Dynamica is a term coined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) in 1689 during his Italian journey, referring to his doctrine of forces. In that year, he composed an extensive work called Dynamica, which remained unpublished at the time. His major publication on the subject is “Specimen Dynamicum,” which appeared in the Acta eruditorum for 1695, in which he tried to reconcile a variety of metaphysical and mechanical traditions relevant to the notion of force on the basis of a grid of the following four notions: (1) active primitive force is a purely metaphysical entity expressing the activity of substances and is also called entelechy; (2) active derivative force is somehow the phenomenal manifestation of an aggregate of metaphysical substances and is measured by living force, or vis viva; (3) passive primitive force is purely metaphysical and expresses the imperfection of substances; (4) is passive derivative force, which is also called inertia, is its phenomenal manifestation. The connection between metaphysical and phenomenal levels was and still is especially problematic in this account. Leibniz further introduced the distinction between vis viva, which pertains to actual motion and is proportional to the square of velocity, and vis mortua, or dead force, which pertains to the very beginning of motion and is proportional to infinitesimal velocity. Examples of the latter are Christiaan Huygens’s (1629–1695) centrifugal, and Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) centripetal, forces.

Leibniz developed his views in several works and tried to establish many laws of nature, such as the law of conservation of force, or vis viva, on the metaphysical foundations provided in his system. Although Leibniz’s metaphysical preoccupations are extreme even by seventeenth-century standards, at the time notions like motion and force had much larger philosophical dimensions than the modern reader may suspect. Ca. 1700 the notion of dynamics had a distinctive Leibnizian flavor that Newton found particularly irritating and distasteful. In a manuscript, he complained that “Galileo began to consider the effect of Gravity upon Projectiles. Mr Newton in his Principia Philosophiae improved that consideration into a large science. Mr Leibniz christened the child by a new name as if it had been his own, calling it Dynamica…. But his mark must be set upon all new inventions. And if one may judge by the multitude of new names and characters invented by him, he would go for a great inventor.” Although Leibniz’s dynamics was primarily a science of living forces, in the quotation above Newton portrayed it as dealing with his own force, a notion more similar to Leibniz’s dead force. Almost exactly a century after Leibniz had coined the term, Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), in his classic Mécanique analytique (1788), defined dynamics as the science of accelerative forces and of the motions they produce. In his historical outline, he portrayed Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) as the founder of dynamics, a science later perfected by Huygens. Lagrange went on to argue with involuntary irony that mechanics and, therefore, dynamics were then revolutionized by Newton. Thus, by that time it had become customary to call dynamics a doctrine of forces based, unlike Leibniz’s, on accelerations, such as Newton’s. Newton himself had given the greatest possible emphasis to his doctrine of forces by stating in his Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis (1687) that the whole burden of philosophy consists in investigating the forces from the phenomena of motion and then from the forces to demonstrate the phenomena. The term dynamics is also used by some historians in the sense of science of motion, rather than strictly of forces, and is contrasted to statics, or the science of equilibrium of bodies. Ernst Mach (1838–1916), for example, devoted the first two parts of his influential Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung (1883; ninth edition, 1933) to the development of the principles of statics and of dynamics, which in his view had been founded by Galileo and by which he meant a science of motion. These preliminary reflections leave the scholar of the Scientific Revolution with the problem of whether it is legitimate or helpful to talk of a history of dynamics in the seventeenth century, including such actors as Galileo and Huygens, and extending back to the medieval scientia de motu (science of motion) and scientia de ponderibus (science of weight) and even to the Quaestiones mechanicae attributed to Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) or to one of his immediate disciples. The answer to this question depends on several factors, such as whether dynamics is taken to mean a science of accelerative forces, a science of motion, or a science of the causes of motion. Further, it depends on the aims and purposes of one’s historical research. Historians, however, ought to be aware of the categories of their actors, even if for a variety of reasons they decide not to follow them, and make a conscious and deliberate decision, as opposed to taking for granted that dynamics always existed and that its history can, therefore, be written unproblematically.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, self-proclaimed educational reformers suggested broad changes in both school curricula and teaching methods. Reformers like Peter Ramus (1515–1572) and Samuel Hartlib (ca. 1600–1662) generally couched their proposals within the context of a general reformation of society, but their vision of a topdown restructuring of the schools experienced only limited success, for they lacked the political power and social organization to implement their plans. Nonetheless, numerous educators of the period found elements of the programs of the reformers attractive and incorporated them alongside more traditional subject matter and methods.

