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The Farmington Canal
The first years of the 1800s in America were loud with canal talk. The enormous success of the Erie Canal had aroused engineering instincts in every American. Even the barnyard was invaded; inventive farmers were building small canals from their farms to the nearest river, some had devised sluiceways from barn to barn for floating heavy loads instead of hauling them in wagons, and others made...
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The Canny Cayuse
Among the Indians of the Plains and the Rocky Mountains the sport of horse racing was a product of necessity and passion—the necessity of mastering the breeding of the horse, on which their very lives depended, and a passion, seemingly inborn, for gambling. Wherever they came together—witli other Indians or with friendly white men of sporting blood—horse racing became the principal social...
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General Sherman And The Baltimore Belle
It took a lot of time to run an army, and that was why Major General James B. McPherson, commanding the United States Army of the Tennessee, didn’t write his Baltimore fiancee, Emily Hoff man, as often as he should. Not that he loved her any less—he had idolized that unbeatable Victorian combination of blue eyes, golden hair, and chaste daintiness ever since the summer they met just before the...
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A Quakers Letter To His Watchmaker
“I send thee once more my erroneous watch, which wants thy speedy care and correction. Since the last time he was at thy school, I find, by experience, he is not benefited by thy instruction; thou demandest the fourth of a pound sterling, which thou shall have, but let thy honest endeavors first earn it. I will board him with thee a little longer, and pay for his table if thou requires...
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Rip
The old-fashioned epitaph, a literary form all its own, runs to both conscious and unconscious humor, as this little sampling bears lasting witness. The inscriptions come from a number of sources, but we acknowledge the special help of Peter Beilenson of the Peter Pauper Press in collecting them.
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When Perry Unlocked The “gate Of The Sun”
Throughout the mid-1830’s there raged in American naval circles, as veil as in Congress when defense appropriations came up, a debate on the wisdom of introducing into our sail-driven frigate fleet a revolutionary new method of propulsion—steam. Most captains as well as congressmen were opposed to the innovation. It was costly. It was uncertain. Sailors knew nothing about machinery and did not...
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Japan’s First Long Look At The West: A Portfolio
TENSIONS EASE BETWEEN SHIP AND SHORE, AND PERRY GOES SIGHT SEEING AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY AND MILITARY METHODS AMAZE THE JAPANESE JAPANESE WRESTLERS, AMERICAN MINSTRELS ENLIVEN THE TREATY MAKING A LILLIPUTIAN LOCOMOTIVE DELIGHTS PERRY’S HOSTS
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F.D.R. Vs. The Supreme Court
The great struggle between the President and the Supreme Court in 1937 stirred the national emotions to unusual depths because it brought Franklin D. Roosevelt’s crusade against depression into collision with one of our most hallowed traditions. And after a lapse of twenty years it remains high on the list of the most dramatic contests in our constitutional history. The great struggle...
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Last Survivors Of The Revolution
In the summer of 1864, as the Civil War dragged on, the Reverend Elias Brewster Hillard, a Congregational clergyman from Connecticut, was asked by a Hartford publisher to visit the last surviving soldiers of the American Revolution in order to record their memories of that earlier war and to obtain their views on “the present rebellion” imperiling the Union they had helped bring to birth....
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Father Of Our Factory System
Feats of memory, particularly of the kind of memory derided as “photographic”—Tor all the cornucopias of wealth they sometimes pour over television contestants—are looked down on in modern limes, but they have their role in history. Consider, for example, the story of Samuel Slater. It would be impolite tu call him a spy, lor he would not have considered himself one. Furthermore, he was a man...
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How The Frontier Shaped The American Character
Since the dawn days of historical writing in the United States, historians have labored mightily, and usually in vain, to answer the famous question posed by Hector St. John de Crèvecœur in the eighteenth century: “What then is the American, this new man?” Was that composite figure actually a “new man” with unique traits that distinguished him from his Old World ancestors? Or was he merely a...
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The Elusive Swamp Fox
“Our band is few, but true and tried , Our leader frank and bold; The British soldier trembles When Marion’s name is told.” There is the poem, and there is the sentence or two in schoolbooks about the phantom general who sallied at night I’rom his secret lair in the swamps to attack the British loe. And there is the sobriquet, the Swamp Fox. And that’s about all anyone seems...
