MYSTERIES OF AMERICAN HISTORY

We asked dozens of historians to play detective and tell us what case in all of American history they would most like to see cracked

The question we asked this year of the members of the Society of American Historians, and several other scholars, was simple: What is the one mystery in United States history you would like to see resolved? And what do you imagine is a plausible solution?

To encourage their responses, we added that the missing minutes of the Nixon tapes was an obvious example of what we had in mind. And what Aaron Burr was up to was another. But we were sure there were many other mysteries from all eras of our past—ones that involved people, events, and social and economic patterns. Finally, to forestall any objections that considerations of this kind might be seen as trivial, we quoted the words of that wonderful seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Browne: “What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.…”

The results follow. If nothing else, they prove that history is never fully disclosed; the case is always open.

—The Editors

What Made Burr Tick?

I have often wondered what Aaron Bunwas really up to when he wandered south and west, raising money, enlisting coconspirators, intriguing with the British, the Spanish, and the Mexicans, dropping hints of separatism and empire. The answer, I suppose, was targets of opportunity, with maximum and minimum objectives. In some moods he must have seen himself as the emperor of America; in other moods he perhaps hoped that if he threatened enough trouble, the Jefferson administration would buy him off by a diplomatic appointment. But a mystery remains: How could a man, so coolly realistic so much of the time, live so rich a fantasy life the rest of the time?

—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., historian, currently at work on the fourth volume of his The Age of Roosevelt series.

Was Jefferson Guilty?

On September 1, 1802, the Richmond, Virginia, Recorder; or Lady’s and Gentleman’s Miscellany, asserted that President Thomas Jefferson “keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the president himself.”

Thus did the editor of the Recorder, James Callender, create a mystery that continued to haunt American history for the next 188 years. The accusation tormented Jefferson and his family during their lifetimes. It resurfaced in the 187Os, reinforced by Sally’s descendants, who claimed she told them Jefferson was their father. After being dormant for another half-century, it became a public issue again in the 1950s, when J. C. Furnas in his best-selling Goodbye to Uncle Tom flatly declared Jefferson guilty. By the late 1960s, when debunking America became a national obsession, this conclusion was accepted in many quarters as an established fact.

This much is certain. Sally Hemings (or Hemmings), herself a mulatto, lived at Monticello and had five mulatto children, several of whom had reddish hair and some resemblance to Jefferson. In private, Jefferson denied his guilt several times but never made a public statement. In my opinion, the reason for his silence was, first, Sally Hemings was the illegitimate daughter of his wife’s father, John Wayles, and, second, the father of Sally’s children was Jefferson’s nephew Peter Carr, who grew up at Monticello and was a virtual son to Jefferson.

The question of Jefferson’s guilt or innocence has become more than a merely historical mystery. As a Jefferson biographer I have received letters from high school students and teachers, some black, others white, who view the assertion with enormous symbolic weight. For blacks, many of whom presume Jefferson’s guilt, it is a paradigm of white betrayal. Feminists also lurk on the fringes of the debate. I think the question is sufficiently serious to warrant the appointment of a committee of scholars from the Society of American Historians or some other leading historical organization who would attempt to determine with all the authority the facts can muster where the truth lies—and publicize the conclusion vigorously.

—Thomas Fleming, historian and author of The Sage of Monticello and novels including The Officers’ Wives.

What Turned Madison Around?

For me one of the minor mysteries in United States history, but one that had great importance historically, was why James Madison, who had been categorically resistant to adding a bill of rights to the Constitution in 1787, by 1789 not only favored adding rights to the Constitution but performed one of the greatest feats of legislative leadership in American history in shepherding through Congress what became the Bill of Rights. Why the shift? Some suggest that it was the influence of Thomas Jefferson, others simply that Madison “saw the light,” especially during the period of the state ratification conventions. My own theory is much more political: Madison discovered a great deal of support for the Bill of Rights when he vied with James Monroe for a seat in Congress and made commitments in the election contest that as a person of integrity he honored in the first session of Congress. I should add that the question of Madison’s motivation is still a matter of dispute among historians, as lately as the last convention of the Organization of American Historians.

