private New Year�s eve celebrations last until midnight, when the new year begins. Many adults celebrate the beginning of the new year with a glass of champagne, and couples often exchange a kiss at the stroke of midnight. Many championship, or �bowl,� games for college-level American football take place later on New Year�s Day, making it an especially important occasion for sports fans.

Martin Luther King Day:

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day marks the birthday of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. It is observed on the third Monday of January each year, which always falls close to Dr. King's actual birthday of January 15. It is one of three United States federal holidays to commemorate an individual person. In the 1950�s and 1960�s, Dr. King was the chief spokesman of the nonviolent civil rights movement, which successfully opposed racial discrimination in American federal and state laws. Although he was assassinated in 1968, Dr. King�s legacy continues to have a strong impact on American politics and social life today.

WASHINGTON�S BIRTHDAY:

Washington's Birthday is celebrated on the third Monday of February. It is also commonly known as Presidents Day. Although schools and businesses previously were closed during the holiday, its proximity to Abraham Lincoln�s birthday, another holiday, led the Federal Government to honor both presidents on the same day. When Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was created as an additional day off of work, many employers stopped closing shop on Presidents� Day to compensate for the new day off. Because many businesses now stay open during Washington�s Birthday, it has lost much of its luster in recent years. Today, Washington�s Birthday is most familiar to Americans as an occasion for special sales at retail outlets, particularly car dealerships.

MEMORIAL DAY:

Memorial Day is a national holiday that is observed on the last Monday of May. It commemorates U.S. men and women who died while serving in the military. Although the holiday was first enacted to honor veterans of the American Civil War, it was expanded after World War I to honor American casualties from any war or military action. Because the holiday falls on a Monday, many American families take advantage of the extended weekend to travel. Additionally, many Americans also hold �Memorial Day Barbeques,� outdoor cookouts where they gather with friends and family to enjoy grilled hamburgers, hot dogs, and other snacks.

INDEPENDENCE DAY:

American Independence Day is celebrated every year on July 4th. Commonly referred to as the Fourth of July, it commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The Declaration officially severed ties between the United States and the British Monarchy, and is the formal beginning of the American Revolution. A little known fact about the holiday is that the Declaration of Independence was actually signed on July 2, but the public did not know that it had been signed until two days later, at which point until the Declaration had been edited into its final form and was widely distributed. Americans commemorate the Fourth of July with outdoor picnics and barbeques, and sit down to enjoy elaborate fireworks displays at night.

LABOR DAY:

Labor Day is observed every year on the first Monday in September. The holiday originated in 1882 as the Central Labor Union of New York City sought to create "a day off for the working citizens," and the American Congress declared it a federal holiday on 1894. Traditionally, Labor Day is celebrated by most Americans as the symbolic end of the summer. Today, Labor Day is often regarded as a day of rest and parades, and an occasion for picnics, barbecues, water sports, and a last chance for travel before the end of summer. Labor Day marks the beginning of the American football season at both the professional and university level.

COLUMBUS DAY:

Columbus Day commemorates Christopher Columbus�s discovery of America, and is celebrated on the second Monday in October. Many schools and businesses around the country close in recognition of the holiday, although many choose to stay open as well. Schools often have special lesson plans in the days leading up to the holiday that teach students about Columbus�s voyage and the importance of his arrival in the New World. Many members of the Italian-American community consider the holiday a celebration of their heritage.

VETERANS DAY:

Veterans Day is an annual American holiday honoring military veterans, and is celebrated on November 11. If November 11th falls on a weekend during a particular year, then the nearest weekday is designated for holiday leave. It was originally called Armistice Day, marking the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. In 1954 the name of the holiday was officially changed to Veterans Day, in order to recognize the sacrifices of American soldiers in subsequent military conflicts. Veterans Day is marked with parades and ceremonies to honor American servicemen and women around the country.

THANKSGIVING DAY:

Thanksgiving Day is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November. Although it was historically a religious observation to give thanks to God, it is now considered a secular holiday. Thanksgiving commemorates early English settlers� success and gratitude after surviving an especially brutal first winter in America. Most Americans celebrate by gathering at home with family or friends for a holiday feast. The feast reflects the food eaten by American colonists, traditionally featuring dishes like mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, sweet corn, other fall vegetables, and pumpkin pie. A full turkey (often baked or fried) serves as the meal�s centerpiece, and has become so symbolically linked with the holiday that Thanksgiving is often referred to as �Turkey Day.� Although the Thanksgiving feast may appear to be an unnecessary indulgence, Thanksgiving is also an occasion for community service. Many Americans help to feed the needy at Thanksgiving time, and most communities have annual food drives that collect packaged and canned foods for this purpose.

CHRISTMAS DAY:

Like in many countries around the world, Christmas Day is a cause for celebration in the United States. Celebrated on December 25th, Christmas gives Americans of all religions time away from work and school that they can spend with friends and family. Although many Christian Americans commemorate the holiday by exchanging presents, many Americans of other faiths engage in holiday gift giving as well. Although the holiday has a strong religious foundation that is a key part of many Americans� Christmas experience, for other Americans the holiday�s festivities take on a more secular role of setting the mood at the beginning of the winter season. Many neighborhoods and public areas are illuminated with strings of lights to give a festive mood, with many of these displays installed shortly after Thanksgiving. Some of the more famous Christmas displays include an enormous Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center in New York City, and Washington D.C.�s impressive National Christmas Tree that is displayed across the street from the White House.

   Other celebrations in US:

HALLOWEEN:

Halloween is a non-Federal holiday celebrated on October 31. The day is often associated with the colors orange and black, and is strongly associated with symbols such as the jack-o'-lantern, a hollowed-out pumpkin whose sides are carved to create small openings that become illuminated when a lit candle is placed inside it. Halloween activities include bonfires, costume parties, visiting seasonal attractions, carving jack-o'-lanterns, reading scary stories, and watching horror movies. Perhaps the most notable Halloween activity, however, is called �trick-or-treating.� Trick-or-treating in America began in the early 1900�s when youths would knock on people�s doors on Halloween night and threaten to cause mischief unless the residents bribed them with food. In the last fifty years, however, trick-or-treating has become a much more wholesome endeavor. Instead of mischievous youths, young children dressed in  costumes knock on neighbors� doors, threatening no harm and instead saying �trick or treat� as a polite way to ask for some pieces of candy.

VALENTINE�S DAY:

Americans celebrate Valentine�s Day on February 14th. Although Valentine�s Day is not a Federal Holiday, it is nonetheless an important holiday for many Americans. The day is most closely associated with the mutual exchange of love notes in the form of "valentines". Valentine�s Day symbols include the heart-shaped outlines, doves, and images of the winged Cupid. Since the 19th century, handwritten notes have largely given way to mass-produced greeting cards. Many couples use the holiday as an occasion to go out to a nice dinner, and most exchange small presents. These gifts typically include roses and chocolates packed in a red satin, heart-shaped box. In the 1980s, the diamond industry began to promote Valentine's Day as an occasion for giving jewelry. In some North American elementary schools, children decorate classrooms, exchange cards, and eat sweets to celebrate the holiday. In the greeting cards, these students often mention what they appreciate about each other. The rise of Internet popularity is creating new traditions. Every year millions of people use digital means of creating and sending Valentine's Day greeting messages such as e-cards, or printable greeting cards.

    Built in America

Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California.

An international icon of American engineering genius, the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937 and remains one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. The main span of 4,200 feet crosses the turbulent waters at the entrance to San Francisco Bay. Chief engineer Joseph B. Strauss started the construction project in 1933.

The Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty (French: Statue de la Libert�), officially titled Liberty Enlightening the World (French: La libert� �clairant le monde), is a monument that was presented by the people of France to the United States of America in 1886 to celebrate its centennial. Standing on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, it welcomes visitors, immigrants, and returning Americans traveling by ship.

The copper-clad statue, dedicated on October 28, 1886, commemorates the centennial of the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence and was given to the United States by France to represent the friendship between the two countries established during the American Revolution. Fr�d�ric Auguste Bartholdi sculpted the statue and obtained a U.S. patent for its structure. Maurice Koechlin�chief engineer of Gustave Eiffel's engineering company and designer of the Eiffel Tower�engineered the internal structure. Eug�ne Viollet-le-Duc was responsible for the choice of copper in the statue's construction and adoption of the repouss� technique, where a malleable metal is hammered on the reverse side.

The statue is of a robed woman holding a torch, and is made of a sheeting of pure copper, hung on a framework of steel (originally puddled iron) with the exception of the flame of the torch, which is coated in gold leaf (originally made of copper and later altered to hold glass panes). It stands atop a rectangular stonework pedestal with a foundation in the shape of an irregular eleven-pointed star. The statue is 151 ft (46 m) tall, but with the pedestal and foundation, it is 305 ft (93 m) tall.

Worldwide, the Statue of Liberty is one of the most recognizable icons of the United States[10] and was, from 1886 until the jet age, often one of the first glimpses of the United States for millions of immigrants after ocean voyages from Europe. Visually, the Statue of Liberty appears to draw inspiration from il Sancarlone or the Colossus of Rhodes.
The statue is the central part of Statue of Liberty National Monument, administered by the National Park Service.

AMERICAN HISTORY ON A PLATE

By Andrew Weisberg

From the signing of the Declaration of Independence through the present day, few aspects of American life can be said to reflect the American experience as much as American foods. Over their country�s history, Americans have gone from worrying about having enough food to eat to deciding which foods they should choose to eat in order to have a healthier and longer life. While the broad category of what can be considered �American food� encompasses dishes, tastes, and cooking styles from around the world, it is clear that the evolution is indicative of America�s larger journey as a nation.

At the time of American independence, most Americans lived in rural areas and food staples varied by region. Most of these early Americans relied on the land for both food and economic livelihood. Americans living on the Atlantic coast relied on fish, whales, and crabs, and many of these states are still renowned for their seafood. Although early Americans made good use of their country�s expansive coastline, they reaped even greater benefits from its rich soil. Most early Americans were farmers, and even famous American leaders like George Washington owned large farming plantations. Farmers in early America grew cash crops like tobacco and cotton as well as food crops like wheat, barley, rice, and corn. Most American farms at the time were self-sufficient, growing multiple crops and raising different types of livestock on the same piece of land. Early American farmers ate what they grew, turning wheat into flower for bread and pies, or mixing it with cornmeal to make cornbread and an oatmeal-like snack called �corn mush.� Meat was often roasted, salted, or smoked, and came from livestock raised on the farm or animals like deer, rabbits, and turkeys that were hunted in the wild.

This type of diet was prevalent in America until after the Civil War. The industrial revolution of the late 1800�s brought a rapid increase in urban jobs, which in turn brought waves of immigrants, as well as migrants from rural America, to the cities. As more and more people moved to America�s cities, food demand increased although the number of farmers supplying it diminished. This imbalance, as well as the increased distance between Americans and where their food was produced, necessitated revolutions in farming methods that dramatically increased per-acre crop yields, as well as advances in canning technology and ever-increasing railroad networks that made food easier to preserve and transport. Technology�s relationship to American food progressed from one of handling food to new methods of creating the food itself after the Second World War. Americans embraced many of these new products, and items like instant coffee, which had originally been created for use by Allied troops serving overseas, became ingrained in mainstream American life during the post-war years.

The immigrants arriving on both of America�s coasts before and after World War Two brought with them new tastes, recipes, and ideas that have since become firmly established in American culture. Chinese immigrants brought their cuisine to America�s West Coast, although in its present version American Chinese food features sweeter, tangier tastes and includes much more meat than traditional Chinese food does in order to appeal to American preferences. Dishes now considered some of the most iconic American foods today, moreover, came from European immigrants to America�s East Coast, who introduced their fellow Americans to the pizza, the hamburger, and of course the frankfurter � better known as the hot dog.

Although many of America�s iconic foods are variations on dishes originally introduced from abroad, some American favorites are completely original. A sandwich called the Philadelphia cheese steak is one such example. In its simplest form, a Philadelphia cheese steak consists of thinly sliced pieces of beef steak and melted cheese that are placed along the inside of a long sandwich roll. The cheese steak was created during the 1930s in the Italian immigrant section of Philadelphia, in a hot hog stand run by two brothers, Harry and Pat Olivieri. Tired of eating hot dogs, one day the two brothers sliced up some beef and grilled it with some onions. The brothers piled the meat on rolls and were about to dig in when a cab driver arrived for lunch, smelled the meat and onions cooking and demanded one of the sandwiches. The sandwich soon became immensely popular, and the two brothers eventually opened up a restaurant to sell it. 20 years later, an improvising employee at the Oliveris� restaurant was the first to add cheese to the sandwich, and the combination became an overnight sensation.

As the United States has become even more culturally diverse in recent years, American palates have expanded to accommodate new dishes and styles as well as old favorites. Mexican dishes, especially tacos and burritos (meat, beans, rice, and vegetables wrapped in a flour pancake) are increasingly popular today, as is Spanish-style tapas dining, where a group of people orders a variety of appetizer dishes for all to share instead of each person ordering a main dish. Japanese sushi is another growing trend, and is generally viewed as a stylish and trendy food choice.

Perhaps the most important recent trend in American eating habits relates to Americans� growing desire for knowledge about the food that they eat. Increased access to information over the internet, as well as new laws mandating the publication of food products� ingredients and nutritional value, have led many Americans to seek out foods that are healthier, organic, and often locally produced. Many supermarkets have begun carrying organic foods in response to this demand, and one nationwide supermarket chain was launched in order to cater exclusively to it. Because this movement is relatively recent, however, it is difficult to tell whether or not the organic food movement is a momentous shift in American dietary habits or just a passing trend.

America�s food has evolved throughout its history, drawing inspiration from other cultures while at the same time contributing some of its own unique creations. American food, like America itself, has been shaped by historical events and technological revolutions since its founding.  America�s existence not only as a melting pot of culinary styles, but as a melting pot of ideas, is what gives American food, and the country itself, its enduring strength.

Globalization and the U.S. Financial System

By Charles R. Geisst

Globalization helped fuel the current financial crisis, and it will undoubtedly be employed to help resolve it.

Charles R. Geisst is a professor of finance at Manhattan College. His many books include Wall Street: A History, and he is the editor of the Encyclopedia of American Business History.

In the decades following World War II, the idea of globalization became more and more popular when describing the future of the world economy. Some day, markets for all sorts of goods and services would become integrated and the benefits would be clear. The standard of living would be raised everywhere as barriers to trade, production, and capital fell. The goal was noteworthy and has been partially realized. But recently it hit a major bump in the road.

Globalization has many connotations. Originally, it meant international ease of access. Barriers to trade and investment eventually would disappear, and the international flow of goods and services would increase. Free trade and common markets were created to facilitate the idea. A world without barriers would help distribute wealth more evenly from the wealthy to the poor.

To date, only financial services have succeeded in becoming truly global. Fast-moving financial markets, aided by speed-of-light technology, have swept away national boundaries in many cases, making international investing effortless. Government restrictions have been removed in most of the major financial centers, and foreigners have been encouraged to invest. This has opened a wide panorama of investment possibilities.

This phenomenon is not new. Since World War II, many governments have loosened restrictions on their currencies, and today the foreign exchange market is the world�s largest, most liquid financial market, trading around the clock. And there is no distinction made in it because of those national peculiarities or restrictions for the major currencies. If governments allow their currencies to trade freely, as most in developed countries, then a dollar or a euro can trade in Hong Kong or Tokyo as easily as it does in Dubai or New York.

Cross-Border Trading

Other financial markets quickly followed this precedent. The government bond markets, corporate bond markets, and the equities markets all started to develop links based on new and faster technology. Forty years ago, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of software giant Intel, made his famous prediction (Moore�s Law) that microchip capacity would double every two years. New, faster chips were able to accommodate an increasing number of financial transactions, and before long that capacity spawned even more transactions. Soon, traders were able to cross markets and national boundaries with an ease that made the supporters of globalization in other sections of the economy jealous. During the same time period, manufacturers had been promoting the idea of the universal car, without the same level of success.

Wall Street and the other major financial centers prospered. Customers were able to obtain executions for their stock trades with a speed unimaginable in the mid-1990s. The NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) and the NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) abandoned their old method of quoting stock prices in fractions and adopted the decimal system. Computers did not like fractions, nor did the old method encourage trading at the speed of light. Customers were now able to trade via computer in many major markets as quickly as in their own home markets. True cross-border trading was born, making financial services the envy of other industries that long had dreamed of globalization.

The results were astonishing. Volume on the NYSE increased from a record 2 billion shares in 2001 to a record 8 billion in 2008. Volume on the foreign exchange markets was in the trillion-dollar equivalents on a daily basis. The various bond markets were issuing more than a trillion worth of new issues annually rather than the billions recorded in previous record years. The value of mergers and acquisitions equally ran into the trillions annually. The volumes and the appetite for transactions appeared endless.

A Traditional Cycle

The U.S. economy traditionally had witnessed long periods of prosperity before slowing down substantially, usually brought to a temporary halt by an asset bubble that finally ran out of hot air. The situation had been replayed many times since 1793, when the first major economic downturn was recorded in New York. Similar problems were recorded at least eight times until 1929. Each boom was followed by a bust, some more severe than others. The post-1929 depression finally ushered in far-reaching reforms of the banking system and securities markets.  

Until 1929, these recessions were called �panics�. The term �depression� was used once or twice in the early 20th century, but during the 1930s the term became associated exclusively with that decade. The traditional cycle is still in evidence. The recession of 2001 followed the dot-com bust, and many of the day traders who had employed the new computer technology retreated to the sidelines much as their forebears had done in the 19th century. A recession followed, temporarily slowing down the appetite for speculative gains.

The 19th and the 21st centuries had more in common than might have been imagined. After gaining its independence from Britain, the United States had been dependent on foreign capital for the first 120 years of its existence. Until World War I, much of the American infrastructure and industry had been financed with foreign money, mostly in the form of bonds. Americans produced most of the goods and services they needed, but capital was always in short supply until the war changed the face of geopolitics.

