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The Woods Around Us
Tradition has it that the first European settlers in America had to chop their way into a solid wall of impenetrable forest that reached from the high-tide line of the Atlantic Ocean to the edge of the prairie in Illinois. But tradition has been so strongly influenced by the heroic labors of the pioneer axeman farther west that we have forgotten what primeval New England was really like....
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Crisis At The Antietam
A whitewashed Dunker chrch without a steeple, a forty-acre field of corn that swayed, head-high and green, in the September sun, an eroded country lane that rambled along a hillside behind a weathered snake-rail fence, and an arched stone bridge that crossed a lazy, copper-brown little creek—these unimpressive features of a quiet Maryland landscape made the setting in which one of the greatest...
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Bloody Trek To Empire
Oregon commemorates in 1959 the one hundreth anniversary of its admission as a state of the Union. Oregon today contains the country’s greatest reserve of standing timber and produces far more lumber than any other state. Oregon was first in the nation to provide for election of United States senators by popular vote, and it pioneered in introducing to the New World such governmental reforms...
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Astor And Astoria
No more a wilderness man than any Montreal fur merchant, [John Jacob] Astor was a better business man than the best of them. Adept at the international alliances of finance, he could also think in terms of continental and world trade. … [President] Jefferson … told [Meriwether] Lewis that Astor was “a most excellent man” and he had pledged Astor “every reasonable patronage and facility in the...
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The Search For The Missing King
If, one of these days, someone in England comes across a huge chunk of lead, rather battered and defaced, but recognizable as the head of a certain British monarch, the finder will have his hands on a part of the most famous statue in early American history. This was the equestrian statue of King George III which was pulled down by patriots in New York City on July 9, 1776, and hacked into...
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Jefferson And The Book-burners
When, on the night of August 24–25, 1814, General Robert Ross burned Washington, most though not all, of the infant congressional library went up in flames. Patrick Magruder, who doubled as clerk of the House and librarian, had betaken himself to Virginia Springs, and the convulsive efforts of his assistants to save the library foundered on the lack of wagons. A subsequent congressional...
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Baghdad On The Freeway
O n a hot summer afternoon, two commuters sat in an auto on a Los Angeles freeway—stalled bumper to bumper in the homebound traffic. Their shirts were open from the blast of the sun, their eyes swollen with the smog of a hundred thousand exhausts. “My solution,” drawled one of them, “is to make everybody in L.A. draw lots to see who packs up and moves out.” A generation ago this would...
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Thoreau Looks To The West
I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for the thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force, but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect...
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A Monument To Oregon’s Pioneers
As the state of Oregon nears its one hundredth anniversary, the realm where the Tonquin ’s wayfarers experienced some of their bitter hardships is about to be added to our series of national historic shrines. The event will salute not the first permanent settlement of Americans at the mouth of the Columbia River, which was that of the Pacific Fur Company in 1811, but one which even preceded...
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Daylight In The Swamp
The tradition of the American lumberjack is an ancient one, as industrial antiquity goes in the united States. It began more than three hundred years ago, some say in 1631, when colonists set up the first sawmill in America in what is now South llerwick, Maine, and ted it with the great white pines, a classic species whose graceful outline was soon to appear on (lags, provincial coats ot arms...
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The Epic Is Yet To Be Written
Two years after Appomattox, William Dean Howells remarked that “our war has not only left us a burden of a tremendous national debt, but has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has hitherto staggered very lamely.” According to an anonymous reviewer for Scribner’s Magazine , it was staggering in 1904. “The war,” the reviewer complained, “still waits for its novel, and will wait...
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The Spectral Soldier
At last, they saw him stop and stand motionless. Hastening up, they perceived that his face wore an expression telling that he had at last found the place for which he had struggled. His spare figure was erect; his bloody hands were quietly at his side. He was waiting with patience for something that he had come to meet. He was at the rendezvous. They paused and stood, expectant. … He was...