—James MacGregor Burns, professor of political science, Williams College and author of many books, including The Workshop of Democracy.

How Did Meriwether Lewis Die?

Did Meriwether Lewis, who with William Clark first blazed a trail to the Pacific in 1804–06, die by his own hand at Grinder’s Stand on the Natchez Trace in 1809, or was he murdered? If he was murdered, who was the murderer and what was the motive?

Through the years the names of several suspects have been advanced, but little is known about most of them. On the list are Robert and Priscilla Grinder, or Griner, who operated the inn where Lewis died violently. Others are James Neelly, an Indian agent traveling with Lewis; John Pernier, Lewis’s servant; and Tom Runions, believed to be an occasional land pirate. In the documentation that exists are numerous discrepancies.

Questions are also unanswered in the evidence that has been presented to give credence to the suicide of Lewis. Some of it came from the suspects themselves. Recent scholarship leans toward the suicide theory, but in the area of Tennessee where Lewis died, local folklore still strongly supports the belief that he was murdered, even among descendants of some of the suspects.

The solution may be in Lewis’s use of laudanum, an opium-based drug, if proof can be found that he was carrying any at the time of his death.

—Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Conspiracy of Knaves.

What Was the Truth of Andrew Jackson’s Marriage?

When Andrew Jackson ran for the Presidency in 1828, the Nashville Central Committee issued a statement to explain the strange, indeed mysterious, circumstances of his marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards. According to the committee’s report, Jackson escorted Rachel to Natchez in January 1791 to help her escape her husband, Lewis Robards of Kentucky. Then he returned home. Several months later Jackson heard that Robards had obtained a divorce from his wife. Without waiting for confirmation, Jackson returned to Natchez and, according to the committee’s statement, “married Mrs. Robards” sometime in the summer of 1791. Two years later the couple learned that Robards did not have a divorce. All he had was an enabling act permitting him to sue for his freedom in a court of law. Not until September 27, 1793, did a jury find Rachel guilty of living “in adultery with another man” and desertion, whereupon the court dissolved the marriage. Four months later Jackson and Rachel were legally married by the justice of the peace of Davidson County, Tennessee, Robert Hays, Rachel’s brother-in-law.

In the presidential campaign of 1828 Jackson’s supporters insisted that he and Rachel were innocent of any wrong-doing at the time of their “first” marriage. But despite a recent and extensive search in this country and abroad, not a single document has been found that corroborates the story put out by the Central Committee. Indeed, several documents suggest a different interpretation. For example, the inventory of the estate of John Donelson, Rachel’s father, dated January 28, 1791, lists her as Rachel Jackson. Other documents dated July and October 1790 list her as Rachel Donelson. It would appear that Jackson and Rachel had “married” prior to their departure for Natchez, sometime between October 1790 and January 1791. It is also possible that they did not marry at all and simply lived together as husband and wife until the divorce was finally granted in 1793.

During the presidential campaign Rachel was accused of bigamy and the couple of moral delinquency. Was there a marriage prior to 1793? William B. Lewis, Jackson’s close friend, insisted that there had to be. “I would ask,” he wrote in 1827, “how it is possible that any man [such as Jackson] could have been held in such high estimation by a whole community if he had acted as has been alleged? Could any man, so destitute of moral virtue … maintain so high a standing?”

What makes this “mystery” historically significant, I think, is the fact that if no marriage took place in Natchez or anywhere else before 1793, as probable, within a forty-year period—the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century—ideas about “moral virtue” in relation to marriage on the frontier had changed considerably in the United States.

—Robert V. Remini, author of Andrew Jackson and the Cause of American Democracy, 1833–1846.

What Was Bugging James Monroe?

For me, one of the nagging little mysteries in presidential history is why James Monroe spent his post-Presidency incessantly suing the federal government. Scarcely out of the White House, Monroe wheedied thirty-six thousand dollars out of Congress in 1826 in satisfaction of a claim for extra salary and expenses that he insisted were owed him for the two diplomatic missions he had carried out many years earlier, funds he had never previously sought to recover. Almost immediately after the settlement, he was at it again, dredging up additional items he solicited reimbursement for. Once more Congress obliged, granting him thirty thousand dollars in 1831, for which Monroe regarded himself not so much grateful as shortchanged! What was Monroe up to in his time of retirement?