The situation remained unchanged until the late 1970s, when the position again was reversed. The U.S. household savings ratio declined and foreign capital poured into the country. Bonds were the favorite again, but the equities markets also benefitted substantially. Consumers, accounting for about two-thirds of the U.S. gross domestic product since the 1920s, bought domestic and foreign goods, while foreigners supplied the capital necessary to finance the federal government and many American industries. The situation persists today, with about half the outstanding U.S. Treasury bonds in the hands of the Chinese government alone.

The Mortgage Boom

After the dot-com bust and the Enron and WorldCom scandals, it appeared that Wall Street was due to take a breather for lack of new ideas to fuel another bubble. But it was a combination of cyclical trends that reappeared and together fueled the greatest short-term boom yet. Globalization, an influx of foreign capital, and esoteric financial analytics combined with residential housing to produce the most explosive � and potentially destructive � boom/bust cycle ever witnessed in American history.

The recent market bubble was created by the boom in residential housing. Normally, housing follows stock market booms but has not caused them. In the wake of the dot-com bust and the post-September 11 trauma, the situation became reversed. The home became the center of many investors� attention. First-time buyers abounded, and many others clamored to refinance their existing mortgages. The new thing was really an older thing dressed up by modern finance.

This phenomenon was difficult to detect in its early stages. All of the factors that converged to produce it had been seen before. Many were well-known and time-proven methods in finance. Securitization had been used for several decades by the U.S.-related housing finance agencies to convert pools of residential mortgages into securities that were purchased by investors. This provided even more available funds for the housing market at a time that demand was very high after 2001. The new thing on Wall Street became financing the �American Dream� � the idea that everyone should own his or her own home.

Demand for the securitized bonds proved strong, so strong that Wall Street securities houses began cranking them out at increasingly fast speed. Much of the demand came from foreign investors � central banks, banks, sovereign wealth funds, and insurance companies � all drawn by their attractive yields. Dollars were being recycled by these investors, especially central banks and the sovereign wealth funds, from the current account balances they were accumulating with the United States. The money left the United States as Americans purchased imports from foreign producers and found its way back as investments.

Victims of Their Own Success

The mortgage boom began after 2001, and within a couple of years it was in full stride. Demand remained strong for mortgage-backed securities, and soon subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, and other exotic collateral based on derivatives became part of the asset backing. By the late summer of 2007, as short-term interest rates rose from historically low levels, cracks began to appear in this collateral and asset values began to collapse, creating the banking and insurance crises within months. In the past, without the technology, the results would have taken years.

The boom was aided immeasurably by the deregulation of the U.S. financial markets in 1999, officially culminating over two decades of a gradual easing of once stringent rules. The new financial environment it created allowed banks and investment banks to cohabit, something that had not been allowed since 1933. When they began to share the benefits of deregulation under the same roof, older ideas of risk management began to crumble in a greater quest for profit.

The credit market and collateral crisis marks the end of the almost 40-year legacy of the federally related housing agencies and all of the benefits they provided since the social legislation passed during the 1960s. Wall Street, the credit markets, and the U.S. housing industry all were victims of their own success when the markets collapsed in 2008. Greed, lack of regulatory oversight, and the sophistication of structured finance, which created many of these exotic financial instruments, all played a role in the most recent setback for the markets and the economy as a whole.

Most importantly, the crisis demonstrates the pitfalls of deregulation and globalization. Unfortunately, the appropriate skepticism that must accompany every boom has been missing. Globalization helped fuel the crisis and will undoubtedly be employed to help resolve it. Deregulation will be swept aside in favor of more stringent institutional controls on financial institutions designed to prevent fraud and deceit. It took almost four years after the market crash of 1929 to erect a regulatory structure to separate different types of banks and establish national securities laws. Moore�s Law suggests that it will occur faster this time around. The forces that shaped globalization will demand it. 

U.S. Energy Efficiency Advances in 2009

A summary of efficiency initiatives in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The economic stimulus law enacted in February 2009 recognizes the close ties between the economy and energy production, and provides a variety of funding sources and incentives to increase efficiency and encourage broader adoption of renewable energy technologies.

In announcing his budget plan for the forthcoming year, President Obama also emphasized his commitment to greater investments in renewable technologies. �We will invest $15 billion a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced biofuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks built right here in America,� the president said in his February 24 speech to Congress.

Highlighted below are selected new measures targeting efficiency initiatives.

�   $5 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program. This 30-year-old program pays for improvements to the homes of low-income families to increase energy efficiency. More than 5.6 million low-income families have received these services since the program began in 1976. The program increases the comfort of these homes and lowers families� energy bills for the long-term.

�   $4 billion for energy efficiency retrofits in public housing units maintained by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

�   $300 million for rebates paid to consumers who purchase energy-efficient appliances.

�   $3.2 billion in grants to states and local governments to support energy efficiency and conservation projects in government buildings.

�   $4.2 billion to the U.S. General Services Administration to convert federal buildings into high-performance green buildings, combining increased efficiency techniques and renewable energy production.

�   $6.9 billion to the Federal Transit Administration for distribution to local public transit agencies� investments in conservation and expansion of mass transit options.

�   $50 million for efforts to increase the energy efficiency of information and communication technologies.

A Musical Tour of America

A tour of U.S. musical shrines in every region of the country

There are dozens of ways to organize a visit to the United States�you can tour its major cities, hike the national parks, or sightsee the famous monuments. In this essay, Dr. John Hasse suggests a more unique way: explore America by touring its many and varied musical shrines which can be found in every region of the country.

Even people who have never visited the United States are familiar with its music. During its nearly 230 years as a nation, this country has developed an enormous amount of original music that is astonishing in its variety, vitality, creativity, and artistic accomplishment. Running the gamut from the humblest banjo tunes and down-home dances to the haunting blues of Robert Johnson and the brilliant jazz cadenzas of Charlie Parker, American music is one of the most important contributions the United States has made to world culture.

Arguably, no nation in history has created such a wealth of vibrant and influential musical styles as has the United States. American music reflects the energy, diversity, spirit, and creativity of its people. You don't have to understand English to feel the power of Aretha Franklin, the plaintiveness of Hank Williams, the joie de vivre of Louis Armstrong, the directness of Johnny Cash, the virtuosity of Ella Fitzgerald, or the energy of Elvis Presley.

These musicians and their musical genres are available to people around the world via recordings, downloads, Internet radio, Voice of America broadcasts, and television and video. But to really appreciate and understand them, there is nothing like visiting the places where they were born, and where their musical creations evolved and are preserved.

This article offers visitors a unique tour of the United States by surveying music museums and shrines across the country. Other musical traditions brought here by more recent immigrants�such as salsa and mariachi�and other new U.S. styles, including grunge, rap, and hip-hop, have yet to be associated with dedicated museums or historical landmarks. They are, though, easy to find in nightclubs and festivals, or by searching the World Wide Web. Nightclubs come and go at a dizzying pace, and new festivals pop up all the time, so the emphasis here is on those locations that are likely to be around in the years ahead.

Jazz. Jazz is the most consequential, influential, and innovative music to emerge from the United States, and New Orleans, Louisiana is widely known as the birthplace of jazz. No city, except perhaps for New York City, has received more visiting jazz aficionados than New Orleans. In the wake of the devastating blow to the "Crescent City" by Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005, unfortunately, international jazz enthusiasts may need to remain alert to news reports concerning the rebuilding of New Orleans.

New Orleans residents and jazz devotees worldwide eagerly await the reopening of the French Quarter and Preservation Hall [http://www.preservationhall.com], a bare-bones pair of wooden rooms that has served since 1961 as a shrine of sorts to the traditional New Orleans sound. Other New Orleans treasures that will be revived include the Louisiana State Museum's exhibition on jazz [http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/site/], complete with the musical instruments of Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke and other early jazz masters, and the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park Visitor Center [http://www.nps.gov/jazz], which will once again offer self-guided walking tours and other information from its North Peters Street location.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Kansas City, Missouri was a hotbed of jazz�Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, and other greats performed there. You can get a sense of the music by visiting the old jazz district around 18th and Vine Streets, where you'll find the American Jazz Museum [http://www.americanjazzmuseum.com] and the historic Gem Theater.

In New York City, jazz from all periods can be heard in the city's many historic nightclubs, including the Village Vanguard [http://www.villagevanguard.net/frames.htm], the Blue Note [http://www.bluenote.net], and Birdland [http://www.birdlandjazz.com]. Harlem's Apollo Theater [http://www.apollotheater.com] has seen many great jazz artists, as has Carnegie Hall [http://www.carnegiehall.org] located at 57th Street and 7th Avenue. The city's newest jazz shrine is Jazz at Lincoln Center [http://www.jazzatlincolncenter.org], a $130-million facility, opened in October 2004, featuring a 1,200-seat concert hall, another 400-seat hall with breathtaking views overlooking Central Park, and a 140-seat nightclub, Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola.

In the Queens borough of New York City stands the home of, to my mind, the most influential U.S. jazz musician, Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong (1901-71). The Louis Armstrong House [http://www.satchmo.net] offers tours and a small gift shop.

Ragtime. This syncopated, quintessentially piano music is one of the roots of jazz. A small display of artifacts from Scott Joplin, "The King of Ragtime Writers," is at the State Fair Community College in Sedalia, Missouri�the town where Joplin composed his famous Maple Leaf Rag. Sedalia hosts the annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival. In much larger St. Louis, you can visit one of Joplin's homes, the Scott Joplin House State Historic Site [http://www.mostateparks.com/scottjoplin.htm].

Blues. The twelve-bar blues is arguably the only musical form created wholly in the United States; and the state of Mississippi is often considered the birthplace of the blues. Certainly the state produced many leading blues musicians, including Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King. Most came out of the broad floodplain known as the Mississippi Delta, which runs 200 miles along the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee south to Vicksburg, Mississippi. This part of Mississippi boasts three modest blues museums: the Delta Blues Museum [http://www.deltabluesmuseum.org] in Clarksdale, the Blues & Legends Hall of Fame Museum [http://www.bluesmuseum.org] in Robinsonville, and the Highway 61 Blues Museum located [http://www.highway61blues.com] in Leland.

Highway 61 is a kind of blues highway, the road traveled by blues musicians heading north to Memphis, Tennessee. In Memphis, there is a statue of W.C. Handy, composer of "St. Louis Blues" and "Memphis Blues," on famed Beale Street [http://www.bealestreet.com] as well as a B.B. King's Blues Club [http://www.bbkingclubs.com].

Bluegrass Music. Bluegrass music�syncopated string-band music from the rural hills and "hollers" (hollows or valleys) of the eastern U.S. Appalachian mountain range�has found a growing audience among city-dwellers. You can visit the International Bluegrass Music Museum [http://www.bluegrass-museum.org] in Owensboro, Kentucky and the smaller Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Hall of Fame [http://www.beanblossom.com] in Bean Blossom, Indiana. A newly-designated driving route, the Crooked Road: Virginia's Music Heritage Trail [http://www.thecrookedroad.org], is a 250-mile route in scenic southwestern Virginia that connects such sites as the Ralph Stanley Museum, the Carter Family Fold, the Blue Ridge Music Center, and the Birthplace of Country Music Museum.

Country Music. Long the epicenter of country music, Nashville, Tennessee boasts the Grand Ole Opry [http://www.opry.com], home of the world's longest-running live radio broadcast, with performances highlighting the diversity of country music every Friday and Saturday night, and the impressive Country Music Hall of Fame [http://www.countrymusichalloffame.com]. Its permanent exhibit, Sing Me Back Home: A Journey Through Country Music, draws from a rich collection of costumes, memorabilia, instruments, photographs, manuscripts, and other objects to tell the story of country music.

Nearby are Historic RCA Studio B, where Elvis Presley, Chet Atkins, and other stars recorded, and Hatch Show Print, one of the oldest letterpress print shops in America whose posters have featured many of country music's top performers. In Nashville, you can also see Ryman Auditorium [http://www.ryman.com], former home to the Grand Ole Opry, as well as many night spots, such as the Bluebird Caf� [http://www.bluebirdcafe.com], one of the nation's leading venues for up-and-coming songwriters. In Meridian, Mississippi, the Jimmie Rogers Museum [http://www.jimmierodgers.com] pays tribute to one of country music's founding figures.

Rock, Rhythm & Blues, and Soul. Rock 'n' roll music shook up the nation and the world, and more than 50 years after emerging, it continues to fascinate and animate hundreds of millions of listeners around the globe. Memphis, Tennessee, is home to Elvis Presley's kitschy but interesting home known as Graceland [http://www.elvis.com], the Sun Studio [http://www.sunstudio.com] where Elvis made his first recordings (and many other famous musicians have subsequently recorded), the Stax Museum of American Soul [http://www.staxmuseum.com] which covers Stax, Hi, and Atlantic Records, and the Memphis and Muscle Shoals sounds.

The Memphis Rock and Soul Museum features a superb Smithsonian exhibition tying together the story of Memphis from the 1920s to the 1980s with blues, rock, and soul�from W. C. Handy through Elvis and Booker T. and the MGs [http://www.memphisrocknsoul.org].

Detroit, Michigan offers the Motown Historical Museum [http://www.motownmuseum.com] with memorabilia from the Supremes, Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin and other soul singers who recorded for Motown Records.

If you're a big Buddy Holly fan, you might trek to the Buddy Holly Center [http://www.buddyhollycenter.org] in Lubbock, Texas.

The formidable Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame [http://www.rockhall.com] in Cleveland, Ohio fills a stunning building designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei with hundreds of rock and roll artifacts and audio-visual samples. In Seattle, Washington, The Experience Music Project in the Frank Gehry-designed building [http://www.emplive.org] is a unique, interactive museum, which focuses on popular music and rock.

Folk Music. Most nations have their own indigenous music�in Europe and the United States it is often categorized as "folk music." Folk music is passed along from one person to the next via oral or aural tradition, i.e., it is taught by ear rather than through written music. Typically the origin of the songs and instrumentals is shrouded in mystery and many different variants (or versions) of each piece exist, honed through the ears, voices, fingers, and sensibilities of many different performers. The easiest way to find live folk music is at one of the many folk music festivals held throughout the United States. The biggest is the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival [http://www.folklife.si.edu] held every June and July on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The 40th annual festival will be held in 2006.

Latino Music. Of course, the United States is a "New World" country of immigrants and each new ethnic group that arrives brings its own musical traditions which, in turn, continue to inevitably change and evolve as they take root in their non-native soil. Hispanics now account for the largest minority group in the United States, and they practice many musical traditions.

Played by ensembles of trumpet, violin, guitar, vihuela, and guitarr�n, Mexican mariachi music can be heard in many venues in the American Southwest; the closest thing to a mariachi shrine is La Fonda de Los Camperos, a restaurant at 2501 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, which in 1969 pioneered in creating mariachi dinner theater. Bandleader-violinist Nati Cano has been honored with the U.S. government's highest award in folk and traditional arts, and his idea of mariachi dinner theater has spread to Tucson, Arizona; Santa Fe, New Mexico; San Antonio, Texas; and other cities.

The vibrant dance music called salsa, which was brought to New York City by Cuban and Puerto Rican �migr�s, can be heard and danced to in nightclubs of New York, Miami and other cosmopolitan cities. A museum exhibition called �Az�car! The Life and Music of Celia Cruz, featuring the Queen of Salsa who spent the majority of her career in the United States, has been mounted at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. It will be on display through October 31, 2005. An on-line exhibition may viewed at http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/celiacruz/.

Cajun Music. The Prairie Acadian Cultural Center in Eunice, Louisiana (about a three-hour drive west of New Orleans) tells the story of the Acadian, or Cajun, peoples �who emigrated here after being evicted from Canada in the 1750s�and their distinctive Francophone music and culture [http://www.nps.gov/jela/pphtml/facilities.html].

The nearby Liberty Theater is home to a two-hour live radio program, Rendez-vous des Cajuns, featuring Cajun and zydeco bands, single musical acts, and Cajun humorists every Saturday night. Eunice is also home to the Cajun Music Hall of Fame [http://www.cajunfrenchmusic.org], and the Louisiana State University at Eunice maintains a web site devoted to contemporary Creole, zydeco, and Cajun musicians [http://www.nps.gov/jela/Prairieacadianculturalcenter.htm].

Show Tunes and Classical Music. No tour of music in the United States would be complete without mentioning two other great offerings: show tunes and classical music. Although the latter originated in Europe, native composers such as Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein brought an exuberant American style to the classical genre. The Lincoln Center [http://www.lincolncenter.org/index2.asp] and historic Carnegie Hall in New York City [http://www.carnegiehall.org/jsps/intro.jsp] are the best-known venues for classical offerings, although excellent performances by some symphony orchestras can be found throughout the country [http://www.findaconcert.com/]

For show tunes enthusiasts, Broadway is America's shrine to live theater. Broadway is the name of one of New York City's most famous streets. It also refers to the entire 12-block area around it, known as "The Great White Way" of theater lights. In the United States, revivals of Broadway musicals appear throughout the year at regional theaters.

Musical Instruments. New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art [http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/department.asp?dep=18] exhibits rare musical instruments as works of art. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. displays rare decorated Stradivarius stringed instruments, pianos, harpsichords, and guitars, and has, as well, exhibits devoted to jazz legends Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington.

In Carlsbad, California�not far from San Diego �the Museum of Making Music [http://www.museumofmakingmusic.org] displays over 500 instruments and interactive audio and video samples. The Fender Museum of Music and Arts [http://www.fendermuseum.com] in the Los Angeles suburb of Corona, California has an exhibition on 50 years of Fender guitar history.

In the Great Plains town of Vermillion, South Dakota, the National Music Museum [http://www.usd.edu/smm] displays 750 musical instruments.

No matter where you go in the United States, you'll find Americans in love with "their" music�be it jazz, blues, country-western, rock and roll, or any of its other myriad forms�and happy to share it with visitors. It's a fun and informative way to tour every region of the U.S.A.

RECOMMENDED READING

Bird, Christiane. The Da Capo Jazz and Blues Lover's Guide to the U.S. 3rd Ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 2001.

Cheseborough, Steve. Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues. 2nd Ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.

Clynes, Tom. Music Festivals from Bach to Blues: A Traveler's Guide. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 1996.

Dollar, Steve. Jazz Guide: New York City. New York: The Little Bookroom, 2003.