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The Submarine That Wouldn’t Come Up
The sun set in a clear sky behind Charleston the afternoon of February 17, 1864. The besieged city lay in defiant silence, watching the Federal monitors at the entrance to the harbor. Out at Fort Sumter, where the war had begun, the faint boom of the sunset gun proclaimed that the little pile of rubble, now scarcely more than a symbol of resistance, was still held by its Confederate garrison....
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Music Had Charms
I hear America singing,” wrote Walt Whitman in 1860, and on a quantitative basis, at least, the air was as full of quavering voices, scraping fiddles, and tinkling pianos as—in other ways, in different rhythms—it is today. The publishers of the confection at the left, for example, advertised 33,000 different pieces of sheet music in 1867—most of them especially aimed at the family group around...
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Turner States His Frontier Theory: 1893
In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appeal these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken iiito by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore,...
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The Case Of The Missing Portrait
“Nobody, my darling, could call me a fussy man; But I do like a little bit of butter to my bread.” Like A. A. Milne’s wistful king, Thomas Jefferson could be pardoned for feeling entitled to just a little consideration. The sage of Monticello, sometime inventor, author of the Declaration of Independence, former President of the United States, and purchaser of 828,000 square...
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A Journal Of An Indian Captivity During Pontiac’s Rebellion In The Year 1763, By Mr John Rutherfurd, Afterward Captain, 42nd Highland Regiment
Perhaps the most haunting tear of the American frontiersman was capture by the Indians, an experience of suffering which left a permanent mark on those who were lucky enough to survive it. As long as the Indian threat persisted, captivity accounts appeared constantly. One of the most remarkable examples of this uniquely American literary genre was written by a seventeen-year-old Scot named...
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Reading, Writing, And History
A Man Withdrawn We like to make thumbnail sketches of our famous men, and to Henry David Thoreau we have given one of the most compact of the lot. We see him as the complete lone wolf, the man who tried to reform the world by divorcing himself from it and reforming himself. Declaring that a free man could not without disgrace associate himself with a government that would make war on...
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What’s Seen And Heard In Yokohama
The illustrations on these pages come from an abundantly illustrated, three-volume Japanese tourist guide to Yokohama published in the years after Perry’s visit. Then foreigners flocked to the city to open trade, and Japanese flocked from near and far to ogle the foreigners. In the drawings the streets and shops are all carefully identified and the odd garments and odder mannerisms of the...
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The Legend Of Jim Hill
Long before his death, more than forty years ago, Jim Hill had become a legend in the American West. Whether lie was hero or villain matters little. He died something of a giant in the vast region where many contemporaries came often to think him less a man than an elemental force. Time has not diminished his stature; neither has it quite managed to condemn him nor to put him safely on the...
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The Family Seat
“As for the White House, all the boy’s family had lived there, and, barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson’s reign, had been more or less at home there ever since it was built. The boy half thought he owned it, and took for granted that he should some day live in it. He felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President was a matter of course in every responsible family; he had two...
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Belated Honor For The Little Savannah
When the world’s first nuclear-powered merchant vessel, now under construction at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation, was named Savannah , it was belated vindication for another Savannah , which in 1819 became the first steampropelled ship to cross the Atlantic. The original Savannah was actually a hybrid—half steamship, half sailing packet. In addition to three masts carrying a full...
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The Master Showman Of Coney Island
On every warm summer week end on Coney Island a great swarm of people may be found heading for a slow-moving line that leads always to the same entertainment device. Typically, they will wait nearly an hour to enjoy a ride that lasts for perhaps one mildly exhilarating minute, fudged as a thrill, the ride packs about as much punch as a cup of cambric tea. Yet it is a sale bet that at any given...
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Border Warrior
On the morning of January 20, 1889, the New York Sunday Times carried an account of the elaborate preparations for the Yale Junior Promenade. On other pages were discussions of the prospects of the Harvard and Cornell crews for the coming rowing season. The balance of the paper bore foreign and domestic news of no startling importance. But tucked away in the obituary column there was a brief...
