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Restoring A Battlefield
As a Park Ranger at the Gettysburg National Military Park for the past 20 years, Eric Campbell has given plenty of battlefield tours: “I always had to say, ‘See those trees over there? They were not there during the time of the battle. So imagine this area being wide open.’” Now 576 acres of trees the combatants would not have seen...
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Do We Really Need To Spend A Lot Of Time, Effort, And Money Saving This Big Old Painting?
Not only tourists and battlefield aficionados but also the leading scholars of the Civil War have found inspiration in the Gettysburg Cyclorama. A new survey of prominent military historians shows some disagreement about how the painting should be displayed—but unanimity about its value to America’s past and future. —H.H. Gary W. Gallagher The Gettysburg Cyclorama, when fully...
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The Lost Tribe Of Indian
On November 1, 2003, I flew to Los Angeles to attend a support rally for the second incarnation of an American legend. Defunct since 1953, the fabled Indian Motorcycle Company was kick-started back to life in 1999. But four years later it found itself, once again, on the verge of extinction. Organized by the Indian Riders Group, the $20 rally buy-in included T-shirt, rally pin, and a 12-mile ride...
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Indian Life
The Museum The Motorcyle Hall of Fame Museum, in Pickerington, Ohio, owns a century’s worth of motorcycle art, advertising, dioramas, as well as 150 vintage cycles. All the memorabilia and the Indians themselves reproduced here were drawn from their past exhibit “Century of Indian.” Visit their Web site at www.motorcyclemuseum.org...
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The 18-hole Hustle
It was a short putt, about three feet or so, and the stakes were only $5,000—pocket change for a guy like the poker champion John “Professor” Moss, even in 1939 dollars, not that Moss was prone to choking anyway. This was more about bragging rights, because his opponent that day was “Titanic” Thompson, the notorious gambler and proposition artist who, among other things, took $30,000 off the...
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Correspondence
mail@americanheritage.com America and Slavery America and Slavery America and Slavery America and Slavery Dan Sickles’s Leg
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Gambling And Golf
Gambling, of course, is a tradition in golf practically as old as the game itself. The records of the venerable Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews tell of an incredible “death match” between Sir David Moncreiffe and John Whyte-Melville in 1870 in which they actually put their lives on the line. While the club maintains no official record of the outcome,...
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My Brush With History
USLO Peking Flying on Borrowed Time
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Uslo Peking
Twenty-five years later I still find them turning up: small ceramic pandas, nail clippers bearing the logo of the People’s Republic of China airline, handsome lapel pins with a golden profile of Chairman Mao. I collected them all while commuting from Hong Kong to Beijing in the late 1970s, when there was no American Embassy there, just...
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Flying On Borrowed Time
In the early 1970s I was the executive officer of the 147th Combat Support Squadron, assigned to the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, a Texas Air National Guard unit. Our squadron’s mission was to provide all necessary ground support for the group’s other units, including the Fighter Squadron. Back in those days practically all wristwatches sported stylish expansion bands. These bands...
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America And Slavery
It is gratifying that the fact of slavery and its horrors has begun to attain a major position in the interpretation of American history (“The Central Fact of American History,” by David Brion Davis, February/March 2005). The descendants of those poor Southern whites suffered harm from the slave system too, so I certainly don’t wish to support any part of it. Neither did my ancestors; they...
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America And Slavery
The Declaration of Independence is the central fact of American history. It grew out of our colonial history and lays out the basic principles of the unique American experiment in citizens’ government. All other events, including our long struggle to end slavery, are illuminated in its light.
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America And Slavery
My contribution to the discussion of the peculiar institution is to observe that it was not peculiar. The term refers to a concept from Roman law, that is, peculium , which was the right of a slave to own property. The slave may have been the property of some Roman master, but he (probably not she) had the right to some property in his own name. It was possible for a slave to own...