Fussell, Fred C. Blue Ridge Music Trails. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Knight, Richard. The Blues Highway: New Orleans to Chicago: A Travel and Music Guide. Hindhead, Surrey, UK: Trailblazer Publications, 2003.

Millard, Bob. Music City USA: The Country Music Lover's Travel Guide to Nashville and Tennessee. New York: Perennial, 1993.

Unterberger, Richie. Music USA: The Rough Guide. London: The Rough Guides, 1999.

John Edward Hasse

John Edward Hasse, Ph.D., is a music historian, pianist, and award-winning author and record producer. He serves as Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, where he founded the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and the international Jazz Appreciation Month. He is the author of Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, the editor of Jazz: The First Century, and the producer-author of the book and three-disc set The Classic Hoagy Carmichael, for which he earned two Grammy Award nominations. He lectures widely about American music throughout the United States and other parts of the world.

American Identity: Ideas, Not Ethnicity 

By Michael Jay Friedman

Since the United States was founded in the 18^th century, Americans have defined themselves not by their racial, religious, and ethnic identity but by their common values and belief in individual freedom.

Michael Jay Friedman is a historian and writer in the Bureau of International Information Programs of the U.S. Department of State.

�I�m in a New York state of mind.�
     �- Billy Joel

In 2000 28.2 percent of people living in the New York metropolitan area were foreign born.
     -- U.S. Census Bureau

In 1782, barely six years after the United States of America declared its nationhood, Benjamin Franklin offered certain �Information to Those Who Would Remove to America.� Among the constellation of outsized historical actors Americans came to know as their �founding fathers,� Franklin was in many ways the most typically American: If George Washington was inapproachably august, Thomas Jefferson bookish, and John Adams dour, it was Franklin � that practical inventor, resourceful businessman, and ever-busy civic catalyst � who best understood that his countrymen were, as the historian Walter McDougall would later call them, a nation of hustlers. In such a land, Franklin instructed the would-be immigrant:

People do not inquire concerning a Stranger, What is he? but, What can he do? If he has any useful Art, he is welcome; and if he exercises it, and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him.

Franklin�s remark was grounded in first-hand observation: As early as 1750, German immigrants outnumbered English stock in his home colony of Pennsylvania. The newcomers were perceived as industrious and law-abiding. Skillful farmers, they improved the land and stimulated economic growth. In 1790, when Congress set the first national standard for naturalized citizenship, it required no ethnic or religious test, no literacy test, no property requirement � just two years residence, good character, and an oath to uphold the Constitution. Because American identity is, as Franklin understood, grounded in actions and attitudes rather than racial, religious, or ethnic identity, Americans differ from many other peoples both in how they define themselves and in the kinds of lives they choose to lead. Membership in the national community, as cultural scholar Marc Pachter has written, �demands only the decision to become American.�

This communal American identity embraces a pluralism that spans racial, religious, and ethnic divides. It also encompasses a strong civic commitment to individual freedom and to a representative government of limited and clearly defined powers that respects that freedom.

Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?

The American self-image has always harnessed a creative tension between pluralism and assimilation. On the one hand, immigrants traditionally have been expected to immerse themselves in the American �melting pot,� a metaphor popularized by the playwright Israel Zangwill�s 1908 drama The Melting Pot, in which one character declares:

Understand that America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians � into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.

Nor were Zangwill�s sentiments new ones. As far back as 1782, J. Hector St. John de Cr�vecoeur, a French immigrant and keen observer of American life, described his new compatriots as:

... a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes ... . What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither an European nor the descendant of an European; hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American� leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners ... .

The melting pot, however, has always existed alongside a competing model, in which each successive immigrant group retains a measure of its distinctiveness and enriches the American whole. In 1918 the public intellectual Randolph Bourne called for a �trans-national America.� The original English colonists, Bourne argued, �did not come to be assimilated in an American melting pot ... . They came to get freedom to live as they wanted to ... to make their fortune in a new land.� Later immigrants, he continued, had not been melted down into some kind of �tasteless, colorless� homogeneous Americanism but rather added their distinct contributions to the greater whole.

The balance between the melting pot and transnational ideals varies with time and circumstance, with neither model achieving complete dominance. Unquestionably, though, Americans have internalized a self-portrait that spans a spectrum of races, creeds, and colors. Consider the popular motion pictures depicting American troops in action during the Second World War. It became a Hollywood clich� that every platoon included a farm boy from Iowa, a Brooklyn Jew, a Polish millworker from Chicago, an Appalachian woodsman, and other diverse examples of mid-20th century American manhood. They strain at first to overcome their differences, but by film�s end all have bonded � as Americans. Real life could be more complicated, and not least because the African-American soldier would have served in a segregated unit. Regardless, these films depict an American identity that Americans believed in � or wanted to.

Individualism and Tolerance

If American identity embraces all kinds of people, it also affords them a vast menu of opportunities to make and remake themselves. Americans historically have scorned efforts to trade on �accidents of birth,� such as great inherited wealth or social status. Article I of the U.S. Constitution bars the government from granting any title of nobility, and those who cultivate an air of superiority toward their fellow Americans are commonly disparaged for �putting on airs,� or worse.

Americans instead respect the �self-made� man or woman, especially where he or she has overcome great obstacles to success. The late 19th-century American writer Horatio Alger, deemed by the Encyclopedia Britannica perhaps the most socially influential American writer of his generation, captured this ethos in his many rags-to-riches stories, in which poor shoeshine boys or other street urchins would rise, by dint of their ambition, talent, and fortitude, to wealth and fame.

In the United States, individuals craft their own definitions of success. It might be financial wealth � and many are the college dropouts working in their parents� garage in hopes of creating the next Google, Microsoft, or Apple Computer. Others might prize the joys of the sporting arena, of creating fine music or art, or of raising a loving family at home. Because Americans spurn limits, their national identity is not -- cannot be -- bounded by the color of one�s skin, by one�s parentage, by which house of worship one attends.

Americans hold differing political beliefs, embrace (often wildly) divergent lifestyles, and insist upon broad individual freedoms, but they do so with a remarkable degree of mutual tolerance. One key is their representative form of government: No citizen agrees with every U.S. government decision; all know they can reverse those policies by persuading their fellow citizens to vote for change at the next election.

Another key is the powerful guarantees that protect the rights of all Americans from government overreaching. No sooner was the U.S. Constitution ratified than Americans demanded and received the Bill of Rights: 10 constitutional amendments that safeguard basic rights.

There simply is no one picture of a �typical� American. From the powdered-wigged Founding Fathers to the multiracial golf champion Tiger Woods, Americans share a common identity grounded in the freedom � consistent always with respecting the freedom of others � to live as they choose. The results can bemuse, intrigue, and inspire. Cambodia�s biggest hip-hop star, born on a Cambodian farm, lives in southern California. (He goes by the name �praCh.�) Walt Whitman, the closest Americans have produced to a national poet, would not have been surprised. �I am large,� Whitman wrote of his nation, �I contain multitudes.�

An Energy Revolution by the People

By Elisa Wood

Government policies can only go so far to bring about greater energy efficiency. Real gains must be made by consumers, one at a time. Growing awareness of profligate energy use has spurred citizens to a variety of creative efficiency measures in different spheres of American life.

Elisa Wood is a U.S.-based writer who specializes in energy issues. Her articles are available at www.RealEnergyWriters.com.

High prices motivate consumers to reduce energy use more than any other factor. So how do you inspire them to conserve when they are not responsible for the bill?

John Petersen, director of the environmental studies program at Oberlin College, faced this dilemma when he embarked on a project to reduce electricity use in the Ohio college�s dormitories. He found the answer in a crystal ball.

Petersen set up a contest to see which student dormitories could reduce energy consumption the most. Initially, the college offered a Web site where students monitored their dorm�s energy use by analyzing colorful charts and graphs. But Petersen realized the approach was �techno-geeky� and not for all students. So he designed an Energy Orb, a crystal ball-styled object that glows different colors to show building energy use at any given time. He placed the orbs in dorm lobbies. With just a quick glance, students knew their dorm was consuming a lot of energy when the ball was red, and less when it was green.

 �They certainly were conversation starters,� he says. �People would just gather around the orb and talk about it.� Moreover, the students pursued energy efficiency in earnest; winners reduced consumption by more than 50 percent.

�Students in winning dorms did things like unplug vending machines,� Petersen says. �You have students who walk by these vending machines every single day, probably multiple times a day. Before this competition, I bet you none of those students stopped to think about the parasitic consumption of electricity by this vending machine.�

Students became aware �that they are walking through a world of energy-consuming devices,� he says. �That�s what I hope we are doing with this � making people aware of the flow of resources that are necessary to support their lives.�

In doing so, Petersen, an environmental scientist, cultivates a growing recognition among Americans that conservation is an act of personal responsibility. By replacing incandescent lights, caulking windows, and installing smart meters, conservation-minded Americans help stoke a $1 trillion energy efficiency boom in the United States that generates more than 8.6 million jobs, according to the American Solar Energy Society.

In the Right Spirit

For Sara Spoonheim, energy efficiency goes beyond technical achievement; it is a spiritual act. Spoonheim is a deputy director at Faith in Place, an organization that believes two great responsibilities are common to all religions: to love one another and to care for creation. Based in Chicago, Illinois, the organization helps Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Baha�i, and Unitarian congregations improve their energy use.

Funded by foundation grants, religious groups, and individuals, the program seeks cost-effective efficiency for cash-strapped congregations. To that end, Spoonheim helped begin a national online store, ShopIPL.org [http://www.shopipl.org], where churches can purchase discounted energy-efficient products. The store is sponsored by Interfaith Power & Light, a multistate organization affiliated with Faith in Place, which encourages religious communities to take action against global warming.

Spoonheim�s latest project at Faith in Place assists Lutheran churches as they try to reduce their carbon footprint. Through a program called Cool Congregations, she helps the churches replace energy-draining appliances, install LED exit lights, and undertake other measures to cut energy use. �They have agreed to be guinea pigs, letting us experiment with them, to see what all churches will need,� she says.

Places of worship offer unique challenges for energy efficiency. For one thing, a sanctuary is used typically just once a week and may contain musical instruments that cannot be exposed to extremes in temperature and humidity. Spoonheim focuses energy efficiency efforts on parts of buildings used frequently, such as homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and schools, where efficiency measures have greatest impact.

Faith in Place sees such work as primary to the more conventional efforts of religious organizations: providing food, clothing, and shelter. �Even if we do all those things, and love our brothers and sisters with our whole heart, it will not matter if we neglect the ecological conditions of our beautiful and fragile planet,� says the organization.

Car Drives House

When an ice storm knocked out power in Harvard, Massachusetts, for four days in December 2008, electrical engineer John Sweeney brought new meaning to the phrase �energy independence.�

While neighbors huddled in cold houses, Sweeney and his family stayed warm because he turned his hybrid car into an emergency home generator.

Sweeney says his feat was no big deal. But then he likes to tinker with energy devices, going back to his college days in the 1970s when he drew plans for a hybrid car as his senior project.

Today, Sweeney�s summer vacation spot is a sailboat with two windmills that charge large batteries to run the boat�s refrigerator, lights, computer, and navigation electronics. At home, a whole-house electric meter sits on the kitchen counter. Several smaller �kill-a-watt� meters measure the power use of appliances, hour by hour. Watching the meters inspired his family to cut their energy bill by about $50 per month.

So, as heavy ice dragged down miles of electrical transmission lines in New England, Sweeney began to tinker. He realized he had a �simple and cost-effective� solution to the power outage, right outside his door.

He knew from online forums that the Toyota Prius can generate more wattage than it needs. To use the excess electricity, he needed an inverter � and happened to have one in his basement. He wired the inverter directly to the car�s battery and ran a long extension cord from the car to the house. He connected the refrigerator and freezer, woodstove fan, television, and several lights.

Because the car is a hybrid, it burned 18 liters of gasoline over the four days. A conventional car, wired in a similar fashion, would use more than 150 liters of gasoline.

�This use of a car will seem normal in five to 10 years when we have plug-in hybrids and pure electric cars for sale to the general public,� Sweeney says.

Time Constraints Are No Excuse

Cathy Clites apologizes for scrubbing the kitchen floor as she is interviewed by telephone. The Louisiana mother and grandmother makes the most of every moment because she is chief caretaker for her family of nine, which includes her husband, Charlie, wheelchair-bound and no longer able to support his family after a stroke six years ago.

Somehow between the cooking, the dishes, the laundry, and the shopping, Clites finds time to be an energy efficiency advocate. �It�s just about being a good citizen in today�s time. It is a courtesy. We are considering what will be there when our kids and our grandkids need it,� she says.

She first learned about energy efficiency when she won a contest for an energy efficiency home makeover offered by NBC Universal�s SCI FI Channel and the Alliance to Save Energy (ASE).

As she watched the contractors install the new appliances, lighting, and insulation, and then saw her utility bill drop, Clites was sold on energy efficiency � and decided to sell others. ASE says Clites has become �a grassroots ambassador for energy efficiency,� creating a drumbeat of support. She chats up neighbors, friends, family, and church members. When the mayor of Baton Rouge declared an energy efficiency day for the city, Clites participated in a news conference to rally the city to the cause. She brings reporters through her house to view the makeover, and she takes time to design bookmarks with energy savings tips, which she distributes to anyone interested. At night, when chores are done and the house is quiet, she wanders about with an eye to stamp out �vampires� � appliances and electric gadgets no longer in use but sucking up electricity just because they are plugged into an outlet.

�In today�s world we all have to look at ways of being penny pinchers. This is an easy way to do it. I wish others would try � they�d all feel like they had won something,� she says.

These stories � Oberlin�s orb, Faith in Place�s spiritual mission, Sweeney�s tinkering, and Clites�s volunteerism � are just a few examples of the hard work by Americans intent on reducing energy use. Will this dedication continue? Some analysts worry that if energy prices fall, Americans will forget about efficiency. Others say price shocks have been too great in recent years for the nation to retreat. Moreover, advanced meters, Oberlin�s orbs, and other measuring technologies serve as motivators.

 �The electronic revolution which created personal computers and the Internet will probably also change how we generate, store, and use energy,� Sweeney wrote in an article for his local paper. �Please support these changes through the political system, and encourage your kids to pursue science and engineering. This country needs to start thinking �outside the box,� and we will need all the technical talent we can muster to solve our current energy issues in an environmentally friendly way.�

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government

Ethiopian American Wins 2009 World Food Prize

Gebisa Ejeta developed drought-tolerant, parasite-resistant sorghum

 By Kathryn McConnell - Staff Writer

Washington � An acclaimed plant breeder and geneticist who was born and grew up in rural Ethiopia has won the 2009 World Food Prize for his major contributions in the production of sorghum, one of the world's five principal grains.

The announcement came during a June 11 ceremony at the State Department.

The work of Gebisa Ejeta, a professor at Purdue University in Indiana and a U.S. citizen, has dramatically enhanced the food supply of hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa, said Kenneth Quinn, president of the World Food Prize Foundation, which is based in Des Moines, Iowa.

Ejeta will accept the prize during an international symposium in Des Moines on October 15.

The World Food Prize is awarded annually to individuals whose efforts significantly contribute to improving the quality, quantity and availability of food in the world.

Working in Sudan during the early 1980s, Ejeta developed Africa's first commercial hybrid variety of sorghum tolerant to drought. Later, with a Purdue colleague in Indiana, he discovered the chemical basis of the relationship between the deadly parasitic weed striga and sorghum, and was able to produce sorghum varieties resistant to both drought and striga.

In 1994, eight tons of drought- and striga-resistant sorghum seeds were distributed in Eastern Africa. They yielded four times more grain than traditional varieties, even in drought areas.

�By ridding Africa of the greatest biological impediment to food production, Ejeta has put himself in the company of some of the greatest researchers and scientists,� U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said at the ceremony.

High in protein and easily digestible, sorghum is a staple food crop in Africa but is used mainly for livestock feed in the United States, Ejeta told America.gov. He said he is working to develop sorghum varieties that can be used in food products that will appeal to U.S. consumers.

�Ejeta�s accomplishments in improving sorghum illustrate what can be achieved when cutting-edge technology and international cooperation in agriculture are used to uplift and empower the world�s most vulnerable people,� said Norman Borlaug, founder of the World Food Prize and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Borlaug is recognized around the world as "Father of the Green Revolution" and is credited with saving millions of lives from starvation during the 1960s and early 1970s.

Ejeta also has worked with national and local authorities and nongovernmental groups to improve the lives of subsistence farmers in Africa through the creation of agricultural enterprises.

�Even while he was making breakthroughs in the lab, Ejeta took his work to the field,� said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. �He knew that for his improved seeds to make a difference in people�s lives, farmers would have to use them, which meant they would need access to a seed market and the credit to buy supplies.�

THE MAKING OF A PLANT SCIENTIST

During primary school, Ejeta planned to study engineering when he reached college age, but his mother convinced him he could do more working in agriculture, Clinton said.

With aid from Oklahoma State University, he attended an agriculture and technical secondary school in Ethiopia. The university and the U.S. Agency for International Development helped him earn a doctorate from Purdue.

This year's October symposium will focus on �Food, Agriculture and National Security in a Globalized World.�

At the announcement of Ejeta�s honor, Clinton also announced a U.S. initiative to develop a new global approach to hunger. The approach would help countries carry out strategies to meet their specific food security needs, she said.

Fields of Dreams: American Sports Movies

David J. Firestein

Reflecting Americans' love for sports of all kinds, U.S. filmmakers turn repeatedly to sports themes to convey messages much larger than the stories themselves. David J. Firestein is a foreign service officer currently assigned to the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, U.S. Department of State. The author of three books and some 130 published articles, Firestein has taught at Moscow State University of International Relations (MGIMO), the University of Texas (Austin), and George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

There are few, if any, countries in the world in which sports�not a sport but sports in general�permeate national life to the degree that they do in the United States. Sports are part of the very fabric of American life, discourse, and lexicon, so much so that it is commonplace to hear prominent national leaders speak about matters of state with reference to such sports metaphors as "throwing up a Hail Mary," "scoring a slam dunk," "playing hardball," and "hitting below the belt." Indeed, the little black presidential briefcase that holds the codes necessary to launch U.S. nuclear forces is referred to as "the football."

