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The Buyable Past
After a 1946 Fortune magazine feature devoted 11 pages to a fledgling phenomenon called high fidelity, many music lovers were quick to purchase equipment made by Fisher, a little-known firm whose products were ranked “best … in price and performance.” Since most of the era’s prominent makers of radios and phonographs ignored distortion and neglected difficultto-capture...
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Screenings
More than 40 years later, In Cold Blood seems as fresh and as horrifying as it did on publication. The book’s success and continued critical reputation have distorted Truman Capote’s image in American letters. In truth, before In Cold Blood he was seen in Manhattan literary circles as a colorful but minor celebrity better known for appearances at fashionable parties and on TV talk shows...
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The Cannon Spa
 2006_3_18  friends of the national parks at gettysburg2006_3_18a Where can you go to fix a 1,580-pound cast-iron cannon carriage? Well, if you’re near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, you can simply—or maybe not so simply—roll it to the repair shop behind 302 York Street.There, on a typical day, you might find bronze gun tubes stacked up awaiting their carriages, like nineteenth-century...
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Why Do We Say...?
 keith conlon2006_3_21 To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the invention of the cocktail, the United States Bartenders’ Guild was scheduled to join forces on May 13 with the Museum of the American Cocktail to present the first annual American Cocktail Awards—dubbed, almost inevitably, “The Olives”—at a ceremony in—again, almost inevitably—Las Vegas, Nevada.The museum and the guild selected...
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Cruel And Usual
One of the worst ideas Americans have embraced recently is the belief that a decent society must be run at a profit. Government can easily come to resemble kudzu. You have to keep an eye on it and cut it back constantly if you don’t want it to grow completely out of hand. That said, there are some attempts to save the taxpayers money that actually undermine our most basic values.  ...
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Grand Junction
If you were asked to name pivotal meetings in American history, the linking of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads might not immediately come to mind. But it was perhaps the most important. Before the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, it took months to get from coast to coast, and more than $1,000. After these two lines met at Promontory Summit in northern Utah, a...
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To Plan A Trip
For information about golden Spike, visit the official Web site of the National Park Service ( www.nps.gov/gosp ), or call 435-471-2209. To learn more about Union Station, visit www.theunionstation.org , or call 801-393-9886. The railroad museum shares the station with other attractions, including the Browning Firearms Museum, dedicated to the work of Ogden’s own John M. Browning (1855–1926...
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What Would The Founders Do Today?
Who cares what the founders would do? Who believes that the experiences, opinions, or plans of men who lived 200 years ago could have any relevance to our problems? Who imagines that the Founders could answer our questions?We do. I have heard it with my own ears. Over the past decade I have given hundreds of talks about the Founding Fathers, on radio and TV, and to live audiences. Every time...
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Sweet Nothing—the Triumph Of Diet Soda
It is probably fair to say that Hyman Kirsch, 50 years dead, his once powerful beverage company now a shadow of its former fizzy self, could not have imagined the ways in which his No-Cal soda would change the world. Kirsch was gone before Diet Coke hit supermarket shelves everywhere; he never heard “Tab, Tab cola, for beautiful people” or drank a diet soda “just for the taste of it.” But his...
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The Man Who Made Deadwood
David Milch has taken one of the most convoluted imaginable paths to success in television. Having earned an M.F.A. in fiction at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, he went on to teach literature at Yale for nine years and became close friends with a man he now regards as one of his mentors, the great novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren. From 1982 to 1987 he wrote for “Hill Street...
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Grim Reapings
Published in 1929, Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest shocked some reviewers with its frank sexuality, fierce language, and graphic violence. Set in the fictional town of Personville—“Poisonville” to its inhabitants—the novel was based on Hammett’s own experiences as a Pinkerton detective in the mining town of Butte, Montana, a city that he perceived as devoid of moral authority from within and...
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Dodge Vs. Deadwood
“Gunsmoke,” which made its debut in 1955, is the longest-running dramatic series in television history. “Deadwood” debuted nearly 50 years later and is now in its third season, the only Western on TV. Broadcast on CBS, “Gunsmoke” was, for several seasons, the number-one-rated show; “Deadwood,” one of the most popular dramatic shows on cable TV, is on HBO. The exploits of Seth Bullock (Timothy...