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America And Slavery
What’s astonishing and fair about your February/March issue is its inclusion of one article praising Confederate generals (“General Longstreet and the Lost Cause,” by Stephen W. Sears) and another exposing the pervasiveness and profitability of slavery, which was the institution those generals fought to preserve. I commend David Brion Davis for setting the record straight about slavery...
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Dan Sickles’s Leg
Thank you for James Sorensen’s delightful description of his odyssey in search of Stonewall Jackson’s arm (April/May 2005). It reminded me of my lunch-hour search for Gen. Daniel Sickles’s leg (which he lost at Gettysburg) when I was a law student in Washington, D.C., in 1964. I found it on display in the Army Medical Museum at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Georgia Avenue. Is it...
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Oliver Jensen
 emma landau2005_4_7 As this issue was going to press, we learned that Oliver Jensen had died.Oliver—along with James Parton and Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr.—founded American Heritage, bringing out the first issue of the magazine just a little over half a century ago in December 1954. The infant company grew quickly: Soon it had launched another magazine, Horizon, which approached the world’s...
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Time And Time Again
“In 1976 my daughters and I put together a bicentennial box,” writes Judy Ivery, from St. Louis. “We asked family members to add to our collection, we sealed it up, and we vowed not to touch it until the year 2000. The years went by, and in February 2000 we held a big party and opened the box [above]. Although it had been sealed for 24 years, it had weathered well. One by one we...
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1780 225 Years Ago
On September 23, three Continental guerrillas stopped a mounted man riding south near Dobbs Ferry, New York. He gave his name as John Anderson, and he seemed nervous and confused, so the men searched him. Hidden in his shoes they found information about the Continental Army’s planned maneuvers and a detailed description of the construction and defenses of its fort at...
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Time Machine
50 Years Ago September 24, 1955 In Denver, President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffers a heart attack that will keep him hospitalized for seven weeks. 100 Years Ago August 5, 1905 Japanese and Russian diplomats join President Theodore Roosevelt onboard the presidential yacht, the Mayflower, and sail to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where they will attempt to resolve the war they are...
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Looking Back And Forward
How does a great republic sustain itself? How do we keep the democratic ideal before us in a world preoccupied with instant gratification, with allegiance to tribe and creed above all else? A democracy must always face in three directions at once, confronting the future and the past just as unflinchingly as it does the present. The greatest test of...
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History Now
Tailgating: The History New Deal Color Why Do We Say That? C’est Daguerre L.A. Observed Deconstructing Cheeseburger Soup Whose Line Is It Anyway? The Buyable Past
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Tailgating: The History
It has become as firmly established an autumn ritual as Halloween or Thanksgiving, as Stephen Linn explains in his just-published The Ultimate Tailgater’s Handbook (Rutledge Hill Press, 224 pages), and it can get very elaborate indeed. Linn gives instructions on how to tailgate at every level from equipment checklists to recipes. In this excerpt he also offers an exploration of tailgating’s...
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New Deal Color
So powerful and familiar are the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Steichen, and many others that today’s Americans can be forgiven for envisioning those turbulent times as a black-and-white world.   john vachon2005_5_12   russell lee2005_5_12a So powerful and familiar are the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea...
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Why Do We Say That?
When President Bush visited Chile last November, a state dinner at the presidential palace in Santiago was canceled at the last minute because of the U.S. Secret Service’s insistence that guests pass through metal detectors. This is standard practice in the United States, but Chileans regarded the weapons check as humiliating. “Can you imagine someone like the chief justice of the Supreme Court...
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C’est Daguerre
Photography exhibitions in museums often have a superfluous air. The pictures may be beautiful, but you could probably see them just as well or better in a magazine or book. Not so with daguerreotypes. The images they contain can be photographed and reproduced, but the mirrored surface, illusion of depth, and striking clarity of a well-made daguerreotype can be experienced only in the original...
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L.A. Observed
As early as 1925 Aldous Huxley described Los Angeles as “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis,” and many people not native to the city still tend to see it as a vast incoherence, sun-dazzled and a little sinister. As a child growing up in New York City, Ben Stiller visited a Los Angeles that “smelled different, it felt different—it was fantasyland. And I loved it. I guess that might be why...
