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Editor’s Letter
 The keen 19th-century observer of the American scene, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” In this issue we celebrate some of this country’s and North America’s most remarkable pioneers—no copies here—ranging across four centuries of our history. Pulitzer-prize winner, David...
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Six Of The Top Recent Books On Abraham Lincoln
 Abraham Lincoln is the most written-about person in American history, and the third most in world history—ranking below only Jesus and Napoleon. The deluge of books about the Great Emancipator has only increased with the bicentennial of his birth this year. Lists of the “essential” Lincoln books have been published, and one renowned Lincoln scholar has even suggested that...
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Digital Reviews
 Matters of Debate IN THIS BICENTENNIAL YEAR of Lincoln’s birth, one of the hundreds of offerings about the 16th president brings his voice to life with particular power: BBC Audiobooks has released a 16-hour audio recording of the famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and his great rival, Stephen Douglas, for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858. The seven debates, each held in a...
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Editor’s Letter
 When economic times get difficult, we feel the call to look back at our history more urgently than ever for context and inspiration.  Several of the stories we bring you this issue address how Americans over the centuries have dealt with adversity and give us useful clues for today. We asked one of the nation’s most respected historians, William E. Leuchtenburg, to walk us...
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The Emancipation Question
 One hundred fifty years ago on a “frigid and repulsive” January day in New York, 30-year-old William G. Sewell departed on a steamer for Barbados, the first stop on a tour of the Caribbean island colonies of the British West Indies. Doctors had recommended that the New York Times editor travel south because of tuberculosis. While recuperating, he would file a series of articles on a topic...
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Play Ball!
The game of baseball was not always the well-ordered sport we know today, played on elegantly manicured fields bordered by crisp white lines. As historians have debunked the widely held myth that Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York, invented the sport out of whole cloth in 1839, they have discovered its deeper American origins. In 1787, the same year the Constitution was written, a Worcester...
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Flashback To Woodstock
Forty years ago a few rich kids hatched a nutty idea that became an event that rocked the nation, then morphed into a movement whose legacy lives on. This summer the young Museum at Bethel Woods in rural New York commemorates the anniversary of that idea, the zeitgeist that spawned it, and the phenomena that flowed from it—all of it evoked in one word: Woodstock.Recalling his museum’s planning...
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Paterson, New Jersey Honored With A National Historic Park
 More than 200 years ago, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton witnessed the power of the Passaic River crashing over falls in northern New Jersey and saw America’s economic future. He founded Paterson, which quickly turned into a manufacturing powerhouse, “a place of supreme importance in the annals of American economic history,” notes historian Ron Chernow. Paterson...
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Surprise Inscription Found On Lincoln Watch
 On Saturday, April 13, 1861, the day after Confederate artillery had fired upon the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, President Abraham Lincoln sprang into action, calling up volunteer state armies and strategizing with his cabinet. If Lincoln reached into his waistcoat pocket that day to check his pocket watch, he would not have felt it. Nine blocks away, at Washington...
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Plain, Honest Men: The Making Of The American Constitution, By Richard Beeman
 This book offers a rare treat for American history devotees. Richard Beeman, who has devoted much of his career to studying the Constitution, played a leading role in the creation of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and is currently vice chair of its Distinguished Scholars Panel. Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (Random House, 544 pages, $30) caps...
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Apollo: Through The Eyes Of The Astronauts, Edited By Robert Jacobs, Michael Cabbage, Constance Moore, And Bertram Ulrich
 My favorite photo in this boldly styled book is a sweeping panorama of  the Moon’s Taurus-Littrow Valley, taken by Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan. Jagged, starkly lit boulders litter the foreground, while surrounding massifs shoulder their way into a black sky. Mid frame right, the tiny figure of astronaut and geologist Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, sampling scoop in hand...
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Drawn To The Past
 Animation has come to historical documentaries. Perhaps inspired by the success of animated fictional films such as Waking Life (2001), nonfiction filmmakers are choosing to illustrate the past rather than rely on archival images or reenacted scenes. Such use of animated images introduces some thorny issues. Is it right to call these “documentaries”? Don’t documentary...
