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Account Of A Buyer Of Bargains
I AM the husband of a buyer of bargains. My wife has fomewhere heard, that a good houfewifé never had any thing to purchafe, when it was wanted. This maxim is often in her mouth, and always in her head. She is not one of thofe philofophical talkers that fpeculare without practice, and learn fentences of wifdom only to repeat them; fhe never paffes by a fhop where furniture is fold, but me fpies...
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Notable Public Works
The public buildings of Philadelphia were monuments to the humanitarianism and the enlightened spirit of the Quakers. At the left in the engraved view above is the House of Employment and Almshouse— the so-called Bettering House—built and largely supported by private contributions. Jt was considered “one of the principal Ornaments” of Philadelphia when it was completed in the fall of 1767. The...
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The Pulse Of City Life
 At the turn of the century, in 1799 and 1800. Birch and his son Thomas issued a series of engraved views of Philadelphia that provide a remarkable record of the most attractive and the most enterprising of eighteenth-century American cities. At the time the Birches pictured it, the junction of Second and High streets (left) marked the heart of Philadelphia. Distances from the city to other...
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The Good Citizen
Benjamin Franklin was the most cosmopolitan spirit of his age. The self-made republican, the tallow-chandler’s son, the many-sided tradesman, and the universal genius moved with grace and honor among the powdered heads of Europe, quipping with royalty and corresponding at once easily and profoundly with the greatest intellects of the day.Born in Boston, whither his parents had moved from...
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Men Of Mind And Substance
 Except for its distance from the Old World’s courts and capitals, there was little that was provincial about Philadelphia in the second half of the eighteenth century. Although Franklin’s enormous reputation tended to overshadow the attainments of his fellow citizens, the city abounded in men of brilliant minds, some of them as highly regarded in Europe as they were in America. Benjamin...
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Revolution And Occupation
The scene in Independence Hall as the Continental Congress voted for independence (above) was painted by Robert Edge Pine and Edward Savage some years after that historic occasion. Fourteen months after the Declaration was issued, General Howe moved into Philadelphia. The painting by Xavier Delia Gatta (opposite page) pictures the action about Benjamin Chew’s house on the Germantown Road as...
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Fair Ladies And Fine Houses
The modishness and the wit of the ladies of Philadelphia were both celebrated and criticited. Young John Quincy Adams, shortly alter his return from Russia, thought that attractive women were almost commonplace in the Quaker city. Thomas Jefferson admired Mrs. Bingham’s keen mind and good sense as much as he appreciated her beauty. John Adams, on the other hand, wrote growlingly from Philadelphia...
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Ardor For The Arts
In 1763, when Franklin wrote a friend that “the Arts delight to travel westward,” Philadelphia was last becoming the indisputable art center of America, a distinction it retained through the first decades of the nineteenth century. Benjamin West had already opened a London studio to which aspiring colonials soon came in a long, steady parade for guidance from the great man. Many of them returned...
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The Storming Of The Alamo
Few battles in our history have had more reverberations than the siege and assault of the Alamo, and yet no battle of consequence has been so skimpily reported. In this action fewer than 200 men, most of them Americans, were besieged by 3,000 Mexican troops in a fortress built on the ruins of a Spanish mission at San Antonio, in Texas, then a part of Mexico, from February 23 to March 6, 1836,...
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Father Of The Modern Submarine
“Without celebration,” the New York Times reported under date line of May 17, 1897, “the Holland, the little cigar-shaped vessel owned by her inventor, which may or may not play an important part in the building of the navies of the world in the years to come, was launched from Lewis Nixon’s shipyard this morning.” John Philip Holland, her designer, hurried up to the launching platform at the...
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When The Red Storm Broke
In the early days ot November, 1917, a wiry, abbreviated man bearing on his face the expression of a determined ferret and in his pocket an important commission from President Woodrow Wilson, stopped off in London at the Savoy Hotel, then noisy with officers on leave from the western front and a banjo band straight from Dixie. He soon heard disconcerting news. “Vague word of a strange new Russian...
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Braddlock’s Alumni
On the evening of Washington’s Birthday last, my wife and I went to the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania to hear a talk on “Pennsylvania—A State Neglected in Our Country’s History.”After the lecture the ladies of the society served coffee and small sandwiches in the basement. There I chanced to see Mr. G., president of the Pittsburgh company I work for. I approached him and said:“There...