Perhaps the most important change during this period arose as a response to the pressures of humanism. By the late fifteenth century, Italian humanists had successfully promoted a neoclassical pedagogy that sought to train cultured and morally upright citizens who could speak and write in an elegant Ciceronian Latin. While appealing to the European aristocracy as a means for training effective political leaders, humanism experienced staunch resistance in the universities, where Aristotelian natural philosophy and syllogistic disputation continued to be the norm until the late seventeenth century. Despite this resistance, humanism’s primary influence on schooling came in the field of rhetoric. By 1539 Rudolph Agricola’s Dialectical Invention (De inventione dialectica; written ca. 1480 but first published in 1515) had become the standard text in humanist schools throughout northern Europe, replacing the Scholastic Compendium of Logic (Summulae logicales) of Peter of Spain (fl. ca. 1250). In his text, Agricola (1444–1485) provided the teacher and the student with a methodical introduction to the variety of compositional styles, which students were to master and emulate. Building on Agricola’s reforms, the French humanist Peter Ramus sharply derided Scholasticism for its emphasis on abstruse and complex strings of logical arguments. Instead, Ramus and his followers promoted a much simplified logic that stressed diagrammatic methods for analyzing dialectical arguments. Purportedly, Ramus’s simplified system of argumentation would allow the student to apply logic to the practicalities of everyday life. This may explain why Ramist reforms were so popular among artisan classes, especially in England where Puritan reformers joined Ramist logic to biblical exegesis.

Practical concerns were even more prominent among the circle of reformers surrounding Samuel Hartlib, who was active in England, between 1628 and 1662. In anticipation of the biblical end times, the Hartlib Circle made educational reform a central part of its sweeping plan for the social and religious reformation of society. Based on Baconian empiricism, their educational system emphasized natural philosophy and mathematics in order to prepare the student for commercial life. Furthermore, since it was believed that knowledge of the natural world would also lead to a greater understanding of God’s divine powers, a belief central to natural theology, the study of empirical science also helped advance notions of Puritan piety. Although the political realities of England’s Interregnum government prevented the circle’s proposals from becoming social reality, the association of its members with members of the future Royal Society helped guarantee that aspects of these reforms, such as the interest in chemical and agricultural knowledge, found a permanent home. Because of its comprehensiveness and logical coherence, as well as the general conservatism of university faculties, Aristotelian natural philosophy continued to function as the core of the university curriculum throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, Scholastic pedagogy proved remarkably open to innovative ideas. Thus, for instance, the heliocentric astronomy of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473– 1543) and the geoheliocentric system of Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) were often studied alongside the geocentric astronomies of Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) and Ptolemy (ca. 100–ca. 170) without actually replacing them. In Reformation Germany, in particular, the group of mathematicians and astronomers associated with the Lutheran Phillip Melanchthon (1497–1560) was fairly open to Copernican astronomy. A humanist devoted to astronomy and astrology, Melanchthon was responsible for the reformation of the German universities and created numerous new chairs in mathematics and astronomy, thus helping to spread the study of heliocentrism.

During the latter half of the seventeenth century, René Descartes (1596–1650) formulated the first comprehensive new philosophical system to challenge that of Aristotle’s and thus attracted considerable support and strong criticism. In short, Descartes provided a method of philosophizing based on deductive arguments arising from first principles and a mechanical philosophy of nature that accepted and accounted for a heliocentric astronomy. Although defenders of Aristotle sharply criticized Cartesian philosophy on cosmological and epistemological grounds, the new philosophy had effectively replaced Aristotle’s at the University of Paris by the start of the eighteenth century due, in part, to the growing inability of Aristotelian cosmology to account adequately for new experimental discoveries. In England, the Cambridge Platonists helped introduce Cartesian philosophy to university students, but Cartesianism did not replace the Aristotelian worldview in the English universities as Newtonian natural philosophy was to do in the eighteenth century. Thus, by the end of the seventeenth century, education in Europe combined traditional and revised methods of Scholastic pedagogy with the philosophical and, eventually, experimental approaches to nature developed during the Scientific Revolution. But the process of educational reform had been both gradual and controversial, involving the efforts of educators throughout Europe and at all levels of education.