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When Good And Evil Had Roots
Viewing this contrast between the life of virtue and the ways of sin, who could doubt that Nathaniel Currier was on the side of the angels? If, today, the famous New York printmaker seems unduly pre-occupied with morality—or the absence of it—we must remember that Americans of the mid-nineteenth century lived closer to the God-fearing Puritan and his homilies. Perhaps it was no accident that...
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No Son Unsung
“At 4, I took a wherry to London, Passed by multitudes of shipping & in an hour landed at King James’s Stairs, in Wapping: where I lodged; but could not persuade the Civil people who Entertained me, that I was born & educated in New England;...
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Gusher At Spindletop
Texas, as everyone knows, is synonymous with oil. But how many know, at least in any detail, the story of the fabulous strike which ushered in the age of the Lone Star billionaire? The history of Texas oil really begins on a dramatic morning in January, 1901, when the Lucas gusher, afterward world-famous as Spindletop, was brought in near Beaumont. (The name Spindletop is said to be...
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The Battle Of The Saintes
Nowadays tourists visit the West Indies by air, and sooner or later most of them avail themselves of one or other of the local services that, originating in Puerto Rico, hop from island to island southeastward along the chain of the Lesser Antilles to Trinidad and Georgetown, on the coast of British Guiana. During the brief passage from Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe to Roseau in Dominica—a...
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Painter Of The Revolution
At the end of October, 1797, the year V of the French Revolution, a 41-year-old American artist named John Trumbull was stranded in Paris. The government was in peril and the capital was near chaos. With business at a standstill, poverty was general; restless, quick-tempered crowds roamed the streets. For a foreigner, the atmosphere was dangerous. But Trumbull, though he was no stranger to...
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“Tonight For Freedom”
In the spring of 1863 the Union government tried hard to break into the strongly defended harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. In April navy ironclads attached the Confederate defenses and were repulsed; joint army-navy operations were then planned, and in July the army seized the lower end of Morris Island, a long, low stretch of tlie coast on the southern side of the entrance to the harbor. It...
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President Washington’s Calculated Risk
Washington, upon taking office, was confronted by demands more complex and critical than were to be posed any incoming President until the day of Lincoln’s inauguration. Far from least among these problems was the contriving of a foreign policy that might offer some hope of retaining American title to the Ohio Valley without the maneuver involving us in a new war with recent enemy England or with...
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The Battle Of Fallen Timbers
On the morning of [August] twentieth [1793], with about three thousand men, including the mounted Kentuckians under [General Charles] Scott, [Wayne] marched down the north branch of the Maumee to attack the Indian position. A drizzling rain was falling and the clouds were dark. The Indians had long been preparing for the conflict… A few miles south of the British fort, they had taken up a...
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The Enigma Of Dighton Rock
Dighton Rock is a mysterious tide-washed boulder that juts up out of the Taunton River at Assonet Neck, just across from the town of Dighton, Massachusetts, and the Dighton Yacht Club. To yachtsmen sailing the river and even to some residents of Assonet Neck, it looks like just another rock, about eleven feet long and five feet high, standing where the river widens abruptly on its way to Mount...
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Herbert Hoover Describes The Ordeal Of Woodrow Wilson
A third of a century since his defeat and death, most of the passion that surrounded Woodrow Wilson in life is spent. Nearly all his friends and contemporaries have left the scene, and a world resounding to fresh agonies catches only echoes of the crusade that failed and of the opportunity cast aside at the close of the “war to end wars.” But the figure of the crusader himself, the unlikely St....
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Reading, Writing, And History
What Is Sea Power? Mistakes of Strategy Reconstruction
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What Is Sea Power?
The task of the military historian is beginning to look a trifle odd because the world is moving out from under him. Statesmen who have at their disposal intercontinental missiles with atomic warheads are not apt to find much nourishment in studies of conventional strategy. The lessons of even the most recent war—painstakingly studied and evaluated with profound thought—seem as out of date as...
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Mistakes Of Strategy
Samuel Eliot Morison takes a broader view in his compact, thought-provoking little book, Strategy and Compromise . That is, although he too concerns himself primarily with sea power, it is the strategy of the entire war which engrosses him, and he discusses not so much what happened at sea as the basis on which strategic decisions were reached and the results that rame from them. Both...
