Editors’ Choice: The Best of the Past From the Year Just Past
American Heritage’s editors and contributors survey the historical offerings of recent months, and pick their favorites from a field wide enough to include movies, restaurants, furniture, cocktails, hotels, cookies, wristwatches—and artifacts retrieved from the staterooms of the Titanic.
Sections
Entertainment
Travel
Food & Drink
Museums
Shopping
Bookshelf
Trends
Contributors
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Entertainment
 | | We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions |
Historical Recording
Springsteen Reignites the folk song
In 1997 the rock god Bruce Springsteen was asked to contribute to an album commemorating the folksinger Pete Seeger. Immersing himself in Seeger’s music, Springsteen decided to take an unconventional approach to the American folk song. He convened a motley ensemble of 17, including a 4-member horn section, an accordionist, 2 fiddlers, and assorted others, and recorded a brace of tunes popularized by Seeger. Over the next few years Springsteen found himself returning again and again to the session tape. “Listening to it was a relief,” he said recently. “It was just people playing. It sounded like fun.” In 2005, and again earlier this year, the singer invited the same group of musicians to his home in Rumson, New Jersey, to cut more tunes, many of them more than a century old and all of them recorded by Seeger. The result, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, is a splendid piece of work, capable of changing the way you think about folk music.
Springsteen shows that the American folk song is a capacious vessel. Instead of the pick-and-strum acoustic-guitar sound we inevitably associate with folk, this band brims over with different styles. On “Old Dan Tucker” the southern Appalachian strains of the banjo and fiddles encounter the horn section’s big-band sweep and the Hammond organ’s sweet soul music. On the old Negro spiritual “Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep,” keening klezmer violin meets a rousing gospel choir. Amazingly, everything coheres. “We Shall Overcome” sounds to be as much about a couple’s struggle for stability as it is about the quest for social progress. It is a little off-putting to hear a zillionaire like Springsteen sing the old stevedores’ tune “Pay Me My Money Down,” but then again, Springsteen may be making an ironic point about a zillionaire’s singing the song in the first place. This album’s careening, rip-roaring music bears about as much relationship to Seeger’s quiet, almost genteel sound as a Hummer does to a bicycle. Seeger winds up being almost incidental to the project, the conduit through which Springsteen discovered this material.
An important item on Springsteen’s agenda—accomplished—was to capture the feel of music spontaneously coming together, being assembled even as it is being recorded. According to Springsteen’s liner notes, there were no rehearsals; everything, presumably, was put together on the spot. On the accompanying DVD, Springsteen says of these songs: “You get the sound of music being made. There’s an energy to that, when no one knows [the music]. That’s the moment when opportunity and disaster are close at hand. If you can push it to opportunity, you get something really special.”
They did.—Tony Scherman
Road Movie
Brilliance in a Bus
The road movie, from It Happened One Night to Sideways 70 years later, is wholly American—born of an abundance of open space and cheap vehicles, it is our picaresque novel. In recent years it’s become the perfect genre for independent moviemakers with small budgets. The first-time feature filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, producers and directors of numerous music videos, would seem unlikely candidates for a leisurely, nuanced comedy based on character development and satirical kick. But completely unanticipated, Little Miss Sunshine arrives out of the Southwestern desert as the best comedy of 2006.
A family of misfits headed by Greg Kinnear, a failed motivational pitchman, and his exasperated wife (Toni Collette) drive from New Mexico to Southern California so their seven-year-old daughter (Abigail Breslin) can compete in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. Their battered Volkswagen bus must be pushed to restart after each stop, about as funny a metaphor for pop self-help programs as there is. The family includes Alan Arkin, inexplicably and hilariously Jewish as Kinnear’s cokehead father, and Steve Carell as the first gay, suicidal Proust scholar in American film. The pageant itself seems too hideous not to have been inspired by reality.—Allen Barra
Documentary
The Incomparable Toots
 | | A fixture from the good old days at Toots’s. | | (Collection of Richard F. Snow) |
How can a documentary about a Jewish kid from South Philly who ran a saloon in Manhattan be a veritable cutaway view of a city and a time (in this case, New York from World War II to the early 1960s)? How can you watch a film and feel like you’ve just inhaled 90 minutes’ worth of cigarette smoke and downed three Scotch and sodas but still have a clear head?
In Toots Shor: Bigger Than Life, Toots’s granddaughter, Kristi Jacobson, using interviews, film clips, video clips from TV shows, and still photographs, has created an endearing and invigorating portrait of the man whose restaurant defined an era. A salesman could rub elbows with America’s most famous athletes, from Joe DiMaggio to Frank Gifford to Joe Louis, and possibly bump into Frank Sinatra or Ernest Hemingway on the way to the restroom (and maybe have to step over Jackie Gleason to get there). How congenial was the atmosphere at Toots Shor’s on West Fifty-first Street? Frank Costello, the head of the New York mob, could tip a glass across the bar to Chief Justice Earl Warren.
We should have been there and, hearing about it from Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Pete Hamill, and many others, you’ll feel as if you were.—Allen Barra
Historical Film
It’s time to see a movie we couldn’t bear to go to
The British filmmaker Paul Greengrass’s United 93, the best American movie of 2006, is that rarest of achievements, a work about politics that is entirely apolitical. Setting his film in real time, fusing documentary techniques with brilliant interpretive writing, and with a cast that seamlessly blends accomplished supporting players with amateurs, Greengrass imagines the 90-odd minutes in the flight of the airliner that was intended to crash into the U.S. Capitol on September 11, 2001. Many who couldn’t bring themselves to go to a theater for it will discover the brilliance of United 93 on cable and DVD.—Allen Barra
TV History
Exploring the Secret Capitol
For years, C-SPAN enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the U.S. Capitol, not only broadcasting gavel-to-gavel congressional proceedings but offering the omnipresent view of the Capitol dome outside its windows during live studio telecasts. Brian Lamb’s dome and the Capitol dome became inseparable.
In recent years, however, rival networks have horned in on the once-exclusive backdrop. So last season, C-SPAN went them one better, taking its HDTV cameras inside and under the iconic dome for an exhaustive, extraordinary, three-day, 10-hour-long national special that aired from November 23 to 25.
