(Joseph) Stalin and My Father‪.‬

E. J. HUNDERT is professor of history at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches European intellectual history. His The Enlightenment's `Fable': Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society was published by Cambridge University Press in 1994. In the autumn of 1951, shortly after the New York Giants defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers in the most dramatic baseball championship game on record, my parents bought a television set. Unencumbered by foreknowledge and possessing the historical sense of an 11-year-old, I was unaware that this event would place me just outside the last generation of Americans to enter puberty without the benefit of TV. For me, rather, television simply meant more baseball, which my parents strictly rationed in the belief that unregulated viewing would damage my eyesight; not much later, it came to mean Sunday night's Ed Sullivan Show, a variety program of the type wonderfully captured by Fellini in Fred and Ginger, and the Evening News, in front of which my mother, father, and I ritually gathered for 30 minutes each weekday night at 11 o'clock.