Their mature heights vary from the smallest species of chinkapins, often shrubby, to the giant of past American forests, Castanea dentata that could reach.

Or else the North really believes that all Southerners except a few quaint old characters have come around to realizing the errors of their past, and are now at heart sharers of the American Dream, like everybody else.

Of greater importance, however, is the content of those programs, which have had and are having enormous consequences for the American people.

Willard Thorp, in his new book, American Writing In The Twentieth Century, observes, quite validly it seems: `` Certain subjects are conspicuously absent or have been only lightly touched.

The interesting thing about Mr. Lyford's approach, and the approach of the contributors to The Agreeable Autocracies ( Oceana Publications, 1961 ) to the situation of American civilization, is that it is concerned with comprehending the psychological relationships which are having a decisive effect on American life.

To the extent that our sampling of the orientations of American college students in the years 1950 and 1952 may be representative of our culture -- and still valid in 1959 -- we are disposed to question the summary characterization of the current generation as silent, beat, apathetic, or as a mass of other-directed conformists who are guided solely by social radar without benefit of inner gyroscopes.

One had it that a friend, protesting her snobbery, said, `` But, Gracie, you are an American, aren't you ''??

Pohl and Kornbluth's ad men have long since thrown out appeals to reason and developed techniques of advertising which tie in with `` every basic trauma and neurosis in American life '', which work on the libido of consumers, which are linked to the `` great prime motivations of the human spirit ''.

Perhaps the moralities of world law are not advanced by stealing American diplomatic papers and planes, but the Kennedy administration can always file a demurrer to the effect that, but for its own incompetence in protecting American interests, these things would not happen.

Then people wonder why Russian pupils are more advanced than American students.

The Providence Sunday Journal article ( Jan. 29 ) asking whether American taxpayers are being victimized by a gigantic giveaway to pay for the care of war veterans who have non-service-connected disabilities sounds as though The Providence Journal is desperate for news.

Independence Day is the appropriate date as a symbolical reminder of the American article of faith that governments are instituted among men to secure to them certain inalienable rights, the first of which is life, and when any government becomes subversive of that end, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

But he -- and all of China -- wears the scars of American indecisiveness, and he knows what an uncertain ally we are.

That exchange was not only possible but commonplace last week in Manhattan, as more and more New Yorkers were discovering 29th Street and Eighth Avenue, where half a dozen small nightclubs with names like Arabian Nights, Grecian Palace and Egyptian Gardens are the American inpost of belly dancing.

and now, therefore, do I, John A. Notte, Jr., Governor of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, proclaim Monday, May 22nd, 1961, as National Maritime Day, reminding our citizens that American Merchant ships and American seamen are ready at all times to serve our Nation in the cause of freedom and justice.

One need not waver in his belief in virile law enforcement to insist that there are other things in American life which are also of great importance, and to which even law enforcement must accommodate itself.

It is the concern of the Department of State that the American people are safe and secure -- defense is not a monopoly concern of the Department of Defense.

But he takes his bearings from the great guidelines of policy, well-established precedents, the commitments of the United States under international charters and treaties, basic statutes, and well-understood notions of the American people about how we are to conduct ourselves, in policy literature such as country papers and National Security Council papers accumulated in the Department.

To meet this urgent need for skilled manpower we are proposing the establishment of a Peace Corps -- an organization which will recruit and train American volunteers, sending them abroad to work with the people of other nations.

Newcomers to the American hunter are the Browning group of bolt-action, high-power rifles.

For restoration of early American life the places to visit are Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown, Virginia.

Although New Orleans was not to learn of it for a spell, she also was a sadist, a nymphomaniac and unobtrusively mad -- the perpetrator of some of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed on American soil.

A good deal of English was spoken on the beach, most educated Greeks learn it in childhood, and there were also American wives and children of our overseas servicemen.

Perhaps, as Mr. Freeman says, American agriculture may stop the Communists, but it is also swindling the American taxpayer.

But the Latin American republics who have been rather inclined to drag their feet on taking action against Castro also reacted swiftly last week by finally throwing Cuba off the Inter-American Defense Board.

It can also contribute to the education of America and to more intelligent American participation in the world.

It should be American policy not only to encourage effective land reform programs but also to underline the relation of such reforms to the economic growth and modernization of the society.

Masu also uses the training she got in an American home where she learned to polish furniture, clean corners, and work effectively in keeping a shiny house.

Her education in the United States, not just in a classroom, but also in an American house with an American housekeeper, stands her in good stead.

`` Billions of American dollars, not only from capital investors but also from the pockets of U.S. taxpayers '', this author states, `` are being poured into South Africa to support a system dedicated to the oppression, the persecution, and the almost diabolical exploitation of 12 million people the color of whose skins happens not to be white ''.

Mantle, the bull-necked blond switch-hitter, had one sensational triple-crown season, 1959, when he batted and also led the American League in home runs, 52, and rbi's, 130.

Almost any information about the Dreadnought would also reveal secrets about the American underwater fleet.

Dr. Hester, also one of the youngest men ever to head a major American university, succeeds Dr. Carroll V. Newsom who resigned last September to join Prentice-Hall Inc. publishing firm.

-- American Stock Exchange prices enjoyed a fairly solid rise but here also trading dwindled.

The same thing is also evidenced by the extreme `` culture-Protestantism '' so often observed to characterize the preaching and teaching of the American churches.

It is to this same tradition that most of the creative figures in the last century and a half of American theology also belong.

We do well to remind ourselves that from men and women of New England ancestry also issued the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Science, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the American Home Missionary Society, the American Bible Society, and New England theology.

One of the finest soft shoe tunes ever invented, `` Once In Love With Amy '' is also, of course, one of the most tantalizingly persistent of light love lyrics to come out of American musical comedy in our era.

The radio broadcast of the September 8, 1937 Hollywood Bowl George Gershwin Memorial Concert, in which An American in Paris, also conducted by Shilkret, was second on the program, was recorded and was released in 1998 in a two-CD set.

In other countries ( and in some, particularly smaller, British and North American universities ), anthropologists have also found themselves institutionally linked with scholars of folklore, museum studies, human geography, sociology, social relations, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and social work.

* Brad Lesley ( born 1958 ), American baseball player and television personality also nicknamed " The Animal "