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The Madness Of Mary Lincoln
In August 1875, after spending three months in a sanitarium in Batavia, Illinois, put there by her son against her will, Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the martyred President, wrote: “It does not appear that God is good, to have placed me here. I endeavor to read my Bible and offer up my petitions three times a day. But my afflicted heart fails me and my voice often falters in prayer. I have...
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My Brush With History
That Smile The Briefcase Listening Post
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That Smile
2006_3_68 When I was growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in the early 1960s, the Kennedys were a vivid presence in our household. My father had Profiles in Courage on the bookshelf by his special chair, and Jackie Kennedy’s outfits were featured in all of my mother’s fashion magazines. Even I, a first-grader, had a Jackie and Caroline paper-doll set that I...
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The Briefcase
In the summer of 1961 I was assigned temporary duty from Headquarters Company, 3d Medical Tank Battalion, 33d Armor, Fort Knox, Kentucky, to Camp Breckenridge, Morganfield, Kentucky, as billeting officer. Various reserve and National Guard units were sent to Camp Breckenridge for their annual two weeks of active-duty training. My job was to assign quarters and issue equipment—mattresses,...
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Listening Post
We were in washington to attend a concert at the Kennedy Center. Our daughter Joan’s school orchestra, the Interlochen Arts Academy Symphony, from Interlochen, Michigan, was performing, and she would be playing the bassoon. It was a big deal for our family. My wife and I had picked up my wife’s mother in Indiana, and our son, David, had flown in from college. David and I parked the car in...
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1881—President Garfield Shot
 library of congress2006_3_72 125 years ago at nine-twenty on the morning of July 2, President James A. Garfield and Secretary of State James G. Blaine walked into the Baltimore & Potomac train station in Washington, D.C.A few seconds after they entered the visiting room, a man rushed up behind them and shot Garfield twice with a .44-caliber revolver. The President, who was accompanied...
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Time Machine
25 Years Ago June 6, 1981 The competition to design a national Vietnam memorial is won by 21-year-old Maya Ying Lin, who proposes a low, sweeping wall inscribed with the names of fallen servicemen. July 17, 1981 Two walkways filled with people collapse over a crowded hotel ballroom in Kansas City, Missouri. The accident, which kills 114 people, is later traced to a seemingly...
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Book $ale
This June marked the tenth anniversary of Abebooks.com, an Internet operation that has made things much easier for American Heritage editors along with countless thousands of other people.   2006_4_10 This June marked the tenth anniversary of Abebooks.com, an Internet operation that has made things much easier for American Heritage editors along with countless thousands of...
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Secret Season
 carla davidson2006_4_13 On a brilliant September afternoon Crested Butte, deep in the Colorado Rockies, is crowded with young people wearing flowing velvets and silks, their faces daubed with fierce streaks of color.Among the cries and drumbeats that float into the crystalline air one youth’s chant dominates: “Oats and corn, oats and corn, all that die shall be reborn, all that die shall...
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To Plan A Trip
You can get started at the state’s excellent web site, www.colorado.com , then zero in on the southwest region for Gunnison and Crested Butte, and check out Aspen on the site’s northwest section. Or just go directly to GunnisonCrestedButte.com and aspenchamber.org . Linking the communities is a memorable drive along the West Elk Loop. The 204-mile, two-lane journey provides a great...
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Second-term Blues
 franklin d. roosevelt library, hyde park, n.y.2006_4_20b Pity poor George W. Bush, stuck in the morass of those second-term blues! As of this writing, Mr. Bush’s poll numbers—those now ubiquitous barometers of presidential popularity—are barely creeping up after hitting record lows earlier this year. The seemingly stalled war in Iraq, the bungled relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina,...
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Our 10 Greatest Natural Disasters
There is something uniquely chilling about a natural disaster, the uncontrolled, unpreventable fury of normally benign elements: a blue sky now black exploding in water and electricity; the air around us sudd But if the year of recrimination over Hurricane Katrina has shown us anything, it’s the potency of human intervention in the hours and days before and after those moments. A nation that...
