One of my favorite historians is Claude Bowers, an Indiana journalist who was born in 1878 and moonlighted during the 1920s and 1930s by writing evocative books about Jefferson, Jackson, and the Reconstruction period. Mr. Bowers was also a noted political speaker who gave keynote addresses and key nominating speeches at Democratic Party conventions in the 1920s.

Tired of being an onlooker in debates about "the homeless"? Trying to figure out how you can help? Here's an experiment you can do yourself if you live or work in or near an urban area: Why don't you find out whether panhandlers with signs such as "Hungry, need a meal" or "Will work for food" mean what they say?

While the "freemen" tie themselves down in their Montana fort, slaves in other places try to escape. Frequently, a call from a Los Angeles teenage hooker locked into a hotel room comes to the Children of the Night switchboard. Typical message: Her pimp has beaten her and threatens to do worse. She wants out. How can she escape?

California referendum, Texas case, Congressional legislation-affirmative action is being debated among God's children throughout the land once again, with learned discourses on both sides. I'm not a very good "briefer," as they say in Washington, because I tend to throw complications at politicians who want simple answers, but on this issue I can keep it simple.

This month, as a new season begins at the Colorado Rockies ballpark in downtown Denver, junkies and winos on Larimer Street two blocks away are also celebrating the coming of spring. They have somehow survived the winter and will now once a month be able to celebrate "Christmas Day"-the day government checks arrive-by going on drinking or injecting sprees without concern about freezing to death.

Now that the major party presidential candidates are essentially picked, the question of minor parties is at the speculative forefront. The Republican Party cannot win without Christian conservatives, but Bob Dole excites little enthusiasm. It won't take much-a slight here, a typical Dole misstatement there-to send a crucial 10 percent of the electorate to a St. Patrick who promises to drive the snakes out of Washington.

His month the new york times and pat Buchanan-strange bedfellows-have shone spotlights on the dilemmas of workers displaced by economic change; this week's WORLD article (pages 18 and 19) illuminates another side of the story. But there's another war for jobs being waged not far from the Capitol in Washington, a war fought one soul at a time, and so far it has received little publicity.