Lucius Wilmerding, who thirty years ago revealed these shenanigans in his superb monograph James Monroe: Public Claimant, offered the opinion that Monroe felt so keenly he had never received sufficient credit for his public service that he became determined to make his aggrievement pay off. If he could not have the gratitude and admiration of his fellow citizens, he would at least wrench from them justice and recompense.

My guess is less sympathetic: Monroe was so pricked and undone by the substantial charges, which he never fully succeeded in downing, that he had misapplied public money while in official posts (even that he had personally profited from his refurbishing of the White House after its torching by the British) that his shame became an incubus in his brain. This President, who gave his name to the country’s first and most enduring “doctrine,” was, by a curious mental inversion, turned into a permanent plaintiff in order to aver to himself and to the nation a Founding Father’s equivalent of “Well, I am not a crook.”

—Henry F. Graff, professor of history, Columbia University.

What Did Key See?

Our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” has always been wrapped in mystery. Except for the first stanza, nobody knows the words. For historians, an even greater mystery surrounds the circumstances under which the anthem was written.

We do know that Francis Scott Key wrote it immediately after the repulse of the British fleet attacking Baltimore in the War of 1812. He had been detained while on a truce mission to the fleet and had to observe the battle with two American companions from the British anchorage eight miles down the Patapsco River.

All day September 13, 1814, Key watched the enemy squadron bombard Fort McHenry, the star-shaped brick fortification that guarded the entrance to Baltimore harbor. That night—despite a heavy rain that cut visibility to a minimum—the gun flashes and bomb bursts told him that the fort was still holding out.

Around 4:00 A.M. the firing tapered off, and soon there was only silence and the blackness of the murky night. Had the fort surrendered? Had the British quit? From Key’s flag-of-truce boat it was impossible to see anything. He could only guess.

And at this point conjecture takes over for us all. Purists say that it happened just as Key later told it: He waited breathlessly until finally, in the first light of dawn, he saw the American flag waving in the breeze, and then he knew that the fort had held out. Carried away, he began scribbling lines of celebration on the back of an old letter. “The Star-Spangled Banner” was born.

Realists wonder. The Fort McHenry flag was huge—forty-two feet by thirty feet, some four hundred yards of bunting. Flying it on a rainy night would almost certainly have broken the flagpole. At the very least it would have hung as a soggy mass, not about to wave poetically in the breeze. The fort did have a smaller “storm flag,” which it probably did fly, but it’s unlikely that it could have been seen through the smoke and rain eight miles away.

A little-known account by an English participant, discovered only in 1969, suggests what might really have happened. Midshipman Robert J. Barrett of the frigate Hebrus recalled in an account written in 1841 that as the squadron gave up its attack and started back down the river, the Americans taunted the British by raising “a most superb and splendid ensign on their battery.” According to the Hebrus’s log, the time was about 9:00 A.M.

It seems most likely that this was the flag that Key saw. Everything fits except the time. Like any good poet, he knew that dawn is a more magic hour than 9:00 A.M. It was time to resort to a little poetic license.

—Walter Lord, historian and author of The Dawn’s Early Light and A Night To Remember.

Who Owned the Slaves?

Two large questions interest me: First, who really owned the slaves in the antebellum South—the planters or the bankers, especially Brown and Baring Brothers? If the banks owned the slaves as mortgaged property, then it was the bankers, rather than the planters, who were able to control manumission.

Second, what percentage of the U.S. national budget was expended on the arts and sciences, including the Smithsonian project, in the period between 1840 and 1860? Research in all printed records provides a tantalizing clue: Between 25 and 33 percent of the national budget was spent on such projects. If this figure proves to be correct after research through the ledgers by a team of researchers, it changes the complexion of American culture as seen from Tocqueville and a number of those, including the artists and scientists themselves, who have declared the United States government consistently ignorant and parsimonious about the arts and sciences.

—William H. Goetzmann, Jack S. Blanton, Sr. Chair in History and American Studies, University of Texas at Austin; author of The West of the Imagination.

What Turned Madison Around?