This concept emerged during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, closely associated with magnetism. It soon became important within the development of matter theory and the treatment of occult qualities. William Gilbert (1544–1603) is often credited as the founder of the science of electricity. He was the first to use the term electricity, which he derived from the Greek word for the attractive properties of amber. Gilbert’s key contribution consists of the experimental discovery of many “electric” substances—beyond the already known amber—that caused the attraction and repulsion of a variety of substances when rubbed.

Rejecting medieval and Renaissance “sympathies” and seeking instead a material mode of interaction, he explained the electric phenomena by combining concepts taken from alchemy and Aristotelian viscosity and cohesion. Without providing many details, he claimed that emanations of electical vapor, or effluvia, were the vehicle of the attraction. Niccolò Cabeo (1585–1650), a leading Jesuit mathematician and natural philosopher, challenged Gilbert’s presentation of both magnetism and electricity. Implementing the Jesuit program aimed at achieving intellectual supremacy, Cabeo first established himself as an authority in electricity through the finding of many new phenomena and electric substances and then replaced Gilbert’s effluvia, explaining electrical attraction through emitted streams that displace the surrounding air, forming a wind that can either attract or repel bodies.

In the second quarter of the century, mechanical philosophers offered another explanation for electrical phenomena. Noting that not all of the electric substances emit effluvia, René Descartes (1596–1650) proposed invisible elastic particles. Also trying to rationally explain directly unintelligible powers, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) compared the action of these particles to the movement of the chameleon’s tongue. In England, electrical experiments became popular in the Royal Society; Robert Boyle (1627–1691) intervened in the debate in 1675 with a book entitled Experiments and Notes About the Mechanical Origin and Production of Electricity, in which hecountered Cabeo’s and the Cartesian theories and proposed an explanation based upon emission and refraction of effluvia. Within the Royal Society are found the major subsequent developments in both electric theory and experimentation. On the Continent, Otto von Guericke (1602–1686) carried out important experimental work.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a new genre of literature known as the emblem book became popular. A rich, visual language of symbolic images was created that soon spread far beyond the pages of the emblem book and had an impact on many aspects of society, including the practice of science. Andrea Alciati (1492–1550), an Italian lawyer and humanist, published the first emblem book in 1531, entitled Emblemata. This work is a collection of emblems, each consisting of an engraved image and text. Taken together, the image and the text form a puzzle that was meant to entertain and also often to impart a moral lesson. Alciati’s Emblemata went through more than two hundred editions, and by the early seventeenth century hundreds of other authors had produced emblem books.

A typical emblem consisted of a picture, a brief motto—often taken from a classical source—and a longer epigram that explained the lesson in more detail. One emblem, for example, has a picture of a hunter aiming his bow at a bird flying overhead, while a snake curls around his leg. The motto declares: “Those who contemplate the heights come to grief.” The epigram relates a story, taken from one of Aesop’s fables, of a man who was so intent on his high-flying prey that he failed to notice a snake attacking him. Emblem-book writers drew on many earlier traditions for their ideas, including Egyptian hieroglyphics, Aesopic fables, ancient books of proverbs, and even the images on antique coins.

