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The Revolution’s Caine Mutiny
In a prefatory note to The Caine Mutiny Herman Wouk makes the point of informing the reader that “the records of thirty years show no instance of a court-martial resulting from the relief of a captain at sea under Article 184, 185, and 186 of the Naval Regulations,” and that both persons and events in his novel are imaginary. Had his researches carried him back much farther into the American...
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Reading, Writing, And History
In Defense of Slavery One century ago there were plenty of Americans who spoke and wrote in defense of the institution of human slavery. There was a wealth of literature designed to prove not merely that slavery was a necessary evil which could be eradicated only at the cost of a social and economic convulsion, but that it was a positive good, a proper way to get the world’s work done. To...
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Miss Knight Abroad
For upper-class Americans of the 1850’s the Grand Tour of Europe was at once the fullfillment of a lifelong ambition and a flamboyant way of letting their neighbors know that they had arrived. To lives made wealthy by the whirring wheels of northern industry or bumper harvests of southern cotton, they were anxious to add a patina of culture; the Grand Tour seemed the quickest and surest method of...
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The Moving Image
The older arts, all seven of them—architecture, dance, drama, literature, music, painting, and sculpture—had their origins in the Mediterranean basin several thousands of years ago. The only new art, and the most universal, was born near the mouth of the Hudson River, and within the memory of living men. Three American geniuses—Thomas Alva Edison, Edwin Stanton Porter, and David Wark Griffith—...
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The Fearless Frogman
Well out to sea from New York and bound for Liverpool, Captain Bragg, master of the steamer Queen, was consternated one October evening in 1874 to see a figure clad in rubber from head to foot appear suddenly from under a lifeboat and waddle purposefully toward the rail. He raced from his bridge to lay hands on the apparition, which, as he could now see, was bristling with all the equipment of...
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Russians In California
On the swell of the morning tide, with all sails full, the Juno ran before the wind into San Francisco Bay. As the ship approached the Golden Gate, Fort San Joaquin—so unimposing that at first it seemed merely a group of rocks, rather than the main defense of the harbor—was sighted on the southern point. A "great commotion” within the fort, plainly visible from the ship, revealed the garrison’s...
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Footprints Of The Great Ice
A narrow band of very low, very gentle hills extends across the northern states from Cape Cod to the Rocky Mountains in Montana. In places the winds and rains of thousands of years have worn them down to insignificant undulations; in other places they may be a hundred feet high or more. There is nothing about it to catch the casual eye, but the geologist recognizes this ridge as the terminal...
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Children Of The Young Republic
A mid-nineteerith century English lady named Mrs. Mary Duncan complained that American parents not only encouraged their children to show off to guests, but if the little dears didn’t happen to be home during your visit you’d have to go through the ridiculous business of looking at their portraits.In a hitherto unexhibited trove of 160 American folk paintings collected by the late Mr. and Mrs....
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The Coal Kings Come To Judgment
The highways leading south and west out of Scranton, Pennsylvania, wind through the graveyard of a dying industry. Its monuments are decaying company houses, boarded-up collieries, and mountainous piles of culm—the black, gravelly residue from the mining of anthracite coal.Most of the area’s younger men have moved away now, unwilling to endure the bone-wearying labor and irregular pay checks...
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One-Shot War With England
Perhaps the best, if silliest, war this country ever fought was caused by the death of a rooting pig. Though tediously long—it persisted, with extended periods of inactivity, for nearly thirteen years—it had one outstanding virtue: the pig was its only casualty. In addition, when this war (if so it can be called) was finally terminated, the nonbelligerent belligerents settled down to a century of...
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The Long Drive
Tales of the great longhorn herds which thronged the plains of Texas lured many fortune seekers there after the Civil War. One of them was an elderly livestock buyer named Upton Bushnell, who set out from Ohio in the spring of 1866. Bushnell had reckoned that beef fetching no more than three or four dollars a head in the poor and underpopulated Southwest was worth ten times as much up North—an...
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Did The North Pole Wander?
What caused the ice ages? Why were the Siberian mammoths frozen alive, or how did great forests grow in Antarctica? The theory propounded by Maurice Ewing and William Donn, and described by Mr. Andrist in his article, is only one of the most rigorous and ingenious of many attempts to account for the often-contradictory evidence left behind by the glaciers. As recently as 1953 a geologist called...
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Webster Enters The Case
The killing of the venerable Captain White was so mysterious and frightful that it attracted widespread attention before Senator Daniel Webster stepped on the scene. But his consent to appear for the prosecution gave it unprecedented notoriety. In the summer of 1830, Webster, in his forty-ninth year, was at the absolute height of his fame—the Cicero of America, the matchless orator of...