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Reconstruction
It might, indeed, have been worth remembering in that crucial war of the American people, the Civil War that was waged between 1861 and 1865. That war was fought, apparently, on the pious belief that once secession had been crushed and slavery had been ended, both sides could pick up the old threads and go on to rebuild a once-broken but now-restored Union. In the end the picking-up process...
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Mark Twain Vs. Blondin
Most people at Niagara remembered Blondin fondly, but to Mark Twain, who in 1869 bought a one-third interest in the Buffalo Express , the great Frenchman was merely “that adventurous ass.” A certain Professor Jenkins was then in the news for crossing the gorge on a velocipede, and on August 26 Twain wrote and published the following satirical letter, signing it “Michael J. Murphy, Reporter...
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Reading, Writing, And History
The Tragic Motive With the Gunners The Technician
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The Tragic Motive
The tragic pattern seldom finds a place in the American story. Our history is keyed to the mood of success: the victorious struggle, the rise from depths to heights, the triumph that grows out of daring and endurance. Fidelity, bravery, and nobility of soul always pay off, and the reward is always immediate and tangible. Our most enduring legends seem to be built around the winner. But...
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With The Gunners
It was, to repeat, defeat and victory together, one and inseparable; and although some profound emotion compels us to look at the beaten, we do see at the same time that various people on the other side had something to do with the outcome. Gettysburg Was not just lost; it was also won, and something can be learned by asking “Why?” on that side as well. Gettysburg has been under the...
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The Technician
The technician, as a matter of fact, can be extremely important in American history, and when the story is his alone we do get the traditional success story. Increasingly, we are a people who work with gadgets, whether the gadgets be rapid-fire guns or earth-moving machines, and the man who knows how to use gadgets properly becomes increasingly worth attention. Not all of our profound efforts...
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How To Win An Election
In 1835, after a bitter stump-speaking campaign, Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee was defeated in his bid for a fourth term. Fed up with politics, he headed for Texas, but on his way to death and glory at the Alamo he is alleged to have made a speech, here described in his own words, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Like much other material attributed to him in The Life of David Crockett, the...
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The Coming Of The Green
Now there was in Ireland in olden times a great poet named Oisin. Such was his power that he had but to speak of summer, and whiter went from the land; and where there had been only the rime of front and the blackness of rocks, there were meadow’s filled with clover and sweet grass and the murmuring of bees. And one day a maiden came to Oisin and said, “I am Niav of the Golden Hair and I...
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The Days Of Boom And Bust
The decade of the twenties, or more precisely the eight years between the postwar depression of 1920–21 and the stock market crash in October of 1929, were prosperous ones in the United States. The total output of the economy increased by more than 50 per cent. The preceding decades had brought the automobile; now came many more and also roads on which they could be driven with reasonable...
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Blondin The Hero Of Niagara
On Thursday, June 30, 1859, the atmosphere at Niagara Falls was charged with excitement. A slightly built Frenchman, dressed in tights and carrying a long balancing pole, was planning to attempt the impossible—he was going to walk across the terrible gorge of the Niagara River about a mile below the Falls on a slender rope cable, 190 feet above the swift and boiling flood. As they watched in...
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Get The Prospect Seated … And Keep Talking”
In the autumn of 1885, around harvest time, when a granger was likely to have sold his wheat, a man in a slouch hat, wearing the Grand Army badge, appeared on the piazza of almost every American home. There was nothing in his hands to suggest his errand. Touching his hat respectfully, he would say: “I called to give you an opportunity to see General Grant’s book, of which so much has been said...
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“ah, Your Majesty, There Is No Second”
The month was August and the clay was the twenty-second. Even the time of the afternoon—5:45—was mentioned by the alert correspondent of the Times of London, who further observed that the Prince of Wales went ashore from the royal yacht wearing his while sailor’s uniform and tarpaulin hat and danced down the road with boyish vivacity. To bring the appealing picture into focus it is...
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Sailor With A Paintbrush
In August, 1818, the fist time a steamboat landed at Detroit, local Indians gaped in amazement at what certain white settlers had facetiously heralded as a giant canoe drawn by sturgeon. Even when they had been disabused of this notion, they still experienced no less wonder when informed that the mysterious boat was run by steam power. A quarter century later, though steamboats had become a...
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