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How The Hurricane Got Its Name
Our hurricane-naming system evolved much the same way our baby-naming system did. Just as it’s easier to say “Jane Q. Smith” than to reel off a list of her identifying characteristics, so forecasters in the nineteenth century grew tired of referring to every big storm by its longitude, latitude, and date of origin. But that was the official protocol until the early 1950s, and more than once it...
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Tiki
In December 1931 a somewhat adrift 24-year-old washed up in Southern California, looking for something to do. A native of New Orleans, he was named Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt. Curious by nature and something of a protobeatnik by choice, he had spent the previous months vagabonding on the cheap through some of the globe’s more humid locales: Jamaica, Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Marquesas...
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Make The King Of Tiki Drinks At Home.
The mai tai is the quintessential tiki drink. The classic Trader Vic’s version, upon which this recipe is based, is complex, sophisticated, and a far cry from the overly sweet, cherry-red pre-mix variants that lesser establishments fob off on their customers. It is relatively simple: It starts with rum blended with those two building blocks of most outstanding rum drinks, lime and sugar...
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A Top 10 Tiki Tour
  What happens when a love of tribal art, mid-twentieth-century pop culture, and good rum drinks all come crashing together? I had never asked that question before, but it was answered for me anyway in 1991, when I discovered my first vintage tiki bar. This, I thought, was truly the place for me. It seamlessly incorporated three favorite recreational pursuits—and in an amusing way...
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A Tiki Bookshelf
The tiki civilization has a surprisingly broad literature. Much of it is still in print, but perhaps it’s best to start with the pioneering Trader Vic, whose Trader Vic’s Book of Food and Drink sold so well when it was published in 1946 that it is still available (from, among other places, Abebooks, whose anniversary we marked on page 10 of this issue).   2006_4_46a...
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“You Have The Right To Remain Silent”
Suspect confesses, case closed. Confessions are frequently the best evidence of a crime and, more often than not, the deciding factor in a suspect’s eventual conviction. But what if the confession is coerced? A confession induced with a nightstick clearly is suspect. But what about those that are the product of subtle techniques? Those confessions born of 36-hour interrogations? Or in response...
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“Flying Coach To Cairo”
Jimmy Carter was at home in his study in Plains, Georgia, on October 6, 1981, when the call came in a little after daybreak. A reporter was on the line asking for his response to the attempted assassination of Anwar Sadat. The Egyptian president had been reviewing a military parade in Cairo when men in uniforms sprayed the crowd with bullets and hand grenades. Carter, shocked, asked for details....
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My Brush With History
Army Math
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Army Math
On Monday, August 24, 1970, I was a graduate student in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. My research laboratory was in the chemistry building, and that morning I rode over on my bicycle to find broken glass everywhere. More than a thousand windows in 26 campus buildings had been shattered. One of them was mine. Four Vietnam War protesters calling themselves...
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History Now
The War at Home Why Do We Say...? Now You Can Offer S--- On A Shingle Book $ale
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1831 - Nat Turner’s Rebellion
Around two in the morning on August 22, 1831, a group of seven slaves emerged from the woods in Southampton County, Virginia, armed with axes, hatchets, and knives. They stopped at a farmhouse, hacked its four white occupants to death, took some firearms, and left—then remembered the family’s baby and returned to chop it to pieces as well.The band was led by an enslaved black preacher named Nat...
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Time Machine
25 Years Ago August 3, 1981 Members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization illegally go on strike. President Ronald Reagan announces that those who do not return to work will lose their job. August 19, 1981 U.S. Navy jets shoot down two Libyan fighters that had opened fire on them over the Gulf of Sidra. Libya claimed the entire gulf as its territory, while...
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The War At Home
 He was, to Americans of a certain age, the urbane, well-bred, well-read, well-connected Englishman who hosted “Omnibus,” a cultural lighthouse that shone over the wasteland of network television in the 1950s. Later, from 1971 to 1992, he presented “Masterpiece Theatre,” the American shop window for the best drama from the BBC.  library of congress2006_4_7 He was, to americans of a...
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Why Do We Say...?
Rooster is the common term today for a male chicken, and most people utter it without realizing that it is a euphemism, a “good” word employed in place of a “bad” one. The word rooster is an Americanism, and its appearance in the written record toward the end of the eighteenth century helps signal a major cultural and linguistic change, as people began to be much more fastidious when speaking of...