The Capitol proved as enthralling a history lesson as TV has ever offered—and a dazzling art and architecture survey into the bargain. Guiding viewers where tourists never tread, C-SPAN paid a dizzying, up-close visit to Constantino Brumidi’s fresco Apotheosis of Washington, high above the Rotunda, then burrowed deep underground for a tour of the long-abandoned Senate Baths. Here were ornate rooms reserved for the rare visits of the President and restored chambers where the Supreme Court once told Dred Scott he had no rights, where Senators Hayne and Webster debated, and where John Quincy Adams died of a stroke. In true C-SPAN fashion, not a corner was overlooked.
Congressional elders—Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy, and Dennis Hastert among them —got to show off not only their handsome private offices but their considerable knowledge of the past too. Capitol historians led tours through private corridors and underground passageways, offering memorable anecdotes at every turn. So when Lamb stood high atop an off-limits outdoor balcony, the illuminated city at his back, it came as no surprise that caller after caller expressed awe and appreciation for this behind-the-scenes masterpiece. They were learning, and they were enraptured.
For those who missed one of the great history triumphs of 2006, the complete Mark Farkas–produced broadcast is available in a boxed DVD set from c-span.org. —Harold Holzer
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Travel
 | | The solarium in Mohonk’s new spa. | | (Courtesy of Mohonk Mountain House) |
Resort
Sneaking a Spa In
Mohonk Mountain House opened in 1870 in one of the most spectacular settings in the Eastern United States, a craggy private mountaintop with views of five states. By 1902 it had grown into one of those monumental country hotels that exist in only a handful of places. Then it spent most of a century staying true to its austere Quaker roots, for years not even serving alcohol, despite being just 90 minutes from New York City.
Some found the resort ideally old-fashioned; others found it suffocatingly old-fashioned. How could it remain true to the ever-fewer former while drawing in the desperately needed latter? Mohonk has come a long way. Just in the last couple of years room air-conditioning was introduced, and a bar was built. Now the Mountain House has capped its embrace of the best of today by building a big, sumptuous spa in a new 30,000-square-foot wing, with a 60-foot heated indoor pool, saunas, steam rooms, meditation and yoga classes, and a menu of dozens of massages.
The new building that holds it all is gorgeous, with gleaming pine floors and stained-ash wainscoting, made largely with local materials. It fits perfectly with the rambling buildings beside it, and it adds an element of modern resort life not dreamt of when they were built.—Frederick E. Allen
Amenity
The Front Porch Comes to the Airport
In the ancient days of our own times, flying was actually glamorous. Passengers dressed up for a flight. But gradually through the years, members of the flying public had to accept the fact that they were no longer personages. Long before security concerns added extra rules, passengers were turned into nonentities by the airports and airlines. Service personnel learned to excel at condescension, a contradiction in terms that left a trip through an airport as something to be endured. And endure it I did, but barely, before a flight in late July. In fact, by the time I reached the gate I wanted to go home. But with requisite obedience, I settled into a seat in a fixed row of chairs like those at every airport, as sturdy as an I-beam and just as ergonomic. Then I noticed in the middle of the section, where the rows slacked off, a pair of rocking chairs.
Rocking chairs in an airport? A bastion of nineteenth-century domesticity as an antidote to twenty-first-century regimentation? It is certainly a step in the right direction. To see them, and the lucky people contentedly rocking away in them, was heartwarming. Maybe the warden doesn’t hate us after all.
Rocking chairs, I have since learned, first made an impact in the Charlotte airport, where they were supposed to be part of a temporary exhibit about the traditional front porch. Passengers insisted that they remain after the exhibit left. Since then the idea has been adopted at other airports. Possibly hooked rugs, an Autoharp, and a calico cat at every gate will be next.—Julie M. Fenster
Cruise
The Queen of Memory
On the recently launched Queen Mary 2, you will find many nods to Cunard’s past, including “Maritime Quest,” an exhibit using photos, film, and audio that winds its way through eight decks. This would qualify as a best, except for another offering that appears just once per sailing.
Scan the “Daily Programme” for the Queen Mary Reunion, aimed at those who sailed on the original vessel between 1936 and 1967. These gatherings are especially popular on transatlantic voyages, where Cunard can usually find between 20 and 40 qualified attendees.
“I remember when it [the new ship] didn’t have a name, but I guessed what it would be,” one passenger recalled. “I won a bet and got a penny off my teacher in Wales.” A passenger who admitted he had been “a difficult child” was left in the nursery for his whole trip. “I didn’t appreciate it.”
More memories: “My father had left his shoes out to be shined, and one night they got lost. So he immigrated to the United States in sandals.”
“She pitched and rolled very badly,” several people agreed. Also: “Violinists from the ship’s orchestra serenaded us through the corridors.” And during the nightly turndown service “the steward arranged my nightgown in a very provocative position.”
Then there was the couple who had honeymooned on the Queen Mary in the 1950s and been deeply impressed by “its tradition and all its glory. We were young, we danced, it was so romantic,” the elderly woman said. “Now that we are about to end our cruising days, we thought it would be appropriate to do so on the QM2.”—Carla Davidson
Historic Destination
Shacking Up with Bette Midler
Dreaming of a road trip back in time along California’s Highway 1? Pack your surfboard, roll the top down, and book an overnight stay at Crystal Cove Cottages, a historic beach-cottage colony dating from the 1920s that has been restored and is once again open to the public. Situated between Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach in Orange County (that is, between Los Angeles and San Diego), these pleasingly raffish pastel cottages offer prime oceanfront views and pristine coastline at an extremely reasonable cost for the area. That’s because their former inhabitants banded together in 1999, when the bungalows were threatened with demolition (in favor of a fancy resort hotel), and formed the Crystal Cove Alliance. The rescued cottages are now part of the Crystal Cove State Park system and are registered historic landmarks. Part of the colony’s funky appeal is that it was built by hand from scavenged materials found in the area, including timber from a capsized lumber ship that washed ashore in 1927. The colony’s Hollywood connection lends historic savor as well. As early as 1910 the studios began planting palm trees and building thatched-roof huts to serve as sets, first in South Seas–themed silent films and later in classics like Treasure Island. Bette Midler fans might recognize the brown shingled cottage from her 1988 movie Beaches. The best part of a stay at Crystal Cove, though, is that glimpse of a California that’s difficult to find outside the movies—vintage surfboards and miles of unspoiled coastline. For reservations, call 800-444-7275 or visit www.crystalcovebeachcottages.org.—Amy Weaver Dorning
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Food & Drink
 | | Peychaud’s: a better bitter. | | (Photograph by J. Christopher Launi) |
Cocktails
Bitters are back
Historically it was the addition of bitters to alcoholic beverages in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that defined a new category of mixed drinks called the cocktail. The word first appeared in print in 1806 in a New York periodical called The Balance, and Columbian Repository. In response to a reader’s inquiry about what it meant, the editor replied, “Cock tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters.” It was commonly known as a Bittered Sling.