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Raising The Dead
 There’s a new twist on the old party game of asking what questions a person might ask should they have the opportunity to dine with Abraham Lincoln or other historical figures. The “synthetic interview,” a technology that comes from the computer labs at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has made it possible to chat with such luminaries as Charles Darwin, George...
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Letters To The Editor
 Letters to the Editor   400 Years Ago Your special New York section, “Encounters 400 Years Ago,” in the Spring 2009 issue contains a terrific set of articles! It is so good to hear the details of other explorers besides Captain John Smith. I have lived in Vermont and in Maine, and it made me happy to see Samuel de Champlain and Captain George Popham given some credit too....
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The Man In White
Candor is the keynote in Mark Twain’s famous style of dress, but it is an ironic, sagacious, very American brand of simplicity. The three-piece white suit, so notably taken up in later days by John Huston and Tom Wolfe, so movingly worn by Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird , here becomes the epiphany of an American theme. All the shifting, insistent wrinkles in the loose outfit echo the...
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Making The Man
Until recent years the United States wasn’t known as a capital of fashion for men. If anything, our historical male image has been rough and artless compared with suave British counterparts and elegant Continental models. Nevertheless, we have had true masculine fashion figures, men whose dress has harmonized so well with their free American souls that the whole world has been moved by the...
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1963 Twenty-five Years Ago
President Lyndon B. Johnson presented the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer with the Atomic Energy Commission’s Enrico Fermi Medal on December 2. As the brilliant leader of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had headed the team of scientists that developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but after the war he opposed the development of the far more destructive hydrogen bomb,...
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The Wild West
Buffalo Bill is the source for all our ideas of what to wear in our own wilderness. His clothes show how to encompass what the Indians and the Mexicans knew and to exercise our Yankee style in harmony with theirs. The leather fringes blend with the quasi-military boots and big belt, the firearms with the silver embroidery; the cowboy hat crowns the assemblage. Chaps or a bandanna might be...
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To Find Out More
The author recommends Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620-1820 , volumes 1 and 2, by Alice Morse Earle (Dover Publications, 1976), and Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America , by Claudia B. Kidwell and Margaret C. Christman (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974). The latter, now out of print, is available at some libraries.
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Probity And Zeal
Here is the upright and honorable public man of mid-nineteenth-century America. Rufus Choate (1799-1859), a prominent lawyer who served terms as a congressman and a senator as well as attorney general of Massachusetts, was a man without a moment to spare or lose. Here we can see his heavy coat trying to calm his necktie’s urgent flight and subdue the surge of his waistcoat; his emphatic,...
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1888 One Hundred Years Ago
Reviewing the nation’s financial situation in its December 1 issue, Harper’s Weekly gave voice to a worry that today seems inconceivable. Treasury estimates had projected a surplus of $203 million for 1890: “This prefigures a situation demanding imperatively enormous reduction of revenue or utterly reckless expenditure.”
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1913 Seventy-five Years Ago
The Gulf Refining Company opened the nation’s first drive-in service station on December 1 at the corner of Baum Boulevard and St. Clair Street in Pittsburgh. The station was open twenty-four hours and offered free crankcase service, but despite these enticements the manager, Frank McLaughlin, pumped only thirty gallons of gas on the first business day. Mack Sennett needed a comedian. The “...
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The Big Store
 An odd thing about looking at photographs from the turn of the century is that, except for the inevitable black and white of the picture itself, and the stray horse or trolley car, the general urban panorama looks very much as it does today. We see familiar streets and shops and buildings in a dozen eclectic styles; it’s all a setting that one could easily imagine walking through. The great...
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1863 One Hundred And Twenty-five Years Ago
The rise of the U.S. population in the first half of the nineteenth century resulted in a corresponding rise in the number of representatives in Washington. Wings added to the Capitol building in the 185Os solved the overcrowding but made the building’s original dome look disproportionately small. Congress hired the architect Thomas U. Walter to design a new, larger one. Made of iron...
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1938 Fifty Years Ago
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced on December 10 that he would donate his papers and correspondence and a private collection of books and prints to form the nucleus of the first presidential library open to scholars and the public. Presidential papers had traditionally remained the private property of the departing Chief Executive. George Washington shipped his to Mount Vernon...