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The Working Ladies Of Lowell
Dusk fell over the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, a few minutes before five o’clock on January 10, 1860. In the five-story brick textile factory owned by the Pemberlon Manufacturing Company, lamps began to flicker in the ritual of “lighting-up time.” The big building—nearly three hundred feet long and eighty-five wide—rumbled unceasingly with the noise of its hundreds of machines for turning...
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“What A Sight It Was!”
For adventurous young men of the nineteenth century, there was no magnet, not even the sea, to compare with the Plains frontier. Here was the excitement of buffalo hunting, beautiful scenery, and narrow scrapes with Indians enraged at the advance of the white man. Fortunately, William de la Montagne Cary, born in 1840 in Tappan, New York, combined his sense of adventure with a talented hand both...
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Professor Of The World’s Wonders
Louis Agassiz, the enthusiastic Swiss naturalist, appeared on the American scene at exactly the right time and place. The place was Boston, the time, the mid-nineteenth century. Science was beginning to challenge religious concepts long held sacred. Public attention was increasingly directed toward scientific advance and toward the study of nature. Now came Agassiz, the scientist “with the Gallic...
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Billy Mitchell In Alaska
Few figures in American history have been surrounded by more controversy than General William Mitchell. He is a man chiefly remembered for his outspoken advocacy of air power in an age when most military minds were still firmly rooted in the earth, and for a visionary’s indifference to the feelings of his more conservative superiors, which led to a sensational court-martial. Little remembered...
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Pioneers Under The Sea
When Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea appeared in 1869, it helped advance beyond the realm of dreams an idea which had been in the minds of men for well over a thousand years. Alexander of Macedon is reputed to have used underwater divers at the siege of Troy in 334 B.C. At about the same time, we are told, he had a glass barrel built (left), in which he had himself lowered to...
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Moment Of Dawn
And so, of course, did Christopher Columbus. This greatest and most fascinating of all explorers went looking for a short cut to the East and found instead the infinite West; and although he never quite realized what he had done—the enormous dimensions of his achievement were in fact too big for any of his contemporaries to grasp—he was very well aware that he had sailed out of one era and...
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End Of The Road
It ended, apparently, in Africa, just about a century ago, and no one who had anything to do with it thought for one moment that anything was ending. On the contrary, men supposed that a new threshold had been crossed, and that more doors would be opened as the years went on. But the last blank places on the map were at last being filled, and without any warning at all the old driving energy...
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A New Horizon?
The idea is worth dwelling with for a while. Suppose, just for the sake of supposing, that something happens to push the horizons back once more, to restore the old feeling that we live in a world of infinite possibilities. What then takes place back in the adrenal glands? Do we then, in other words, find the dynamic force that goes with the unlimited view? Do the two actually go together?...
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On Choosing A Subject
The biographer in between books is doubly vulnerable because biography seems to be everybody’s business. For the novelist, the plot of his next book is a private matter between himself and his typewriter—a happy secrecy, permitting conception without interference of seduction or extracurricular rape. With me at least, my last work is no sooner on the stands than letters come, suggesting a...
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On Finishing A Very Long Book
It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer house in my garden. After laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake and mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of...
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“there Is Room For All, And Millions More”
America is a wonderful country, endowed by the Omnipotent with natural advantages which no other can boast of; and the mind can hardly calculate upon the degree of perfection and power to which, whether the States are eventually separated or not, it may in the course of two centuries arrive. At present all is energy and enterprise; every thing is in a state of transition, but of rapid...
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What Samuel Wrought
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serions tilings. They are but improved means Io tin unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate … As if...
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Lincoln And The Telegrapher
Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph, when the Civil War came, proved to be an essential weapon—permitting the commander in chief personally to direct his armies. No one was more aware of its importance than Abraham Lincoln, who came each morning to the War Department telegraph office across the street from the White House; and jew men had a more intimate picture of the wartime...
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The Red Ghost
One morning in the spring of 1883 two women were alone with their children in a small adobe house on Eagle Creek in the southeastern corner of the Arizona Territory. The men of the family had gone out early to determine how many of their sheep had been slaughtered or driven off by Geronimo and his Apaches in the latest raid through the area. Being left alone at such a time meant a certain...