Various types of aromatic bitters were once a popular ingredient in cocktails. Up until Prohibition there were numerous commercial brands and hundreds of proprietary brands of bitters in use.
During the latter half of the twentieth century the use of bitters declined to the point that they all but vanished. The running joke among bartenders was “Which will last longer: your marriage or your bottle of bitters?”
With the revival of the cocktail that clicked into overdrive with the new millennium, bitters are back. Many inspired bartenders have returned to classic recipes and searched out not just that bottle of Angostura but several of the lesser-known products like Peychaud’s and Fee Brothers bitters. The Fee Brothers company of Rochester, New York, has recently expanded its markets overseas and introduced two new products to its line. The writer and cocktail expert Gary Regan used to supply me with orange bitters that he made in his own kitchen. Just last year the Sazerac Company began producing them commercially under the name of Gary Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6. It’s good to see bitters finding their way back, not just in classic recipes but also by way of bartenders’ introducing them into their original and signature cocktails. Below are two recipes that include bitters; one is a modern martini using Gary’s orange bitters and the other is the Manhattan, which calls for Angostura, a tropical bitters that has been manufactured in Trinidad since 1830.
Cheers!—Dale DeGroff
Soho Martini
ingredients:
2 ounces Finlandia vodka
1/4 ounce Stoli Vanilla
1/2 ounce orange curaçao
Dash Gary Regan’s Orange bitters No. 6
preparation: Assemble all the ingredients in a Boston shaker glass and stir with ice. Strain into a chilled martini glass and garnish with flamed orange peel.
Manhattan
ingredients:
2 ounces blended whiskey
1 ounce Italian sweet vermouth
2 dashes Angostura bitters
preparation: Pour all ingredients over ice in a mixing glass and stir as you would a martini. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry. Note: If you prefer a dry Manhattan, use dry vermouth and garnish with a lemon peel.
Retro Snack
The Hot Dog Goes Haute
 | | The unquenchably popular Shake Shack at Madison Square Park in New York City. | | (Keith Conlon) |
What’s the most fashionable nibble served by Manhattan caterers these days? It’s pigs in blankets, that martini-soaker-upper of the 1960s suburban cocktail party, which to me always was a perfect mix of elegant and homey. Hot dogs have gone trendy. In 2004 Danny Meyer, the owner of such fine New York restaurants as Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern, sensed that the exaltation of the hot dog was in the air when he opened his Shake Shack in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, a glitzed-up old-fashioned takeout place in Madison Square Park that serves beer, milk shakes, hot dogs, and hamburgers. People are lining up for juicy all-beef “Chicago-style” dogs served on poppy-seed buns and topped with a salad of relish, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, pickles, onion, celery salt, and mustard. These are designer hot dogs.
When I was a kid growing up in New York, my friends and I all associated street hot dogs, bobbing in the murky water of vendors’ carts, with mouse droppings. Not that that stopped us from eating them and loving them. Food fads come and go for no apparent reason, but I think the emerging fad for a more elegant hot dog is anchored in the baby boomers’ memory of a slightly tawdry childhood pleasure. Now boomers want a healthier, cleaner dog. Not only have franks long had a dirty and lowbrow reputation, there is also a possibly more serious issue. Sodium nitrite and nitrates may pose a cancer risk. Sodium nitrite is used as a preservative in hot dogs; it’s part of what gives a Yankee Frank or a Hebrew National its juiciness and pinkish color.
Organic hot dogs have been available at health food stores for years, nitrite-free but mushy and brown. With the development of a new “natural” cure, pink and plump organic hot dogs are now a reality. They show up at restaurants and fancy markets.
Niman Ranch makes hormone-free grass-fed beef dogs. Dines Farms, in the Catskills in New York State, also makes a very good beef version from free-range, grass-fed cattle, with a natural casing (some upscale dogs are packaged without casings, which means you don’t experience that ballpark snap when you take a bite). On the West Coast you can buy elegant, healthy hot dogs made by Let’s Be Frank in San Francisco. And the great thing about these new designer hot dogs is that they taste just like traditional hot dogs—but even better. They may cost more, but at least you know what’s in them.—Erica De Mane
Restaurant
THE AUTOMAT IS BACK
 | | (Collection of Richard F. Snow) |
In 1888 the 27-year-old Joe Horn wanted desperately to be a restaurateur. He had the money—a thousand dollars—but no concept. His partner, 38-year-old Frank Hardart, had an idea—to share the wonder of French-drip New Orleans coffee with the world—but no money. A third man, whose name is lost to history, had a European gadget, a machine that served food automatically. These three men came together, and their collaboration, the Horn & Hardart Automat, became the coolest way to eat for much of the twentieth century: You fed nickels into a slot, and a glass door sprang open, giving you your meal.
In 2006, 15 years after the close of the last Automat, a surprisingly similar story led to an Automat revival. Thirty-year-old Robert Kwak was the enterprising restaurateur this time, and his friend 30-year-old David Leong the one with the ideas. Leong, who had taken a trip to Amsterdam, came back to the United States full of praise about an automatic restaurant he had seen there. Just like Frank Hardart, who took a trip to Germany to see the invention for himself, Kwak was unconvinced and flew over to Amsterdam to have a look. Immediately smitten, he came back enthusiastic about the venture.
The result, Bamn!, in New York City, is an Automat for the twenty-first century. Dolled up in shiny pinkness and cartoony fonts, the machines offer “macaroni and cheese krokets” (a new utensilless version of Horn & Hardart’s beloved macaroni and cheese), roast pork buns, chicken nuggets, peanut-butter-and-jelly croquettes, and other items, which rotate from a menu of 50 choices.
