Giant superstores stock their shelves - producing an unlikely windfall for academic and small presses. The superstore boom portends a revolution in scholarly publishing. But by 1997, the boom appears to go bust: Superstores flood small publishers with returns of unsold merchandise.

After a bitter three-year battle, Leonard Jeffries Jr. resigns as chairman of the black studies department at City College of New York. Jeffries's troubles began with a 1991 speech in which he asserted that "rich Jews" played a leading role in financing the slave trade; City University of New York stripped him of his chairmanship in 1992, prompting Jeffries to sue the school. In 1993, a federal jury found that CUNY had violated Jeffries's free speech rights, and a federal judge reinstated his chairmanship. But CUNY successfully appeals the decision.

In a letter to the New York Times, the Unabomber explains his position: He has nothing against humanities professors, only scientists. "All the university people whom we have attacked have been specialists in technical fields," the famous fugitive writes. "We would not want anyone to think that we have any desire to hurt professors who study archaeology, history, literature, or harmless stuff like that." LF's R.J. Lambrose reports that due to the Unabomber's suspiciously "high-powered vocabulary" and his use of words like "anomie," the FBI's sleuths have subpoenaed the subscription lists for the journal Critical Sociology.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, World War II veterans and eighty members of Congress protest a planned Smithsonian exhibit of the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb. They complain that the exhibit text, which entertains the notion that there were nonmilitary reasons for dropping the bomb, denigrates the American war effort. In response, the Smithsonian scales back the exhibit to just the fuselage and a few neutral explanatory materials. Historians cry foul, calling it a capitulation to political pressure. "It is reminiscent of the McCarthy era," bemoans historian Robert K. Musil.