—James MacGregor Burns, professor of political science, Williams College and author of many books, including The Workshop of Democracy.

Did Stanton Betray Lincoln?

It is a murder mystery—or an essential part of one: the nagging questions about Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War. Why did he refuse the escort the President asked for when he called at the War Department the day of his assassination? The reason Stanton gave for not letting Maj. Thomas Eckert go with Lincoln was urgent business at the telegraph office, which the major supervised. When the President went into that office and repeated his request, Eckert, in virtual insubordination, gave the same excuse. The record proves that no dispatches were sent from the office that night; indeed, neither Stanton nor Eckert showed up there. In the event, the substitute bodyguard proved criminally neglectful.

After the tragedy Stanton went out of his way to tell a congressional committee, which was asking a different question, that Lincoln’s last visit to the department took place two days before the fatal night, and soon he contradicted himself, putting the time one day later. From Stanton also came a description of that final meeting: rejoicing in common over approaching victory; expressions of mutual affection and admiration. Nobody confirmed this touching encounter, though it was not described as occurring in private. It appears, too, that Stanton had dissuaded General Grant from accepting the President’s invitation to join the party at Ford’s Theatre. Why? What a distressing list of unanswered questions!

—Jacques Barzun, retired dean, Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

What Did Lincoln Really Think?

My favorite historical puzzle is the question of what Lincoln actually thought about Reconstruction and black rights in the period just before his assassination. Was he on the verge of accepting the radical commitment to federally enforced racial equality, or was he closer to the conservative position that would be defended by his successor, Andrew Johnson? Two key documents, supporting one side or the other, have been discredited or at least called in question. One is a letter to Gen. James S. Wadsworth advocating universal manhood suffrage for blacks, which was apparently concocted after Lincoln’s assassination to support the black-suffrage cause. The other is the uncorroborated testimony of Gen. Ben Butler that as late as 1865 Lincoln still considered the “colonization” or deportation of the freedmen the best policy that the federal government could pursue. The remaining evidence is inconclusive, and we still don’t know whether Lincoln embraced public equality at the time of his death or remained a moderate white supremacist. A plausible solution is that he had not yet made up his mind.

—George M. Frederickson, professor of history, Stanford University.

Were Sacco and Vanzetti Guilty? Was Hiss?

I think the two greatest mysteries in American history concern the Sacco-Vanzetti and Alger Hiss cases. With regard to the first, Felix Frankfurter once wrote his friend William L. Marbury, a Baltimore attorney, that when he reached heaven, he wanted the divine authorities to give him the true story of that case. Were the two Italians guilty of murder, or were they victims of unjust prejudice against Italians and against anarchism when the state of Massachusetts sent them to their death?

Equally intriguing is the role that Alger Hiss may or may not have played in the transmission of American diplomatic secrets to the Soviets on the eve of the Second World War. If I had a battery of graduate students, I would like them to rummage in the files of the Soviet intelligence agencies to locate whatever materials might shed light on the matter. Certainly there are mysteries surrounding the affair that Alien Weinstein’s study, Perjury, could not resolve beyond a shadow of doubt.

—Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History, University of Florida.

Who Invented the Hamburger?

Anybody solving my favorite mystery in American history will ease my frustration at my own failure to do so. Twenty years ago for a book in process I set myself to find out who invented the hamburger—not its grandfather, the German-born “Hamburger steak,” a broiled mound of chopped beef eaten with knife and fork, but the browned patty tucked into a plump white roll that became the worldwide symbol of American gastronomy. I did draw some blood: Around 1900 Louis’ Lunch in New Haven was serving a broiled beef-patty sandwich, but that was on sliced bread, not the roll, as essential to the classic hamburger as potatoes are to clam chowder. I managed to trace a rapid infiltration of a “hamburger” item into lunch wagons and carnival lots well before World War I but turned up no definite point where the roll took over. People kept telling me roll-hamburgers first appeared at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. But local archives had no trace of such a thing, nor did Thomas Hart Benton when I asked him about it: “No, sir, I had a growing boy’s appetite, and I was all over that fair every day—no hamburgers.”