Though Kwak and Leong had never been to an American Automat, they did talk with Marianne Hardart, the great-granddaughter of Frank Hardart and the author, with Lorraine B. Diehl, of The Automat. “I read the book twice, and we picked her brain about the old Automat,” says Kwak. Hardart, for one, is pleased about the resurgence of the machines. “If the automatic windows provide fun and a sense of playfulness for a new generation, great!” she says, and “if they bring back fond memories for those who frequented the original Automat, that’s great too.”—Claire Lui
Food Comeback
All New York in one big cookie
 | | The Black and White doesn’t stay whole long. | | (Adam Kuban) |
When Sgt. First Class Laurence Lang at Camp Victory in Baghdad was asked by a visiting TV producer if he wanted anything from home, he immediately answered, “Black and White cookies.” Sergeant Lang grew up in New York. If we had a state cookie, the Black and White would be it.
The sergeant’s story made the papers. Suddenly Black and Whites were everywhere. From my apartment on Ninety-fifth Street to the greenmarket on Ninety-ninth, I now have nine Black and White opportunities. Nine where once I had three.
It’s not that the Black and White ever disappeared. For many it’s a staple, quintessentially New York. It’s big. It’s integrated. If you tilt it, it looks like a yin/yang. It’s the best of both worlds, chocolate and vanilla, and heads the great New York black and white tradition, followed by the Black and White soda (I prefer a White and Black) and the less site-specific Oreo, Yankee Doodle, Devil Dog, and Hostess cupcake with its calligraphic vanilla loops. We’re a complex city. One flavor isn’t enough.
A classic Black and White is five inches in diameter. Beware: There are lots of small ones and bad ones out there. Sad as I am to see the 2nd Avenue Deli go, I won’t miss its sorry rendition. Moishe’s was even worse. The ones shrink-wrapped in Korean markets taste a little better than Kitty Litter. I’ve tested Black and Whites everywhere, and the very best ones are made by Yura and Company, hands down. Sublime care and thoughtfulness go into their Black and Whites. (Did anyone else in New York grow up calling them “Headlights”?) Yura uses two different kinds of icing. The vanilla side, lightly scented with almond, is a fondant, hard, matte, what’s on petit fours. The chocolate side is soft and buttery, the kind of icing that takes a fingerprint. Many Black and Whites, if you close your eyes, it’s like eating Life Savers in the movies: You can’t tell what the flavor is. Not Yura’s. Even the dough gets the royal treatment. It’s pale yellow, never browned, and has a fine, dry crumb. It’s not cakey, spongy, or moundy in the middle. You may be tempted to scarf Yura’s Black and White in the street, but I recommend waiting till you get home then slicing it in 8 strips one way and 8 the other, creating 64 little brown and white tiles that take a long time to eat.
I’m glad Sergeant Lang got his cookies. I want him to come home safe so he can contact me through this magazine and I can treat him to the best Black and White there is. He’s earned it. (Alas, Yura doesn’t think its Black and Whites can travel, so you have to come to them!)—Patricia Volk
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Museums
 | | The interior of the new National Museum of the Marine Corps. | | (Nick Merrick © Hedrich-Blessing/Courtesy of Fentress Bradburn Architects) |
Exhibit
Titanic Survivors
Nearly 95 years after the sinking of the Titanic, the story of the ill-fated ship continues to enthrall the public like no other saga. Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition feeds that endless curiosity by bringing to the public never-before-seen items recovered from the wreck two and a half miles beneath the North Atlantic. RMS Titanic, the company with diving rights to the site, sponsors the exhibit, dividing the five thousand–plus found objects among concurrent shows in cities around the world (current exhibitions are in San Francisco and Las Vegas). Ticket sales to the exhibit, which claims to be the most widely attended of its kind in history, in turn help fund the recovery missions, which are conducted by manned submersibles and remotely operated vehicles.
Handson explanations of all this nifty science are nicely woven in with displays of passengers’ personal effects (handbags, unsent postcards, and shaving brushes) and actual pieces of the ship that survived the “rusticles,” or iron-related bacteria at the bottom of the ocean. Entire public spaces are re-created in thoughtful detail around a few authentic remnants. But it is the exhibit’s interactive theme—a “you are there” approach—that lends the show its intimate feel. Profiles of passengers and crew, from first-class magnates to engine-room stokers, are highlighted throughout, and upon “embarkation,” visitors are given a reproduction of a ticket that belonged to a Titanic passenger (whose fate is disclosed at the end). It’s a humanizing detail among all that steel and ice. See www.titanic-online.com.—Amy Weaver Dorning
National Shrine
Bringing George Washington Back To Life
“This has been a massive, very expensive effort because we’ve wanted to bring George Washington back to his rightful place as first in the hearts of his countrymen.” That’s how James Rees, the executive director of Mount Vernon, Washington’s estate on the Potomac River in Virginia, explains the building of the new visitors’ center and museum that just opened in October, after 11 years of planning and construction, $60 million of fundraising for initial costs, and another $50 million to endow future operations.
The result is stunning. Arriving at Mount Vernon, you now enter the Ford Orientation Center, which is spacious and light and airy yet remarkably unobtrusive from without. The offerings there, before you head out to Washington’s home, include a one-twelfthscale model of the house and every piece of furniture in it and a $5 million 18-minute live-action film that shows the young Washington meeting and courting his future wife, battling in the French and Indian War, preparing to cross the Delaware in 1776, and resigning his commission in 1783—all as a way of quickly acquainting you with his life and accomplishments in the years before what Rees calls Mount Vernon’s golden age, the happy time between the end of the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention and Presidency.
But the best new addition is the Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center, which you’re expected to visit after taking the tour of Washington’s house and enjoying the grounds. Part of the museum is a traditional exhibit space that will display 800 artifacts, foremost among them the great 1785 bust of Washington by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. But there’s also a string of galleries that give you a multimedia trip through Washington’s whole life. It includes among many other things TV monitors showing short films produced by the History Channel, a reproduction of a cabin at Valley Forge, a theater with a big-screen movie about the Revolution, and a room devoted entirely to Washington’s dentures (a painfully fascinating subject). But best of all are the three dioramas containing ultrarealistic life-size figures of Washington, at ages 19, 45, and 57, based on painstaking scientific research.