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Deconstructing Cheeseburger Soup
Does reading this magazine’s “Buyable Past” column make you feel as if you’re in church? If so, you’ll love the two-volume Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure in America , edited by Gary S. Cross (Thomson Gale, 1,036 pages), which says under the heading “Collecting as a Response to Existential Angst” that “collecting fights against the sterility of appraising objects according to their use...
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Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Late this Spring the New York Times reported on yet another controversy over John F. Kennedy’s ever-restless memory. Two writers have produced books with diametrically opposed conclusions about his most famous line. In Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America , Thurston Clarke insists it was JFK alone who wrote, “Ask not what your country can do for...
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The Buyable Past
In Jonathan Valin’s mystery novel The Music Lovers , a character named Leon Tubin visits the detective Harry Stoner after he finds 35 of his most valuable record albums missing. One is worth $1,500, another $2,000, Tubin laments, and he tutors Stoner on valuable classical LPs, including “EMI’s, London Bluebacks, Lyritas, English Deccas,” and ones from Mercury and RCA Victor. Apart from...
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“An Adventure In Prosperity”
The law of unintended consequences is usually invoked to explain political disasters. Take Prohibition. Its millions of advocates thought that it would free the country from the scourge of drink, inducing fathers to spend time with their children instead of squandering their pay at the local saloon. What we got, of course, was Al Capone. Sometimes, however, while the consequences are just as...
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An Age Of Security?
It’s easy to get silly when you start generalizing about generations. Witness the recent mania regarding Tom Brokaw’s beloved “Greatest Generation.” Yes, those individuals who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II were certainly courageous in guiding America through the two worst crises it ever faced. But does that really make them any greater than, say, the generations...
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Boomer Century
Just a matter of weeks from now, on December 31, as millions of Americans don party hats and pop champagne corks to usher in the New Year, Kathleen Casey, the Philadelphia-born daughter of a Navy machinist and his wife, will likely find her phone once again ringing off the hook. It happens every decade or so. Journalists and academics and earnest civic leaders, family and friends, all find their...
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A Boomer Bookshelf
Terry H. Anderson The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America From Greensboro to Wounded Knee (Oxford, 1995). Anderson, a Vietnam veteran and history professor at Texas A...
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The Cars They Drove
Of all the marketing departments that helped raise the postwar generation, none were as cunning in the art of manipulation as those of the automaking companies. Any vehicle of the era could, after all, transport a person from one place to another. But then there were cars that evidently made the owner younger. Stronger, richer, or smarter. More fun at the beach. In the matter of cars and...
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History’s Homepage
Richard F. Snow Fred Allen
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Is It Really “the Worst Generation”?
“With the convertible and your long hair,” the girl had said, “you must really think you’re something.” And so the next time I got drunk—which was that night—I shaved my head. This was in 1967, immediately before the arrest. “March on Cincinnati, end the war in Vietnam” was the slogan, which even then sounded absurd—even to me. After the disinfectant shower, my college mates and I were herded...
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The Movies That Mattered
1. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)—This is the mother of all baby boomer movies, the one that gave definition to the angst of an entire generation of suburban white teenagers. The high school students portrayed in Nicholas Ray’s film were born before World War II, but in their alienation and just plain misunderstoodness, they presaged scores of characters that followed, establishing the...
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Letter From The Editors
It’s been a busy few months. Early this year Scott Masterson, my friend and colleague of a quarter-century, took the helm as president of American Heritage. Scott is a person of formidable energies, and he immediately directed them toward strengthening many areas of the company. But one mandate of his has affected our working lives more than all the others combined. American Heritage has...
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Letter From The Editors
Richard’s praise is extravagant, for what we have put together (with untiring help from him, of course) is just the beginning. We want the new americanheritage.com to be the definitive site for history on the Web, and to achieve that, it will grow and grow. But even at the beginning we think it offers a great deal. The highlight, and the first thing you see on the homepage, is at least one new...
