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The Books We Got For Christmas
If an American child of the first half of the Nineteenth Century could see today’s flood of books for children, he might be delighted, but he would certainly be bewildered, for American children before 1850 had few books they could call their own. On long winter evenings they settled down to Cooper’s Leather- Lestocking Tales, or they read Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book until they knew “...
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Portrait Of A Yankee Skipper
 The principal difference between history and life is that history is simpler. Things are themselves in history; in life they are generally something else. Take, for obvious example, the New England sea captain of the early 1800’s. In history he is a sea captain and nothing more: the master of magnificent brigs and ships on all the oceans, survivor of dreadful storms, proud and often...
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Lafayette’s Two Revolutions
Lafayette, at the head of a group of young French nobles, first landed on American soil amid the live oaks hung with Spanish moss on the swampy shores of the little port of Georgetown in the southern Carolinas, in the early summer of 1777. He came in his own private brig, chartered from a Spaniard. He had slipped out of France with a lettre de cachet at his heels amid a welter of bureaucratic...
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From Mother To Daughter And Back By Rebus
 The story behind the curious and delicately drawn riddles which appear on these pages began when the long lines of General John Burgoyne’s sullen British troops marched out of camp to stack their arms and ammunition in a meadow not far from Saratoga, New York. The staggering news of Burgoyne’s defeat brought France into the war against Great Britain, and George III decided, early in...
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The Girls Behind The Guns
On various occasions the American muse has sung of arms and the woman: a musketeer, a marine in the fighting tops of the Constitution, a color bearer, a cavalrywoman, even a brigade commander ex officio. The twain of this story, Molly Corbin and Molly Pitcher, were cannoneers, serving pieces in two of the hottest actions of the Revolution. Fittingly they embodied tradition, for the patron saint...
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The Camera Opens Its Eye On America
It is on a day in the autumn of 1839, although the exact date was never recorded, that the scales fall away from the eyes of history, that the first primitive camera stares out at the American scene, that we see for the first time neither interpretation nor imagination, but the exact face of the world. Here, as Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, was “the mirror with a memory.” Almost overnight...
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The Music Of The Puritans
ON THE DAY they left Leyclen for America, so one of the Pilgrims reported, “We refreshed ourselves, after tears, with singing of psalms, making joyful melody in our hearts as well as with the voice, there being many of our congregation very expert in music; and indeed it was the sweetest melody that ever mine ears heard.” Sailing the open ocean, the Puritans set their night watches with a psalm...
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The Great Bicycle Craze
When a craze of any kind really catches on in this republic, restraint does not characterize its reception. The great bicycle craze of the Gay Nineties offers a fairly good example. Listen to the editor of the New York Tribune in 1895: “The discovery and progressive improvement of the bicycle is of more importance to mankind than all the victories and defeats of Napoleon, with the First and...
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The Remarkable American Count
On Munich’s bustling Maximilianstrasse, before the huge Bavarian National Museum, is a bronze statue of a tall, elegant, strikingly handsome man in the uniform of a general of the late Eighteenth Century. His chiseled features are framed by a peruke, a military cloak hangs in folds to his knees, across his chest slants the broad riband of an order of knighthood, he swings a tasseled cane as he...
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The Man Who Discovered America
In 1841, before Commodore Perry had opened up Japan, before any Japanese had set foot in America, a fisherman’s boy was transported by a chance of history to Massachusetts. This is his story, condensed from a new book by Hisakazu Kaneko, published by Houghton Mifflin Co. Manjiro, The Man Who Discovered America is a true account, so strange and charming that it reads like a fairy tale. ...
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Manjiro’s New World Wonderland
By one of the coincidences of publishing, a second book dealing with the adventures of Manjiro was published a little later this year. Titled Voyager to Destiny and written with verve and clarity by Emily V. Warinner, it is enriched by Manjiro’s illustrations of the new world that unfolded before his incredulous eyes. American Heritage is indebted to its publishers, the Bobbs-Merrill Company...
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Reading, Writing And History
History as a Cure H and Non-H
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History As A Cure
Not long ago two teen-age boys in New York City got into trouble with the law. The police laid hands on them as juvenile delinquents, and in due course the boys appeared in court. Judge J. Randall Creel, of Magistrates’ Court, faced the tough problem that confronts jurists in such cases: should he send the boys off to jail forthwith, or should he see whether they might not be able to straighten...