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A Face From The Past—i
He is the President no one knows. If school children remember him at all, it is as a name that comes somewhere between the Mexican War and the Civil War—and that judgment is strangely close to the heart of the matter. The generation of Webster, Calhoun, and Clay was gone by 1852. In Baltimore, where the divided Democrats were meeting to select a presidential candidate, forty-eight ballots...
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Brother Against Brother
Sometimes the, weariest old clichés turn out to be, true. The Civil War was, really, a war of brother against brother. Now and again tlie brothers come under the magnifying glass and can be seen, hot and bitler against one another. The Civil War began in mid-April, 1861, with the bombardment of Fort Suniter. President Lincoln called for troops. Among the contingents that headed for...
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America And Russia: Part Viii The Wasted Mission
The stately Hotel Grillon on the Place de la Concorde was a scene of frenzied activity in the early months of 1919. It was filled with 1,300 Americans who had come to Paris for the peace conference that would end the First World War. The corridors swarmed with ethnologists, geographers, economists, interpreters, army officers, reporters, and ambassadors. On occasion, President Wilson, the...
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Ambassador’s Return: 1933
On the evening of December 8, 1933, William C. Bullitt boarded a train bound from Paris to Moscow. This time he traveled as the first American Ambassador to Russia since the Bolsheviks had come to power in 1917. For Bullitt, who had long worked for the recognition of the Communist government by the United States, it seemed a moment of triumph. As one observer commented, his new appointment was...
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Two Gentlemen From Newburyport
Newburyport, Massachusetts—the modest seaport town at the mouth of the Mcrrimack River—is immoderately rich in social history. Under the name of “Yankee City,” Newburyport has been the subject of an intensive sociological study by W. Lloyd Warner and his associates, published in five volumes which picture the subtle division of its inhabitants into grades of class and status. The son of an...
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The Johnson Country War
On a blizzardy April morning in 1892, fil’ty armed men surrounded a cabin on Powder River in which two accused cattle rustlers had been spending the night. The first rustler was shot as he came down the path lor the morning bucket of water; he was dragged over the dOOrstep by his companion, to die inside. The second man held out until afternoon, when the besiegers fired the house. Driven...
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Reveille On East 75th Street Or Roughing It With The Girl Scouts Of 1918 In A Manhattan Mansion
If there is any axiom about pioneering, it is this: the further back one goes in history, the tougher it was. Where Grandpa hacked his way through the wilderness, we ride the throughway. Father, he is happy to tell the world, worked harder than you. Before you new recruits joined up, one learns in any organization, life in this outfit was infinitely more rugged. We trust that this point...
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Jones Vs. Jones
When the Protestant ministers of Toledo, Ohio, voted almost unanimously to invite the fiery and widely renowned southern evangelist, Samuel Porter Jones, to lead a month-long crusade in the spring of 1899, it was apparent to everyone that the salvation of souls was not their only aim. However loudly they might proclaim a great campaign to regenerate the city’s !lagging spiritual...
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The Kings Census: 1577
Throughout recorded history the marks of the empire builder have been a passion tor order and a determination to allow not even the farthest corners of his realm to go unsupervised; the story of Christianity itself begins in the midst of a census decreed for tax purposes by a Roman emperor. To this rule Philip II of Spain was no exception. The 400-year-old maps reproduced here and on the next...
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Mad Old Man From Massachusetts
After his defeat for re-election to the Presidency in 1828, John Quincy Adams cloistered himself in his Quincy, Massachusetts, home and wrote in anguish, “I have no plausible motive for wishing to live when everything that I foresee and believe of futurity makes death desirable, and when I have the clearest indications that it is near at hand.” Bitterly, Adams resigned himself to the political...
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Why Won’t They Work?
The idea of perpetual motion—something for nothing under the laws of physics—is as insidious as any in history. It will not lie down and die. To this day, the persistence of the idea is the one thing perpetual about it. The Patent Office is still pestered by single-minded inventors of “self-motors,” the technical section of the Library of Congress is haunted by furtive figures, and...