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Martial Russia: 1836
I am free to confess Russia astonished me. I have sailed down the mighty Mississippi,—I have been in the dark and silent bosom of our own forest homes,—I have been under the eye of Mont Blanc and Olympus,—I grew familiar with Rome and London,—without experiencing the same degree of wonder which fastened upon me in Russia. I thought there to have encountered with hordes of semi-barbarians, yet...
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The Mystery Of Time
One of the most fascinating of all the mysteries left for modern man by the original inhabitants of North America is the largely indecipherable record, carved on stone by a stone-age people, of the fabulous civilization of the Maya Indians. In the jungles of Yucatan and Central America are the imposing ruins of fantastic cities or ceremonial centers, many of them dating back to the early years...
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Say It Ain’t So, Joe!
On November 6, 1920, a grand jury in Cook County, Illinois, issued to an aroused public a statement of reassurance on a question that seemed to eclipse in significance even the landslide presidential victory of Warren Gamaliel Harding just four days earlier. In spite of the jury’s recent disclosures, the game of baseball was “clean.”Only five weeks before, this same jury had disclosed that the...
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The Enemies Of Empire
We know, to the hour and minute, when this country reached the point of no return on its way to becoming a world power. It was at exactly 5:30 A.M., Manila time, on Sunday, May 1, 1898, when Commodore George Dewey, U.S.N., commanding the Asiatic Squadron of four small cruisers and two gunboats, coolly turned from his position on the bridge of his flagship Olympia, and said to its captain in...
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The Rage Of The Aged Lion
Cassius Marcellus Clay was one of the most colorful, pugnacious, and irrepressible sons of that most colorful, pugnacious, and irrepressible state, the Kentucky of old-time blue-grass tradition. Son of a pioneer Indian fighter and frontier soldier, General Green Clay, and cousin of the great Henry Clay, he was born in 1810 and he lived until 1903, surprising everyone (including himself) by dying...
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A Royal Welcome For The Russian Navy
No delegation of Russian visitors, the Bolshoi dancers not excepted, ever has been welcomed to this country with anything like the enthusiasm that greeted the Czar’s Atlantic fleet when it dropped anchor in New York Harbor in 1863. The fleet’s arrival was completely unexpected—a point to which we will return—but the American reaction was immediate, spontaneous, and open-armed. The ships’ officers...
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Our Last King
Poor George III still gets a bad press. In their famous television talk in London, the Prime Minister of Great Britain suggested to the President of the United States that the kind of colonial policy associated with the name of George III still distorted the American view of the nature and function of the British Empire, and Mr. Eisenhower smilingly agreed. It is not surprising. Since Jefferson’s...
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Ordeal In The Arctic
On Friday, September 14, 1883, black headlines filled the morning editions of American newspapers. The sturdy sealing ship Proteus, veteran of the Arctic seas, had been crushed in the pack ice of the Far North and sunk. These headlines carried a message of impending tragedy, not for the crew of the Proteus—they had been saved, the papers noted—but for a brave army officer, Lieutenant Adolphus W...
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The Young Devils And Dan’l Webster
Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1830’s, was a city of some 14,000. Merchants and sailors, shopkeepers and ship chandlers, owners and bankers and insurers, doctors and lawyers lived in its red brick and white wood houses. Neighbor and trader with more of the rest of the world than any other port of the United States, Salem in the spring of 1830 was pressing its prime. In Samuel Eliot Morison’s neat...
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Douglas, Deadlock, & Disunion
Late in April, 1860, a strife-ridden Democratic party met at Charleston, South Carolina, to choose a presidential candidate. This was to prove one of the most fateful meetings of its kind in American history. At a time of mounting sectional antagonism, the Democratic party was the one remaining political organization that represented both North and South; its disruption would mean nothing less...
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“Shall I Not Take Mine Ease In Mine Inn?”
The old saying about many an American inn, that “George Washington slept here,” is not necessarily so apocryphal as we sometimes assume. His campaigns kept him constantly on the move, and wherever he found himself, there was likely to be an inn nearby. On foot, on horseback, or even in a coach, a day’s journey was very short by our modern standards, and accommodations had to be available nearly...
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Narrative Of An Escape From A Rebel Prison Camp
On April 20, 1864, the Union outpost at Plymouth, on the North Carolina coast, was captured by the Confederates. One of several thousand prisoners was a twenty-one-year-old officer named Morris C. Foote, who made a break for freedom after seven months in captivity. After the Civil War was over, he wrote an account of his adventures for his family and friends. A copy of this rare and exciting...
