Faculty Bibliography

Visitors flock to its battlefields, where re-enactments are the rage. Truckers and accountants boldly storm Gettysburg's Little Round Top or Chickamauga's Horseshoe Ridge in the tailored uniforms of "Billy Yank" and "Johnny Reb." More than 40 million people watched Ken Burns's 1990 documentary, The Civil War. Even the chapters on Web sites concerned with military matters go beyond battles and armaments to the experiences of common soldiers. Want to learn about the treatment of wounded troops? The University of Toledo has a good site (http://www.cl.utoledo.edu/ canaday/quackery/quack8.html). Need some material about Jews in the Civil War? Click on (http://www.jewishhistory.com/civilwar.htm). Curious about the layout of the Civil War prison at Andersonville, Ga.? A National Park Service Web site, (http://www.nps.gov/ande), provides the details, including evidence of an uncompleted escape tunnel. Or the searcher can explore the mixed emotions of Franklin County's whites concerning the evils of slavery and its further expansion. Some viewed slavery as the proper station for those with dark skin, while others accepted its presence in the South but opposed its spread into new territory. A few demanded its abolition on moral grounds.

For the immigrants who came through New York harbor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Statue of Liberty no doubt dazzled their senses, but Ellis Island determined their fate. A new CD-ROM gives you a feeling for what they saw and felt as they arrived. The key sections of this CD-ROM - The Journey and The Golden Door - are well done. Combining videos, photographs, primary documents and crisp commentary, they follow the immigrant path from the tiny villages of Europe to the controlled chaos of Ellis Island. Viewers should have no trouble navigating along. There is an adequate search function, a zoom lens to enlarge images and simple commands to store and print documents. One disappointment is the failure of "The Ellis Island Experience" to emphasize the changing dynamic of immigration. In the 1890s, some Americans grew uneasy about the enormous flow of immigrants from places such as Greece, Italy, Russia, Poland and Hungary. Without new safeguards, some believed, these immigrants would pollute the nation with a stream of alien blood. Ellis Island was a logical response.

MOST Americans view the immigrant experience through the bold strokes of struggle and assimilation. They barely notice the underside of immigration--the rules for inspecting, admitting and excluding newcomers to American shores.

Vice President Al Gore is in top physical condition with excellent heart function, although his blood lipids are mildly elevated, according to a three-page medical summary that was prepared by the White House physician and released yesterday by Mr. Gore's campaign for president. Mr. Gore ''is in outstanding health'' and does not routinely use prescription medications, Dr. Richard Tubb, the White House physician who provides health care for the vice president and his family, said in a telephone interview. A routine checkup performed last May 7 at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., by a panel of military and civilian doctors showed that the 51-year-old Mr. Gore had only minor medical problems. He had a mild high-frequency hearing loss. It does not interfere with normal conversation and has not changed since his last previous hearing test, in 1995. Because the hearing loss is possibly related to exposure to loud noises from aircraft, doctors have advised Mr. Gore to wear ear plugs at airports and helipads. The vice president uses them periodically, Dr. Tubb said

He finds close coincidence in both time and place between the earliest cases of AIDS and the testing of an oral vaccine developed at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and, later, in two labs in Belgium. From 1957 to 1960, the vaccine was given to a million people in what are now Rwanda, Burundi and Congo. The Wistar Institute, the first independent medical research centre in the United States, appointed the 1992 panel to examine the theory that its vaccine might have touched off the AIDS epidemic. Now it says it is trying to find independent experts to do what they were unwilling to do seven years ago, when the panel recommended testing the remaining stocks of the experimental polio vaccine. Colour Photo: AP/ An Ethiopian child receives modern polio vaccine. Most scientists believe the AIDS virus derives from a simian virus in chimps. Now, British journalist [Edward Hooper] suggests chimp tissue was used to make an experimental oral polio vaccine tested between 1957 and 1960 in central Africa -- epicentre of the AIDS epidemic. ;

Is AIDS a disaster inadvertently brought on by humans during early testing of a polio vaccine in Africa in the 1950s? This provocative theory seemed far-fetched when it came to public attention in an article in Rolling Stone in 1992. Most AIDS experts dismissed it after a scientific committee reviewed the theory and deemed the probability very low. In 'The River,' Edward Hooper suggests that an experimental oral polio vaccine might have been made with chimpanzee tissue contaminated with a simian ancestor of the virus that causes AIDS. Although he has no medical expertise, Hooper, 48, has done a prodigious amount of research since 1990. In 1,070 pages, he builds a case entirely on circumstantial evidence that he accumulated in hundreds of interviews and exhaustive library research. He finds close coincidence in both time and place between the earliest cases of AIDS and the testing of an oral vaccine developed at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and, later, in two laboratories in Belgium. From 1957 to 1960, the vaccine was given to a million people in what are now Rwanda, Burundi and Congo

Is AIDS a disaster inadvertently brought on by humans that arose from early testing of a polio vaccine in Africa in the 1950s? In 'The River,' Edward Hooper suggests that an experimental oral polio vaccine might have been made with chimpanzee tissue contaminated with an ancestor of the virus that was to cause AIDS. He finds close coincidence in both time and place between the earliest cases of AIDS and the testing of an oral vaccine developed at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and, later, in two laboratories in Belgium. From 1957 to 1960, the vaccine was given to a million people in what are now Rwanda, Burundi and Congo

For those seeking to understand this conflict's remarkable grip on our collective imagination, The Civil War Experience is a good place to start. Bulging with information, beautifully put together and simple to navigate, it combines serious history with mindless (though mildly addictive) razzle-dazzle. Made in conjunction with the History Channel, the disc includes 150 top-flight biographies of leading Civil War figures and dozens of topical essays supplemented by video clips and eyewitness accounts. There are video games that allow you to blast the enemy with cannon fire and run a naval blockade. There is also a trivia game that I strongly urge overconfident historians to avoid. The opening section of this CD-ROM, The Road to War, is disappointing. Essays on topics like the Missouri Compromise (1820-1821), the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and the Dred Scott decision (1857) provide some historical background, a sound idea, except that the essays, alas, are flat, poorly connected and confuse the slavery issue. In the Dred Scott essay, for example, we are told that ''Southerners saw the decision as a guarantee that slavery would be protected within Southern borders.'' In fact, that point had long been conceded by most Northerners, Lincoln among them. What Southerners really saw in the Dred Scott decision was a guarantee that slavery would be protected into the vast federal territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War

The reason his file is so extensive is that Mr. [John] McCain, a Navy pilot whose jet was shot down over North Vietnam, was treated for major fractures and other injuries during more than five years as a prisoner of war and received the standard psychological evaluations that were given to all P.O.W.'s after their release. Mr. McCain's campaign carefully controlled the release of the records in what appeared to be an effort in part to counter discussions of whether Mr. McCain, a Republican, has the temperament to be president. The campaign released a statement by Dr. Michael M. Ambrose, director of the Robert E. Mitchell Center for Prisoner of War Studies, and Dr. Jeffrey L. Moore, a clinical neuropsychologist at the center, that said: ''Senator McCain has never been diagnosed with or treated at the center for a psychological or psychiatric disorder. He has been subject to an extensive battery of psychological tests and following his last examination in 1993, we judged him to be in good physical and mental health.''