The scientific discipline most directly affected by the emblem tradition was natural history. Although Alciati had included some emblems of animals and plants, later writers, such as Joachim Camerarius (1534–1598), produced emblem books that focused exclusively on animal and plant emblems. Camerarius was a highly respected botanist and physician, and he saw his collection of emblems as a contribution to natural history as well as to the emblem literature. Other naturalists agreed, and Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522 1605) included many of Camerarius’s emblems in his authoritative encyclopedias of natural history. Naturalists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were concerned not merely with empirical observations, but also with exploring all of the symbolic meanings attached to a creature. The emblem books, therefore, provided these naturalists with important insights. One example of an animal emblem that was included in all of the important naturalhistory books is seen in Fig. 1. There are different versions of this emblem, but the pelican is always shown pecking open its breast to allow the young to feed on its own blood. The text explains that the pelican represents Christ’s mercy, and this religious imagery is strengthened by the crucifix in the background of the emblem shown here. This symbolic language of the emblem was not limited to emblem books and natural history. Emblematics played an important role in Court culture. The Courts in which many of the most important figures of the Scientific Revolution worked each had their own emblems. These emblems allowed the rulers to legitimate their power by weaving themselves into a rich mythological tradition and also gave them a kind of visual stamp, which would remind people of their power wherever it was spotted. These royal emblems appeared in public ceremonies, festivals, paintings, operas, and also on the title pages of scientific books. To gain the patronage of a powerful ruler, a scientist had to be skilled at framing his work in the context of the emblematic language of that particular Court. For example, when Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) presented his discovery of the moons of Jupiter to Cosimo II de’ Medici (1590–1621) in 1610, he tied this discovery into the imagery of the Medici Court. The Medici family had created for itself an elaborate myth, in which each member of the family was associated with one of the gods. Cosimo I (1519–1574), the dynasty’s founder, was associated with Jupiter. Galileo named the moons of Jupiter the Medicean Stars and explained in the dedication of Sidereus nuncius (1610) how these stars actually played an astrological role in transmitting certain qualities from Cosimo I to his successors. The Medicean Stars then became a standard part of the symbolic language of the Medici Court, and they were featured in paintings, theatrical presentations, and even sonnets. A new emblem had been created, and the image of Jupiter sitting on a cloud surrounded by the four Medicean Stars became an emblematic representation of Cosimo II.

Emblem books became less and less popular in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but the visual language they had created lived on in children’s books and also in the imagery found on the title pages of scientific books. Even in the works of Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), one still finds elaborate, emblematic title pages that carry on the rich symbolic tradition of the emblem book.

In the summer of 1971, President Richard Nixon learned that what you don’t know can hurt you. In June 1971, the New York Times ran a headline that hardly seemed sensational: “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement.” What the headline did not say was that the study also traced thirty years of deceit and ineptitude on the part of the United States government. In page after numbingly detailed page, the Times reprinted thousands of documents, cables, position papers, and memos, all referring to the American effort in Vietnam. Officially titled The History of the U.S. Decision Making Process in Vietnam, the material quickly became known as the Pentagon Papers. Richard Nixon was not aware of its existence. But it would shake his administration and the military establishment in America to their toes. Ordered by Robert McNamara, one of Kennedy’s “best and brightest” prior to his resignation as defense secretary in 1968, this massive compilation had involved the work of large teams of scholars and analysts. The avalanche of paper ran to some 2 million words. Among the men who had helped put it together was Daniel Ellsberg, a Rand Corporation analyst and onetime hawk who, like McNamara himself, became disillusioned by the war. Working at MIT after his resignation from Rand, which was involved in collecting and analyzing the papers, Ellsberg decided to go public with the information. He turned a copy over to Times reporter Neil Sheehan. When the story broke, the country soon learned how it had been duped. Going back to the Truman administration, the Pentagon Papers revealed a history of deceptions, policy disagreements within several White House administrations, and outright lies. Among the most damaging revelations were cables from the American embassy in Saigon, dating from the weeks before Prime Minister Diem was ousted with CIA encouragement and then executed. There was the discovery that the Tonkin Resolution had been drafted months before the incident occurred from which it took its name. And there were memos showing Lyndon Johnson committing infantry to Vietnam at the same time he was telling the country that he had no long-range plans for a strategy in Vietnam.

