September 4, 2000


Features

Never Mind the Bollocks
BY BILL BOISVERT

Here's the new Republican Party

The Battle of Philadelphia
BY DAVE LINDORFF

Working It
BY DAVID MOBERG
Will unions go all out for Gore?

Black Radicals Regroup
BY SALIM MUWAKKIL
Detroit hosts the Black Radical Congress.

Mad Sheep Scare
BY TERRY J. ALLEN
Farmers, scientists and the USDA square off in Vermont.


News

Cleaning Up
BY HANS JOHNSON
Missouri, Oregon consider campaign finance initiatives.

Star Strike
BY BEN WINTERS
Actors demand a better deal.

Renegade or Redeemer?
BY STEVE ELLNER

Hugo Chavez leads Venezuela into a new era.

The New Front
BY KARI LYDERSEN

American anti-abortion groups crusade in Ireland.

Profile
BY TED KLEINE

Johnny Lira is in their corner.


Views

Editorial
BY DAVID MOBERG
Big money problems.

Appall-O-Meter
BY DAVID FUTRELLE

A Terry Laban Cartoon

Dialogue: The Balkans
More Conspiracy Theories?
BY EDWARD S. HERMAN

A Humanitarian Crusade
BY DIANA JOHNSTONE


Culture

A Man for All Seasons
BY HOWARD ZINN
Francis Wheen's Marx: A Life.

Interstate Rambler
BY PHILIP CONNORS
On the road with Larry McMurty.

England's Dreaming
BY JOHN GHAZVINIAN
History falls off the back of a lorry.

Under the Influence
BY JASON SHOLL
Sadie Plant writes on drugs.

Vanishing Act
BY
JOSHUA ROTHKOPF
Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man.

Presidential Dance Parties
BY GREG SMITHSIMON

 

England's Dreaming
By John Ghazvinian

In Search of England: Journeys into the English Past
By Michael Wood
University of California Press

336 pages, $24.95

As Michael Wood reminds us in his book, In Search of England: Journeys into the English Past, 1997 was a big year for England. As Hong Kong was handed back to China, a new prime minister swept into power promising almost complete autonomy to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as an end to the House of Lords as we know it. England has had to seriously re-evaluate its collective understanding of the past. John Major's warm-beer-and-cricket vision of England already seems as quaintly distant as wartime rationing, but the myths and fictions about English history and English identity are still very real to the emasculated carapace that 50 years of post-imperial decline has left behind. And it is these myths, and their connection to historical reality, that Wood sets out to explore.

Wood's particular interest is the late Anglo-Saxon period and the early Middle Ages. And England's past, as we are reminded from the get-go, is more multicultural than some might like to think. Indeed, there was no such thing as an "England" until successive waves of Britons, Celts, Angles, Saxons, Danes and Vikings - each exercising power over a different part of the island - were united under the rule of the kings of Wessex in the 10th century, only to be conquered themselves by a band of Vikings living in the north of France in 1066 - the Normans.

Wood is not interested in making a political point about asylum-seekers - or anything else - but does explore the darker corners of what might be called England's historical imagination. The first part of the book highlights the complexities and contingencies of the country's early Medieval past - the what-ifs and the almost-wasn'ts of a murky and unstable time in the history of the North Atlantic Archipelago

 

 


In These Times © 2000
Vol. 24, No. 20