The author is persuaded that the main purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was to raise the confidence of moderate ruling groups in Western Europe. Today NATO is an expression of support between troubled allies with a number of common interests. (RM)

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a national catastrophe and the major news story of the year, was the first national labor strike in U.S. history. Because of the ideological bias of the press, specifically its implicit commitment to capitalism and to objectivity (itself a "myth" of social order), newspapers of the period could be…