First you see Washington the surveyor, young, athletic, and confident, in a clearing in the Shenandoah Valley. Next he’s on horseback, surrounded by his troops and falling snow at Valley Forge, in a blue dress coat with gold epaulets and white leather breeches, looking every inch the commander. Finally he’s at Federal Hall in New York, taking the oath of office as President, looking older, more like the George Washington of Gilbert Stuart and the dollar bill, but amazingly alive and real and consistent with his younger versions. You’ll come away from seeing these three Washingtons thinking you’ve gotten to know the man in a way you never before could have. Visiting Mount Vernon has always been an inspiring experience. It has gotten even more so.—Frederick E. Allen
New Museum
One service’s bid to “live forever”
No branch of our armed services has a more vigorous sense of its past than the Marines, and now they have a particularly effective way to help keep that past vivid. Appropriately situated in Quantico, Virginia, the brand-new (it opened to the public this November 13) National Museum of the Marine Corps houses some 60,000 artifacts, from small arms to very large ones (a Harrier jump jet hangs in the main gallery). Along with the traditional displays are some strenuously modern ones. The visitor can get hectored through boot camp, take a tour of the lines in North Korea, and, in Vietnam, debark from a helicopter onto a contested landing zone complete with heavy humidity.
The museum is the anchor of the still-building Marine Corps Heritage Center, which in time will include a “display armory,” a memorial park, parade grounds, hiking trails, and the inevitable IMAX theater. But there’s plenty here already, including a flag that flew on Mount Suri-bachi, and not the least stirring sight is the quote barked out by Sgt. Daniel Daly, urging his battered outfit forward through Belleau Wood in 1918. Although carved in marmoreal stone, it vibrates with the pugnacious gallantry of the Corps and encapsulates what that gallantry costs: “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?”—Richard F. Snow
Museum Renovation
A Great Institution Gets Greater
Like several other San Francisco icons, the original M. H. de Young Memorial Museum began life as a pavilion in the 1894 California Midwinter International Exhibition, housed in the city’s still-new Golden Gate Park. Michael de Young, then editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, had been a major force behind the exposition, hoping the proceeds would stimulate the city’s depressed economy. He had the right idea: More than 1.3 million visitors attended, generating enough profit to turn the pavilion into a permanent art museum, the city’s first. Over the ensuing decades the de Young evolved from an eclectic assortment of exotic odds and ends into a major storehouse of American, African, and Oceanic art, and as the collection began to outgrow the available space, buildings were torn down and rebuilt, creating an architecturally dysfunctional whole. When the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake caused heavy damage to the museum, the time had come to start from scratch. It closed its doors on December 31, 2000; thousands of San Franciscans came to pay tribute.
The decisions to leave the new museum in the park instead of relocating it to a more convenient downtown site and to let the natural surroundings influence its architecture turned out to be both crucial and happy ones. Though many locals weren’t sure they were going to like the new 140-foot coppery tower rising over their beloved park, the results have been a smash success, with both architecture critics and the public. Since its October 2005 opening, more than 1.6 million visitors have walked the slate floors of the new de Young, and there are no signs of the crowds thinning. And this time around the de Young promises to age gracefully. As the copper exterior oxidizes, it will take on the hues of the surrounding park. Those looking for vestiges of the museum’s beginnings will find them in the sphinx statues guarding the front entrance, the “Pool of Enchantment,” and the palm trees that were planted for the original exhibition.—Amy Weaver Dorning
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Shopping
 | | Three of the six diplomat stamps. | | (United States Postal Service) |
Wristwatch
MONTANA MASTERPIECE
At the beginning of the twentieth century America produced the majority of the world’s watches. Companies like Hamilton, Elgin, and Illinois manufactured timepieces that set the standard for craftsmanship and reliability.
Today you can count on one hand the number of companies manufacturing watches in the United States. The Montana Watch Company is among an elite group of horologists who are keeping alive the tradition of homegrown, handcrafted wrist and pocket watches.
Each timepiece—the company produces no more than 500 a year—is assembled and hand-finished in the firm’s Livingston, Montana, studio. Cases, machined from a single piece of stock, are available in a choice of metals, including steel, silver, gold, and blue titanium. The watches are powered by mechanical movements regulated and decorated in-house.
Recently the Montana Watch Company introduced the elegant rectangular-cased Model 1930. This style of case, known as the “tank,” was originally designed by Louis Cartier. Inspired by the horizontal section of Renault tanks, introduced during World War I, the prototype was presented to Gen. John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, in 1918. By the 1930s the tank, with its Art Deco architecture, was completely in vogue and has remained a favorite ever since.
Like all of the Montana Company’s watches, the case of Model 1930 can be decorated with hand-finished techniques such as engraving and gem setting. The timepiece can be fitted with several straps, including American bison. Very appropriate.—Stuart Leuthner
Fifties Furniture
THE SIDE TABLE AS SCULPTURE
In the late 1950s the famous American sculptor Isamu Noguchi set aside the material for which he’s best known and fabricated a few pieces from a very different one. “It seemed absurd to me to be working with rocks and stones in New York, where walls of glass and steel are our horizon, and our landscape is that of boxes piled high in the air,” he explained. “After some experiments, I asked the Aluminum Company of America to supply me with … sheet aluminum and, thus armed, set to work.” In addition to aluminum sculpture, Noguchi designed a few small side tables in the metal, and one of them is the most captivating piece of furniture I’ve seen from the age that spawned the International Style called Modern. While its geometric form, a trisectioned hexagon on three sharply tapered legs, distills that design idiom to its essence, the table also makes a witty personal statement. Noguchi, whose father was Japanese, fashioned something that seems to have been fabricated of folded paper, an allusion to the ancient art of origami that was part of his heritage. The elegantly simple prismatic table is now available in a reissue from Vitra, a European manufacturer that specializes in furniture from major designers, and reiterates its era’s less-is-more doctrine in visual language that elevates applied to fine art.—David Lander
Stamp
SOBER SUPERHEROES
Probably no stamps have proven more popular in 2006 than a set issued to commemorate the action heroes of DC Comics. For months now Batman and Green Lantern and Wonder Woman have been superheroically leaping over post-office counters, dispensing thrills and justice to patrons forced to attest that every last envelope they want to send through the mail contains nothing liquid, fragile, hazardous, or perishable. But the consumer patience demanded by our present postal situation should make customers consider purchasing a much less flashy series of commemoratives than the DC Comics set—namely, the Distinguished American Diplomats Collection, which arrived at the post office on May 30.
