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To: Win Smith who wrote (54)	11/17/2002 3:03:02 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 603

'The Landscape of History': Learning From the Natural Sciences nytimes.com [ review of THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY How Historians Map the Past. By John Lewis Gaddis. Excerpt: ] A better prototype for the way historians work, Gaddis argues, is those natural sciences that themselves attempt to explain great historical processes (the creation of the universe, the evolution of species, the shaping and reshaping of the natural world). ''These disciplines work,'' he says, not by imposing theories on events, but ''by deriving processes from structures, by fitting representations to realities, by privileging neither induction nor deduction, by remaining open . . . to what insights from one field can tell you about another.'' Historians have paid too little attention to these nonlaboratory natural sciences, Gaddis writes, but there are many unacknowledged similarities between the way they do their work and the way historians do theirs, and much that each can learn from the other. Most of this book is less polemical than these central arguments make it sound. Gaddis offers a painstaking explanation of the way historians reach conclusions, the way they test their assumptions, the way they constantly revise their explanations. ''It's part of historical consciousness,'' he says, in an implicit rebuttal to conservative critics of historical revisionism, ''to learn . . . that there is no 'correct' interpretation of the past.''

To: Win Smith who wrote (54)	11/26/2002 10:31:28 AM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 603

U.S. Fails to Curb Its Saudi Oil Habit, Experts Say nytimes.com Clip: Established in the 1970's as a response to an oil embargo by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, which is based in Kuwait, the reserve now holds a record 592 million barrels, part of a Bush administration plan to reach 700 million barrels by 2005. But because of increased American dependence on imported oil, the length of time the reserve can compensate for lost imports has declined from a high of 118 days in 1985 to 51 days at the end of last year. Some oil experts advocate increasing the reserve to one billion barrels. Alan Larson, under secretary of state for economic affairs, went to Saudi Arabia last month to secure assurances that Riyadh would pump extra oil if it were needed, American and Saudi oil executives say. Last month Mr. Caruso's office helped prepare an "oil market contingency planning" book, based entirely on public data. The Energy Department has restricted the book's distribution to keep it from Congress and the public, according to government officials.