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We Were What We Wore
 A Chicago judge ruled in 1908 that a nightgown was a luxury, not a necessity, and thereupon issued a restraining order forbidding an eighteen-year-old girl from buying one against her father’s wishes. “The only possible use of a nightgown,” the judge explained, “is to keep off flies and mosquitoes, and the bedclothes will do just as well.” The father testified: “She never wore a nightgown...
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To Plan A Trip
Although almost any stretch of days from mid-December to early January will contain special celebrations, festivities reach their peak on Christmas Eve. Residents compete for the best displays of farolitos and luminarias (bonfires). After midnight mass people stroll around the city, admiring each other’s handiwork and warming themselves at the fires. Anglos are also welcome at several of...
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Slick City Dreams
Duke Ellington is a 1940s American urban Image, flickering with motion, set to steady music, expressed in overlapping patterns that combine, dissolve, and recombine. In cities, loud sound and strong light need a sophisticated order to achieve their best effects. Here bright stripes and checks, rippling hair, and sharp lapels merge with the glitter of bright eyes and teeth to make Ellington’s...
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The Time Machine
1763 Two Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago 1813 One Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago 1863 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago 1888 One Hundred Years go 1913 Seventy-five Years Ago 1938 Fifty Years Ago 1963 Twenty-five Years Ago
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The Entrepreneur
Dressed like an American Diaghilev or Prince of Wales, the artist Frederic Remington (1861-1909) here wears the clothing of manipulative power, a sleek style quite correctly remote from the actual product he marketed. Remington helped create the romance of the West, elevating Cody’s cowboy-and-lndian melodrama into enduring art. He showed how the Western myth] could be regenerated by Eastern...
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The Deep Blue
This crisp and disciplined model of turn-of-the-century elegance is Adm. George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay. Yachting clothes in all their later adaptations—the universally becoming blue blazer and pale trousers in all their variants—suggest the freedom of the seas rightly subject to poised and purposeful masculine control. Even a rather massive figure is flattered by the clean, cool style...
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The Wary Dandy
Cary Grant is the British image Americanized. The wary frown and tense jaw give humanity to the perfect tailoring and layers of subtle texture. A self-doubting American spirit inhabits all this smooth wool—one we can believe in. Grant helped create the image of the handsome American man whom women may adore in formal clothes but whose private self really makes the conquest. This 1946 image is...
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1813 One Hundred And Seventy-five Years Ago
Gen. George McClure of the New York militia, glumly holding Fort George on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, watched his ranks dwindle as enlistments expired and soldiers headed home for Christmas. On December 10, with just a hundred men left under his command, McClure decided to withdraw. As a final gesture before leaving, he set fire to the village of Newark. The general later said...
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1763 Two Hundred And Twenty-five Years Ago
Indian violence against white settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier had reached a frightening pitch. Gruesome tales circulated of scalping, torture, and wholesale slaughter. Many wanted to strike back, and, for some, any group of Indians would do. On the morning of December 14 a group of about fifty rangers, scouts, and sturdy backwoods types from the town of Paxton and vicinity...
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Christmas In Santa Fe
  One cold January a few years ago, the daughter of a French friend of mine wrote that she was coming to America. She would, of course, visit New York, and then she hoped to see some of the rest of the country, possibly les Grands Lacs. It was not hard to imagine a young tourist unfolding a map of the United States and settling on Rochester or Duluth as the kind of lakeside resort you...
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Still Being Made
In regard to your article “Day of the Player Piano” in the May/June issue, while Mr. Fox mentions that “rolls for the pianos have been manufactured continuously since the 1890s,” he makes no mention of the fact that player pianos themselves are still being manufactured. We purchased a new one four years ago; it plays rolls electrically and by foot pedal and can play a wonderful honky-tonk...
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Our 4th Annual Winter Art Show
Virtually every issue of American Heritage closes with one or another of the editors disgruntled because there is no room for a favorite painting—or because no piece of caption-writing cleverness could make it appropriate to the story that needed illustrating. The Winter Art Show, now in its fourth year, gives those paintings a second chance. Here, along with ones gathered in for specific...
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When Robert Louis Stevenson Was One Of Us
  Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Scotland and spent the last years of his life in Samoa, but for a year he lived in California, and that year was a turning point in his life. It is not too much to say that he belongs at least as much to us as he does to Scotland or to Samoa.Even today Americans who love books remember that Stevenson was often sick as a child “and lay abed,” tenderly...