Among this quietly tireless group of civil servants—none of them household historical names—is the stalwart Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen (1904–74), an early advocate of “containment” and President Eisenhower’s first-term ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bohlen and his philatelic counterparts dashed around the globe in pinstriped pants instead of tights and capes, but they got some awfully dangerous jobs done—in Bohlen’s case, the half-century-long effort to win the Cold War without our having to hear the great thermonuclear “POW!” and “BAM!” that we dreaded for so long.—Thomas Mallon
Department Store
110-YEAR-OLD GLAMOUR
The opening of a major downtown department store has always been a public event, but when the setting is a historic architectural treasure, and the location is San Francisco’s Union Square, there really is something to celebrate. On September 28, 2006, San Francisco’s new and expanded Westfield Centre flung open its doors after more than 10 years of planning, building, and public anticipation. The anchor stores Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom share 1.5 million square feet of retail space with dozens of gourmet dining spots, boutiques, and a multiplex movie theater. But what sets this complex apart from the others is the fact that it incorporates the Beaux-Arts facade, grand rotunda, and soaring 200-foot glass dome from the old Emporium, which was once one of the city’s most popular department stores. Inevitable comparisons to the 2003 reopening of the city’s other Beaux-Arts treasure, the Ferry Building, are being made in hopes that this center will be a similar success in bringing the crowds downtown.
The original Emporium opened on May 25, 1896, catering to middle-class San Franciscans who couldn’t afford the fancier stores like City of Paris or I. Magnin. The facade and a partially damaged dome were all that survived of the Emporium from the 1906 earthquake and fires, but the store was rebuilt to its former glory. It closed for good in 1996 and after much controversy was spared demolition but sat unused for many years. Having been restored to circa 1908 magnificence, the “new” Emporium is bringing some much-needed glamour back into the San Francisco shopping experience.—Amy Weaver Dorning
Retro Car
The TOUGH CAR OR THE FUN CAR?
Retro cars are all the thing in Detroit—and no surprise. With sales slumping, why shouldn’t the Big Three want to look back to the good old days? But history and retro are words not applied to the models that channel past star cars. Heritage is the fashionable substitute.
The best recent retro efforts are Dodge’s Challenger and Chevrolet’s Camaro, both unveiled in January and set for production in 2008. The Challenger is almost a replica, slavishly loyal to the original muscle car. But the Camaro is something very different. It suggests a sculpture of the original. “Milled from a single billet of metal” is a phrase often heard in Detroit, today referring to the look produced by computer-driven machines robotically translating drawings into three dimensions.
Such translation is akin to other modes of history making, like stories of battles or biographies. Designers, like storytellers, must focus on one aspect of a car to revive. In the case of the Camaro, the choice was between the muscle car side of its legacy and the less intense pony-car side—the tough car or the fun car. It was a choice of memories, made in a competition between studios ordered up by the General Motors design chief Ed Welburn. The winning look came from Studio X, headed by Tom Peters, who designed the most recent Corvette.
The result pleased the buffs, because it is everything they liked about the original—and more. It is a rolling rendition of their memory cars. The swelling bulge in the grille, the muscular fenders, the side vent all suggest V-8 power and rubber-burning rear-wheel torque. The head and taillights on the original car were circular. On the new one, they are semicircular and seem to wear a hooded, intent expression—older and, if not wiser, at least not so wide-eyed innocent. But set beside an original, like most retro cars, the new one seems oh so serious. Lost is a sweetness of line, a confident, unselfconscious grace—and the exuberant, ignorant energy of youth. Gone in fact are all the things most missed about the original era.—Phil Patton
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Bookshelf
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Military History
Wishful War
A Prussian general considering his next war once said, famously, that no plan survives contact with the enemy. That is because war, far from being merely an event, is a process, a dynamic phenomenon; it never obliges those foolish enough to think they can command the unfolding of history. That is also why when statesmen plan war, idées fixes are so dangerous. The greatest statesmen have always understood this. As for the less talented, once war has defeated their dreams, they are left only with salvaging their miscalculations.
Michael Gordon and Gen. Bernard Trainor’s book Cobra II is a case study of how a nation’s grand strategy can be corrupted by wishful thinking and the consequences of its collision with reality. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, long-nurtured neoconservative ambitions to transform Iraq into a democratic beach-head in the Middle East quickly overtook strategic calculations. When clear thinking was imperative, American politicians instead promoted a war against Iraq as the best defense against terrorism. All too pliable generals, thoroughly intimidated by their Secretary of Defense, obliged by concocting a breathtakingly simplistic campaign whose design was judged less by its military expertise than by how well it matched their superiors’ illusions.
Much of this we know already. Cobra II’s contribution lies in explaining what happened as these illusions collided with the realities of war. The authors’ long experience, military knowledge, and wide access to official sources distinguish Cobra II from the many other instant histories of this war. Here the reader is in the steady hands of experts. One leaves the book wishing our strategists had listened to them instead of to their own voices.—Roger Spiller
Novel
L.A.’s Scariest Product
Michael Tolkin is one of the most remarkable figures in—what exactly? In American film? Fiction? As a writer and director he has made two smart low-budget films, The Rapture (1991) and The New Age (1998), that put a deft finger on the jittery pulse of late-twentieth-century America. As a commercial screenwriter he added fresh layers to otherwise familiar sci-fi and horror material (Deep Impact [1998] and Dawn of the Dead [2004], the latter uncredited).
Unlike every other Hollywood screenwriter who always wanted to find time for that serious novel, Tolkin has written several, most notably The Player (1988), Among the Dead (1993), and this year The Return of the Player. It’s obvious that like most directors, what Tolkin really wants to do is just write fiction. In his latest, Tolkin adds a new dimension to the L.A. novel, an intriguing genre of American literature derived from such diverse visionaries as John Fante, Raymond Chandler, and Nathanael West. Griffin Mill, the film producer protagonist of The Player, realizing he will never eat lunch in this town again, finds his true calling: politics. Unlike the current governor of California, he will someday be eligible to run for President; the possibilities are more terrifying than those of any of the films Tolkin has worked on.—Allen Barra
Graphic Novel
Hard-core Victorian
In Lost Girls, the author of From Hell and V for Vendetta unites the heroines of three of the most popular works of children’s fiction and re-imagines their surreal adventures as experiences of sexual awakening.