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H And Non-h
A few fighting words were issued in the general direction of American antiquarians the other day, from a fairly expert transatlantic source. The speaker was John F. W. Rathbone, who as an official of Britain’s National Trust knows a good deal about preserving and restoring historic sites. After visiting a number of restorations in this country, and after complimenting us on our growing enthusiasm...
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Sketches From The Vanishing Landscape
Artist Eric Sloane lives in Connecticut and roams about America seeking to recapture the look and the feel of a countryside which is inexorably changing. On these two pages are presented some of his sketches, which depict things that seem to be symbols of a bygone age. “Such symbols,” he writes, “preserved by a longing tethered to the past, whether it be a distant church spire, a gracious bend...
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Reading, Writing And History
Out of the National Attic The New Picture Books The Triumph of Right Leader of Lincoln?
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Out Of The National Attic
One day in the mid-1840’s, old John Quincy Adams, then congressman from Massachusetts, sat motionless, bolt upright, for a full sixty seconds while a young man named Mathew Brady took his daguerreotype. We can see the bald, bullet head sunk into the upright collar of the time, the eyes staring clearly out of the deep-lined face, the actual look of a tired old man whose work was done. Although...
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The New Picture Books
The Frontier Years , by Mark H. Brown and W. R. FeIton (Holt: $10), perhaps the best of this year’s picture histories, is also the most limited in time and space. It is built around the life of one man, L. A. Huffman, a photographer who came to Fort Keogh on the Yellowstone, in Montana, in 1878 and remained in that area until his death in 1931, taking pictures of just about everything that...
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The Triumph Of Right
You never quite know where you are going to find them. The men who can interpret the American dream in terms of the people who have to live with it, and who can take fire from what they have glimpsed and go out and work and fight to make the reality come a little closer to the substance of the dream- they wear no uniform and they are not typed, they can appear without warning in the most...
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Leader Of Lincoln?
The grimmest face in the American picture gallery is that of old Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania abolitionist who forgot nothing, forgave nothing and made himself the living symbol of the so-called radical viewpoint after the Civil War—the view which saw the South as a set of conquered provinces that could and should be remade even at the expense of completely destroying the structure...
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Enroughty, Darby And General Mcclellan
To the Editor of American Heritage: A propos of nothing at all except that I just thought of it, I wonder if this little bit of Civil War-iana would interest you. It started back in 1903 when I was a chemist in the laboratory of the Virginia-Carolina Chemical Company in Richmond, and on Saturdays played on the Boston Heights team of the Tri-City semi-pro league. In our first game the...
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The Hard-luck Frigate
When Hurricane Connie whirled towards the U.S. coast in August, 1955, an odd-looking old cral’t wallowed up Chesapeake Bay just ahead of the oncoming gales. The United States frigate Constellation , oldest American fighting ship, her masts and spars gone and her hull gripped tight in a floating dry dock pulled by a panting tug, was racing for her life. She made it, warping into a berth in...
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Ambassadors To The Court Of Theodore Roosevelt
The friendships of the President of the United States inevitably have a significance far transcending those of an ordinary citizen. When these friendships are with members of the foreign diplomatic corps, the relationships may influence the course of world politics. Theodore Roosevelt’s likes and dislikes for particular ambassadors stationed at Washington during his presidency proved to be...
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How A Madman Helped Save The Colonies
  August 22, 1777. The militia had marched and been defeated. Behind the stockades of the New York frontier, many widows wept, not for their dead husbands only but for their still living children. The invader, Lieutenant Colonel Barry St. Leger of His Majesty’s Thirty-fourth Foot, did not lead a civilized army; his troops were largely cruel Iroquois. In star-shaped Fort Stanwix on the...
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The Famous Cyclorama Of The Great Battle Of Atlanta
The Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta is here reproduced, complete and in color, for the first time in any magazine. AMERICAN HERITAGE is indebted to the Department of Parks of the City of Atlanta for its courtesy in granting permission for this publication; to Mayor William B. Hartsfield, to Mr. George I. Simons, general manager of the Department of Parks, and to Mr. C. F. Palmer for their...