The centrality of sports in American life is amply reflected in contemporary American cinema. For decades, U.S. moviemakers have successfully mined sports to produce some of the most inspiring, poignant, exciting, and memorable American movies ever made. This tradition started in the first half of the 20th century, but it remains vibrant today. Just in the past few years, Hollywood has produced popular and critically acclaimed films featuring virtually every major sport, from football, basketball, baseball, and hockey, to boxing, horse racing, and even surfing. Since the mid-1970s, four U.S. sports films have won Academy Awards, or Oscars; most recently, Million Dollar Baby (2004), the Clint Eastwood film about a female boxer, won four Oscars, including the one for best picture (an honor the film shares with just two other sports movies). Though American sports movies make use of a common vehicle to explore the fullness of American life and the nuances of human psychology, they tell us many different things about the values that are important to Americans.

American football, always an important subgenre of U.S. sports cinema, has overtaken baseball in recent years as the sport most frequently featured in U.S. films. The last several years have seen the release of a plethora of serious, high-quality football movies that have explored such diverse themes as overcoming adversity (We Are Marshall, 2006); working hard to achieve your dreams (Invincible, 2006); the unrelenting pursuit of excellence (Friday Night Lights, 2004); the power of sports to heal racial/class divides and build communities (Remember the Titans, 2000); and the triumph of an athlete's innate competitive spirit and innocence over the crass commercialism and cynicism of the U.S. professional sports industry (Any Given Sunday, 1999). As diverse as these themes are, an overarching message about football emerges from these recent films: Football�in its epic scale, over-the-top pomp, gritty attitude, and, yes, hard hitting�is the most complete and vivid sports metaphor for American life itself.

There has been a relative paucity of recent American films about basketball and baseball, the second and third most popular spectator sports in the United States. The two most successful American basketball films of recent years, both based on inspiring true stories, address themes of racial reconciliation (Glory Road, 2006) and teamwork and self-respect (Coach Carter, 2005). Another American basketball classic (Hoop Dreams, 1994), one of the relatively few documentaries in the sports film genre, painted a compelling portrait of inner-city American life and the power�and real-world limitations�of dreams. In their own ways, the two more recent basketball films make the same point: whatever the color of our skin, whatever our rung on the socioeconomic ladder, we can do great things when we commit ourselves to a larger team and a loftier goal. Hoop Dreams tells us that, even so, it's probably not going to be easy. Meanwhile, the one major American baseball movie of the last few years (The Rookie, 2002), also inspired by a true story, reminds us, in true American fashion, that you're never too old to reach for your dreams, whatever the odds against realizing them.

Hollywood has long demonstrated a fascination with boxing. The three major boxing films produced in recent years (Rocky Balboa, 2006; Cinderella Man, 2005; and Million Dollar Baby, 2004) are all classic underdog stories (while Million Dollar Baby explores other, more complex themes, as well). The underdog theme�a perennial favorite of U.S. producers of sports films�also extends to the Olympic hockey rink (Miracle, 2004) and the horse racing track (Seabiscuit, 2003), in which athletes (and, in Seabiscuit, a racehorse) achieve stunning victories in the face of overwhelming odds.

Collectively, these movies say a lot about American values, but they strike a chord with foreign audiences, as well. That's because these films, at their core, are less about sports than they are about that part of each of us that yearns to take the field, give our all, and live our dreams.

Game On! Sports and Recreation Idioms in American English

Idioms derived from the sports and games played in the United States are commonly used in American English. The author gives examples of idioms used in everyday conversation and in the media. Jean Henry is the author of How to Play the Game: American English Sports and Games Idioms. A retired teacher and professor of English as a second language, she has degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University, and she has done additional course work at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Oxford University in England.

English is a dynamic and changing language. Because of the nature of the language, words and phrases are constantly being added or subtracted. "Carbon neutral" was added to last year's edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary and named "word of the year" because of the concern about climate change. "Blog," "to blog," and "blogging" have entered the common lexicon. This dynamism is also true for idiomatic or metaphorical language and its use in the United States.

Idioms are words or phrases that cannot be understood literally, but are derivative. (Webster's dictionary defines an idiom as "a peculiar way of saying something which has become established after long use.") Idioms exist in all languages. They are, however, especially common in spoken American English.

American idioms are derived from many sources, including the culture of sports and games. Perhaps because of the informal atmosphere, language used by sports reporters, fans, and the players themselves has produced many words and phrases used in other contexts. Sports phrases are constantly changing: A "lay-up," an easy shot close to the basket in basketball that used to mean an easy task in the non-basketball world, has evolved into "slam-dunk" as increased size and athleticism have allowed players to elevate above the rim of the basket and forcefully slam the ball through it.

The knowledge of American idioms or metaphors, particularly those of sports and games, is essential to mastering colloquial American English speech. Games have captured the American heart and mind. Terms associated with play have become associated with work and business. To "pinch hit" or "carry the ball," two expressions from baseball and American football, used in their idiomatic sense rather than the literal, mean that a person will substitute or work on a project for a co-worker or boss. Failure to understand the games and the terms and idioms derived from them hinders communication.

The use of a word or an idiom changes with the popularity of the games played and the psyche of the country, the region, and the person using them. For example, idiomatic expressions based on sailing terms, such as "take a new tack" or "bail out," might be used more on the west and east coasts of the United States than in the heartland, and a person whose hobby is sailing will undoubtedly use them more frequently. There are many baseball and American football idioms used in the United States because of the widespread popularity of these sports.

At Condoleezza Rice's Senate confirmation hearings for the position of secretary of state, one Republican senator, using metaphors from American football, said about the nominee's response to questions, "�there was some bump and run defenses and tactics used against her but she never really got off her stride."

Some idioms will be international in use. "Always on the ball," a New York Ticketmaster advertisement with a picture of a ball, will be understandable in translation to persons worldwide. As will "game plan," used by Stanford University Professor David G. Victor when talking about President Bush's global goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. According to a June 1, 2007, article in the New York Times, Victor said that the goal would be "very difficult to be taken as seriously as it should be taken in the world without some kind of a clear [U.S. domestic] game plan."

Some are more difficult: A New York Times article of June 4, 2007, entitled "Romney Political Fortunes Are Tied to Riches He Gained in Business," says: "Bain [Romney's company] and its co-investors extracted special payments of over $100 million from each company, enabling Bain to make a healthy profit even before re-selling the businesses � a practice know as 'getting back your bait.'" This refers to a fishing term.

Idioms are often difficult for the non-native speaker to learn in isolation from their original sources. Thinking in categories helps: Team sports, such as basketball and football, will have many of the same rules, terms, and fields as their international counterparts. Card games, hunting, and fishing are similar to the same games and sports in other countries. This framework or context of the game from which the term originated facilitates learning both of the literal and of the idiomatic usage. And familiarization with American games can also be enhanced by watching television broadcasts of baseball, football, and basketball games, or Olympic events. The context of a sentence is important. "Two strikes against him," a baseball expression, denotes that one strike is left before the batter, is declared out. The sentence, "He hit a home run to left field with two strikes against him," could be a sentence for a student to practice, since it requires an understanding of this phrase in its literal sense. The idiomatic meaning then can be practiced in a sentence such as "He had two strikes against him when he interviewed for the job, because he had no experience."

Some phrases, such as "play hardball" are more common in the derived or idiomatic sense. The sentence, "Let's play hardball on this contract," for example, means that one party intends to make little or no compromise in negotiating with the other party. This use is more typical than its literal meaning: to play baseball, a game that uses a ball made from a hard material.

In many cases, the student, businessperson, or politician at a conference might hear an idiomatic phrase and try to deduce the meaning from the context of the meeting. If there is confusion, the learner can ask someone later or use one of the many idiomatic phrase books or Internet sites available to find the idiom and its meaning. The student or professional person should then practice the use of the idiom with a friend, preferably someone who is conversant in colloquial English.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

Living Traditions of Native America 

By Gabrielle Tayac

Historian Gabrielle Tayac is a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington. She is a descendant of the Piscataway tribe, who inhabited the Chesapeake Bay area. Her grandfather, Chief Turkey Tayac (1895�1978), was a traditional healer. Here she discusses the importance of an accurate portrayal of the history and culture of indigenous peoples.

�The Earth and myself are of one mind.�  � Chief Joseph

Chief Joseph (1840�1904) of the Nimipu Band of the Nez Perce lived much of his life amid the encroachment of white settlers drawn to the Gold Rush in the western United States. The U.S. government promised to reserve land for the Nez Perce, including their traditional homelands, now the states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. However, by 1863 the land base was reduced by 6 million acres (2.4 million hectares) to one-tenth of its original size. Chief Joseph reluctantly agreed to move to the reservation, but a violent reaction by younger warriors led the U.S. Army to pursue the Nez Perce. Despite his brilliant military strategy, Chief Joseph was forced to surrender in 1877 because his people were weakened by starvation, cold, and illness. He spoke the words quoted above during his surrender. He was never allowed to return to his beloved home, the Wallowa Valley. Today the Nimipu have not only survived, but they participate in a modern economy through fishing, logging, education, and commerce. A group of us working at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, D.C., thought that Chief Joseph�s story and his sentiment about the Earth should be the first that visitors encounter upon entry to our building.

Four major ideas are helpful for understanding the past and present situation of Native peoples. First, they have diverse cultures that are united in the concept that humans must be stewards of a living world. Second, individuals are defined by and are accountable to their tribal communities. Third, the trauma of the destructive encounters with European settlers has shaped who we are today. Finally, Native peoples� creative expressions, past and present, continue to contribute to global culture and science.

Native America, to understand it as a world described by NMAI curator Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), is �ancient and modern, and always changing.�

About 4 million people identify themselves as either being an American Indian or having American Indian ancestry. American Indians can be found across the country, and 70 percent do not live on reservations, the lands set aside by treaty for tribes. Many are intermarried with people of other ethnic and racial backgrounds, the highest rate of intermarriage among any ethnic group in the United States. Despite recent economic gains, especially through casino gaming allowed due to jurisdictional sovereignty that tribes have, American Indians still suffer from poorer health, higher poverty, and lower educational attainment than other sectors of the U.S. population.

Tribes are tremendously diverse, with each having its own traditional culture, language, history, and government. Most Native people seek a balance of maintaining ancestral cultures with participation in an increasingly global environment.

For many years, because of discrimination and misunderstanding in the broader society, Native Americans were not valued and our cultures were thought to be dying. But in the past 30 years, thanks to the collective efforts of people of all backgrounds, new life is coming to the tribes in an era of increasing self-expression. Our museum, which opened in 2004, is a product of that struggle. Created by an act of Congress in 1989, the NMAI brought an important private collection of more than 800,000 objects into public stewardship under the Smithsonian Institution. Perhaps most importantly, NMAI lets Native people speak on their own behalf to interpret their histories, philosophies, and identities for a world audience.

NMAI signals a profound shift in the valuing of Native cultures. An essential role that the museum serves is to educate the public about Native peoples from their own point of view. While stereotypes are difficult to address among adults, our real hope lies with the future shaping of children�s viewpoints. Schoolchildren are a key audience to our facility, and our education department works with tribal scholars to develop accurate materials for use in the classroom. Internet resources are available also, as most people in the country will not have the chance to spend time at the museum, showing a diversity of Native cultures across topics in the arts and sciences. For example, many people aware of American culture may be familiar with the tradition of Thanksgiving as a special dinner in November based on a peaceful exchange between Native Americans and Puritan colonists in the 17th century. However, even in the United States few people are aware that the idea of thanksgiving is based upon a traditional Native daily ceremonial practice to express gratitude and responsibility for the abundance in the world. Different seasons bring different thanksgivings, such as the �strawberry thanksgiving� that is practiced every June among northeastern tribes.

Living Worlds

 �With beauty I speak, I am in peace and harmony.�  � Navajo Blessing

The profound teachings of diverse Native cultures are often known as �original instructions,� meaning that the ways of being in the world were passed to humans by a Creator or other spiritual beings. These ideas have been passed down orally, embedded in story, song, and dance as
American Indians north of Mexico did not have
writing systems until European forms were adapted by tribes. There is no singular Native philosophy � there are hundreds. Living in balance with the natural and spiritual realms, respecting our role in the world as human beings, and embracing family and community responsibility are shared cultural values intended to guide our peoples in today�s world.

One example, the Navajo, whose blessing is quoted above, call themselves Din� or the people. They live on a reservation extending almost 7 million hectares (26,000 square miles) in the arid lands surrounding the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Their current population of nearly 300,000 comprises the largest tribe in the United States. The Din� are traditionally sheepherders and weavers, although today you can find individuals in every profession and on every continent. A core principle in Din� philosophy is hozho, which has been simplified in English as �beauty.� But hozho is more complicated than that. It conveys values of wholeness, balance, and restoration. Many Din� ceremonies and practices are devoted to restoring harmony in individuals, communities, and the world. So when a person says, �with beauty I speak,� they are stating a much more complicated idea � that their thoughts should be restorative, holistic, and balanced. As the Din� have reclaimed control of their education and government systems over the past decades, they are inserting this philosophy of what should guide their schools, courts, and economy.

Native philosophies are rich and varied. People of all backgrounds are increasingly interested in learning more about these ancient systems that still have relevance. For most of American history, unfortunately, Native religions and philosophies were at best misunderstood and at worst outlawed. Many Native nations are now working hard to recover traditions that were lost and preserve what they still have.

Community

�Being an Indian is not about being part something; it is about being part of something.� � Angela Gonzales (Hopi), 2007

Relationships are at the core of Native identity. The sense of family is often more extended than what we see in the contemporary United States, in which most families are nuclear, chiefly parents and children. In American Indian cultures, family includes not only blood-related relatives but clan or society relationships. Tribal membership is also a key to identity, which is determined by the degree of Indian heritage, or �blood quantum, acceptable for membership to the tribe. To be an American Indian is not merely to be a member of a broader ethnic or racial group but also to belong to a specific community that defines its own membership. Some tribes trace descent through the mother, other tribes through the father, and still others have adopted the rules set out by the U.S. government in the early 20th century. Each tribe is unique.

As subjects of discriminatory racial policies, Native Americans and African Americans have a great deal in common. Both Native Americans and African Americans were viewed as inferior biologically and culturally to many Euro-Americans for centuries. There were laws prohibiting whites from intermarrying with them, laws that were enforced more stringently for African Americans. Interestingly, both Native Americans and Africans shared indigenous lifestyles, enabling them to relate to each other upon first contact. In early colonial history we find quite a bit of intermarriage between them on the Atlantic seaboard. Their work towards overturning discrimination was also linked. Encouraged by the 1960s civil rights movement, many American Indians began their own social movements to regain rights. American Indian identity is perhaps one of the most talked about topics among American Indians themselves. The tensions between obligations to a tribal community and living in a quickly changing era of globalization makes many people feel that they are constantly juggling �two worlds.� Yet as policies and social attitudes about the value of American Indian cultures changed, some younger Native people are exploring the idea that they really live in just one world as whole people with a tribal identity that can adapt to any circumstance.

Expression

�The Indian way is a thinking tradition.�  � John Mohawk, ca. 1990

The brilliance of Native cultures is manifold. One can observe creative genius in ancient agricultural innovations, contemporary art, pre-contact concepts of governance, or environmental conservation traditions. Indigenous peoples have much to offer the world, even as they bring their tribal identities and global contemporary realities into one world.

Native American Ideas of Governance and U.S. Constitution

By Bruce E. Johansen

Bruce E. Johansen is the Frederick W. Kayser Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. With co-author Donald A. Grinde Jr. he pioneered the

once-controversial, now widely accepted research on the significant influence of indigenous American government practices on the Constitution of the United States.

Besides well-known European precedents � from Greece, Rome, and English common law, among others � indigenous American ideas of democracy have shaped the government of the United States. Immigrants arrived in colonial America seeking freedom and found it in the confederacies of the Iroquois and other Native nations. By the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, these ideas were common currency in the former colonies, illustrated in debates involving Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Later, during the 19th century, conceptions of Iroquois gender relations had an important impact on major architects of American feminism. These ideas illuminate political debates today.

Throughout eastern North America, Native nations had formed confederacies by the time they encountered European immigrants: the Seminoles in what is now Florida, the Cherokees and Choctaws in the Carolinas, and the Iroquois and their allies the Wyandots (Hurons) in upstate New York and the Saint Lawrence Valley.

The Iroquois system of confederation was the best-known to the colonists, in large part because the Iroquois occupied a pivotal position in diplomacy, not only between the English and French but also among other native confederacies. Called the Iroquois by the French and the Five (later Six) Nations by the English, the Iroquois peoples, who call themselves Haudenosaunee �People of the Longhouse,� controlled the only relatively level land pass between the English colonies on the eastern seaboard and the French settlements in the Saint Lawrence Valley.

The Iroquois Confederacy was formed by the Huron leader Deganawidah, �the Peacemaker� in Haudenosaunee oral tradition, who enlisted the aid of Aiowantha (sometimes called Hiawatha) to spread his vision of a confederacy to control bloody rivalries. The confederacy originally included the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. The sixth nation, the Tuscaroras, migrated into Iroquois country in the early 18th century and were adopted. The confederacy probably dates from the 12th century of the Common Era, according to research by Barbara A. Mann and Jerry Fields of the University of Toledo.

Haudenosaunee fundamental law, the Great Law of Peace, stipulates to this day that sachems� (chiefs�) skins must be thick to withstand the criticism of their constituents: sachems should take pains not to become angry when people scrutinize their conduct in governmental affairs. Such a point of view pervades the writings of Jefferson and Franklin, although it was not fully codified into U.S. law until the Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) made it virtually impossible for public officials to sue successfully for libel.

The Great Law of Peace also provides for the removal from office of leaders who can no longer adequately function in office, a measure remarkably similar to a constitutional amendment adopted in the United States during the late 20th century providing for the removal of an incapacitated president. The Great Law includes provisions guaranteeing freedom of religion and the right of redress before the Grand Council. It forbids unauthorized entry of homes � all measures that sound familiar to U.S. citizens through the Bill of Rights.