The papers did not cover the Nixon years, and White House reaction was at first muted, even gleeful at the prospect of the embarrassment it would create for the Democrats. But Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger (b. 1923), soon realized that if something this highly classified could be leaked, so could other secrets. Both men were already troubled by leaks within the administration. How could they carry on the business of national security if documents this sensitive could be photocopied and handed out to the nation’s newspapers like press releases? There was a second concern. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers had fueled the antiwar sentiment that was growing louder and angrier and moving off the campuses and into the halls of Congress. The administration first tried to bully the Times into halting publication. Attorney General John Mitchell threatened the paper with espionage charges. These were ignored. Nixon then tried the courts and received a temporary injunction blocking further publication. But the brushfire started by the Times was growing into a forest fire. The Washington Post and the Boston Globe were also running the documents. A federal court ordered the Post to halt publication, and the question went to the Supreme Court. On June 30, the Court ruled six to three in favor of the newspapers on First Amendment grounds. Kissinger and Nixon went nuclear. Said Nixon, “I want to know who is behind this. . . . I want it done, whatever the costs.” When Ellsberg was revealed as the culprit, a new White House unit was formed to investigate him. Their job was to stop leaks, so they were jokingly called the “plumbers.” White House assistant Egil Krogh, Nixon special counsel Charles Colson, and others in the White House turned to former CIA man E. Howard Hunt and ex-FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy to bring their special clandestine talents to the operation.

One of their first jobs was to conduct a break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. As a burglary, it was only marginally more successful than the next break-in planned by the group, at an office complex called Watergate. Apart from setting into motion some of the events that would mutate into the Watergate affair, the publication of the Pentagon Papers had other important repercussions. From the government’s standpoint, American security credibility had been crippled, severely damaging intelligence operations around the world, for better or worse. On the other side, the antiwar movement gained new strength and respectability, increasing the pressure on Nixon to end the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And the Supreme Court’s action in protecting the newspapers from prior restraint established and strengthened First Amendment principles. But the Pentagon Papers case also reinforced a “bunker mentality” that already existed within the White House “palace guard.” There was an us-against-them defensiveness emanating from the Oval Office. Publication of the Pentagon Papers made the Nixon White House far more aggressive in its defense of “national security,” an idea that was expanded to include the protection and reelection of Richard Nixon by any means and at any cost.

Germs and what goes on behind bedroom doors have always taken a back seat to dates and battles and speeches in most history books, but they have often had much more to do with history than most politicians, kings, generals, or court decisions ever did. Squeamishness among teachers, academics, and publishers, along with America’s resilient Puritan ethics, have long meant that sex, disease, and death are the unmentionable parts of history that the schoolbooks leave out. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, sex and disease were never a bigger part of American history, as a new and terrifying ailment completely altered the way the country behaved and thought about sex.

“Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” The headline appeared inside the New York Times on July 3, 1981. Written by Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, a physician who covered medical news for the Times, the article was about 900 words long. Altman’s story described how doctors were reporting a small but frightening number of patients who were mysteriously dying from a rare and especially fatal form of cancer. “The cause of the outbreak is unknown,” Altman wrote, “and there is as yet no evidence of contagion.” Little did Altman or anyone else know in 1981 that the appearance of this rare cancer was the visible, early phase of one of the most deadly epidemics in human history. It would not only kill millions but completely alter social behavior, sexual attitudes, and relationships. The medical mystery Altman described would eventually blossom into the full-blown international plague of AIDS. More than twenty years after Altman’s article, the first of more than 900 he would write on the subject, AIDS/HIV had affected some 60 million people worldwide and more than 20 million were dead, according to the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).

It was only a few years before Altman’s article appeared that the medical world had announced one of its greatest victories with the eradication of smallpox. The last known naturally occurring case of smallpox was in Somalia in 1977, and the last known case was due to a lab accident in England in 1978. (Two research stores of smallpox are still secured in labs in the U.S. and Russia.) This triumph for modern science, along with the great strides made against polio, yellow fever, and a host of other killing diseases, left the medical world fairly confident. Then came the mystery ailment. At first, the disease that became known as AIDS was ignored by Americans when the symptoms began to appear in 1981. It seemed to be limited to a few “special cases” in the population—male homosexuals and intravenous drug users. It was first identified as a “new” disease in 1980 and 1981 by physicians in Los Angeles and New York City who recognized that all the patients were previously healthy, young, homosexual men suffering from otherwise rare forms of cancer and pneumonia. Among the homosexual community, word of a “gay plague” was spreading. Among the most fearful rumors was that someone actually was targeting homosexuals with this new disease. Some doctors first called the ailment GRID (for gayrelated immune deficiency) before the Centers for Disease Control settled on the name AIDS (the acronym stands for “acquired immune deficiency syndrome”). For a variety of reasons—which included shrinking federal medical research budgets, competition among doctors who wanted to be the first to publish, and miscommunication of basic facts to the public— the initial response to the growing epidemic was slow. Then AIDS began to show up among young hemophiliacs and female sex partners of infected men. The sense of alarm started to grow. When the enormity of the problem became more apparent, and people realized that the nation’s blood supply might be tainted, a sense of national panic ensued. Even as knowledge of the course of the cause and course of the disease became known, the country was gripped by fear. It took some time to learn that AIDS is the final, life-threatening stage of infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The name refers to the fact that the virus severely damages the body’s most important defense against disease, the immune system. After the discovery of the AIDS virus by the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1983, Dr. Robert Gallo’s team at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, developed a blood test to detect the virus in 1985. The tests to detect evidence of HIV have been used to screen all blood donated in the United States since 1985. These tests were also used to analyze stored tissues from several people who died going back to the late 1950s, and scientists concluded that some of these people had died from AIDS.

