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Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle was published to accompany an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Dealers that showcase his wares include All Wright ( www.all-wright.com ) and Mood Indigo ( www.moodindigonewyork.com ). Wright aluminum items are sometimes reproduced to precise specifications, and examples can be found at Highbrow Furniture ( www....
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Travel: In Search Of Albuquerque’s 300-year-old Past—and Its Neon-lit Present
Last April, when i mentioned that I was flying to Albuquerque, several people assumed I was headed on to Santa Fe and seemed surprised that I wasn’t. “What’s there?” someone asked. I said I’d tell him when I got back. Now I know.In 1706 New Mexico’s provisional governor, Francisco Cuervo y Valdes, petitioned the king of Spain to charter a town (known as a villa ) in a region along the Rio Grande...
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To Plan A Trip
After the 300th anniversary celebrations of 2006, Albuquerque continues to offer the visitor a wide range of diversions. For more information, go to the Convention and Visitors Bureau at www.abqcvb.org .
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10 Moments That Made American Business
It has been 400 years since European settlement began in what is now the United States. In that time a land occupied by a few million Neolithic hunter-gatherers has been transformed into the mightiest economy ever known, producing nearly one-third of the world’s goods and services. There are few economic sectors indeed, from agricultural exports to jet-aircraft production to entertainment, in...
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40 More Critical Moments In American Business History
1. 1606: The Virginia Company is formed to seek profit from a new business: American settlement. 2. 1612: John Rolfe plants West Indian tobacco in Virginia, the cash crop that assures the colony’s success. 3. 1614: John Smith, finding no gold, sets his men to fishing for cod off New England, pointing the way to the area’s first economic mainstay. 4. 1619: The first blacks arrive in Virginia as...
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The Trial Of General Homma
On the morning of December 16, 1945, Lt. Robert Pelz steeled himself to meet a monster. A young Army lawyer not long out of Columbia Law School, Pelz was stationed in Manila, where he had been assigned to work on the trial of the most notorious Japanese war criminal of them all: Masaharu Homma, the general who had handed America a staggering military defeat—the surrender of the Bataan Peninsula...
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The Wrecking Crew
On a cool, overcast February night in Hollywood, near the slightly scruffy, down-on-its-luck intersection of Vine Street and Santa Monica Boulevard—the final stretch of Route 66—a group of highly talented musicians gathered in a weathered, non-descript former dentist’s office are about to make rock ’n’ roll history. No one present, from the bass player to the drummer to the guitarist, has any...
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The Wrecking Crew Top 10
2007_1_51-album1 1. PET SOUNDS—BEACH BOYS (1966) The first real “concept” album, Pet Sounds featured the Wrecking Crew and wunderkind producer Brian Wilson at their creative apex. Considered by Sir Paul McCartney to be the finest pop recording of the 1960s, it undeniably influenced the very competitive Beatles to create their conceptual masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper...
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Other Cities, Other Sessions
Although the Wrecking Crew is widely considered the most prominent group of pop/rock studio musicians to come out of their day, other cities and other music styles had their own important session players. Detroit In Motor City a disparate group of local session aces hired by the music impresario Berry Gordy became known as the Funk Brothers and, unbeknownst to the public, played...
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Highest Adventure
At One O’Clock on May 1, 1963, Jim whittaker, a 34-year-old native of Seattle on his first Himalayan expedition, stepped onto the summit of Mount Everest. The six-foot-five-inch mountaineer, known as “Big Jim” to his fellow climbers, was the tenth climber and the first American to reach the top of the world’s highest mountain, 29,035 feet above sea level. Nawang Gombu, a 27-year-old Sherpa...
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The Greatest Moments In American Mountaineering
A list like this is bound to stir controversy among mountaineers. A climb on a given mountain may be significant because it’s a “first,” but it may not be as physically challenging as a second or third ascent of the same mountain by other routes, or in other seasons, or when it is accomplished alone, or without the use of bottled oxygen. But here are 10 strong contenders, and a few sure bets...
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My Brush With History
Wild About Harry
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Wild About Harry
Even made with a smile, a physical threat by a future President of the United States against a past President just doesn’t happen every day. But I know it did once. Richard Nixon was scheduled by the American Legion to speak at its Denver convention in early 1962. The Republican party of Colorado, of which I was then state chairman, had also asked him to speak at a GOP fundraiser. Eager...