The procedure for debating policies of the confederacy begins with the Mohawks and Senecas, called �elder brothers.� After being debated by the Keepers of the Eastern Door (Mohawks) and the Keepers of the Western Door (Senecas), the question is thrown �across the fire� to the Oneida and Cayuga statesmen, �younger brothers,� for discussion. Once consensus is achieved among the Oneidas and the Cayugas, the discussion returns to the Senecas and Mohawks for confirmation. Next, the question is laid before the Onondagas, who try to resolve any remaining conflicts.

At this stage, the Onondagas exercise a power similar to judicial review and functions built into conference committees in the U.S. Congress. They can raise objections about the proposal if it is believed to be inconsistent with the Great Law. Essentially, the council can rewrite the proposed law so that it can be in accord with the constitution of the Iroquois. When the Onondagas reach consensus, the Tadodaho, the chief executive officer of the Grand Council, confirms the decision. This process reflects the emphasis on checks and balances, public debate, and consensus. The overall intent of such a parliamentary procedure is to encourage unity at each step. 

The Iroquois and Colonial Federation

At Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1744, Canassatego, the Iroquois Tadodaho, advised colonial representatives on Iroquois concepts of unity:

�Our wise forefathers established Union and Amity between the Five Nations. This has made us formidable; this has given us great Weight and Authority with our neighboring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy; and by your observing the same methods, our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire such Strength and power. Therefore whatever befalls, never fall out with one another.�

Benjamin Franklin probably first learned of Canassatego�s advice to the colonies as he set the sachem�s words in type. Franklin�s press issued Indian treaties in small booklets that enjoyed a lively sale throughout the colonies, from 1736 to 1762. Even before the Albany Congress, the first attempt to unify the colonies, Benjamin Franklin had been musing over the words of Canassatego. Using Iroquois examples of unity, Franklin sought to shame the reluctant colonists into some form of union in 1751 when he engaged in a hyperbolic racial slur: �It would be a strange thing � if Six Nations of Ignorant savages should be capable of forming such an union and be able to execute it in such a manner that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble, and yet that a like union should be impractical for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous.� Actually, subsequent evidence shows that Franklin had a healthy respect for the Iroquois. He began his distinguished diplomatic career by representing Pennsylvania in treaty councils with the Iroquois and their allies, as he became a forceful advocate of colonial union.

On July 10, 1754, Franklin formally proposed his Plan of Union before the Albany Congress. Franklin wrote that the debates on the Albany Plan �... went on daily, hand in hand with the Indian business.� The Iroquois sachem Tiyanoga not only spoke for the roughly 200 Indians in attendance at the Albany Congress but also briefed the colonial delegates on Iroquois political systems, much as Canassatego had done 10 years earlier.

In drawing up his final draft of the Albany Plan for colonial unification, Franklin was meeting several diplomatic demands: the British, for control; the colonies, for autonomy in a loose confederation; and the Iroquois, for a colonial union similar to their own in form and function. For the British, the plan provided administration by a president general appointed by England. The individual colonies were to be allowed to retain their own constitutions, except as the plan circumscribed them. The retention of internal sovereignty within the individual colonies closely resembled the Iroquois system and had no existing precedent in Europe.

Thomas Jefferson and Native American Concepts of Governance

While Franklin and Jefferson were too pragmatic to believe that they could copy the �natural state,� its image was sewn early into the United States� national ideological fabric. Jefferson wrote: �The only condition on earth to be compared with ours, in my opinion, is that of the Indian, where they have still less law than we.� When Thomas Paine wrote, on the first page of his influential pamphlet Common Sense, that �government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence,� he was recapitulating observations of Native American societies.

Writing to Edward Carrington in 1787, Jefferson linked freedom of expression with public opinion and happiness, citing American Indian societies as an example:

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, our very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter �. I am convinced that those societies [as the Indians] which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments.

�Without government� could not have meant without social order to Jefferson. He, Franklin, and Paine all knew native societies too well to argue that Native Americans functioned without social cohesion. It was clear that the Iroquois, for example, did not organize a confederacy with alliances spreading over much of northeastern North America �without government.� They did it, however, with a non-European conception of government, one of which Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin were appreciative students who sought to factor �natural law� and �natural rights� into their designs for the United States during the revolutionary era.    

A Debate Regarding Federalism at the Constitutional Convention

By June of 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were engaged in a debate about the fundamental nature of the Union. Many delegates appeared to agree with James Wilson when he stated, on June 1, 1787, that he would not be �governed by the British model which was inapplicable to � this country.� Wilson believed that America�s size was so great and its ideals so �republican, that nothing but a great confederated republic would do for it.�

In 1787, on the eve of the Constitutional Convention, John Adams published his A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. Although Adams was selected as a Massachusetts delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he chose not to attend and published his lengthy essay instead. Adams�s Defence was a critical survey of world governments that included a description of the Iroquois and other Native American governments and other historical examples of confederacies in Europe and Asia.

Adams�s Defence was no unabashed endorsement of native models for government. He refuted the arguments of Franklin, who advocated a one-house legislature resembling the Iroquois Grand Council, a model that had been used in the Albany Plan and Articles of Confederation. Adams did not trust the consensus model that seemed to work for the Iroquois. Adams believed that without the checks and balances built into two houses, the system would succumb to special interests and dissolve into anarchy, or despotism. When Adams described the Mohawks� independence, he exercised criticism, while Franklin wrote about Indian governments in a much more approving way.

Native American Ideas and the Origins of American Feminism

An aspect of Native American life that alternately intrigued, perplexed, and sometimes alarmed European and European-American observers, most of whom were male, during the 17th and 18th centuries, was the influential role of women. In many cases they hold pivotal positions in Native political systems. Iroquois women, for example, nominate men to positions of leadership and can �dehorn,� or impeach, them for misconduct. Women often have veto power over men�s plans for war. In a matrilineal society � and nearly all the confederacies that bordered the colonies were matrilineal � women owned all household goods except the men�s clothes, weapons, and hunting implements. They also were the primary conduits of culture from generation to generation.

The role of women in Iroquois society inspired some of the most influential advocates of modern feminism in the United States. The Iroquois example figures importantly in a seminal book in what Sally R. Wagner calls �the first wave of feminism,� Matilda Joslyn Gage�s Woman, Church, and State (1893). In that book, Gage acknowledges, according to Wagner�s research, that �the modern world [is] indebted [to the Iroquois] for its first conception of inherent rights, natural equality of condition, and the establishment of a civilized government upon this basis.�

Gage was one of the 19th century�s three most influential American feminists, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Gage herself was admitted to the Iroquois Council of Matrons and was adopted into the Wolf Clan, with the name Karonienhawi, �she who holds [up] the sky.�

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

Native-Owned Newspaper Wins Battles with Torch of Truth

 By Tim Giago

Tim Giago is an Oglala Lakota journalist and editor who founded the Lakota Times on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1981. Later renamed Indian Country Today, it became the largest independent Indian newspaper in the country.

Giago has trained and mentored numerous American Indian journalists.

An award-winning journalist, he was founder and first president of the Native American Journalists Association, has worked in both print and broadcast media, is the author of several books, and writes a nationally distributed weekly column, �Notes on Indian Country.� Emerging from retirement, Giago started the weekly Native Sun News in April 2009, to �go back to the traditional way of providing news for Indian country,� in print and not online, he wrote in his Huffington Post blog.

In 1980, 29 years ago, there wasn�t a single independent, Native American-owned weekly newspaper in the United States. I didn�t know that when I decided to start a weekly newspaper on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the spring of 1981.

A business plan? What was that? I failed to realize until I went to a bank in the reservation border town of Rushville, Nebraska, that interest rates at the time hovered around 20 percent. The 1980 U.S. Census had just been released and it named Shannon County, the heart of the Pine Ridge Reservation, as the �poorest county in America.�

In the face of all these negatives, I started a weekly newspaper. I started the paper because it was vitally needed. Gossip and rumor and lies were rampant, and I believed that the people deserved to know the truth. Truth was my torch, and truth is what made this small startup newspaper a success. Within two years our circulation had spread to all nine reservations within South Dakota�s borders. Our circulation had gone from the initial 3,000 to nearly 12,000 weekly within the first three years.

 Guns vs. Words

There was a lot of violence on the reservation following the Wounded Knee occupation (an armed, 71-day, activist takeover of the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, which drew law enforcement, publicity, and attention to Native American issues). Factions fought factions and it was a terrible time in our history. The murder of two FBI agents at Oglala on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1978 exacerbated the situation. I decided that my newspaper, the Lakota Times, had to address this continuing violence and condemn it. Strong editorials pointed out the damage this violence was doing to the future of the tribe. The newspaper covered the violent incidents in depth. The truth upset the violent ones. Attacks began upon the Lakota Times. Office windows were blasted out with guns on three occasions. The newspaper was firebombed with Molotov cocktails in 1981, just before Christmas.

One dark and drizzly night, after I had put the paper to bed and walked out in the rain and climbed into my car, my windshield was shattered by a bullet that ripped past my head. Phone threats of death menaced me, my wife, and my children. The president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Joe American Horse, called a special session of the tribal council after my building was firebombed. American Horse said, �Starting with now, anymore attacks upon the Lakota Times will be considered an attack upon the Oglala Sioux Tribe.� The attacks stopped.

Only one newspaper editor in the entire state of South Dakota had the courage to speak out about the attacks upon me and my newspaper. His name was Jim Carrier and he was managing editor at the Rapid City Journal. Although I was a fellow newspaper editor and publisher in this state and although the attacks on my newspaper were published on my front page, all of the other non-Indian editors totally ignored what was happening to one of their own. Carrier was fired not too long after he stood up for me.

We weathered this horrific storm, and the attacks only made us stronger, but more than that, it brought the Lakota people to our side. It quelled some of the fear that permeated the reservation in the early 1980s. At first people were afraid to write a letter to the editor, until one brave Lakota woman from the Pejuta Haka (Medicine Root) District, my home district, wrote a letter to our newspaper condemning the violence. She wrote, �If Tim Giago, a Lakota man I have known since he was a small boy, can stand up and fight this violence, we Lakota winyan [women] must do the same.�

Pen Mightier Than Sword

After her letter it seemed that the floodgates opened and letters poured into our newspaper speaking up about all of the issues that have plagued our tribal government for years. At last the people had a forum through which they could express their opinions.

For more than 100 years every newspaper in South Dakota had had the opportunity, or I should say the obligation, to cover the largest minority in their state, the Native Americans. They chose not to do this, and so my small weekly newspaper, started on a shoestring, soon became the largest weekly newspaper in the history of South Dakota. It succeeded because it filled a void and it opened the doors for the Native American people to finally move into 20th-century media.

The Lakota Times became the watchdog for the Indian people. When we saw the disparity in justice, one for whites and one for Indians, we attacked it. When we stood up with editorials urging the state legislators and the governor to create a Native American Day as a legal holiday in this state, we won. South Dakota became the only state in the Union to celebrate Native American Day, and this would never have happened if a small, independent Indian-owned newspaper, the Lakota Times, had not fought to see it happen.

We won many battles without using a gun, and we proved indelibly that �the pen is mightier than the sword.� 

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

Nonviolent Thought Through U.S. History

By Ira Chernus

Rooted in 16th century Europe, the intellectual traditions of nonviolent thought and action were developed in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries and traveled abroad to Asia and Africa.

Ira Chernus is a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea.

This article appears in the March 2009 issue of eJournal USA, Nonviolent Paths to Social Change (PDF, 783 KB).

When people set out to create social change, they have to decide whether to use violence to achieve their aims. Some who opt for nonviolence may have no objection to violence in principle. They just believe that violence will not succeed in gaining their goals, or they are afraid of getting hurt, or they can�t persuade others to join them in violence. Theirs is the nonviolence of convenience, or pragmatic nonviolence.

But over the centuries there have been many who might have gained their goals through violence � who had the means, the courage, and the strength to do violence � yet freely decided not to do violence under any circumstances. They followed the way of principled nonviolence. Though many have been inspired to adopt principled nonviolence for emotional and cultural reasons, they have also been moved by the rich intellectual tradition that offers logical arguments on behalf of nonviolence.

That intellectual tradition runs like an underground stream through U.S. history. Its roots go back to the Anabaptist Christians of Europe in the 16th century, the era when Protestant Christianity began. The Anabaptists rejected violence because they were committed to staying separated from the mainstream society and its many conflicts. Some of their descendants came to the United States, where they established what are known as the historic peace churches.

The distinctive American contribution came when other Christians, who were deeply involved in the conflicts of society, decided on principle to pursue political and social change using only nonviolent means. The process began in colonial times, before the United States declared its independence from Britain, among members of the Society of Friends, known as Quakers. Their strict commitment to nonviolence led some of them to oppose the payment of taxes for war, the enslavement of African Americans, and the persecution and displacement of Native American peoples. But the Quakers were primarily a religious group, whose beliefs led them to nonviolence.

The great turning point came in the 1820s and 1830s, when a group of people from different religious backgrounds began to demand the abolition of slavery in the United States. These abolitionists were nearly all Christians, and not all of them were committed to pursuing their goal nonviolently. Those who were, however, created the first group that formed around a goal of political-social change and then chose nonviolence as their means. They believed in God as the supreme ruler of the universe. Therefore, they said, no human should ever exercise authority over another human. On that basis they denounced slavery. But since violence is always a way of exercising authority, they were led logically to renounce violence, too.

The same line of thinking influenced the great essayist Henry David Thoreau to go to jail rather than pay taxes to a government that supported war and slavery. In his famous 1849 essay �Civil Disobedience,� Thoreau explained that he would never obey an unjust law, regardless of what punishment he received, because people should follow their own conscience rather than passively follow the government�s demands. Thoreau�s main goal was to maintain his own moral virtue and his freedom to act on the truth as he saw it. But he did point out that if enough people refused to obey unjust laws, they could �clog the machinery� of the state.

Tolstoy and Gandhi

The writings of the abolitionists and Thoreau inspired the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy to become an ardent exponent of Christian nonviolence. His writings, in turn, helped to shape the ideas of the greatest of all nonviolent activists, the leader of India�s independence movement, Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi. In the 20th century, the ideas of Tolstoy and Gandhi came back to the United States and inspired many Americans, who often did not know that so much of the theory of nonviolence had originated in their own country.

For Gandhi, nonviolence was more a matter of intention than actual behavior. He defined �violence� as the intention to coerce another person to do something the other person does not want to do. Nonviolent actions such as boycotts, blockades, and disobedience to laws may look coercive, but if done in a true spirit of nonviolence, they are merely ways of following the moral truth as one sees it. They leave others free to respond in any way they choose. A follower of Gandhian nonviolence says, in the spirit of Thoreau, �I am doing what I feel I must do. Now you do whatever you feel you must do. You may jail me, beat me, or even kill me. But you cannot take away my freedom to be true to my conscience.�

Gandhi recognized that he was calling all people to act on their subjective view of truth. No one can know the whole truth, he said, and we must be open to the possibility that we will later see that we were wrong. That is why we must never aim to impose our own views on others. But we must take a firm stand � even unto death � on the truth as we see it now. Only then can we discover for ourselves what the truth is in any given situation.

Since principled nonviolence means non-coercion, people committed to nonviolence believe they are never trying to make a situation turn out the way they want it. They are working not for selfish purposes but for the good of the whole world as they see it. In fact, according to Gandhi, they should never be concerned about the outcome of their actions at all. They should only be sure that they are doing the morally right thing at every moment. Following the moral truth is both the means and the end of nonviolence; a right process is the goal. Therefore, nonviolence should not be judged by its ability to produce results.

The most famous exponent of nonviolence in the United States was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the great spokesman for the civil rights of African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. King agreed with Gandhi that nonviolent actions must always be taken out of concern for the well-being of all people, even those who are unjust and oppressive. �We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,� he proclaimed, �tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.�

Unlike Gandhi, though, King was concerned about the results of his actions. He judged the strategies of the civil rights movement not only by their intrinsic moral virtue, but also by their effectiveness in ending discrimination against black people. He wanted to provoke conflict and win political victories.

But as long as one is working nonviolently for justice and equality, King argued, the conflict will yield greater justice and peace for everyone. So in his view, there is no conflict between success for oneself and benefit for society: �We are in the fortunate position of having our deepest sense of morality coalesce with our self-interest.� Even when our acts involve unyielding confrontation and pressure, he said, as long as we are motivated by selfless love offered equally to both sides in the conflict, we are working to harmonize the opposing sides and improve life for all. On that point, Gandhi certainly would have agreed.

Results From Nonviolence

The civil rights movement demonstrated that nonviolence can produce results, if one chooses to judge by that standard. In the 1960s, the nonviolent movement to end the Vietnam War � largely inspired by the successes of civil rights activists � played a significant role in persuading the U.S. government to remove its troops from Vietnam.

Up to the 1960s, most Americans who committed themselves to principled nonviolence were moved by Christian religious beliefs. But the protest movement against the Vietnam War brought in many who were not Christian. The Jewish Peace Fellowship (founded in 1941) grew significantly. An emerging Buddhist peace movement was guided by the teachings of Thich Nhat Hahn and, later, the Dalai Lama.

There were also many more Americans with no religious affiliation who were drawn to nonviolence. They could find inspiration in the writings of the feminist Barbara Deming. Nonviolence is necessarily coercive, she wrote. But it forces people to stop doing only things that they have no moral right to do. It leaves intact their freedom to do whatever they have a right to do. So nonviolence is the most effective way to make lasting social and political change because it is least likely to antagonize the people being forced to change.

Since the 1960s, the United States has seen a growing interest in principled nonviolence applied to many political issues, though it still counts only a very small minority of the population among its adherents.

Nonviolence movements in the United States have also helped to spawn similar movements around the world. They have achieved major improvements in their conditions of life � most notably, in the overthrow of totalitarian regimes in places from Eastern Europe to the Philippines. Nonviolent activists helped to end long-standing and bitter conflicts in Northern Ireland, Guatemala, and East Timor, among other places. They are now active on numerous fronts in conflict zones around the world. In the long view of history, the United States is at the center of an ongoing global process of nonviolent social and political change.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

Oil Companies Embrace Energy Efficiency

By Patrick Crow

Big oil companies are funding major advertising campaigns, suggesting consumers use less energy. It is not a typical approach for a company to implore us to use less of what it sells, but it underscores that all the major players in the energy economy are serious about issues of efficiency and conservation.