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Now You Can Offer S--- On A Shingle
In How to Feed an Army: Recipes and Lore From the Front Lines (Collins, $15.95), J. G. Lewin and P. J. Huff survey the solutions to a problem that, as they say, has been vexing our armed forces “from the day Thomas Mifflin took over as the first quartermaster general in August 1775.” Dozens of recipes chart the gustatory history of the American soldier, most of them giving directions on how...
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Behind The White Suit
Every successful musician sooner or later makes an album of standards, the familiar pieces he or she has loved and learned from over the years. Writers, too, love paying homage to their forebears, as can be seen from a pair of recent books: Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney , by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins, 320 pages, $25.95), and Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–...
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Last Seating
The few people whose names are today synonymous with furniture styles mostly worked for the rich, but one of them, Lambert Hitchcock, achieved fame by being the first to mass-produce furniture. By the late 1820s, when his factory was turning out 15,000 affordable, black-lacquered, brightly stenciled chairs a year, Hitchcocks could be found in countless homes. They still can, for the company has...
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Screenings
  “A tardy and subordinate genre,” sniffed Jorge Luis Borges about the American Western novel in a 1960s lecture. What Borges meant was that it took its lead from the Hollywood Western film, which had long since settled into the ponderous and predictable.   2006_5_14 “A tardy and subordinate genre,” sniffed Jorge Luis Borges about the American Western...
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Crossing In Style
  If there’s a cruise in your future, you probably should pack Luxury Liners: Life on Board , by Catherine Donzel (Vendome Press, 240 pages, $50.00). The coffeetable-size book, following a chronology of embarkation to arrival, is filled with striking photos and memorabilia of the great ships—the Queen Mary , the Ile de France , the France of 1962, and dozens more....
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Home Run History
The chill of autumn air carries a special charge for baseball fans, who know that pennant races and the World Series are at stake. And nothing makes the national pastime’s hopeful, anxious drama explode into excitement like the game’s signature act: hitting a home run. Scan anybody’s list of the greatest moments in sports history, and you’ll find at least three October dingers—Bobby...
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Why Do We Say...?
“History is more or less bunk.” Most readers of this magazine, not to mention its editors, will disagree with Henry Ford’s famous assessment, but it is hard to argue with his choice of words, for bunk is a classic Americanism. Stemming from a great nineteenth-century debate in the House of Representatives, bunk has gone on to enjoy a long and useful life. For instance, soon after Barney’s...
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The Man Who Was Louisiana
  In 1935, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Huey Long of Louisiana spoke against a New Deal measure for more than 15 hours straight, digressing along the way to give tips on frying oysters and brewing coffee. As Richard D. White, Jr., makes clear in Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P.   2006_5_16 In 1935, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Huey Long of Louisiana spoke against a...
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The Quietest War
The war in Iraq has been going on for three and a half years now. That’s about the same amount of time America spent fighting World War II. This seems almost impossible considering how firmly the Second World War is embedded in our collective memory. We have even come to think of an entire generation—The Greatest Generation—in terms of that struggle. Cliché or not, we can still see the sharp...
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Four Centuries
We’re not used to measuring history in great swaths of time in this country, where a hundred-year-old house is considered an ancient survivor. So it was with a sense of going back in time twice over that I read about Virginia’s Grand National Jubilee of 1807. Two hundred years ago this coming May veterans of the Revolution gathered to mark the bicentennial of the 1607 founding of...
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To Plan A Trip
  The Jamestown-Yorktown foundation is planning a series of what it terms Signature Events, ranging from an African-American Conference in February 2007 to a World Forum on the Future of Democracy the following September, with participants from around the world. And, of course, many of the sites and exhibits are meant to be permanent (at least until the 500th anniversary). For more...
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1964 - The Year The Sixties Began
It has been called the “burned-over decade,” a “dream and a nightmare,” the “definitive end of the Dark Ages, and the beginning of a more hopeful and democratic period” in American history. It’s been celebrated in movies like Forrest Gump and memorialized by television shows like “The Wonder Years,” “American Dreams,” and “China Beach.” To many on the Left it is a bygone age of social...
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