Bound Volumes, Hometown History

April 18, 2024

90 YEARS AGO

April 1934

40 YEARS AGO

President Reagan has approved a series of measures, including pre-emptive strikes and reprisals designed to get the upper hand on terrorism worldwide, administration officials revealed. One of the key elements of the policy is an effort to switch from defensive action to offensive, partly by increasing the ability of U.S. operatives to gather intelligence in order to stop terrorist activities before they occur. While the U.S. government has been increasingly concerned with terrorism for several years, new impetus to deal with it occurred when 241 U.S. servicemen died in the truck bombing of a U.S. Marine headquarters bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, last October 23. An anonymous White House official said Reagan did not scrap an existing prohibition against assassination attempts by U.S. government agents. “The general idea is that we don’t allow terrorism to go unpunished,” the source said.

April 1984

30 YEARS AGO

Cornel West, a scholar of Afro-American studies and the author of the book, “Race Matters,” will speak on Wednesday, April 27, at 8 p.m. in the Hunt Union Ballroom at the State University College at Oneonta. In his book, West argues that the major obstacle to harmonious race relations in the United States is nihilism—a sense of worthlessness that he sees as growing among American blacks. West is co-authoring a new book with Michael Learner titled “Blacks and Jews: Conflicts and Coalescence.” West will be leaving Princeton University after the school year to teach at Harvard University where he will divide his time between the Department of Afro-American studies and the Harvard Divinity School.

April 1994

20 YEARS AGO

President Bush’s efforts to ban gay marriage are driving gay rights activists to plan protests and other attention-grabbing events in New York City this summer during the Republican convention. “This is an issue that has really swept the country from coast to coast and is dominating public discussion about civil rights,” said Kevin Cathcart, director of Lambda Legal, a gay rights group. Bush publicly backed a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriages after the high court in Massachusetts ruled it is unconstitutional to prevent gay couples from marrying.

April 2004