Patrick Crow covered the U.S. Congress and federal agencies for 21 years as a reporter for an oil and gas magazine. Crow now is a Houston, Texas-based freelance writer who specializes in energy, chemicals, and water topics.

Major U.S. oil and gas corporations are in the business to sell energy, but today they are urging consumers to use less of it.

The companies are using an array of public relations tools � speeches, advertisements, advocacy groups, and grants � in campaigns to publicize the fact they favor energy efficiency. Although they have long been efficiency advocates, now they are much louder, much more fervent, and much more determined to be seen as the major ally of energy consumers in the battle against high prices.

They are not promoting deliberate conservation (when a homeowner turns the heat down and puts on a sweater), so much as they are promoting efficiency (when a homeowner installs a new furnace that burns less fuel).

Carol Werner, of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, told eJournal USA in an interview that soaring crude oil prices had a lot to do with this trend. �There was a lot of outrage directed at the oil companies last year [2008] as prices skyrocketed and sent a shock through the economic system. Talking about reducing energy use was one way for the oil companies to deflect some of that anger.�

Although the growth of the public outreach campaigns did seem to parallel the steady rise in crude prices, which went from $60 per barrel in mid-2007 to a peak of $147 in mid-2008, oil prices have plunged $100 per barrel since then, but the promotions have continued unabated.

�These companies are constantly reinventing themselves and want to be involved in developing the new technologies,� said Larry Goldstein, an analyst with the Energy Policy Research Foundation. He explained that the oil firms periodically update their business plans to reflect current operating circumstances. �They have to play in the world that is defined for them; they can�t design that world themselves.�

Werner said the oil companies also became conservation converts as they worked to reduce the expenses of operating their energy-intensive drilling rigs, pipelines, and refineries. She said, �The more the companies can drop their consumption, the better it is for their bottom line. Plus it enables them to reduce their carbon footprint, their own greenhouse gas emissions.�

The companies have taken those lessons from their own operations and formed subsidiaries to market their expertise to other firms needing to make efficiency improvements. Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, explained, �They see themselves as energy companies and don�t want to just ride the �oil train�.�

The outreach efforts also are an outgrowth of the industry�s prior communications miscues, according to John Hofmeister, who heads Citizens for Affordable Energy. Hofmeister, who was president of Shell U.S. from 2005 until last year, said that in the 1990s and early 2000s the companies failed to educate American consumers and politicians about tighter energy supplies and subsequently have lost their trust.

Goldstein said the companies� promotions are a manifestation of their competition for market share, just like the glassware gifts they gave drivers who bought their gasoline in the 1960s. �They're all basically trying to look �green� because they believe that�s what their customers expect. It�s not necessarily due to the economics of conservation but because the political and public pressures are so great. Nobody can stand up today and say �no� to conservation and efficiency,� he said.

The U.S. Congress has taken a different approach to conservation and efficiency. Earlier this year, it included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act an array of incentives for consumers, businesses, and governments to invest in a variety of technologies and strategies to squeeze greater productivity out of every energy dollar.

That law may not be the final word on the subject either. Congress could revisit efficiency as it considers global warming and energy bills later this session.

For Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, energy efficiency means using the right fuel in the right way. He has proposed that the United States use more wind and solar energy to generate electric power, reducing the need for natural gas. The surplus natural gas then could be used to displace diesel fuel use in heavy trucks, which in turn would decrease demand for imported oil. On his Internet page, Pickens said his strategy would �buy us time to develop new technologies that will ultimately replace fossil transportation fuels.�

The most influential advocate for energy efficiency and alternative fuels in Washington is President Barack Obama. He has declared, �It will be the policy of my administration to reverse our dependence on foreign oil, while building a new energy economy that will create millions of jobs.�

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

One Indian Writer�s Experience

By Akhil Sharma

Akhil Sharma�s first novel, An Obedient Father, won the 2000 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2001 Whiting Writers� Award. He writes for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. He was named among the best of young American novelists (2007) by Granta magazine.

I can only speak from my own experiences, and so I should not be understood to represent all Indian-American writers.

I first started writing short stories in ninth grade. I did this because I was very unhappy and I wanted attention.

My family came to America in 1979. There was me, my brother, my mother, and my father. Two years after we arrived, my brother had an accident in a swimming pool that left him severely brain damaged. I was 10 then, and my brother, 14.

My brother is still alive and he cannot walk or talk. Anup, which is my brother�s name, cannot be fed through his mouth, and so he is fed through a gastrointestinal tube that enters his stomach from just below his right ribs. Anup does not roll over automatically in his sleep, and so someone has to be with him all night long and turn him from side to side every two hours and, in this way, keep him from getting bed sores.

For two years after the accident, my brother was kept in a hospital, and then my parents decided to take care of him themselves. They brought him to our house and hired nurses. Other than the direct worries of my brother�s condition, another pressing worry that I grew up with was concern about money. Because we had such little money and because we were dependent on insurance companies and nurses, we felt that we were always being betrayed, that people were not fulfilling their responsibilities. Many times we had nurses who said that they would come and start a shift on a particular day and time and they wouldn�t show up. Also, because there were strangers in our house, we were always afraid that people would steal things. We had one nurse who stole teddy bears that my mother had bought at a flea market.

Until ninth grade, when I was 15, the only time I wrote short stories was when they were assigned for a class. In ninth grade I had a teacher, Mrs. Green, who praised me for how well I understood our reading assignments and so, to get more attention from her, I began writing stories.

At first all the stories I wrote had white American characters. I think this was partially because all the fiction I read was about white people. Equally important though was that I felt the experience of being an Indian American was not important. Living as a minority, not sharing the experiences of the majority population, I felt that my experiences, because they were not the majority experience, were not as important as those of white people. Also, to some extent, I felt that my experiences, because they were not shared, were not even as real as those of white Americans.

Among the problems I had in writing about whites is that I didn�t know anything about whites. It was only in 10th grade that I first went into a white person�s house.

In 10th grade I read a biography of Ernest Hemingway. I remember starting reading it one morning at the kitchen table and the windows of the kitchen being dark. I read the biography of Hemingway so that I could lie to people and tell them that I had read Hemingway�s books. (I used to lie all the time and claim I had read books I had not.)

I read the book and was amazed. What amazed me was that Hemingway had gotten to live in France and Spain, that he had travelled to Cuba and appeared to have had a good time in his life. Till then I had thought that I would be a computer programmer or an engineer or a doctor. When I read the book, I suddenly thought that I could have a lifestyle like Ernest Hemingway�s and not lead a boring life.

After I read the biography, I began to read other books about Hemingway. I read biographies and collections of critical essays. I must have read 20 books about Hemingway before I read any actual work written by him. I read all this about Hemingway because I wanted to learn how to repeat what he had done and I didn�t want to leave any clue unexamined. At first, I was not actually interested in Hemingway�s own writing.

I think of Hemingway as the writer who has influenced me most. Hemingway, as you probably already know, wrote about characters whose experience was exotic to American readers. He wrote about gangsters and soldiers in Italy and journalists in Paris. Among the many things I learned from Hemingway, and I could say that almost everything I am as a writer began with Hemingway or as a response against Hemingway, one was how to write about exotic things without being bogged down by the exoticism. Scholars who analyzed Hemingway pointed out that his stories began in the middle of the action, that he wrote as if the reader already knew a great deal about the environment that he was writing about, that when he gave direct explanations, this breaking of the reality of fictional experience was a way of saying to the reader that the reason I am breaking this fictional convention is because I don�t want to lie.

For me, because I began my education as a writer with Hemingway and did not really read any nonwhite writers until I was in college, I have always thought that writing is just writing. Writing is just a string of words and a series of strategies that generate experiences within the reader. I have always felt that in the same way that the race of a surgeon does not matter because a heart and a gall bladder remain a heart and a gall bladder, no matter the race of the patient, the race of a writer also does not matter.

I came to America as part of a great wave of immigration. Because this wave of Asian immigrants has created curiosity within American society as to what exactly it is like to be in Asian families, I have been lucky to have had my books read. (I think of myself as a good writer, but I could imagine that if I had been writing 50 years earlier, my writing might have been too exotic and peripheral to be worth reading by ordinary readers.)

My first book won the PEN/ Hemingway prize. This is given to the best first novel published in any given year.

The person who gave me the prize was one of Hemingway�s sons. I believe it was Patrick Hemingway who gave me the prize. This white-haired gentleman and I sat and talked in a conference room for about 10 or 15 minutes. I did not tell him how much his father had mattered to me because I felt shy. Instead we talked about how his father had found titles for his books in The Book of Common Prayer.

Sometimes when I think of how lucky I have been, I want to cry.

Public Universities in the United States

Public universities have huge enrollments and hundreds of degrees

By Robert H. Bruininks

Public, or state, universities typically enroll tens of thousands of students and offer degrees in hundreds of subject areas. Robert H. Bruininks outlines the makeup and financing structure of large state universities and the opportunities for international students and scholars. He has been president of the University of Minnesota since 2002 and is a member of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

Large public universities in the United States, also referred to as state universities, are closely identified with and supported by the states in which they are located. They are exciting, dynamic, and highly regarded centers for higher education, with unique traditions and connections to their communities. They are also major magnets for talent from all over the country and the world.

Typically, universities of this type enroll tens of thousands of students. They produce the majority of graduate and professional degrees in the country, as well as a significant number of undergraduate degrees. Also common to large public universities are a wide range of academic programs. To use my own institution as an example, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus has 50,000 students, offers hundreds of degrees, and is a leader in fields as varied as neurology and transplant surgery, economics and political science, material sciences and nanotechnology, and agriculture and natural resources.

Public universities play a critical role in regional economic, cultural, and civic development, and many, such as the University of Minnesota, are deeply involved in advancing knowledge and technology through research. These universities are among the major research universities in the United States and frequently have major involvement in international programs around the world. A series of federal actions in the second half of the 19th century provided resources to states to help establish and build universities. Public universities that arose from this federal largesse have a mandate to provide outreach and community engagement to the state in which they are located (e.g., technology transfer, support to agriculture, interaction with primary and secondary schools, and interaction with state and local policy makers).

The level of research intensity varies greatly among state universities. Competitive research grants and contracts awarded to the most prestigious public universities typically amount to hundreds of millions of dollars each year. There is also great variation in the level of support from the states. State universities with large research budgets typically receive 10 to 30 percent of their budgets from the state in which they are located. The remaining portion of their budget comes from tuition and fees, grants/contracts, and gifts.

As a result of the financing structure of large state universities, many graduate students receive financial aid through research assistantships associated with research grants and contracts received by the university. Although many public universities are seeking increased funding to support international exchanges and study, access to financial aid for international students is very limited outside of the aforementioned research/grant funding. Since undergraduates do not generally hold research assistantships, scholarship support for international students seeking undergraduate degrees is quite limited at these public universities.

Large state universities are located in a variety of communities, from modest towns to large metropolitan areas. Many universities also have multiple campuses at locations throughout their state, and many states also have more than one public university system.

Public universities are governed by boards of trustees or regents, with varying reporting responsibility to the state government. Unlike in many other countries, these U.S. universities don't report to a federal-level education minister, and higher education policy is largely delegated to the states, with the important exceptions of federal student financial aid and research funding through federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and many other federal agencies.

Some traditions of public universities in the United States are quite different from those in other countries. Even at these state-supported institutions, students have traditionally paid for part of their education through tuition and fees, and these costs to students are increasing. Today the average student takes out loans in order to help pay for his or her education. Private fundraising plays an increasingly important role in funding projects, scholarships, and positions at public universities. Finally, intercollegiate athletics attract intense interest from students, alumni, and members of the general public, and athletic events generate additional revenue.

Among all U.S. universities, large state universities often include the largest percentage of international students and scholars. At the University of Minnesota, our community includes more than 4,500 international students and scholars from about 130 countries. The University of Minnesota provides support services such as counseling and advising on personal and academic issues, orientation to U.S. and university culture, immigration and visa advising, and English as a second language courses, as well as programs and workshops on a variety of topics including intercultural understanding and communication. Many state universities have similar programs in place to help students navigate what can sometimes be a confusing system of administration and academic regulation, although the scope of these services varies from institution to institution.

With growing competition from other countries, no major university in the United States can afford to take the interest of foreign students for granted. As a result, public universities are increasingly focused on attracting top students from around the world. If you are a motivated and self-directed student looking for exposure to the cutting edge of knowledge and creative work, I encourage you to investigate the rich opportunities available among large public universities in the United States.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

The Demographics of Faith

By Brian J. Grim and David Masci

Scores of different religious groups coexist in the United States, all enjoying the right to follow their faiths with the legal protection of the U.S. Constitution.

Brian J. Grim, senior research fellow in religion and world affairs, and David Masci, senior research fellow in religion and law, are with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The Forum is a project of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan organization in Washington, D.C., which provides information on issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the United States and the world.

The United States is one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world. Indeed, with adherents from all of the world�s major religions, the United States is truly a nation of religious minorities. Although Protestantism remains the dominant strain of Christianity in the United States, the Protestant tradition is divided into dozens of major denominations, all with unique beliefs, religious practices, and histories. Furthermore, Protestant Christianity�s dominance in the United States has waned in recent years. In fact, a recent public opinion survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (Figure 1) finds that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country for the first time in its history. The number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51 percent, down from more than 60 percent in the 1970s and 1980s.

Roman Catholics account for about a quarter of U.S. adults, and members of other Christian faiths account for an additional 3.3 percent. Overall, nearly eight in 10 adults report belonging to various forms of Christianity. Other world religions � including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism � now have followers among about 5 percent of the U.S. adult population. Almost one in six adults are not affiliated with any particular religion, a population that has been growing in recent decades.

Religious diversity in the United States is driven by many factors, including immigration. America�s religious diversity also reflects the protections afforded to the free practice of religion under the U.S. Constitution. Not only do immigrants feel free to bring their religious beliefs and practices with them, but many Americans decide to change their religious affiliation at least once in their lives. Indeed, according to the Forum survey conducted in mid-2007, more than a quarter of American adults have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion � or no religion at all � and that does not include changes in affiliation from one type of Protestantism� to another.

Rights and Restrictions on Religion in the United States

The U.S. Constitution offers protections for religious minorities and for religious practices in general. These guarantees are included in what are called the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses of the Constitution�s First Amendment. The First Amendment, which also guarantees freedom of speech and assembly, was enacted in 1791, along with the other nine amendments that make up the Bill of Rights.

The drafters of the First Amendment, most notably James Madison (a key architect of the Constitution and the fourth U.S. president), were keenly aware that religious differences in Europe had led to centuries of violent conflict. They also opposed policies made by some American states of that era to impose restrictions on certain religious denominations in favor of state-sanctioned or established churches. In particular, Madison believed that limits on freedom of worship, along with government efforts to create religious uniformity, violated fundamental individual rights. He also argued that religious faith would best thrive in an environment in which the government protected individuals� religious liberty but did not support religious institutions. These two aims are the basis for the First Amendment�s religion clauses.

Even in Madison�s day, however, there was significant disagreement over the exact meaning of the religion clauses, which state that �Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.� As a result, it has been largely left to the courts to determine the exact meaning of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses.

While everyone agrees that the First Amendment prohibits the creation of a government-supported church, agreement essentially ends there. Some argue, for example, that the Establishment Clause prevents all government entanglement with religion. They believe, as Founding Father Thomas Jefferson once wrote, that �a wall of separation� exists between church and state. Others argue that the state can support religious activities and institutions as long as it does not favor one faith over another. When disputes over religious practice have entered the judicial system, courts have walked a line between these two views. They have generally ruled that the government can broadly acknowledge religion � for example, on the currency and in public oaths and pledges � but have struck down laws that seem to promote religion � such as the teaching of the Bible in public schools.

The Free Exercise Clause also has been the subject of much debate and disagreement. While courts have consistently determined that the clause protects all religious beliefs, they have treated religious practices and activities differently. Generally, courts have held that the First Amendment does not give people of faith a blank check to ignore the law. However, some court decisions have granted special exemptions to religious groups, including minority faiths. For instance, in 1943 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of Jehovah�s Witnesses to refuse to participate in compulsory flag-saluting ceremonies based on their religious beliefs.

The U.S. Religious Landscape

Within this legal context, a great diversity of religious expression has flourished in the Unites States. No official estimates are maintained of the number of religious groups in the United States because the U.S. Census Bureau has not surveyed citizens about religious beliefs or membership in religious groups since the late 1950s. A good source of information on religion in the United States today comes from the Forum�s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 adults, the Landscape Survey details the great diversity of religious affiliation in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century.

Larger Religious Groups in the United States

The survey found that nearly eight in 10 adults in the United States belong to a Christian church or denomination. Members of Protestant churches now constitute a slim majority (51.3 percent) of the adult population. But Protestantism in the United States is not homogeneous; rather, it is divided into three distinct religious traditions � evangelical Protestant churches (26.3 percent of the overall adult population and roughly half of all Protestants); mainline Protestant churches (18.1 percent of the adult population and more than one-third of all Protestants); and historically African-American Protestant churches (6.9 percent of the overall adult population and slightly less than one-seventh of all Protestants). Protestantism also comprises numerous denominational families (e.g., Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal) that fit into one or more of the above traditions.

Roman Catholics account for nearly one-quarter (23.9 percent) of the adult population and roughly three in 10 American Christians. Among the native-born adult population, Protestants greatly outnumber Catholics (55 percent Protestant vs. 21 percent Catholic). But among foreign-born adults, Catholics outnumber Protestants by nearly a two-to-one margin (46 percent Catholic vs. 24 percent Protestant).