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A South Artist On The Civil War
One of the most talented Civil War propagandists was a citizen of Baltimore named Adalbert Johann Volck, a German emigrant who made his living as a dentist but who was a gifted artist and engraver. In 1861 he passionately espoused the Confederate cause —as did many others in Baltimore—and he created a remarkable series of etchings which had both high emotional voltage and genuine artistic...
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Mr. Godey’s Lady
Mention the words “women’s rights” and much the same picture storms into the avrage American recollection: the grimlipped, podium-pounding suffragette of the late nineteenth ccntui-y. She lias three resonant names (very likely one of them is Carrie) and you cannot by the wildest stretch ol the imagination conjure up an image ol her reading nursery rhymes to the young. Is not the gap between...
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Was John Smith A Liar?
John Smith is one of those persons about whom historians are apt to lose their tempers. JOHN FISKE Standing on the threshold of American history is one of its most colorful and controversial figures, Captain John Smith. Although he spent only a few years in America—at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement on the continent—he became one of its first heroes. But for three and...
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Isaac Singer And His Wonderful Sewing Machine
Edward Clark, a respectable forty-year-old lawyer, found himself, in the summer of 1851, in a disconcerting position. He was (or so it seemed to Clark) newly yoked in partnership with a man of spectacular depravity, a man so lost to shame as to seem that he had never had any to lose. Everything Clark had discovered about his new partner dismayed him; everything in dark’s character and...
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Patrolling The Middle Passage
The American merchantman Mary Ann was primly named, but she had a scandalous history. In i8j8 she cleared lor West Alrica, ostensibly on a trading voyage lor such products as palm oil, which the new American railroads and factories used as a lubricant. He mates and crew seemed to have signed on unaware that any other scheme was in the wind. Eut the course her captain set took her not to the...
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“i’ll Put A Girdle Round The Earth In Forty Minutes”
Cyrus West Field was one of the greatest Americans of the nineteenth century, but today there cm he few of his countrymen who remember him. I Ic opened up no frontiers, killed no Indians, founded no industrial empires, won no battles; tne work he did lias been !juried deep in the Atlantic ooze for almost one hundred years. Yet he helped to change history, and now that his dream of a telegraph...
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The Atlantic Telegraph
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Tragedy In Dedham
On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, two gunmen killed a paymaster and his guard, seized the $16,000 payroll, and escaped. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were picked up by police and identified by several witnesses as the holdup men. In 1921, at the conclusion of a trial in Dedham, the two men were found guilty of murder. The leisurely legal processes...
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Eleven Guns For The Grand Union
Summer was on the wane in wartime Philadelphia, 1776, and the city which had startled the world with the Declaration of Independence was alive with purposeful activity. To John Trottman, age seventeen and on vacation from the college at Princeton, its bustle and excitement were in welcome contrast to the quiet atmosphere of his home in Barbados. During his stay in America, Trottman’s...
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Williamstown Branch
The time is 1898, ana the place, a small Vermont town on a branch line railroad. Any resemblance to presentday America is purely accidental., for the Williamstown that R. L. Duffus knew as a boy might just as well be part of another country on a different planet. As we read the veteran newsman’s reminiscence of his life sixty years ago (it is fair to assume that he was a typical boy in a...
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So You’re Going To America
My Dear X, I am delighted that you have made the plunge and decided to go to America. … But feeling, like all good Europeans, that the Americans owe us a living, as medieval monks and renaissance scholars felt that robber barons and condottieri owed them a living, I yet hope that you can get more out of this trip than a holiday, a few gadgets like electric razors and can openers, and the...
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“Frozen Asset” Or Forty-ninth State?
REPRESENTATIVE CADWALLADER C. WASHBURN (on whether to make an appropriation) “All the evidence we have in regard to the country goes to show its inhospitable and worthless character.… [It] will always be a source of weakness.… It is proposed to pay $7,200,000 for a country where none but malefactors will ever live, and where we are likely to be at constant war with the savages.”SENATOR CHARLES...