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1857 - The Dred Scott Decision
On March 6 the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford . Scott was a Missouri slave, and Sanford (whose last name was misspelled in court papers) was a New York businessman who had custody of some family property, including Scott. In 1846 Scott had sued for freedom on the grounds that he and his previous owner, an Army surgeon, had lived in...
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Time Machine
50 Years Ago March 20, 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Great Britain meet in Bermuda. The purpose of the meeting is to patch up differences stemming from Britain’s seizure of the Suez Canal the previous year, which the U.S. opposed. 75 Years Ago March 1, 1932 The son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh is kidnapped from their house...
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The Buyable Past
Before back-seat video screens, countless children amused themselves on road trips by looking at license plates, thrilled to spot their initials, birthdates, or examples from distant states. Thousands of adult collectors share that enthusiasm.Plates have been around since New York mandated automobile licensing in 1901. Car owners then cobbled together their own, often attaching metal numbers...
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Resources
The Automobile License Plate Collectors Association is the world’s largest club devoted to the hobby; members benefit from a bimonthly newsletter, an annual convention, and regional meets (ALPCA, Inc., 508 Coastal Drive, Virginia Beach, VA 23451; www.alpca.org ). Great plates abound on the Internet. Start at www.alpca.org, click on “Gallery” for select examples and on “Links” for the best...
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Pop Goes The Nation
The Founding of the United States Experience (Presidio Press, 64 pages, $50) earns the slightly unwieldy last word in its title, because digging into this handsome volume creates an experience much like rooting through a treasure-filled attic.   2007_2_15 The Founding of the United States Experience (Presidio Press, 64 pages, $50) earns the slightly unwieldy last word in its...
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“Don’t Be A Show Off”
There were three deadly serious crimes a serviceman could commit, said the United States Army Air Corps commander Carl (“Tooey”) Spaatz; “Murder, rape, and interference with Anglo-American relations. The first two might conceivably be pardoned, but the third one, never.” Seemingly Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed. When he learned that two different-nationality officers of his integrated staff had...
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Why Do We Say...?
A “Call it Pork or Necessity, but Alaska Comes Out Far Above the Rest in Spending.” This headline—from The New York Times—was for a story about the $388 billion federal Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2005. “Consolidated” is an apt word for this annual exercise: The act is nearly 1,700 pages long or, looking at it another way, more than a foot thick. Buried within it are thousands of local...
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Alfred Hitchcock’s America
When I think of Alfred Hitchcock’s America—the vision of America that you get from watching the films that he made during his prime Hollywood period—these are some of the images that come to mind:Heavy rain, poor visibility. The exhausted driver pulls up to a motel with a vacancy on a forlorn highway (Psycho).A low-flying crop-duster takes aim at the well-dressed man running in a wide-open...
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Hitchcock On Location
Although Alfred Hitchcock lived in the United States for more than 40 years, becoming an American citizen in 1955, five years after his wife, Alma, he carefully retained his Britishness. Even in the warm sunshine of Southern California he always turned up for work in an immaculately tailored dark suit, and his wardrobe held dozens of them, all identical except for their varying waistbands. On his...
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An Invitation
Working on this, our twenty-first annual travel issue, reminded me that I am fortunate enough to have a most agreeable travel destination virtually under my feet. This is the Forbes Galleries in the company’s headquarters at 62 Fifth Avenue in New York City. I first visited them 20 years ago. News had come to our offices in midtown that Forbes had bought American Heritage. I remembered...
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The Monitor Makes Port
On March 9, 1862, a naval engagement near Chesapeake Bay in Virginia ended with no decisive victor and without claiming a single life. Yet no one has ever doubted that the bloodless fight changed naval warfare forever. Now, only a few miles from the broad channel where the battle took place, it is changing something else: the way present-day visitors experience Civil War history.A hundred and...
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The Monitor’s Mates
Something about ships accentuates the human experience, most obviously because of the breadth of activity that has taken place within such small spaces. Crewmen, especially aboard warships, did not have an inch to waste, and the social microcosms of shipboard life come alive in each vessel featured here. You don’t have to be a sailor to appreciate their beauty and efficiency. Following are...