Smaller Religious Minorities

The Muslim share of the U.S. adult population is estimated to be 0.6 percent, according to the Pew Research Center�s 2007 nationwide survey of Muslim Americans, which was conducted in Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi in addition to English. Roughly two-thirds of Muslim Americans are immigrants. Nonetheless, the survey finds that they are decidedly mainstream in their outlook, values, and attitudes. Overwhelmingly, Muslim Americans believe that hard work pays off, a belief that is reflected in the fact that Muslim Americans� income and education levels generally mirror those of the overall American public. Muslims also are the most racially diverse group in the United States. More than one in three Muslims are white, roughly one in four are black, one in five are Asian, and nearly one in five are of other races.

Hindus account for approximately 0.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to Pew�s Religious Landscape Survey. More than eight in 10 American Hindus are foreign born, coming almost exclusively from South-Central Asia. Nearly half of Hindus in the United States have obtained a postgraduate education, compared with only about one in 10 of the adult population overall. Hindus also are much more likely than other groups to report high income levels, with more than four in 10 making more than $100,000 per year.

Buddhists make up 0.7 percent of U.S. adults. In contrast to Islam and Hinduism, Buddhism in the United States is primarily made up of native-born adherents, whites, and converts. Only one in three American Buddhists describe their race as Asian, and nearly three in four Buddhists say they are converts to Buddhism. A quarter of Buddhists have obtained postgraduate education, a much higher percentage than in the adult population overall.

The survey finds that most American Jews identify with one of three major Jewish groups: Reform (43 percent), Conservative (31 percent), and Orthodox (10 percent). More than eight in 10 Jews were raised Jewish, and about seven in 10 are married to someone who shares their Jewish faith. More than one-third of Jews have a postgraduate education, and, like Hindus, Jews have much higher income levels than the general population.

A large number of Americans belong to a third major branch of global Christianity � Orthodoxy � whose adherents now account for 0.6 percent of the adult population. In addition, American Christianity includes sizeable numbers of Mormons and Jehovah�s Witnesses. Mormons account for 1.7% of the adult population. Approximately six in 10 Mormons have had at least some college education, compared with half of the general U.S. population. Mormons tend to have slightly higher income levels than average, with a majority (58 percent) making more than $50,000 per year. Jehovah�s Witnesses account for 0.7 percent of the adult population. More than two-thirds of Jehovah�s Witnesses are converts from another faith or were not affiliated with any particular religion as a child.

The survey finds that 16.1 percent of the adult population says they are unaffiliated with a particular religion, making the unaffiliated the fourth largest �religious� tradition in the United States. But the survey also finds that the unaffiliated population is quite diverse and that it is simply not accurate to describe this entire group as nonreligious or �secular.� In fact, despite their lack of affiliation with any particular religious group, a large portion of this group says religion is somewhat important or very important in their lives.

Only 1.6 percent of the adult population in the United States says they are atheist, with men being twice as likely as women to say they are atheist. Younger adults (those under age 30) also are more likely than the adult population as a whole to be atheist.

Geographic Distribution of Religious Groups

The survey finds that each region of the United States displays a distinctive pattern of religious affiliation. The Midwest, or central part of the country, most closely resembles the overall religious makeup of the general population. About a quarter (26 percent) of residents of the Midwest are members of an evangelical Protestant church, about one in five (22 percent) are members of a mainline Protestant church, nearly a quarter (24 percent) are Catholic, and 16 percent are unaffiliated. These proportions are nearly identical to what the survey finds among the general public.

The Northeast has more Catholics (37 percent) than other regions and has the fewest number of people affiliated with evangelical Protestant churches (13 percent). Northeasterners also are much more likely to be Jewish (4 percent are Jewish) than people living in other regions. By contrast, fully half of members of evangelical Protestant churches live in the South, compared with only 10 percent in the Northeast and 17 percent in the West. The vast majority of Mormons (76 percent) live in the West, with the highest concentration in the state of Utah. The West also has the largest proportion of people unaffiliated with any particular religion (21 percent), including the largest number of atheists and agnostics.

American Religion: Diverse and Not Dogmatic

Perhaps reflecting the great religious diversity in the United States, most Americans agree with the statement that many religions � not just their own � can lead to eternal life. Indeed, the survey finds that most Americans also have a nondogmatic approach when it comes to interpreting the tenets of their own religion. For instance, more than two-thirds of adults affiliated with a religious tradition agree that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their faith. The lack of dogmatism in American religion, combined with the legal protections afforded to all religious groups, means that religious minorities are likely to continue to find a welcoming home in the United States.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

The End of Capitalism? Mark Twain, Lake Wobegon, Current Crisis

By Mark Blyth

While the type of financial crisis we face today is unprecedented, crises of capitalism are not. They are commonplace.

Mark Blyth is a professor of international political economy at Brown University. He is the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Political Change in the Twentieth Century.

If you draw what statisticians call a time series of the returns to the U.S. banking sector from 1947 to 2008, it is possible to talk with some confidence about the average rate of profitability of the sector over time, the peaks (1990s to mid-2000s), the troughs (1947 to 1967), and the sharp growth of the sector�s profitability over the past 10 years. If you then add in the data for the period between August 2008 and April 2009, the entire series, like the banking system it describes, simply blows up. Averages, means, variances, and the like dissolve, so extreme have been recent events. Indeed, when the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan, admits that his understanding of market processes was deeply flawed, and when the current chairman, Ben Bernanke, says that we face the greatest crisis since the Great Depression, we should probably take it seriously.

And serious it is. With a grossly diminished $1.3 trillion in assets and as much as $3.6 trillion in liabilities, coupled with a halving of the stock market, the U.S. financial system is either severely stressed, insolvent, or, worse still according to some, at the end of its tether. The end of capitalism has been declared many times before. And yet, to paraphrase American writer and humorist Mark Twain, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

The U.S. capitalism that will emerge from this crisis will be different from the highly financialized consumption-driven and trade-imbalanced version that we developed over the past two decades. It already has changed insofar as Wall Street proper no longer exists. But what people tend to forget is that we have been here before. While the type of crisis we face today is unprecedented, crises of capitalism are not: They are commonplace. It�s just that this one has hit the United States rather than another region of the world. But we have been here before and have survived, mainly because the present is not a copy of the past. Remembering this tempers the expectation that U.S. capitalism has run its course.

The Lake Wobegon Problem (where everyone is above average)

While there are surely many plausible candidates � ranging from the bonus culture of banks to Chinese savings and German parsimony � to blame for the crisis, focusing on the immediate present may mask a deeper set of causes. Putting this crisis in proper perspective requires that we begin almost 30 years ago with the unexpected marriage of unlimited liquidity and limited asset classes. Six processes came together to get us where we are today.

First, beginning in the 1980s, the world�s major financial centers deregulated their domestic credit markets and opened up their financial accounts. This �globalization of finance� resulted in a spectacular growth in available liquidity as previously isolated markets became intertwined. Second, this liquidity was given a huge boost with the growth of new financial instruments, particularly techniques of securitization and the increasing use of credit derivatives. Third, given this growth of global liquidity, long- and short-term interest rates began to fall precipitously. In 1991 the U.S. prime and federal funds rates (and thus global interest rates) began their long decline out of double figures to historic lows.

Fourth, given these changes, the commercial banking sectors of these now finance-driven economies became increasingly concentrated. Available bank credit skyrocketed at the same time as the privatization of former state responsibilities, especially in pensions, encouraged the growth of large non-bank institutional investors, all seeking �above-average� returns since their jobs depended upon beating some benchmark average, usually the annual return of the Standard & Poor�s 500 stock index or an index of their sector�s performance.

Fifth, the U.S. current account deficit climbed to historically unprecedented proportions of the gross domestic product. The United States was effectively borrowing between 3 and 6 percent of GDP each year for more than 20 years, and borrowing at such low interest rates seemed to make money free given the growth rates that we grew accustomed to.

Sixth, and perhaps what facilitated all of the above, was a deep seated ideological change that took place in the United States between 1970 and 2000. Namely, markets came to be seen by politicians, pundits, and the public as self-regulating wonders that could produce ever higher risk-free returns if only the state�s blundering and inefficient regulations could be swept away, which they were by obliging politicians of both parties. Add all this together and you have a financial sector that is both dependent on continually finding above-average returns at the same time as it becomes an increasingly large and important part of U.S. gross domestic product.

The Limits of Lake Wobegon

The problem with chasing a moving average is that it continually gets bid upwards. Here we run into a problem of asset classes: the limited number of categories of assets from which investors can seek above-average returns. There are only a few such classes around: equities (stock), cash (money market), and fixed income (bonds), to which one can add real estate and commodities. If equities, bonds, and money market instruments are regarded as reciprocal investments within a class, then stock markets, relatively underpriced in the early 1990s, became the obvious place to go for such returns. The massive volume of liquidity in its search for above-average returns first flooded U.S. equity markets and quickly thereafter hit global stock markets during the middle to late 1990s.

Once that particular bubble burst, most spectacularly in East Asia, neither bonds nor fixed income alone would provide the above-average returns that the markets � and all of us who depended on them � now expected. The next stop for investors was therefore the ill-fated dot-com bubble, and thereafter the next most obvious asset class, real estate � hence, the global housing boom, which began just as the dot-com bubble popped in the late 1990s. By 2008 this housing bubble had run out of (good) borrowers, in part owing to Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan�s raising of interest rates in the mid-2000s. The result of looking for a new return was that the remaining class of assets, commodities, became the next bubble, with oil quadrupling in price and basic foodstuffs rising between 40 and 70 percent in a little over a year. However, with the exception of oil, these were small markets, too small to sustain such volumes of liquidity, and these bubbles burst quickly. The commodity market collapse combined with losses in the subprime sector of the mortgage derivatives market triggered the current crisis.

Although it is referred to as the �subprime crisis,� it is perhaps better described as a subprime trigger for a systemic crisis caused when all these factors came together through financial actors� risk management practices. While banks and other financial firms have sophisticated models for managing their various risks (credit, liquidity, and the like), those same technologies can create instabilities in markets by either blinding their users to tail risks, which causes a channeling of risk into common portfolios across asset classes as everyone hedges the same way, or by linking assets together in a search for liquidity as positions are unwound as banks de-leverage. So what is rational for one bank can create systemic risk for all banks as asset positions become serially correlated on the upside and the downside of the bubble.

Once the entire banking system had loaded up on mortgage derivatives and credit default swaps, the crisis was just waiting to happen. It came when losses at several major U.S. banks triggered the fall of Lehman Brothers, which in turn caused massive losses in systemically linked markets, particularly the massive credit default swaps market. Liquidity dried up, and the crisis had begun. How it unfolds from here is really anyone�s guess, but does this mark the end of American capitalism? There are several reasons to think that this is not the case, and that Mark Twain�s injunction still stands.

Mark Twain and Three Reasons to Be Hopeful

It is worth noting that while Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke said that we faced the greatest crisis since the Great Depression, he did not say that we face a crisis as big as the Great Depression. Twenty to 40 percent unemployment, a collapse of world trade, ruinous competitive currency devaluations, absurd tariff levels, and the collapse of democracy were the reality of the Great Depression across the world. We face challenging times in the current crisis, and there is always the possibility that things could get much worse, but things are nowhere near this severe. This gives me reason for optimism regarding Twain�s observation, mainly because there is a huge difference between the world of the 1930s and the world that we live in today. Time�s arrow means that we always �live it forward,� such that the conditions of the present are never the same as the conditions of the past. Three of those conditions that pertain today and that are different from those of the 1930s give us the opportunity to avoid the mistakes of the past.

The first lesson learned is that lessons can be learned. We are not doomed to repeat the 1930s precisely because we can reflect upon how bad the 1930s were and how actions taken to protect ourselves individually in this period made us all worse off collectively. Those lessons learned made states across the world build automatic stabilizers into their economies in order to stave off collapses in consumption that would lead to protectionist and nationalist demands in the event of an external crisis, and to rely on multilateral cooperation to forestall obvious policy errors. One can legitimately argue that different countries learn different lessons. Hence, the Germans are worried about the inflationary consequences of the spending the Americans want the Europeans to undertake to avoid the unemployment that the Americans fear. But the point of meetings such as the G20 is to air those differences and find room for policy agreements. The question is one of balance between stimulus and regulation, and both sides of the Atlantic know that they need to find common ground to move forward.

My second reason for optimism derives from the new MAD. During the Cold War, we spoke of �mutually assured destruction,� in which the United States and the Soviet Union had so many nuclear weapons that one side could not destroy the other without destroying itself. Swap �mutually� for �monetarily� and you get the new MAD � �monetarily assured destruction� � which exists between China and the United States. One consequence of the financialization of the U.S. economy was that we managed to get China to swap real goods for paper, and a terrible rate of return on holding the paper, for more than 20 years, in the course of which the Chinese (and other East Asian economies) built up astonishingly large trade and current account surpluses. Essentially, without anyone ever making such a wager formally, the United States made a one-way bet that we could run our economy on finance in a global division of labor in which China made the goods in return for dollars that would be lent back to us so we could consume their products. That system has also come to an end. China needs to consume more and the United States needs to produce something besides mortgage derivatives, and both sides know this. Getting there will be painful, but the alternative, monetarily assured destruction, where the dollar is dumped and the exchanges collapse, is another individually rational and collectively disastrous policy that all parties know, this time around, to avoid.

Third, another ideology has failed. The belief that markets are uniquely good and self-regulating entities, while states are always and everywhere bad and overregulating monstrosities, is a recurring nightmare in the history of capitalism. The 1930s taught us that this belief in markets and self-regulation was fallacious and gave us the Keynesian era of regulated finance and welfare states. The 1970s, the other crisis period of the 20th century, taught us that Keynes was wrong and that open markets and unregulated finance were the way to go. That system, what might be called neoliberal globalization, was the system that just blew up. So what will be the lesson learned this time?

The lesson still to be fully learned from this crisis is that markets and states are always and everywhere mutually overlapping, constitutive, antagonistic, and generative. Capitalism as a system thrives best in an environment of prudential regulation provided by states, and U.S. capitalism is no different. The precise balance between state and market is a political question to be decided by different states. But that there needs to be a balance is something that most states, even the United States, now accept.

So Mark Twain�s injunction stands. Reports of the death of U.S. capitalism are exaggerated and will likely remain so as long as we are willing to learn that lessons from the past can indeed be learned.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

The Rise of the Independents

Kenneth Turan

The modern U.S. independent film industry was born when a few courageous directors spent their own money to produce movies that Hollywood studios were not interested in financing. Public appreciation for these usually low-budget, high-quality films, however, has enabled the independent film industry to grow and thrive. Kenneth Turan is the film critic for the Los Angeles Times newspaper and for Morning Edition on National Public Radio. He is the author of several books, including Now in Theaters Everywhere: A Celebration of a Certain Kind of Blockbuster (2006) and Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made (2002).

Most countries consider themselves fortunate if they have a film industry to call their own. While some areas of the world�India and Hong Kong come immediately to mind�have industries that are thriving, the United States is privileged in having not one but two viable motion picture industries.

The first industry, the one known everywhere movies are shown, is the mainstream Hollywood business. This is where the blockbusters come from, the films like Spiderman and Pirates of the Caribbean that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, earn literally billions of dollars worldwide in return, and spawn sequels almost without end.

But over the past 20-plus years, a parallel American movie industry, the independent film world, has grown up and prospered. It has its own annual festival (Sundance in Park City, Utah) and its own version of the Oscars (the Independent Spirit Awards, held a few days before the Academy Awards). There are even theaters that specialize in showing independent films and actors and directors who do mostly independent work.

That doesn't mean that there isn't something of a symbiotic relationship between these parts of the American movie whole: There very much is. Big Hollywood stars sometimes gain praise for appearing in independent films, the way Tom Cruise did when he took a part in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. And independent stars sometimes find a home in bigger Hollywood films, the way indie (independent) stalwart Steve Buscemi did when he appeared in traditional blockbusters such as Armageddon and The Island. And the independents have also come to be a major force in that most Hollywood of institutions, the Oscars.

Finally, though, two key elements separate the Hollywood movies from the independents. One is budget�how much money a film costs to make�and the other is sensibility and subject matter�what a film is about. As always in the American movie business, the two are linked.

Emphasis on Artistry

When a film costs $100 million plus, as the average studio film does, it has to appeal to the widest possible audience, not only in the United States but all around the world, in order to make its money back. That means an emphasis on action, the one element that audiences everywhere respond to, as well as on the qualities that appeal to the 25-and-under crowd that is the most frequent moviegoing audience.

Independent films, by contrast, cost less: They can be made for anywhere from a few thousand dollars to $15 to $20 million. Though that may seem like a lot of money, by Hollywood standards it is not. And that lower cost frees these films to be more personal, more idiosyncratic, more concerned with character and story than explosions. These films can care more about artistry and self-expression and less about what will work at the box office, which is one of the reasons that they tend to do better at the Oscars than the big money-makers.

If any American movie fan wanted these kinds of experiences from movies 40 or 50 years ago, the only place he or she could get them was in foreign-language films, which is part of the reason the 1950s and 1960s saw an ever-increasing audience for films from France, Italy, Japan, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.

The independent alternative, which allowed American audiences to experience these kinds of films in their own language, did not arrive out of nowhere. The late actor and director John Cassavetes (the only filmmaker to have a prize named for him at the Independent Spirit Awards) was making independent-style films as early as 1957, when his legendary Shadows was shot.

Many people also credit John Sayles's 1980 The Return of the Secaucus Seven with starting the modern independent movement. It cost $60,000 to make, which Sayles financed himself, partly with money made rewriting studio films, and it ended up earning $2 million. For the first time it was clear that money as well as creative satisfaction could be had outside the studio system.

The Independent Establishment

Two other films, both distributed by independent world giant Miramax, the company started by Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob and named after their parents, made it clear that independent films were here to stay. In 1989, Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and went on to take the Palme d'Or at Cannes, beginning the international recognition of American independent film.

Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction did that film one better, not only winning the Palme in 1994 but becoming the first independent film to earn more than $100 million at the box office. This underlined the wisdom of the Disney organization when it acquired Miramax the previous year.

Soon every studio, understanding that independent films were too different to be made by their regular personnel, wanted to have an independent arm of its own. Today these specialty divisions (as they are known in the business) include Fox Searchlight, Warner Independent Pictures, Universal Focus, and the venerable Sony Pictures Classics.