In the early days of AIDS, the prevalence of the disease among homosexuals and drug users marginalized the disease, along with stigmatizing those who were suffering. On the community level, small towns were divided over whether to allow students with AIDS to attend schools, an issue brought to life by the poignant story of a young boy named Ryan White. Schools were also debating what role they should play in educating students about AIDS prevention. Condom distribution and “clean needle” exchanges, which were attempts to get infected hypodermics out of the hands of intravenous drug users, were suddenly part of the debate.

The American religious community was split among those who denounced AIDS victims as “immoral,” and other religious groups who responded with greater compassion. But many Americans, though fearful of this new disease that came shrouded in unpleasant realities, felt somewhat removed from AIDS until it started to claim some very visible victims, including film actor Rock Hudson in July 1985. A longtime symbol of American masculine virility and “wholesome” entertainment, Hudson had costarred with Hollywood beauties like Elizabeth Taylor and Jennifer Jones and become a 1960s icon with a series of fluffy romantic comedies with Doris Day. He had moved on to a highly successful television career with McMillan and Wife, a detective show that ran for six seasons. Before Hudson’s death, the face of AIDS was a stranger. But America was shocked to see the former matinee idol’s emaciated and sunken image. His death helped open up a new national discussion of the subject. Eventually, other figures from the world of Hollywood, the arts, and sports began to die or announce that they were infected. They included tennis champion Arthur Ashe, who died in 1993, infected during a transfusion while in surgery. Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Magic Johnson announced he was infected with HIV in 1991, quit playing, and then, remarkably, resumed his career temporarily, a testament to the progress made in treating the disease, as well as the change in attitudes.

There was no aspect of American public and private life that the AIDS/HIV epidemic did not touch during the last two decades of the twentieth century. The economy was impacted as enormous amounts of money began to be devoted to keep up with the ill and infected. Budgets of hospitals, medical insurers, the national medical research facilities, public health and private welfare agencies were all strained to the limits. The AIDS epidemic fundamentally altered the America landscape. By 1992, both political parties nominating conventions prominently featured spokespeople for the AIDS community in prime-time network television speeches. Condoms, safe sex, anal sex—words never before uttered in polite society—all became part of American common parlance. In many ways, the AIDS crisis also brought homosexuality out of the American closet. Once taboo or tittered at, homosexuality was now openly discussed, accompanied by a new political activism among gay Americans. The word “gay” itself became a new part of the American lexicon. Even the staid New York Times eventually accepted the word. The health care and scientific research became politicized and radicalized. Not simply content with increasing funding for AIDS research, the “gay rights” movement began to press for new legislation that would rid America of institutional discrimination against homosexuals. Of course, these demands were not uniformly accepted. Emboldened by the success of AIDS activists in obtaining funding for medical research, women also spoke out forcefully about the disparity of funds being devoted to breast cancer research. The walls of the entire system of medical research, long an almost exclusive domain of white males, were falling down. The losses from AIDS can’t be totaled in sheer numbers. Just as an entire generation of America’s young men—its “best and brightest”— were wiped out during the Civil War, millions of people around the world fell to AIDS. Their deaths were not only tragic, but the loss of their industry, ingenuity, invention, and potential is the truly incalculable cost of this disease. Twenty years after its appearance, scientists were still not certain how, when, or where the AIDS virus evolved and first infected people. One widely held suspicion is that HIV evolved from viruses that originally infected monkeys in Africa and was somehow transmitted to people.