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George III: A Picture Portfolio Of A Long And Troubled Reign
The King’s Ancestors  GEORGE I (1660–1727): The American colonies which would eject his great-grandson were a mere strip of coastal settlements, distant, insecure pawns in European dynastic wars, when an accident of ancestry brought George Louis, Elector of Hanover, to the throne in 1714. There were closer claimants by blood, not to mention more attractive personalities, among the ousted...
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In Short, No!
I join the Democrats! Never so long as there are sects in churches, weeds in gardens, fleas in hog pens, dirt in victuals, disputes in families, wars with nations, water in the ocean, bad men in America, or base women in France! No, Jordan Clark, you may hope, you may congratulate, you may reason, you may sneer, but that cannot be. The thrones of the Old World, the courts of the...
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Painter To The People
“ Originality is not confined to one place or country, which is very consoling to us Yankees, by God!” So wrote the artist William Sidney Mount. Mount was in America the father of “genre,” as the painting of scenes of everyday life is called. When, as a young man, he stepped, sketchbook in hand, into his own barnyard, he was almost as much of an artistic explorer as if he had...
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As One Predident To The Next
Washington to Adams A solemn scene it was indeed, and it was made affecting to me by the presence of the General, whose countenance was as serene and unclouded as the day. … Methought I heard him say, “Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest!” John Adams, in a letter to Abigail Adams, March 5, 1997 Buchanan to Lincoln If you are as happy, my dear...
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‘The Works Are Not Worth One Drop Of Human Blood’
In his own time there raged about Andrew Carnegie, as about any man who pushes his head above the crowd, many a controversy. From the standpoint of his place in history, none is more important than the great strike that erupted at the Homestead, Pennsylvania, works of the Carnegie Steel Company in the summer of 1892.Carnegie himself owned a controlling interest in the company, but when the strike...
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“The Light Of A Great Revolution”
“ I have always looked upon the struggle in America in the light of a great revolution … whoever … may be young enough to live to witness the ultimate consequences of this Civil War, will see, whenever the waters have subsided, a different America from that which was known to our fathers and even from that of which this generation has had so much experience. It will be an America of armies, of...
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The Girl Who Never Came Back
The girl was twenty-five years old, stood five feet lour inches in height, and weighed about 140 pounds—just about right for a fashionable young lady of the time. She was a niece of a justice of the United States Supreme Court and the daughter of a family so wealthy that she could be called an heiress. As the flowery journalese of the era pictured her, she was “at the summit of her youth, rich...
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Captor Of The Barefoot General
It was July, 1777, the first anniversary of independence, but America’s patriots could find scant reason for celebration. George Washington and his raw little army of farmers and village tradesmen crouched behind the New Jersey hills, waiting for the British regulars and their Hessian mercenaries to begin a summer offensive that well might end the colonial rebellion. New York and Long Island...
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The Wild, Wild West
Wild Bill Hickok in an undated portrait. The world of the Wild West is an odd world, internally consistent in its own cockeyed way, and complete with a history, an ethic, a language, wars, a geography, a code, and a costume. The history is compounded of lies, the ethic was based on evil, the language was composed largely of argot and cant, the wars were fought by gangs of greedy...
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Epitaph For The Steel Master
Toward the end of his days, at the close of World War I, Andrew Carnegie was already a kind of national legend. His meteoric rise, the scandals and successes of his industrial generalship—all this was blurred into nostalgic memory. What was left was a small, rather feeble man with a white beard and pale, penetrating eyes, who could occasionally be seen puttering around his mansion on upper...
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Don’t Boil The Calliope Player, Or, Good News For Music Lovers
Inch by inch, humanity edges forward. First it was the wheel, and the next thing you know we had hieroglyphics, vitamins, and Duz doing everything. But, as everyone is aware, there is another, rather dark side to this shining picture, tor progress tends to skip about a little at times, getting things all out of order. Sometimes inventions come too early, as in the case of Eratosthenes of...
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There Was Another South
The stereotype of the South is as tenacious as it is familiar: a traditionally rebellious region which has made a dogma of states’ rights and a religious order of the Democratic party. Here indeed is a monotonous and unchanging tapestry, with a pattern of magnolia blossoms, Spanish moss, and the inevitable old plantations running ceaselessly from border to border. To this depiction of almost...