The films these specialty divisions make are the top-of-the-line independent films, the ones with the biggest budgets and biggest stars. These films may seem like Hollywood movies, but the reality is that Hollywood isn't making these kinds of films anymore. A case in point is Little Miss Sunshine. Though the film was nominated for best picture and its script ended up winning an Oscar in February 2007, it had been turned down numerous times by the major studios.

In addition to having a different sensibility, independent films can reflect different constituencies and tell different kinds of stories. Because independent films don't have to cost a fortune, the indie world is a place where African-American directors like Spike Lee and gay directors like Gregg Araki have been able to make films that deal with marginalized characters but potentially speak to a broad audience.

The Digital Effect

The question of cost has also been a factor in the rise of the documentary side of the independent world. We are living through a time when more independent documentaries are being made and reaching more viewers than ever before. There are several reasons, but the real key is that the inexpensive nature of shooting with digital equipment has placed the means of production in the hands of the filmmakers.

Scott Hamilton Kennedy, a music video and commercial director, is a case in point. He would never have made the well-reviewed OT: Our Town if he hadn't met the teacher who was putting on the Thornton Wilder play in a California high school. When she told him about her project, he knew he had to record the experience, no matter what. "I never tried to raise money, or put a crew together," he said. "I knew that if any time was wasted trying to do all that, this moment was going to pass undocumented."

So Kennedy went to the high school with a camera so unimpressive he said it looked like a model you can buy at Circuit City, a consumer electronics chain store. But the unintimidating nature of his equipment enabled the students to relax around him, helping to create an intimacy and trust that is the film's greatest strength. Independence in financing leads to independent thinking, resulting in some of the finest filmmaking America has seen in years.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

Virginia Learns Energy Innovations from Abroad

By Dale Medearis

For more than a decade, local officials from Northern Virginia and counterparts from Europe have traded regional environmental planning innovations. The partnership is expanding its focus to climate change mitigation and adaptation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and �green� buildings policies.

Dale Medearis, Ph.D., is the senior environmental planner with the Northern Virginia Regional Commission (NVRC), where he manages climate, energy, and international programs. Prior to working with the NVRC, Medearis spent approximately 20 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency�s Office of International Affairs, managing the agency�s programs for Europe and international urban environment.

Hundreds of thousands of times a day, travelers on the Metropolitan Washington Metrorail system stand on the platform and stare expectantly down the tracks for an oncoming train. Their eyes frequently shift upward to a constantly updating electronic sign hanging above the platform. It tells passengers how many minutes until the arrival of the next train, and the train after that.

In the past, commuters in the 170-kilometer system had little information about when the trains might come and go. Now, commuters have real-time information about the travel status of trains and buses because transportation planners here borrowed some ideas from cities such as Berlin and Stockholm.

The display of these signs at Metro stations, the adoption of traffic-calming measures to reduce speeds, and the convenience of car sharing have become permanent parts of the commuting routine for travelers in the region. When residents and pedestrians in Fairfax County wanted greater safety on neighborhood streets, they looked to the traffic circles and street designs from Stuttgart, Germany. The plan now in development will transform a deadly intersection into a walkable, pedestrian-friendly streetscape.

The citizens of Alexandria, Virginia, enjoy car-sharing programs patterned after those in Berlin and Zurich, which offer reliable, clean, and affordable access to cars without worries of storage, maintenance, or pollution. The success of these schemes not only improves mobility in a transportation-stressed region, but also represents the evolving influence of �soft diplomacy� and the ascendance of state and local governments as laboratories for the transatlantic transfer of innovations into the United States.

Sharing Solutions

The Northern Virginia Regional Commission (NVRC) is a council of local governments for the approximately 2.5 million residents of a state on the southern boundary of the nation�s capital. Its regional counterpart in Stuttgart, the Verband Region Stuttgart, is a comparable council for 2.5 million residents. The two bodies have developed a model partnership focused on the sharing and application of innovative regional environmental, planning, and transportation plans. Since 1998, the Verband and NVRC have brought together professionals and policymakers to learn from each other in the areas of land-use planning, water infrastructure, transportation, �green� design, and stormwater management policies. As a result, environmental planning in Northern Virginia has been transformed.

Our work with Stuttgart ― and other European regions― is easy to justify. By most energy, climate, or environmental benchmarks, European regions such as Stuttgart outperform the United States. For example, since 1990, Germany has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions nationwide by more than 8 percent. Over the same period, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, greenhouse gas emissions in the United States increased by more than 10 percent. Moreover, Germany�s renewable energy sector overall accounts for more than 12 percent of total electricity production and has created more than 250,000 jobs since 1998. By comparison, in the United States, renewable energy accounts for less than 3 percent of all energy production. It is estimated that the total installed solar photovoltaic capacity in Northern Virginia does not exceed 50 kilowatt hours (kWh) � less than that of the train station in Freiburg, Germany.

As Northern Virginia looks ahead to the challenges of confronting climate change, balancing economic growth, and providing housing and mobility for the 500,000 new residents expected in the region by 2019, the imperative to draw lessons from Stuttgart and other European regions will become even stronger. More than two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions in our region, as in the rest of the country, emanate from the �built environment.� This includes the heating and cooling of houses, apartments, and commercial and public buildings and the fuels consumed shuttling commuters to and from their jobs. State and local governments in the United States exercise huge influence over the built environment � with the power of building codes, energy efficiency standards, permits for renewable energy, and the building and maintenance of roads and public transit. Simply put, state and local governments are at the center of global energy, climate, and sustainable policies. As the world�s attention turns to the challenges of energy and climate, the exchange of knowledge about the built environment will become vital.

Northern Virginia and Stuttgart have taken a number of new steps to support the transfer and application of innovations in climate and energy policy. A 2008 meeting with German counterparts in Hamburg, Erlangen, and Stuttgart reaffirmed that a broad range of practices and policies can be shared from Germany to Northern Virginia over the short and long term. These include:

� Community Energy Planning. Climate and energy planning in Virginia requires widespread adoption of energy-efficient design in buildings and housing, efficient generation and distribution of renewable and conventional energies, along with mixed and compact land uses frequently built around transit centers. These measures must be supported by clear, short- and long-term energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets. Hamburg�s HafenCity and Stuttgart�s Scharnhauser Park are models of community energy planning with plenty of lessons for Virginia cities such as Alexandria and Arlington, and also in the greater metropolitan area of Washington.

� Renewable Energies. Development and expansion of renewable energies (wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, and geothermal heating and cooling) in Northern Virginia can be enhanced through governmental incentives, such as �feed-in tariff systems.� Feed-in tariff systems in Germany encourage the production of renewable energies through a government guaranteed purchase rate, generally set above conventional rates.

� Energy Performance Building Labels. The promotion of energy efficiency can be accelerated in Northern Virginia, especially in the process of retrofitting buildings. The display of energy labels on a structure to record and broadcast its energy efficiency and performance is a further strategy to step up efficiency efforts.

� Building Retrofits and Financing. Local governments in Northern Virginia should consider development of a publicly administered capital fund that administers low or zero interest loans for renewable energy applications, insulating or weatherizing private homes and commercial businesses.

Shared Challenges

The ongoing work and achievements of international partnerships at the local level are often overlooked. U.S. and international media give disproportionate attention to the differences within multilateral policy debates on climate change. But state, local, and regional governments have played, and will continue to play, an equally significant role in affecting sustainable energy and climate policies. The overwhelming convergence of shared challenges among local authorities creates fertile ground for the search, exchange, and transfer of innovative energy and climate solutions. The transfer of innovative policies from abroad to the United States should accelerate and become more focused and persistent.

The globalization of the economy also will sustain and expand ties between cities and states � especially between Europe and the United States. The mutual trade and financial investments between the United States and Europe exceed $4 trillion annually and account for millions of jobs. The powerful economic interdependence between Europe and the United States will sustain learning and exchanges among state and local authorities. These issues give officials in the United States motivation to work with counterparts in other countries in search of solutions to mutual problems. These exchanges are a form of soft diplomacy that can only help improve international relations and mutual understanding among nations.

Conclusion

President Obama�s chief environmental and climate advisor, Carol Browner, affirms that climate change is the �greatest challenge we have ever faced.� The science that has emerged clearly suggests that Northern Virginia will not be immune from these challenges. In that context, the partnership between Northern Virginia and Stuttgart can demonstrate to leaders facing similar challenges in other communities around the world that international partnerships and cooperation � especially between local authorities, business interests, and civil society organizations � are not only valuable, but critical to the search for and implementation of long-term global climate and energy solutions.

What Is African-American Literature?

By Gerald Early

Emergence of a new, black pulp fiction may indicate the maturity, rather than the decline, of African-American literature.

Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he directs the Center for the Humanities. He specializes in American literature, African-American culture from 1940 to 1960, Afro-American autobiography, nonfiction prose, and popular culture. Author of several books, including the award-winning The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture (1994), Early has edited numerous anthologies and was a consultant on Ken Burns's documentary films on baseball and jazz.

African-American writer Nick Chiles famously castigated the publishing industry, young black women readers, and the current state of African-American writing in his controversial 2006 New York Times opinion piece entitled �Their Eyes Were Reading Smut.� (The article�s title is, clearly, a parodic paraphrase of the classic 1937 Zora Neale Hurston novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, a feminist staple of the African-American literature canon, considered by many literary scholars to be one of the great American novels of its era.) Although he was happy about mainstream bookstores like Borders devoting considerable shelf space to �African-American Literature,� he was more than a little nonplussed by what the store and the publishing industry considered �African-American Literature� to be. �[All] that I could see was lurid book jackets displaying all forms of brown flesh, usually half-naked and in some erotic pose, often accompanied by guns and other symbols of criminal life,� wrote Chiles. These novels have such titles as Gutter, Crack Head, Forever a Hustler�s Wife, A Hustler�s Son, Amongst Thieves, Cut Throat, Hell Razor Honeys, Payback with Ya Life, and the like. The well-known authors are K�wan, Ronald Quincy, Quentin Carter, Deja King (also known as Joy King), Teri Woods, Vickie Stringer, and Carl Weber. They occupy a genre called Urban or Hip-Hop Fiction, gritty, so-called realistic works about inner-city life, full of graphic sex, drugs and crime, �playas,� thugs, dough boys (rich drug dealers), and graphic violence; lavish consumption juxtaposed to life in housing projects. In some instances, the works are nothing more than black crime novels told from the point of view of the criminal; in others, they are black romance novels with a hard-edged city setting. In all cases, they are a kind of pulp fiction; despite their claim of realism, they are actually about fantasy, as their readers are attempting to understand their reality while trying to escape it. Mostly young African Americans, primarily women, the gender that constitutes the greater portion of the fiction-reading American public, read these books and the books are marketed exclusively for this clientele. Some of these novels sell well enough to support a few authors without the need of a �day job,� a rarity in the writing trade.

The existence of these books proffers three aspects of change for African-American literature from what it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago. First, despite problems with literacy and a dismal high school drop-out rate among African Americans, there is a young, mass, black reading audience of such size that a black author can write for it exclusively without giving a thought to being highbrow or literary or to crossing-over for whites. Second, the taste of the masses is distinct from, and troubling to, the taste of the elite in large measure because the elite no longer control the direction and purpose of African-American literature; it is now, more than ever, a market-driven literature, rather than an art form patronized and promoted by cultured whites and blacks as it had been in the past. The fact that blacks started two of the publishing houses for these books, Urban Books and Triple Crown, underscores the entrepreneurial, populist nature of this type of race literature: by black people for black people. Third, African-American literature no longer has to be obsessed with the burden or expectation of political protest or special pleading for the humanity of the race or the worth of its history and culture as it had to in the past. (This is not to suggest that African-American literature has abandoned these concerns. They are most evident in African-American children�s and adolescent literature, which is frequently, as one might expect, highly didactic.) This is not to argue that the books that Chiles deplores have some neo-literary or extra-literary worth that compensates for them being trashy, poorly written novels. But these books do reveal some of the complicated roots of African-American literature and of the construction of the African-American audience.

Blaxploitation films of the early 1970s � such as Melvin Van Peebles�s independent classic, Sweet Sweetback�s Badass Song; Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Sheba, Baby, starring Pam Grier; Hell Up in Harlem, Black Caesar, That Man Bolt, and The Legend of Nigger Charley, starring Fred Williamson; Superfly; the Shaft movies, starring Richard Roundtree � created the first young black audience for hard-boiled, urban black, seemingly realistic art centered on hustling, drugs, prostitution, and anti-white politics (in which whites � particularly gangsters and policemen -- are destroying the black community). The literary roots for this came from two streams in the 1960s.  The highbrow, mainstream literary and leftist types endorsed such nonfiction, black prison literature as The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Eldridge Cleaver�s essay collection Soul on Ice; Poems from Prison, compiled by inmate and poet Etheridge Knight, which includes Knight�s �Ideas of Ancestry,� one of the most famous and highly regarded African-American poems of the 1960s; and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. All of these books have become part of black literary canon and are frequently taught in various college literature, creative writing, and sociology classes. On the pulp, populist fiction side in the late 1960s and early 1970s were the novels of former pimp Iceberg Slim and imprisoned drug addict Donald Goines � including Trick Baby, Dopefiend, Street Players, and Black Gangster. These novels are the direct antecedents of the books that Chiles found so dismaying in 2006. They occupied a small but compelling portion of the black literature output in the 1970s. Many saw them in a far more political light at that time; now these books dominate African-American literature or seem to. Then, as now, there is a strong belief among many blacks � poor, working-class, and bourgeois intellectuals � and many whites, as well, that violent, urban life represents �authentic� black experience and a true politically dynamic �resistance� culture.

Chiles probably would have preferred if Borders and other bookstores would not label urban or hip-hop novels as �African-American Literature.�. It would be better for the public if such books were called �Afro-Pop Literature� or �Black Urban Fiction� or �Mass-Market Black Fiction.� Then, the category of �African-American Literature� could be reserved for those books and authors who are part of the canon: writers ranging from late 19th and early 20th century novelist Charles Chesnutt, poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar, and novelist and poet James Weldon Johnson, to 1920s and early 1930s Harlem Renaissance figures like poet and fiction writer Langston Hughes, novelist and poet Claude McKay, novelists Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, and poet and novelist Countee Cullen, to the great crossover figures of the 1940s through the 1960s, like novelist and essayist James Baldwin, novelist and short story writer Richard Wright, novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison, novelist Ann Petry, poet and novelist Gwendolyn Brooks, and novelist John A. Williams, to the Black Arts-era writers like poet and children�s writer Nikki Giovanni, poet, playwright, and fiction writer Amiri Baraka, and poet Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), to post-1960s writers like novelists Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Walter Mosley, Colson Whitehead, Ernest Gaines, and Charles Johnson, poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, poets Yusef Komunyakaa and Rita Dove. A few additional figures, like playwrights Lorraine Hansberry, Ed Bullins, Charles Fuller, and August Wilson, and some diasporic writers, like novelist and playwright Wole Soyinka, poet Derek Walcott, novelists Chinua Achebe, George Lamming, Jamaica Kincaid, Zadie Smith, Junot D�az, and Edwidge Danticat, could be thrown in for good measure.

Chiles�s concern about the supposed decline of African-American literature reflects the elite�s fear that the rise of hip-hop and the �urban� ethos generally represents a decline in urban black cultural life. The �urban nitty-gritty,� as it were, seems like a virus that has undone black artistic standards and a black meritocracy. Now, there is only purely market-driven drivel aimed at the lowest, most uncultured taste. This is clearly a position of someone like novelist and culture critic Stanley Crouch. The sensitivity on this point is not by any means wholly or even mostly a matter of snobbery. It has taken a very long time for African-American literature to reach a level of general respectability, where the general public thought it was worth reading and the literary establishment thought it was worth recognizing. Now, for many blacks, blacks themselves seem to be denigrating it by flooding the market with trash novels no better than Mickey Spillane. It is by no means surprising that blacks, a persecuted and historically degraded group, would feel that their cultural products are always suspect, precarious, and easily turned against them as caricature in the marketplace.

Another way to look at this is that urban literature has democratized and broadened the reach and content of African-American literature. In some ways, urban lit may show the maturity, not the decline, of African-American literature. After all, African-American literature is the oldest of all self-consciously identified ethnic minority literatures in the United States, going back as far as 1774 to Phyllis Wheatley�s first book of poems, to the slave narratives of the antebellum period that produced such classics as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs�s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). African Americans have thought longer and harder about the importance of literature as a political and cultural tool than other ethnic minorities in the United States have. The Harlem Renaissance was a movement by blacks, helped by white patrons, to gain cultural access and respectability by producing a first-rate literature. The rise of urban lit does not repudiate the black literary past, but it does suggest other ways and means of producing black literature and other ends for it as well. Moreover, some urban lit authors are far from being hacks: Sister Souljah, a well-traveled political activist and novelist, is a more-than-capable writer and thinker, however provocative she may be. The same can be said of the lone novel of music writer Nelson George, Urban Romance (1993), clearly not a trash novel. Some of the books of Eric Jerome Dickey and K�wan are worth reading as well. A major figure who straddles black romance and urban lit is E. Lynn Harris, a popular writer whose books deal with relationships and other matters of importance for blacks, particularly black women, today.

When I approached Bantam Books two years ago to become general editor of two annual series -- Best African American Essays and Best African American Fiction � I wanted to make sure that the books had crossover appeal to various segments of the black reading public, and so I chose Harris to be the guest editor of Best African American Fiction of 2009, the first volume in the series. I see these volumes as an opportunity not only to bring the best of African-American letters to the general reading public � from younger writers like Z. Z. Packer and Amina Gautier to established voices like Samuel Delaney and Edward P. Jones � but also to forge a sort of marriage between various  types of African-American literature. I wanted to use E. Lynn Harris�s reach to bring serious black literature to an audience that might not be aware of it or even desire it. It is far too early to say whether this attempt will succeed, but the mere attempt alone acknowledges a level of complexity in African-American literature and a level of profound segmentation in its audience that shows that African-American experience, however it is made into art, has a depth and outreach, a sort of universality, dare I say, that actually bodes well for the future of this and perhaps of all of American ethnic minority literature.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.

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