Although it won’t go down as one of the great presidential pronouncements like, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” when candidate Bill Clinton told America, “I tried it once, but I didn’t inhale,” it certainly was memorable. During the primary battles of 1998, Bill Clinton was asked by reporters about smoking marijuana in his college days, and his reply left many Americans choking with laughter. A Rhodes scholar who attended Oxford, where he avoided the Vietnam era draft, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton (b. 1946) dodged many uncomfortable questions during the 1992 campaign. But Americans were less interested in pot smoking, draft dodging, and womanizing than in solving America’s problems. Running as an “agent of change” who promised reforms, Bubba Clinton and his vice presidential running mate, Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, became the first “baby boomers” to win the White House, following a raucous election most notable for the third-party candidacy of H. Ross Perot.

A man whose political fame would be built on assailing big government and excessive government spending, Ross Perot (b. 1930) had built his Electronic Data Systems into a billion-dollar firm with large and very profitable government contracts. With his deep pockets, the amply financed Perot ran as an independent with a campaign aimed at overhauling government. His folksy style and can-do approach appealed to millions of American voters who were completely disenchanted with the two major political parties, whose differences seemed marginal and who seemed most concerned with fund-raising and retaining control. But when he abruptly canceled his unorthodox campaign, Perot was dismissed as a wealthy kook. Then, only weeks before Election Day, Perot stunned the political world by rejoining the fray.

In a series of three-way televised debates, the most indelible image was that of President George Bush checking his wristwatch at the Richmond, Virginia, debate as if his limo was double-parked with the engine and the meter running. When advised to fire up his campaign, Bush turned to name calling, deriding Clinton and Gore as “bozos.” Gore, an environmentalist and author of a book about the risks of global warming, was dismissed as “ozone man.” Then a week before the election, the Iran-Contra special prosecutor announced a grand jury indictment of Caspar Weinberger, and questions about Bush’s role in the Iran-Contra case were pushed back into the headlines. Garnering nearly 20 million votes (19 percent), Perot drew disaffected voters from Bush and probably skewed the race, allowing the Clinton-Gore ticket to win with 43 percent to Bush’s 37 percent. In later years, Bush would claim that the indictment of Weinberger and the failure of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (p. 553) to cut interest rates quickly enough doomed his presidency. But Ross Perot and the Reform Party, like several other successful third-party candidates in American history, had probably been the big difference, tipping the balance in a very closely divided and unhappy America.

He saved the world at least three or four times. He cost George Bush I his reelection in 1992. He made everybody in America rich by causing the markets to soar. When he used the phrase “irrational exuberance” to describe a stock market that he feared might be too high in 1996, he sent tremors through the global economy. He caused a recession and crashed the market in 2001. He can jump tall buildings in a single bound. He is not a bird or a plane. He is the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Who is Alan Greenspan, the “Fed chairman”? And how did he get to be the most powerful man in the world? Until fairly recent times, few Americans ever heard of the Federal Reserve Board or cared who its chairman was. But in the person of Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman became one of the most powerful people in the world. By the mid-1990s, his every pronouncement and television appearance was watched with the same reverence once given the Delphic oracle in ancient Greece. One financial news network even created a “briefcase index,” a humorous attempt to determine if the thickness of the chairman’s attaché case might provide some clue to the actions he was about to take—actions that could make or break fortunes and entire national economies with a word. While “Greenspan watching” became a national pastime during the 1990s, many people had a very basic question: Who was this man and what did he actually do?

The Federal Reserve Board, or the Fed, was created as the central bank of the United States in 1913 with passage of the Federal Reserve Act. An independent government regulatory agency, the Fed is supposed to preserve and protect a flexible but stable economy. To do that, it has power over the nation’s currency and conducts the nation’s monetary policy (simply put, the actions taken to influence how much money is theoretically in the economy at a given time, also known as the money supply). It also regulates banks. Since 1913, the act has been modified, and in 1978, the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act instructed the Federal Reserve to seek stable prices—in other words, to fight inflation—and maximum sustainable growth for the economy, while also seeking to maximize employment. And there’s the rub, as they say. Economics (also known for good reason as “the dismal science”) traditionally holds that growth is good, but too much growth is not good. An economy that is growing too fast will inevitably lead to inflation—which in its simplest terms is too much money chasing too few goods, or demand outstripping supply.