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Nathaniel Bowditch The Practical Navigator
Three items were often listed ax essential in the sea bag of every youngster who heeded the rail of blue-water ships and wandered down the long road to the nearest port: a knowledge of the Gospel, a pair of woolen socks knitted by his mother, and a book— The New American Practical Navigator . The ascending order of importance was never questioned. The Gospel might in time of peril provide...
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Bread Upon The Waters
It was a cold January day on Capitol Hill. In the chamber of the House of Representatives, however, the oratory alone was nearly enough to fend off the winter chill, for the topic under debate was American relations with Russia. “Can we have friendship,” cried a gentleman from West Virginia, “between tyranny and liberty; between Asiatic despotism and modern civilization? … There is no...
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Herbert Hoover: The Making Of A Villain
The richly decorated scroll above, dated July 10, 1923, was presented by the Soviet government to Her ben Hoover, chairman of the American Relief Administration during the Russian lamine just ended, “in the name of the millions of people who have been saved, as well as in the name of the whole working people of Soviet Russia … to express the most deeply felt sentiments of gratitude, and to...
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No Fuel, No Fumes, No Flats, No Fuss
About all that remains today of the Woods Motor Car is the memory suggested by a tattered catalogue. The time was 1900, and the automobile was very much a carriage without the horse; the four Woods models shown overleaf further bear out the impression. The names are taken from carriage styles, and the descriptions, which we quote verbatim, are aimed not at the mob but the nabob, the kind...
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“damned Plague Ships And Swimming Coffins”
The grandparents, or the great-grandparents, or the great-great-grandparents of millions of Americans had as their last view of Europe the diked lowlands where the Weser River leaves Bremen, widens, and Hows into the North Sea. This coastal country is austere and lonely, and looks today much as it must have looked for generations, sparsely dotted with thatched farmhouses that have the sturdy...
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Writers Of The Purple Prose
Our guest reviewer this month is Peter Lyon, free-lance writer and a co-author of the American Heritage Book of the Pioneer Spirit. Elsewhere in this issue (see page 33) he confronts a number of western “heroes,” as depicted in motion pictures und television, with their historical counterparts. To the average reader who takes up’ a book about the West he here offers assistance in telling...
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A New Amusement
Any one who visits the summer out-of-town resorts can see at once that society has a most popular new amusement in operating automobiles. The machines dart hither and thither at all hours of the day, and are used for social calls, to meet friends at the railway station, for trips to the golf links, and for a variety of functions which go to fill up the long day. In all of this, it is noticeable...
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Gems From The Gay Dog’s Companion
In the late nineteenth century, it has often been remarked, a lady’s name appeared in print only three times—at birth, at marriage, and at death. However, there were other women, just as there was—and always is—another history than that which appears in the textbooks, a kind of tabloid obbligato to more important events.Here we reproduce, on the kind of shocking pink paper favored at the time, a...
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The Bloodiest Man In American History
We like to think of the Civil War as the last romantic war—as a sort of gallant duel between gentlemen. There was a certain aura of “swords and roses” in the East, but west of the Mississippi, that neglected area of Civil War history, quite a different atmosphere prevailed. Here the fighting was grim, relentless, and utterly savage—a “battle to the knife, and the knife to the hilt.”Nowhere was...
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“See Those Men! They Have No Flag!”
This previously unpublished account of Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas, was written by Miss Sophia L. Bissell, who with her parents, her sister Arabella, and her brother-in-law, Henry C. Lawrence, was living there on that fateful Angust 21, 1863. Many years later, back in her native Sufffield, Connecticut, Miss Bissell set down her memories of the event; they appear here by courtesy of her...
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With Dana Before The Mast
This brief entry in a Boston commercial newspaper is the first official record of perhaps the best-known sea journey in American history. The voyage itself, curiously enough, was no more eventful than a hundred others to Spanish California by New England ships in quest of cheap leather for the shoe factories of Lynn and Cambridge.This brief entry in a Boston commercial newspaper is the first...
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Pharaoh Had It Easy
“They are awful!” wrote General Alfred Sully in a dispatch to headquarters. “They have actually eaten holes in my wagon covers and in the tarpaulins that cover my stores!”The General’s outrage was evoked during a march across the Dakota Badlands in 1864. “A soldier on his way here,” the report went on, “lay down to sleep on the prairie in the middle of the day—the troop had been marching all...
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The Election That Got Away
“If the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent,” Alexander Hamilton once said of the machinery of the Constitution for electing the President and Vice President of the United States. In making this statement, Hamilton, for all his brilliance, was either committing an egregious error or engaging in eighteenth-century Madison Avenue encomium. On the basis of historical experience, it...
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