It is May 1913, a time of rapid change. Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is about to make its debut. The First World War is not far off. Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy—of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz, respectively —now adults, are drawn to the same hotel in Austria. There they will meet and relate their erotic adventures to one another.
Lost Girls, written by Alan Moore with art by Melinda Gebbie, is an explicitly sexual work. Some of the couplings, though quite common in the Victorian erotic fiction that is one of the novel’s inspirations, would, if real, be unacceptable to us on grounds of safety, legality, and morality. The author and artist intend to test the reader as much as titillate—no fictional characters were harmed in the making of this novel.
Even Moore calls Lost Girls pornography, but he protests too much. Pornography is cheap; it doesn’t require Moore’s immersion in literature or Gebbie’s beautifully nuanced illustrations, and its characters don’t grow, as the Lost Girls do through their storytelling. All the sex, then, must be in service to something greater than mere arousal. Moore’s argument is that the sexual imagination is part of the human psyche, and the intellectual (as opposed to the actual) exploration of the ideas it produces can never be perverse. It is in the world outside the book that perversity reigns, permanently debauched in June 1914 when Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand and unleashed the barbarism that post-Enlightenment Europe had seemed to have vanquished. It is with this event that the novel ends. As Alice observes after a long erotic idyll has been interrupted by falling darkness, “Something quite glorious was finished with for good.”—Steven Goldman
Sports History
Everyone had a stake in this fight
It took David Margolick seven years to research and write his remarkable book Beyond Glory (Alfred A. Knopf), about a heavyweight fight that expired in 124 seconds. But his literary odyssey was worth it, for he has produced a gripping tale about Joe Louis’s first-round destruction of Max Schmeling on the night of June 22, 1938, at Yankee Stadium. However, this book is much more than a sports-page story, for it succeeds in re-examining the signal role that a grimly determined Louis played (much as Jackie Robinson did a decade later) in behalf of Americans with black skin.
With World War II looming, Margolick peers at all of the grotesqueries, horrors, and complications surrounding a prizefight that had millions riveted to their radios. The book reminds us that Louis, the heavyweight champion at the time, was regarded by Germany’s dictator, Adolf Hitler, as little more than subhuman. His rival, the German Schmeling, was something of a chameleon (he had a Jewish manager and a Jewish promoter) as he fulfilled the role of designated Aryan. Having been beaten by Schmeling two years earlier, Louis was supported zealously by America’s black citizenry, even as many whites shared Hitler’s racial theories. The bout, therefore, had a social and cultural subtext not often found in the world of fun and games.
Margolick reminds us of the country-wide emotional convulsion that took place as Louis pounded Schmeling to the canvas and the enormous crowd roared in amazement. Few people did not have some kind of connection with Louis’s struggle, whether they were blacks in Detroit, Jews in New York, or whites in the South. We are grateful to Margolick for recapturing an episode that has long been overlooked but is worth recalling in all its dramatic detail.—Ray Robinson
Study of the War on Terrorism
THE VIEW FROM 400 B.C.
Books on American history can take many forms. Victor Davis Hanson’s A War Like No Other is about the Peloponnesian War, the contest between Athens and Sparta that lasted from 427 b.c. to 404 b.c. and ended with Athens’ decisive defeat. That war inspired Thucydides to write one of the first and still perhaps the greatest works of history. The Peloponnesian War remains the most necessary text for any realist theory of international politics. (The editor of this magazine told me that on a visit to the Pentagon a few years ago, he was intrigued to notice a copy of The Peloponnesian War within reach of almost every desk occupied by an officer advising the Joint Chiefs of Staff.)
A skeptic might have wondered whether we needed another work on the subject, but Hanson’s book has been warmly received and is selling very well indeed. Hanson has previously published a number of books on the classics, others on military history, and two collections of his columns on national security in the wake of 9/11. His Peloponnesian War is in many, many ways a war with grim relevance for Americans, and Hanson knows this and is not afraid to say so: He speaks of “shock and awe” failing in Sicily and of “coalitions of the willing,” and an early section has the frank title “Athens as America.” A long chapter, titled simply “Terror,” examines the role and effect of terror in the war Hanson brilliantly analyzes.
Many ages and minds have revisited the Peloponnesian War and found it a powerful guide to their own times; at the height of the Cold War many Americans saw themselves as Athens facing a Soviet Sparta. Now the tale of Athens as a democratic imperial state inspiring resentment, war, and large, hostile coalitions again speaks to Americans in urgent and not necessarily encouraging ways.
Hanson’s title must be a dark joke, for while Thucydides wrote that his was a war like no other, Hanson writes because he knows that it echoes as we think of our own wars. This is a very good book about one war, and about many wars, and about the American history that is being written by living generations.—Fredric Smoler
Movie History
CHOICE CRITICS
Movie history resists sweeping generalizations, probably because the best films, especially the American ones, so often stand at odds with the major trends of their times. For that reason, I’ve never read a broad-gauged history of the medium that strikes me as more than a dutiful slog.
The best writing about films is critical writing, the product of a single sensibility engaging, one on one, one by one, with the films of a particular period. I’m thinking here of collections by the likes of Andrew Sarris, Graham Greene, Pare Lorentz, all of which go on giving pleasure long after most of the movies they wrote about have surrendered their claims on us. My favorite among these volumes is The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson, a posthumous gathering of the reviews he wrote for The New Republic from 1934 through 1941 (a merchant seaman, Ferguson was killed, at 35, when his ship was bombed in the Bay of Salerno in 1942).
Ferguson was a sensible, skeptical, cheeky writer in the vernacular mode, whose style obviously influenced many who came after him (James Agee, Pauline Kael) and whose great virtue was, perhaps, a negative one: He resisted moralizing, which is the besetting sin of movie reviewers. He took movies as he found them, often discovering qualities in Hollywood products that his contemporaries did not see but which, as time passed, have become more obvious to us. The book, first published 35 years ago by a university press, remains in print, though it is listed at 1,163,839 on Amazon. But Ferguson is the great discovery in Phillip Lopate’s recent American Movie Critics anthology; Lopate reprints more pieces by Ferguson than by any other reviewer. With good reason. Anyone who can end his consideration of Citizen Kane with the remarkable (and I think prescient) comment that it made him “doubt that Orson Welles really wants to make pictures” (as opposed to striking the thwarted genius pose) remains a writer to be happily reckoned with.—Richard Schickel
History
Living America’s Worst Riot
The best work of American history I have read in the past year would be Barnet Schecter’s The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (Walker & Company). Over the decades there have been a number of fine histories written about this critical moment in our nation’s past, most notably Iver Bernstein’s The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War, Ernest McKay’s The Civil War and New York City, and Adrian Cook’s The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863, as well as Peter Quinn’s excellent historical novel Banished Children of Eve.