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Benjamin Franklin’s Grand Design
In one of the world’s great success stories Ben Franklin adverts to a resounding failure with which his name is associated. Quoting from Dryden’s rendition of a Juvenal Satire , he counsels us: Look round the habitable world: how few Know their own good, or, knowing it, pursue! Franklin’s brain child, the Albany Plan of Union, failed of adoption because neither the colonists nor...
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How The Cyclorama Was Painted
The Atlanta Cyclorama is the best surviving example in America of an art form which flourished in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. The huge canvas was a project of William Wehner, a German who established studios in Milwaukee in 1883 and set out to create a series of “spectacle paintings” for display in the large cities of the U.S. From Germany Wehner imported a staff of twelve...
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If Tortugas Let You Pass
Two years ago, when I was a passenger aboard a Norwegian freighter bound from Rio to New York on a fourteen-day run, we spent the better part of a week quietly avoiding a hurricane. It was early September, and we were about 400 miles above the equator. There were eleven other passengers along for the ride. We also had a wireless operator as part of the ship’s company, an agreeable fellow who...
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Dime Novels
His sentence was finished in a ringing shriek, for Calamity had drawn a revolver and shot him, even while his sarcastic words left his lips, and he fell to the ground, wounded through the breast. “ ‘So much for your lyin’, you miserable whelp!’ the girl cried, wrought suddenly to a high pitch of anger. ‘If I was dishonored once, by one such as you, no man’s defiling touch has reached me...
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Light For Lincoln’s Statute
One of America’s great shrines is the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. In the shadowed silence of the great building the statue of Abraham Lincoln, by Daniel Chester French, broods in eloquent majesty. Yet when the statue was first put in the memorial, the effect was very different. Strange lights and shadows touched the marble lace: the effect which the sculptor had sought was missing, and...
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The Great Diamond Fraud
In previous winters when Clarence King and James Gardner finished their work in the Nevada desert and hoarded a river boat for San Francisco, they were the center of the attention of the other passengers. Clarence King was the director of a geological survey of the land along the new transcontinental railroad, and Gardner was his first assistant. They were trying to discover what minerals could...
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Times Of Trial In American Statecraft: First In A Series
The history of statecraft, in the U.S. as in every nation, is studded with great chances, to be seized or lost forever. To the people who lived through any such critical time, it was seldom clear when the decisive moment came or whose counsel M’as the best. Sometimes, by luck or wisdom, the right course was taken and the ship of slate sailed serenely on to peace and prosperity. Who knows...
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How A Great Historian Studied A Great American
Douglas Southall Freeman was entering his fiftyeighth year when in 1944 he brought out the third volume of Lee’s Lieutenants , completing his great series of studies in Confederate history. From early manhood he had hoped that he might write the lives of three illustrious Virginians, Washington, Lee, and Woodrow Wilson. By 1944, still editor of the Richmond News Leader , lecturer at the...
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The Freeman Letters On George Washington
Letter of August 11, 1949 As the announcement on June 25 of my impending retirement led to some newspaper discussion of the wisdom or unwisdom of my action, it may not be amiss to state for your information and that of other gentlemen who face retirement within the next decade or so, precisely how it feels to “change over,” or, if you prefer the figure, to “make the plunge.” I can only...
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Vigilante Justice
The Vigilantes of San Francisco have been a legend and a byword ever since the 1850’s. According to one view they represented lynch law and violence; according to another they exemplified the Anglo-Saxon tradition by which the citizens work out and enforce codes of justice, order and civic decency informally when formal procedures cease to work. Either way, their story is one of the...
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First ‘dude Ranch’ Trip To The Untamed West
In May, 1843, with the first greening of the prairie grass, a strange caravan, billed as a “Sporting Expedition to the West,” rolled spiritedly out from the Missouri frontier past tight-lipped groups of emigrant families grimly preparing what history would call the first great migration to Oregon. It was three years before Parkman, five and more before the California gold rush, and what was...
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Lazy Y And Flying U
The tradition of branding cattle came to the Southwest with the Spaniards, but the present-day reading—the heraldry, if you wish—is purely American. The language of the brands developed as haphazardly as any language, but there was a logic to it—unconscious in the growth perhaps, but wholly reasonable in the end. Brands, for example, are read in three ways: from left to right, from top to...