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Model For Correct Acceptance Of A Proposal
Sir: The attentions which you have so long and so assiduously shown to me have not escaped my notice; indeed how could they, since they were directed exclusively to met … I admit the truth, that pleased and flattered by such attentions, I fondly endeavored to persuade myself that attachment toward me had formed itself in your breast. Judge then, what must have been my feelings on reading...
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Reading, Writing, And History
What War Destroys Excess of Caution The Great Incalculable
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What War Destroys
If the study of military history teaches anything worth knowing, its principal lesson is that modern war never means what the people who are fighting it thought that it was going to mean. This is not merely because it involves infinite physical destruction, but because it turns loose social forces that get completely out of hand. It brings results that were neither foreseen nor desired. It...
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Excess Of Caution
Yet this is where the shoe really pinches. The professional soldier, probably of necessity, spends his life learning how to beat an enemy to his knees, and he does his best to learn this by studying the ways in which the last enemies were beaten. Then the world moves out from under him, and his body of knowledge becomes a hindrance rather than a help—and, once again, history turns a corner...
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The Great Incalculable
Perhaps it is the intensity of the fight that makes the difference. Everything that a nation has is put into the struggle. New powers are developed, new forces are let loose, new capacities are discovered and exploited, and these have a permanent effect. Beyond either victory or defeat they go on working; it becomes impossible for the warring nation to go back to its prewar status simply...
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The “American Woodsman”
Thanks to the plundering agents of the millinery trade, one of the best rambles for a bird watcher in the 1880’s was along the fashionable shopping streets of downtown New York City. On two successive late afternoons in 1886 one sharp-eyed naturalist spotted more than forty different species, including such unlikely specimens as a laughing gull, a ruffed grouse, a green heron, and a saw-whet owl...
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For King Or Congress
Hark, Hark the trumpet sounds, O’er seas and solid grounds, Who for king George do stand, Their ruin is at hand, The Acts of Parliament, I hate their curst intent, Who non-resistance hold, May they for slaves be sold, The Tories of the day, They soon shall sneak away, The Congress of the States, Blessings upon them waits, To General Washington, May numbers daily run, On...
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The Battle That Won An Empire
“This will, some time hence, be a vast empire, the seat of power and learning. … Nature has refused them nothing, and there will grow a people out of our little spot, England, that will fill this vast space, and divide this great portion of the globe with the Spaniards, who are possessed of the other half.” That prophecy, two hundred and one years ago, about the future of Britain’s colonies...
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Quebec Under The Gun
The drawings on these two pages were made in shell-torn Quebec, after the surrender, by Richard Short, purser of H.M.S. Prince of Orange. Describing the scene in Montcalm and Wolt’e, Francis Parkman wrote: “The [British] fleet was gone; the great river was left a solitude; and the chill days of a fitful November passed over Quebec in alternations of rain and frost, sunshine and snow. …...
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The Front Porch Campaign
In 1896, the depression which had followed the Panic of ’93 was in its third year. Debt, business failure, unemployment, and labor unrest were spreading; to many, revolution seemed just a step away. This was the setting for the bitter presidential contest between Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan, and the great debate between the advocates of “sound money” and the...
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The Pepys Of The Old Dominion
He could never resist an old book, a young girl, or a iresh idea. He lived splendidly, planned extensively, and was perpetually in debt. Believing perhaps, like Leonardo, that future generations would be more willing to know him than was his own, he wrote his delicious, detailed diaries in code. Only now that they have been translated, and time has put his era in perspective, do we see what...
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The "Delicious" Land
During the reign of Elizabeth I, as the interest in and knowledge of America gathered momentum, so their reverberation in literature and the arts became louder, more frequent, and more varied. During the reign of Elizabeth I, as the interest in and knowledge of America gathered momentum, so their reverberation in literature and the arts became louder, more frequent, and more varied. On the one...
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A “wildernes As God First Made It”
To its first colonists, Virginia presented an aspect less idyllic, if no less strange, than it held for their compatriots back home in England. On the following pages are photographs of the area near Jamestown, taken by Bradley Smith, which show as closely as possible how the landscape would have looked to Captain John Smith and his companions, when they came here to plant a colony, and look...