Job growth is also good, but too much job growth is not; in theory, when too many people work, labor costs rise and lead to inflation. In the classic economic textbook view, a certain amount of unemployment is necessary, even desirable, because it limits rising labor costs and dampens consumer demand, helping to keep prices in check. Until the economic boom of the mid-1990s, economic orthodoxy said that the unemployment rate could not fall below 6 percent without provoking dangerous levels of inflation. What, then, is “sustainable” growth? And what is “maximum employment”? These are two of the key questions that the Federal Reserve has to wrestle with in setting its policies—policies that can ultimately determine the cost of a home mortgage or car loan, the profits that support corporate survival and the stock market, or even, potentially, who is the next president.

Officially, the Federal Reserve system includes the board of governors in Washington, D.C., and the twelve district Federal Reserve banks and their outlying branches. The seven governors of the Federal Reserve system are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve fourteen-year terms, nearly lifetime appointments that are supposed to guarantee that short-term political considerations will not enter into the Fed’s deliberations and decision making. But like the Supreme Court, the Fed is keenly aware of which way the political winds are blowing. The chairman and the vice chairman of the board of governors are named by the president and confirmed by the Senate. They serve a term of four years, with no limit on the number of terms they may serve. (Greenspan was appointed to his fourth term in 2000, scheduled to end in June 2004.)

There are twelve reserve banks, in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Minneapolis, Kansas City, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, St. Louis, and San Francisco. These banks oversee the banking industry, regulate the coin and paper currency in circulation, clear the majority of all banks’ paper checks, and facilitate wire transfers of payments.

Processed meat is meat that has been modified by chemical treatment and extensive manipulation. This category includes BACON, PASTRAMI, SALAMI, LIVERWURST, HAM, HOT DOGS, hot SAUSAGES, LUNCHEON MEATS, cold cuts, BOLOGNA, and Polish sausage. Sausages and processed meats are some of the fattest foods available. Salami, bologna, and liver sausage contain especially large amount of FAT, and up to 80 percent of their calories can come from fat. This level is equivalent to a huge 15 to 17 g per 2 oz. serving. Processed meats often contain high levels of SODIUM (500 to 1,000 mg per serving). Furthermore, sodium NITRITE is sometimes added as a preservative, or it is added to enhance the color or flavor of the product.

Low-fat processed meat provide 2 to 3 g of fat per slice, a reasonably low value for a processed meat. Chicken or turkey breast and products made only from these are leaner than red meat. Generally, the serving size is one ounce (28 g). If a smaller serving size is used, it will have fewer calories.

Naturally occurring CARBOHYDRATES or compounds related to SUGARS that are used as sweeteners. Carbohydrate sweeteners contribute four CALORIES per gram (less than half as much as fat). The most common are the simple sugars or materials that are primarily sugars: FRUCTOSE and high fructose corn syrup; GLUCOSE (known in the food industry as DEXTROSE); CORN SYRUP; various forms of SUCROSE, including MOLASSES, brown sugar, table sugar, turbinado sugar, and cane sugar; BARLEY MALT; HONEY; fruit concentrates; and ground dates (date sugar).

Amasake is a sweetener prepared from fermented rice. Each provides carbohydrate with only a few other nutrients; therefore the content of VITAMINS, minerals, and FIBER, as compared to that found in whole foods, is low (EMPTY CALORIES). Sugar alcohols taste sweet and are not as easily metabolized as sugars. MANNITOL, related to the sugar mannose, is poorly utilized. XYLITOL, derived from the sugar xylose, while degraded, contributes fewer calories than sugar. SORBITOL, related to sorbose, is the most widely used sugar alcohol and is only slowly absorbed by the intestine. Relative to table sugar, fructose is 1.7 times as sweet; glucose, 0.7; mannitol, 0.7; and sorbitol, 0.6.