Possible solution: A late-at-night run on bread-hamburgers in some one-arm lunch around 1905 exhausted the bread supply, the cook substituted the rolls then used for ham sandwiches—very filling but very little ham—and the customers liked the innovation because it held together better in the hand.

But where, oh where, was that all-night lunchroom and who was that cook?

—J. C. Furnas, author of Fanny Kemble and The Road to Harpers Ferry.

Who Shot Huey Long?

More than anything I would like to know who really shot Huey Long or what actually happened in the marbled back corridor of the Louisiana State Capitol on September 8, 1935. And while we’re at it, I’d like to know who got the “de-duct” box, Huey’s presidential campaign chest filled with more than a million dollars in “contributions” from state workers “encouraged” to tithe to the Kingfish.

By the summer of 1935 Long had become even more ruthless and driven than ever, sure that he could beat FDR the next year and confident, even though he was a United States senator, that he could still control everything back home. After introducing forty-two power-enhancing bills in the Louisiana House on Sunday, September 8, including one that would eliminate an old enemy, Judge Benjamin Pavy, by redrawing his district, Huey confidently roamed the State Capitol. Waiting in a hall outside the House chamber was Dr. Carl A. Weiss, the son-in-law of Judge Pavy. According to some witnesses, Weiss was carrying a .38-caliber pistol. What happened next is wrapped in mystery and contradiction.

Huey came barreling out of an office, far ahead of his bodyguards, when Weiss supposedly stepped from the shadows and shot him. Huey’s men quickly pumped more than thirty bullets into Weiss’s body, ensuring he would never be able to tell his story. Huey died thirty hours later after surgeons selected for their political loyalty botched the job. His last words were: “Don’t let me die. I have so much to do.”

The “de-duct” box disappeared. And for more than fifty years rumors have swirled around the killing.

Weiss’s family has long maintained his innocence, sure he meant only to confront Long with his outrage over his father-in-law’s treatment, sure the gun was planted after the fact. Many believe that Weiss only struck at Huey and that it was overreacting guards who killed Long accidentally, covering their error by pinning it all on Weiss. Some think rival factions within Long’s organization, eager for the “de-duct” box, were behind it. One of Huey’s regular guards told me he was strangely reassigned just before the shooting. There are still many in Louisiana that say “the syndicate killed him.” And some even claim Franklin Roosevelt put someone up to it, to eliminate a formidable foe.…

Whatever happened, visitors still run their fingers over the cool pink marble feeling the pockmarks left by the gunplay that Sunday evening.

—Ken Burns, producer and director of documentary films including Huey Long and the PBS series The Civil War.

Who Are the Childs Brothers?

For almost a decade historians and journalists have known only a small, small part of post-World War II America’s most intriguing spy story: how from the early 1950s through the early 1980s the FBI’s two most prized secret informants were a pair of aging Communist party international travelers, Jack and Morris Childs. The Childs brothers’ story is both-fascinating and convoluted. Personally acquainted with a wide range of world figures, ranging from Fidel Castro to Mao Tse-Tung, the brothers—spoken of as Solo within the U.S. intelligence community—played significant roles in multiple arenas: questioning Castro about Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination; and telling the FBI that Stanley D. Levison, a New York attorney who later would become one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s principal advisers, was a central figure in the subterranean financial structure of the Communist party (CP).

While some officials in the CIA theorized that the brothers were likely to be Soviet triple agents rather than American double agents, the Childs brothers profited handsomely from the FBI’s largess; bureau executives worried about financial questions while wondering whether the project was unintentionally helping sustain the CP rather than combat it. Most important, however, the Childs brothers served as a very direct, one-way transmission belt between the two people in America most committed to believing in the CP’s influence and significance: the Communist party chief Gus Hall and the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Thus the exaggerated private boasts of the former became eagerly welcomed fodder for the latter, top-secret evidence that the Communist party was just as powerful an evil force as ever had been suspected. The FBI’s ongoing post-1956 fixation with the CP was perhaps more a product of the Childs brothers than anything else.