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Wildwood
  If you have 20 cents, you can recapture your childhood on the Wildwood boardwalk. For that price, you can play a round of Flipper’s Fascination, a strangely hypnotic, and once widespread, midway game that is a cross between bingo and Skee-Ball.   adam kuban2007_2_52 If you have 20 cents, you can recapture your childhood on the Wildwood boardwalk. For that price, you...
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Randyland
Right in the middle of Wildwood is an old Woolworth’s, locked up and closed. If you glance into the windows, you could mistake it for a storage space, though you might do a double take at the giant bear that waits, ready to attack, inside the door. But if you stop and peer inside, you’ll see that it is packed with arcade games from the past century. It’s the result of a decades-long...
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Shoobie Doo Wop
  Lodging: The Caribbean ( www.caribbeanmotel.com / 609-522-8292) has bright green interiors, leopard-print chairs, and a dial on the wall that can pipe in oldies at any time. Many other motels are available with doo-wop exteriors, though their interiors may be more 1980s than mid-century. Check the Greater Wildwood Hotel and Motel Association ( www.wildwoods.org/lodging.php ) for a list...
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On The Trail Of Benedict Arnold
Some of the infuriating questions surrounding the great hero-traitor can be answered by visiting the fields where he fought. The trip will also take you to many of the most beautiful places in the Northeast.No one has ever fully explored the inner geography of Benedict Arnold’s heart. The springs whence flowed his mad, desperate courage lie so close to the sources of his cynical, calculated...
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An Arnold Chronology
1741 Born in Norwich, Connecticut. 1758 Enlists in a New York company for service in the French and Indian War. 1759–73 Deserts and returns to Norwich to finish an apprenticeship as a druggist. In time becomes a successful trader and shipowner. 1774 Elected captain of militia. 1775 Arrives in Massachusetts 10 days after the fighting at Lexington and Concord. Captures...
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To Plan A Trip
The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum has extensive displays on the Battle of Valcour Island and the archeological explorations being made there. The museum is open daily 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., from late May to mid-October ( www.lcmm.org / 802-475-2022).The Fort Chambly National Historic Site highlights the strategic importance of the Richelieu River. For details on hours, call450-658-1585 ( www....
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Bootleg Paradise
Prohibition ranks among America’s most vivid historic epochs. Yet the era of flappers and jazz is also curiously Oz-like. The drinking ban dominated the American social and cultural conversation between 1920 and 1933. Then one day the country awoke as if from a dream to find all traces of it gone, save for a few bootlegged bottles that washed up at local historical society museums, flotsam on...
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To Plan A Trip
Saint-Pierre and Miquelon may be reached via the SPM Express ferry from Fortune, Newfoundland ( www.spmexpress.net / 800-563-2006) or on Air Saint-Pierre from Montreal, St. John’s, or Halifax, with additional departure cities in summer ( www.airsaintpierre.com / 877-277-7765). Most accommodations are in the town of Saint-Pierre and within walking distance of the ferry. None is luxurious...
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My Brush With History
Lost Opportunity Through the Front Door
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Lost Opportunity
In the 1950s and ’60s I had the good fortune to live in New York City, right across from Riverside Park. Our 325-acre back yard offered sledding in winter, and for the rest of the year I could race my Schwinn throughout the park. I was allowed to roam freely as long as I promised never to talk to strangers. If you obey no other rule, my mother used to say, obey this one. (I thought that was a...
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Through The Front Door
I long thought that my husband, Forrest, should write his story for this column, but since he passed away recently, the task falls to me. I’ll try to tell his story and a little bit of my own. Forrest, an African-American, grew up in rural Alabama in a family of sharecroppers. He came of age in the late 1960s. I grew up in the same era, but in an affluent Northern suburb. I am white....
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1832 - Lincoln: Indian Fighter
175 Years Ago On April 5 Black Hawk, a chief of the Sauk tribe, accompanied by several hundred warriors and their families, crossed the Mississippi River and set out for Rock Island, in northwestern Illinois. Back in 1804 Sauk and Fox leaders had agreed to abandon their lands east of the river, but Black Hawk and others denied the validity of that treaty. Now he and his followers hoped to reclaim...