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When Congress Tried To Rule
When in the spring of 1868 the Senate of the United States declared Andrew Johnson “not guilty” of the high crimes and misdemeanors charged against him by the House, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens predicted that never again would a serious effort be made to impeach an American President. What the sharp-spoken warrior from Pennsylvania was saying, of course, was that the failure to remove Johnson...
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The $24 Swindle
By now it is probably too late to do anything about it, but the unsettling fact remains that the so-called sale of Manhattan Island to the Dutch in 1626 was a totally illegal deal; a group of Brooklyn Indians perpetrated the swindle, and they had no more right to sell Manhattan Island than the present mayor of White Plains would have to declare war on France.By now it is probably too late to do...
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Mark Twain In Hartford: The Happy Years
Edited by Henry DarbeeThis is the story of twenty happy and productive years in the life of Mark Twain, told by the author himself and by those who knew him. Portions of it were published earlier as a guide to the Mark Twain Memorial, the house now being restored in Hartford, Connecticut, which Twain planned, loved so much, and lost under such tragic circumstances.Mark Twain Moves to HartfordWhen...
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Some Maxims Of Mark Twain
“If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.” “More than one cigar at a time is excessive smoking.” “My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.” Mark Twain’s Notebook “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.” Mark Twain’s Notebook “It is...
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The Boodling Boss And The Musical Mayor
In November, 1901, the little town of Sonoma, California, a few miles north of San Francisco, lay dreaming in the haze of Indian summer. There were few guests in the town hotel, and only two were strangers. One of them was a small man with bright, beady eyes above a huge mustache; he looked like Ren Turpin with his eyes uncrossed. The other was big and broad-shouldered; he had a head of thick,...
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Toys: A Parade From The American Past
The beauty of a good toy is that it picks out the really important things: Oarsmen who actually row, for instance, or the steamer’s great walking beam, or a good loud bell on the train. Imagination does the rest. Any boy knows that. A toy is very like a primitive painting, a crude imitation of life; yet for all that a very shrewd glimpse at it too, for the collection we exhibit here is a kind of...
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Sacco-Vanzetti: The Unfinished Debate
Today, thirty-two years after Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed for the murder of a paymaster and his guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts, the ghosts of the cobbler and the fish-peddler are not at rest. As recently as last year a joint senate-house committee of the Massachusetts legislature was asked to recommend that the governor issue posthumous pardons, thus correcting “an...
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Reading, Writing, And History
In a Changing World The Gold Rush Lost World
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In A Changing World
It is the unhappy fate of some men to stand as symbols of the human being’s natural reluctance to realize that the world has changed. They survive into a day that they cannot understand, and the simple fact that they do not understand it remains beyond their grasp; and since this is the case, the solutions which they attempt for the problems that the changed world brings them are completely...
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The Gold Rush
War is the great, dramatic explosion which makes change obvious. There are lesser ones, less terrible, less harrowing to read about, which evoke simple nostalgia rather than horror. It is pleasant, for instance, to turn from a consideration of the incomprehensible agony of Europe to the gaudy tale of the great Alaskan gold rush of the late 1890’s. In its own way the big gold rush was something...
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Lost World
We still have fragments of the open, useless, untenanted world, and there is an increasing compulsion upon us to preserve these, to set them apart and go and visit them so that we can at least touch the edges of something that is no longer quite within reach. Yet this very drive to preserve and visit the wild spaces may be self-defeating; the mere act of preservation and use robs the wilderness...
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A Winter’s Tale Or, The Legal Mind In Formation
 As Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evans Hughes was the living embodiment of law and rectitude. But even he had at least one skeleton in his moral closet. It is revealed in two letters written to his parents during his junior year at Brown University, and reprinted from Merlo J. Pusey’s definitive biography.Feb. 11, 1880 Dear Pa, … I have bought a pair of skates. You wonder,...
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