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The Famous Tax Included, Tea Was Still Cheaper Here
In one way an Englishman’s view of the Revolutionary War does not greatly differ from an American’s. Our historians, in the main, agree with yours that the American colonies were lost through the mistakes and obstinacy of George III and Lord North and that the whole episode, whether regarded politically or militarily, is one of the most depressing in British history. It is at this point...
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Untitled
Answers to WHY WON’T THEY WORK? 1. Even if friction were no factor, this machine would waste energy. All the water must be lifted to the top, yet only part of it performs useful work on the way down. 2. If there is enough attraction to pull the magnet up the track, there will be enough to pull it to the magnet without a track. At point C the attraction is much greater than at the...
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What Caused The Revolution?
The leadership of the American Revolution was drawn from many sources—the clergy, the merchants, the planters, and the newspaper editors—but no single group was better able to articulate the colonial position within the political, legal, and constitutional framework of the Anglo-American debate than the men of the legal profession. Curiously, modern historians have done them less credit than...
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Reading, Writing, And History
The Sense of Wonder Moment of Dawn End of the Road A New Horizon ON CHOOSING A SUBJECT ON FINISHING A VERY LONG BOOK
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The Sense Of Wonder
Something valuable went out of the world when the last blank spaces on the map were filled in. The age-old area of myth and fable, which had helped to condition men’s minds ever since men first had minds to develop, shrank to the vanishing point, and an odd constriction of the human spirit seems to have begun. Western man lost his sense of wonder; his world became smaller than it had been, and...
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A Sensible Suggestion
Gentlemen: Instead of counting sheep, I am one of those who has often induced sleep by inventing perpetual motion machines of the types 5, 8, and 9 illustrated in your April issue; and in lieu of sleeping pills I have as often achieved a restful night by mentally calculating why they wouldn’t work. Your article proved somewhat comforting in that it assures me that my aberrant musings have...
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Reading, Writing, And History
Setting the Pattern The first half of the nineteenth century in America sometimes appears to have been little more than an eventful and confusing prelude to the great trial by fire which was to be the American Civil War. It began with the first bright triumph of Jeffersonian democracy, and it ended with the development of sectional feelings so intense that the country narrowly escaped...
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“The Noblest Cause That Men Have Ever Died For”
In August of 1865, four months after the end of the Civil War, the American minister in Austria wrote to a friend in the distant United States. That diplomat was John Lothrop Motley, the famous historian who had made a life’s work writing of the struggle for independence of another republic, Holland. At this moment, however, the late American conflict was uppermost in Motley’s mind; his...
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Panic Rides The High Seas
Shortly after noon, on December 1, 1842, three hooded, manacled figures were hoisted to the main yardarm of the U.S. brig-of-war Somers . the captain, as was his wont in such an emergency, delivered a pious homily to the remaining 117 men and boys, many of whom were weeping. The Stars and Stripes was raised. Then the crew gave three cheers for the American flag and were piped down to dinner,...
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Frank Merriwell At Yale Again And Again And Again
When he died at nearly seventy-nine, in 1945, Gilbert Patten was hailed as the last of the dime novelists. Perhaps he was indeed the last. Certainly his Frank Merriwell was the best known and most revered character of the five-cent weeklies, the cut-rate branch of the dime-novel industry. And the most durable. Frank Merriwell made his bow on April 18, 1896, in the first issue of Tip Top...
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Faces From The Past—ii
The ordeal in Wilmer McLean’s parlor took place on April 9, but Robert E. Lee remained near Appomattox for another three days, until his men stacked their arms and I surrendered the worn, laded battle Hags which they had followed for four years. Then he set out toward Richmond, pitching his tent each night, sleeping under canvas for the last time. News of his coming preceded him, and along the...
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The Passing Of The Passenger Pigeon
On September 1, 1914, a bird named Martha died in the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. In covering the news of the day the New York Times devoted half a column to the change in the name of the Russian capital from St. Petersburg to Petrograd and equal space to a defeat of the New York Yankees by the Detroit Tigers. Most of the first three or four pages were, of course, filled by news of the...
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The Road To Yalta
On a brisk November day in Washington in 1933, two spare, tall American officials of high rank and collected demeanor emerged from under the mansards of the old State Department building to journey to Union Station and there greet a squat, rotund, grinning foreigner who in the eyes of many of their compatriots was a dangerous revolutionary. The moment itself was revolutionary, even in a...
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