March 19, 1995

The first two of 118 terra cotta-colored street signs are to go up in the Jackson Heights Historic District in Queens on Wednesday. More than 4,500 similar signs, which identify every intersection as part of a historic district, have been put up along the streets of 61 of the city's 66 such districts by the New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation, which began doing so in 1989. (Queens's other historic district, tiny Hunters Point, has only three signs.)

As the House prepares for debate on welfare legislation next week, the leaders of the nation's Roman Catholic bishops today denounced parts of the Republican bill that could end cash assistance for many children born out of wedlock, unmarried teen-agers who have children and legal immigrants. The bishops said they were speaking not as partisan political lobbyists but in an effort to illuminate "the moral dimensions and human consequences of this debate."

A CITIZENS committee charged with studying the salaries of the county government's elected officials is recommending an end to about $70,000 in committee fees for members of the Board of Legislators and reconsideration of about $160,000 of leadership stipends. The Committee on Pay Raises for Elected Officials also said it believed that policy makers, when considering raises for top elected officials, should take into consideration that County Executive Andrew P. O'Rourke and County Clerk Leonard N. Spano have higher salaries than their counterparts in comparable counties. Mr. O'Rourke's salary is $119,088, and Mr. Spano's is $99,015.

"NIGGER" is an almost universally known word of contempt. That point was driven home to me during a tour as a foreign correspondent in Somalia. By early 1994, feelings there against America's military intervention were running strong. While I was on patrol with some white American soldiers a group of Somali teen-agers taunted us. "Go home, Go home," they shouted, and then, one of them focusing on me, shouted, "Nigger, go home."'

WHEN does an era end? Sometimes a momentous event -- the beginning of the Civil War, the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt -- provides the definitive finale to what historians can later give a name -- the Antebellum period, the Age of Roosevelt. The end of the Cold War had a literal end: on Dec. 25, 1991, the Soviet Union "went out of business," as the historian Michael Beschloss puts it, and the red flag was lowered over the Kremlin, never to be raised again. But what about the era we find ourselves in now? Historians and journalists operate on the assumption that world politics has entered a new phase, that we find ourselves in a pattern of events radically distinct from that of the last 50 years. The trouble is, it doesn't yet have a compelling name. The phrase routinely employed by political pundits -- the post-cold war era -- is tentative, vague; it lacks authority. Unlike, say, the Era of Good Feelings (1815-1825), when the United States dwelled in apparent harmony, untroubled by foreign wars and prosperous at home, the tepid label we reflexively invoke these days carries a suggestion of self-doubt. It's as if our own historical moment is somehow after the fact, overshadowed by the more significant era that preceded it.