The bare bones of this story are known, but the copious, classified documentary record that details it remains wholly untouched and probably will continue to be for decades to come. If the Freedom of Information Act did not provide executive-branch agencies the discretion to withhold historically significant documents even twenty-five or thirty years after the events in question, the Solo story and its attendant mysteries—like others dependent on federal documents for a full telling—would emerge into public view in the 1990s rather than be delayed until well into the twenty-first century, at best.

—Daniel J. Garrow, professor of history, The Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York.

Did FDR Think He Was Immortal?

Did Franklin D. Roosevelt realize how ill he was by the end of the year 1944, when he was about to begin his fourth presidential term? Why in heaven’s name did he insist on holding onto the Presidency, considering that Gov. Thomas E. Dewey surely would not have changed American foreign policy, had Dewey been elected?

Clark Clifford once said that Roosevelt thought he was going to live forever. And yet in his heart of hearts he must have known better. In late 1944 he was no longer waited upon by his regular physician, Vice Adm. Ross T. Mclntire, an ear, nose, and throat man, but by Lt. Comdr. Howard Bruenn, a heart specialist, who was seeing him every day. How much imagination did it take to see what was going on?

Roosevelt must have thought that he would remain in the Presidency as long as he could, until the war was over, which would not be too much longer. And yet the casual way in which he allowed a group of Democratic party bosses to present him with Sen. Harry S. Truman as his vice-presidential running mate, a man he did not really know, and whom he saw only two or three times in the months thereafter, says that he had no intention of passing the Presidency to Truman.

The plausible explanation? Clifford was right.

—Robert H. Ferrell, professor of history, Indiana University; author, Truman: A Centenary Remembrance.

Why Was Waldheim Cleared?

The mystery I should like to see resolved is the clearing of Kurt Waldheim, in 1971, by the CIA, for election to his post as secretary-general of the United Nations.

—Francis Steegmuller, winner, National Book Award, 1971; translator, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert.

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

I have no doubt. My mystery is why after the S&L robberies, those from HUD, the revolving-door larceny at the Pentagon, and, of course, Wedtech, the Reagan administration isn’t pictured as the most corrupt in our history and by the billions. And why this distinction still belongs to poor old Harding. The solution, of course, is for all to abandon the design of Ronald Reagan, which is to substitute the script for the reality.

—John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics emeritus, Harvard University.

What Did the Kremlin Want?

Now that the Cold War is over, I’d love to have access to whatever archives there are in the Kremlin that would settle the question of what the Soviet Union’s foreign-policy intentions were between the end of World War II and the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev. I grew up watching liberals and conservatives argue inconclusively over whether the Soviets were trying to build an empire for all the standard reasons or just protecting themselves against a repeat of the nightmare of the war. In particular, I’d like to know whether the Soviets were trying to develop a first-strike nuclear capability against the United States, along with a domestic civil-defense system designed with the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war in mind. It’s purely a what-if question because the Soviets’ internal weaknesses seem to have forced them to abandon whatever overarching foreign-policy strategy they had during the Cold War, but it’s still compelling because the Cold War so strongly affected the whole tenor of life in this country (and the rest of the world, for that matter) during the postwar period.

—Nicolas Lemann, national correspondent, The Atlantic; author of the forthcoming Promised Land.

Did the White House Trigger the Challenger Catastrophe?

An awareness of public relations considerations hasn’t been lacking in American political practice, from the time of Sam Adams and the Boston Tea Party on. Only in our own day, though, have we seen such considerations threatening to control events to an alarmingly increased extent.

Quite possibly as planned dramatic background for President Reagan’s State of the Union address, originally scheduled for January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger was sent aloft despite weather too cold for hours beforehand to promise favorable conditions for a launching. There was no disclosure then or later of what last-minute messages may have gone from the White House to NASA executives at Huntsville, Alabama, or to officials at Cape Canaveral, bearing on the takeoff decision.

For the period from noon of January 27 to 11:38 A.M. of the 28th, by examination of White House logs or otherwise, I’d like it clearly proven or clearly disproven whether word from or on behalf of the President went to Alabama or Florida bidding those in charge not to be too finicky—given the upcoming address—about getting the Challenger and its seven astronauts into the air, cold weather or no cold weather.

—Charles O’Neill historian and author, currently completing More Than One, about Kentucky Unionists in the Civil War.