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Time Machine
50 Years Ago April 25, 1957 The Navy sends its Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean to support King Hussein of Jordan against an uprising by pro-Egyptian army officers. May 2, 1957 Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, one of the few non-Presidents to have a historical era named after him, dies at the age of 48 at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. He will be...
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History Now
A Funny Man Writes a Serious Historical Novel The Buyable Past Resources Pop Goes The Nation “Don’t Be a Show Off” Why Do We Say...?
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A Funny Man Writes A Serious Historical Novel
Gene Wilder, the son of russian Jewish immigrants, was born in Milwaukee in 1933. A graduate of the University of Iowa, he studied with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School before embarking on a film career that over the last 40 years has included such classics as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Producers (1968), Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), Everything You Always Wanted to Know...
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“Strong Enough To Float An Iron Wedge”
In the waning daylight of the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, a tremendous cheer suddenly resounded from the 23rd Ohio Volunteers arrayed across a cornfield in Sharpsburg, Maryland. The tired men could see the figure of their 19-year-old-commissary sergeant driving his mule team through shot and shell to their front lines bearing barrels of hot coffee and food. Every man in that...
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History And Knowing Who We Are
Former President Harry S. Truman once remarked that the history we don’t know is the only new thing in the world. Picking up on a related theme, the late Daniel Boorstin, an eminent historian, Librarian of Congress, and griend of mine, wrote that planning for the future without a sense of the past is similar to planting cut flowers and hoping for the best. Today, the new generation of young...
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Robert E. Lee’s “Severest Struggle”
One April afternoon in 1861, a proud man in his early fifties strode nervously across the portico of his home, too distracted to appreciate its sweeping view of the Potomac. He had an elegant military bearing and dark looks of a stage star, but on this day his genial face was shadowed by worry. His unsettled demeanor surprised several onlookers, accustomed to his normally composed nature. A...
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Unlocking History: Treasures Of Robert E. Lee Discovered
Stumbling across long-forgotten steamer trunks crammed with family memorabilia can excite the history buff in anyone. But when the trunks belong to Mary Custis Lee, the eldest daughter of General Robert E. Lee, and contain a treasure trove of documents and artifacts about her father and other members of her illustrious family spanning more than two centuries, that’s when historians take notice....
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Editor’s Letter
A friend called me last May with the stunning news that American Heritage had suspended publication.I was shocked. The idea that an institution so important to the historical community—indeed, to the intellectual life of our nation—would simply no longer exist seemed unthinkable.Some things are just too important to lose: the fields of Manassas once soaked with the blood of brave young men; the...
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Editor’s Letter
A friend called me last May with the stunning news that American Heritage had suspended publication.I was shocked. The idea that an institution so important to the historical community—indeed, to the intellectual life of our nation—would simply no longer exist seemed unthinkable.Some things are just too important to lose: the fields of Manassas once soaked with the blood of brave young men; the...
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Why Jamestown Matters
If Jamestown, England’s first permanent colony in the New World, had failed 400 years ago—and it came within a whisker of being abandoned on any number of occasions—then North America as we know it today would probably not exist. Instead of English, we might be speaking French, Spanish, or even Dutch. If Jamestown collapsed, the emergence of British America and eventually the creation of the...
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Fire In The Hole
One Hundred years ago at 10:20 am on Friday, December 6, 1907, trapped methane gas and coal dust ignited in the Nos. 6 and 8 mines of the Fairmont Coal Company in Monongah, West Virginia, setting off a series of violent explosions that shook the earth as far as eight miles away, threw people and horses to the ground, knocked streetcars off their rails, and collapsed nearby buildings. The...
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A Whale Of A Find
Last summer, while butchering a 50-ton bowhead whale off the coast of Alaska, Inupiat hunters found a more-than-100-year-old harpoon lance lodged deep inside its neck. John Bockstoce, the history of whaling expert at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, identified the harpoon as part of an exploding lance made on the southeast coast of Massachusetts in the late 1800s. Bockstoce and his...
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Gettysburg Redux
Visitors don’t get a good look at the new facility at Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg National Military Park until they get close—and even then they could mistake it for an exceptionally large farm complex. That’s no accident. The design and location of the visitor center is in step with the park’s commitment to rehabilitate the 6,000-acre battlefield and surrounding area so it more closely resembles...
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