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Little Rock: The 2005 American Heritage Great American Place
I’ve been thinking about windows. When I wrote this article, I was looking out my apartment window to the Pyrenees mountains in the south of France, where my wife and I had been living for the previous year while I researched and wrote a book about the painter Henri Matisse. Windows were an important motif in Matisse’s art, but that is only part of the reason I’ve been thinking about them. On...
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To Plan A Trip
A great way to start out in Little Rock is by hopping on the sightseeing bus “The Little Rock and Roll.” It gives a tour that hits all the historic highlights of the city. And these historic highlights stretch back a long way. It was 1722 when the French explorer Bernard de la Harpe saw the two rocks on either side of the river, one big, one little.   william j. clinton...
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Overrated & Underrated
African-American Comedian Baseball Statistic Celebrity Trial Children’s Book Writer Conspiracy Theory Crooner Director Football Coach Founding Father Historical Museum Lincoln Speech Movie Classic Naval Battle “Old West” State Painter Soft Drink Spy War Memorial Western Figure
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African-american Comedian
Overrated Dick Gregory. As a citizen of the world, an activist for human rights, and a gadfly in the media ointment, Gregory deserves our undying honor and gratitude. But it’s hard to come up with one bit, one joke, even a one-liner associated with Gregory that’s indelibly his, one that never fails to make you laugh. As a standup comic Gregory broadened the mainstream presence and range...
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Celebrity Trial
Overrated The 1925 Scopes trial is remembered today as a clash of titans, in which Clarence Darrow’s case for progressive, freethinking rationalism triumphed over William Jennings Bryan’s reactionary defense of obscurantism and religious oppression. But that’s the Broadway (and later Hollywood) version, fixed in the dramatic firmament by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee’s Inherit the Wind ....
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Baseball Statistic
Overrated Batting average. Batting average arrived in baseball in 1872, when a fan from Washington proposed that hitters be ranked not by hits per game, the custom of the day, but by hits per at-bat. When the National League formed in 1876 and adopted this “batting average” as the standard by which to award the annual batting championship, the statistic became the primary method for rating...
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Children’s Book Writer
Overrated Dr. Seuss. Theodore Seuss Geisel (1904–91), Dr. Seuss, was already an experienced advertising man, political cartoonist, and children’s-book author and illustrator when Houghton Mifflin commissioned him, in 1957, to write a “new reader” primer of 225 vocabulary words for the school market. He came up with The Cat in the Hat , hailed as something new, a “karate chop on the weary...
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Conspiracy Theory
Overrated American conspiracy theories are hard to underrate, since most of them turn out to be wrong. But their impact is both overrated or underrated, and in this sense, the most overrated are what might be called “event conspiracy theories.” Event theories attribute some dramatic occurrence to the machinations of conspirators. The attack on Pearl Harbor, the crash of TWA Flight 800, and...
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Crooner
Overrated Bing Crosby. The strong paternal voice of Bing Crosby has long soothed America’s soul. His career spanned almost six decades, and the crooners who followed him—Sinatra, Tormé, Bennett—have acknowledged him as one of their influences. By 1931, when crooning approached its pinnacle of popularity, Crosby found himself in a kind of rivalry with a younger baritone named Russ...
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Director
Overrated I choose Orson Welles for the simple reason that an orthodoxy has been established that amounts to a great ice sheet. Anyone asked the name of the greatest American film ever made —or even the best film produced anywhere—answers Citizen Kane . The pace has been set by the British film magazine Sight...
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Founding Father
Overrated Until we build the monument to Thomas Paine on the Mall in Washington, D.C., authorized by Congress in 1992 —that is, until we officially admit Paine into the top rank of the Founding Fathers—I will continue to contend that all the usual suspects, yes, all of them are overrated. If, as I believe, the world-historic importance of the American Revolution and founding of the...
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