Yet Schecter’s book surpasses all of them not only in bringing the terrible days of the riots to life but in illustrating their full significance within the context of both New York and American history. As such it inevitably raises questions about the role of war in American society today: what sacrifices it requires and who should be shouldering the burden. The Devil’s Own Work is everything a history should be, both relevant and relentlessly cognizant of the past as a different country, written with care, passion, and expertise.—Kevin Baker
Historical Novel
Patriotic Fury
The best historical fiction I’ve come across this year is a powerful first novel by Thomas Mullen, The Last Town on Earth.
Its literary ancestors are European: Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Camus’s La Peste, but its subject matter is thoroughly American. The town of the title is faintly modeled on Gunnison, Colorado, one of several Western cities that in the closing months of World War I declared a self-imposed quarantine to keep out the Spanish influenza. In Mullen’s fictional version, as apparently in real life, no one is permitted to enter or pass through the city limits; anyone who leaves cannot return. Armed guards are stationed around its perimeter to discourage intruders.
But Commonwealth, as Mullen ironically calls it, is a town created in accordance with American progressive and socialist ideas, an early-twentieth-century version of those solemn utopias that have spotlighted our history since the days of the Mayflower and Brook Farm. Its fierce quarantine runs deeply counter to its founding ideals.
In the surrounding towns, moreover, Mullen has set loose the dark, intolerant, anti-German, pro-war forces of the period. It is sobering to be reminded now of the violently repressive American Protective League, actually sponsored by the Department of Justice, or the sedition acts that forbade citizens to say anything “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive” about the government or the war effort. Outside the quarantined village, as the story progresses, a superpatriotic anger begins to close in with the same deadly fury as the influenza.
This is a book about what fear (we may want to say “terror”) does to people. It is also a bleak and unforgiving mirror held up to the American character.—Max Byrd
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Trends
Preservation
Saving a Language
According to the Foundation for Endangered Languages, half of the world’s 6,500 languages are “moribund” and likely to disappear. With that, quite a large body of the human experience will be gone forever, since language is not, after all, just communication but a reflection of the mind’s framework.
This year one dwindling language, at least, has been pulled back from the brink. In March the Lakota Sioux language was formally declared safe from extinction, because of the commitment of the Lakota Language Consortium to record the talk of the elders and find ways to pass it on to the youngsters of the tribe.
Which means, as any schoolchild in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, might tell you, “A rainbow has appeared in the sky.”
As for the other 3,249 languages, those apparently still doomed, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation are continuing an effort started in May of 2005 to fore-stall the silence. In one example cited by the NEH, the University of Chicago is helping the Washo tribe along the California-Nevada border to record the voices of all those who still speak the tribal language. They currently number 20.—Julie M. Fenster
Sports Trend
Real Americans wise up
O.K., the World Cup starts when? Weren’t a few people excited about it earlier this year …
or was that last year? Anyway, we haven’t heard much soccer talk lately. Things were a lot different four years ago, when the United States made the World Cup quarter-finals and some newspapers devoted half a page to each day’s developments—not to mention 1999, when our women’s team won the world championship and that lady showed her bra. Those were the days that made you fear for the future of the Republic. Fortunately, Americans have returned in remarkably short order to exercising their God-given right not to give a hoot about soccer. Sure, it’s great for kids, but when you get to be a grownup, it’s time to put away childish things, grab half a dozen brews, sit in the bleachers, and spend three hours watching a 2–1 baseball game. That’s the American way.—Frederic D. Schwarz
Technology
Atoms for Peace
Civilian nuclear power died in March 1979. The Three Mile Island accident finished it off, but its demise was not sudden. In fact, nuclear power had been on the decline for years, as the mounting costs of building, maintaining, and decommissioning reactors wiped out its advantage from low fuel requirements. Yet for something that’s been dead for a quarter-century, nuclear power shows remarkable vigor. Today about 20 percent of U.S. electricity generation is nuclear.
What has made nuclear power respectable again? Two factors that were unheard of when the technology was invented: the greenhouse effect and worldwide terrorism. As concern over global warming continues to rise, nuclear power, which produces no greenhouse gases and has become reliably safe, is looking much less icky to the granola eaters who protested it so vigorously in the 1970s. And generating more power from uranium will provide flexibility that can reduce our dependence on oil imported from hostile states. No one is predicting, as people did 50 years ago, that nuclear power will be endlessly abundant and “too cheap to meter.” But as a safe and reliable source of ecologically and geopolitically sound power, it may be an idea whose time has come again.—Frederic D. Schwarz
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Contributors
Kevin Baker’s most recent historical novel is Strivers Row.
Allen Barra writes American Heritage’s “Screenings” column.
Max Byrd’s historical novels include Grant, Jackson, and, most recently, Shooting the Sun.
Dale DeGroff has invented more than 400 cocktail recipes; he is the author of The Craft of the Cocktail.
Erica De Mane is the author of Pasta Improvvisata and The Flavors of Southern Italy.
Amy Weaver Dorning is a freelance writer in San Francisco.
Julie M. Fenster is the author of Ether Day and, most recently, with Douglas Brinkley, Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism.
Steven Goldman is the author of Forging Genius: The Making of Casey Stengel.
Harold Holzer is the author of 25 books on American history.
David Lander writes American Heritage’s “Buyable Past” column.
Stuart Leuthner is the creative director of Chronos magazine and the author, most recently, of Wheels: A Passion for Collecting Cars.
Thomas Mallon’s seventh novel, Fellow Travelers, will be published in May.
Phil Patton’s books include Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World’s Most Famous Automobile.
Ray Robinson has written several biographies of sports figures, among them Rockne of Notre Dame: The Making of a Football Legend.
Tony Scherman is a writer who lives in Nyack, New York.
Richard Schickel’s most recent book is Elia Kazan: A Biography.
Fredric Smoler is a Contributing Editor of American Heritage.
Roger Spiller was until last year the George C. Marshall Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College; his latest book is An Instinct for War.
Patricia Volk is the author of Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family.
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