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Correspondence
Germ Warfare, 1763 Premature Championship Still Being Made Still Being Made More Fast Food More Fast Food Hinton Historian The War No One Wants
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How America Helped Build The Soviet Machine
Our usual picture of the Soviet Union and its history is strictly political and economic. We trace the many struggles for leadership power and the ups and downs of the Soviet economy. We chart the rise of Stalin and the battles for party domination that followed him, and we watch Mikhail Gorbachev avow glasnost (political openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring). And we hope that our...
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The Compleat Hero
This image of John F. Kennedy in 1962 connects and combines many themes. First is the American individual personality, dressed to suit its inmost self, but here flavored with suggestions of traditional oceangoing strength of will. Along with this go a lack of self-consciousness or need for display and an easy familiarity with simple materials that everyone knows and uses—plain wool and cotton...
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New Dispensation
Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire gave sexual and moral scope to the humble T-shirt and thus unleashed the romance of all neglected plebeian garments. From this moment in the early fifties, the look of the desirable American male was changed forever. The savvy trench coat, the insouciant white tie, and the ingenuous lounge suit were rejected, replaced by the garb of the hip and the...
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Germ Warfare, 1763
The July/August “Time Machine” mentions Jeffery Amherst’s 1763 suggestion that the colonists try to spread smallpox among the Indians. In fact, the campaign went further than that. Amherst suggested to Col. Henry Bouquet, the commander of Fort Pitt, that he “send the small pox” among the tribes that had risen in the Ohio Valley. “ We must ,” he wrote, “Use Every Stratagem in our power to...
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Trainmaster
The spare and vigorous gentleman on the opposite page, William Graham Claytor, Jr., superintending the departure of a local out of South Sun-Porch Station, D.C., at his brick house in Georgetown, is the only man in Washington, or anywhere else in the country for that matter, who runs two big passenger railroads. His other layout is the twenty-five thousand miles, more or less, of Amtrak, with...
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Premature Championship
In the “Time Machine” column for May/June you write that the 1936 Schmeling-Louis bout was a “world championship” contest. It was not. Max Schmeling was a thirty-one-year-old former champion, having lost the world heavy-weight title in 1932 to Jack Sharkey. Joe Louis was an undefeated twentytwo-year-old contender. Their second bout, on June 22, 1938, was for the title, which Louis had won on...
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Letters To The Editor
 Welcome Back I gave up my subscription in the recent past and felt like firing three volleys and sounding taps. Some difference now.  Opening up the Winter 2008 issue was like answering the front door and seeing a long lost friend standing there, smiling.  —Dale N. Davis Portales, NM   As one who grew up reading the white hardbound American Heritage and was a subscriber...
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Treasures From Our Archives
For the first time in a long time, the 58-year-old American Heritage Archives and History Library are under one roof in our new offices! We thought we’d bring you a sneak peak at just a couple of the hundreds of thousands of photographs, prints, drawings, maps, documents, and other artifacts accumulated over five decades by the editors of the magazine.   Perhaps you remember the...
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Letters To The Editor
 Welcome Back I am a second generation subscriber. The editor’s letter in your Spring/Summer issue called the return of American Heritage “revolutionary . . . ‘in the sense of turning back to an early state.’”  That issue carried out that promise brilliantly. I felt that in recent years the magazine had leaned a little too heavily upon what you described as...
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First Images Of The New World
In late 16th-century London, a group of curious Elizabethan courtiers gathered around a sheaf of watercolors and murmured in wonder. A chief Herowans wife of Pomeoc and her daughter of the age of 8 or 10 years exhibited no spectacular artistry, yet did provide something extraordinary: the first representational glimpse of the New World. Aside from a few sailors and a handful of intrepid...
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Letters To The Editor
Revolutionary War Prison Ships The sad, inhuman, and long-untold history of the Revolutionary War  prisoners of war, “Patriots or Terrorists?” which occurred in New York and Brooklyn, as told in American Heritage’s Fall 2008, issue was exceptional. It brought back memories of childhood excursions my Mother took us on Sunday afternoons. We would walk to many of the Borough...
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