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Reading, Writing And History
The Fabulous River Free Soil and Free Men Before the Explorers
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The Oregon Country
Of all the magic names that drew men on to open the American continent, none has had more of the authentic ring of romance and adventure than Oregon. Originally applied by some imaginative geographer to a nonexistent river, the name came finally to stand for a vast territory of forests and mountains and green river valleys—the Oregon Country, a shadowy land almost as remote as the far side of...
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The Fabulous River
Ross covers one little segment of the story. A bird’s-eye view of the whole business, touching on everything from the arrival of the first Yankee sailing vessel at the mouth of the Columbia in 1792 down to the June night in 1942 when a Japanese submarine lay offshore and lobbed shells in at Fort Stevens, is provided in Stewart Holbrook’s The Columbia , which is a fine book to read after Ross’...
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Free Soil And Free Men
Oregon was not a land for Negro slaves. It was settled by a little bit of everybody—by northerners, by southerners, and by folk from the border states who could feel the emotional pull of both sides simultaneously—and by all ordinary logic it should have been the last part of the United States to feel the pulling and hauling of the slavery crisis during the 1850’s and 1860’s. But if it was...
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Before The Explorers
The story of human activity in the Pacific Northwest does not, of course, begin with the arrival of the white man. The Indians of the region had a peculiarly rich culture of their own, dating far back into the mists of prehistory, and in a good many ways their society was unlike the modern conception of how the noble red man lived and behaved when he was on his own. A detailed, scholarly...
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The Great Sea War
The illustrations in this portfolio are reproduced through the courtesy of. Irving S. Olds, lornier chairman of the board of the U.S. Steel Corporation and outstanding collector of naval prints, and with the assistance of Marry Shaw Newman. For all its diplomatic blunders and ol’ten disastrous hind campaigns, the War of 1812 is best remembered in this country as a great drama of the sea....
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Poe’s Last Visit To Richmond
After the death of Edgar Allan Poe in 1849, 1819 his mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, turned to the sale of romance by trying to convince certain ladies that they were the inspirations for Poe’s poems. In actual fact, she knew that “Annabel Lee” had been inspired by her own daughter Virginia, Poe’s wife, and that “To Helen” honored two other people—Poe’s foster mother, Mrs. Frances Allan, and the...
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When New England Saw The Serpent
Recently I went down to Cape Ann and stood on the Stage Rocks overlooking Gloucester Day. There were a few sailboats in sight and occasionally a fishing trawler would round the Dog Bar Breakwater. A strong odor of fish hangs over the town as it has for several centuries, but the air over the Stage Rocks was clean and the visibility was excellent. I stayed there for some time, trying to...
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The Presidents And The Presidency
The White House is much on our minds today. Whether we look ahead to the next election, or back to September 24, 1955, the day of President Eisenhower’s heart attack, we are more aware than we we have been for years of the central position the presidency occupies in our scheme of things. The importance of this noble office, both as instrument and symbol of American democracy, can be most...
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A Chart Of The Presidency
From Washington to Lincoln In the 167 years since George Washington was his first inaugurated, the presidency has risen greatly in power and prestige. The chart on these pages, continuing onto the following two pages, is an attempt to present this rise in graphic form. The rise of the presidency has not been a steady one but has occurred in sudden spurts, most notably when strong...
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America’s Most Imitated Battle
On a January morning in 1781 a battle was fought in the South Carolina backwoods which became the tactical show piece of the American Revolution. It set a pattern not only for two other decisive actions of that war but also for a hard-fought engagement of the War of 1812.This was the Battle of Cowpens, an American victory resulting in the destruction of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s...
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The Ballad Of Cynthia Ann
This is an old tale, and not a pretty one; it is a true tale, a real “Western,” although it wouldn’t go on TV. It sounds to me like a ballad—the ballad of Cynthia Ann. But Cynthia Ann, fleeing us all on the thunder of Comanche hoofs, is no part of a sentimental ditty. By all accounts, she was a very pretty little girl. One of about eighteen children at Parker’s Fort on the Navasota River,...
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