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The Return Of The Resolute
Many have been the occasions when the two English-speaking peoples on opposite sides of the Atlantic have expressed their mutual friendship through some dramatic gesture. But one of the most unusual took place a little over one hundred years ago, when the United States presented to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, in perfect condition, a fully rigged British man-of war. This ship was the H.M.S....
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“Perdicaris Alive Or Raisuli Dead”
On a scented Mediterranean May evening in 1904 Mr. Ion Perdicaris, an elderly, wealthy American, was dining with his family on the vine-covered terrace of the Place of Nightingales, his summer villa in the hills above Tangier. Besides a tame demoiselle crane and two monkeys who ate orange blossoms, the family included Mrs. Perdicaris; her son by a former marriage, Cromwell Oliver Varley, who (...
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New England In The Earliest Days
We owe the name of New England to Captain John Smith. This may be surprising, since his name is so memorably associated with those first years in Virginia. But in 1614 he made a voyage along the coast of New England—the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts, from the towering cliffs of Penobscot, in and out of the islands that form a kind of barrier reef, to the sandy shores of Cape Cod and the...
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The Mennonites Come To Kansas
In the fall of 1874 a Russian farmer, fingering the rich, black earth of central Kansas and gazing out over virgin prairie that stretched as far as his eye could see, predicted that “in three years that ocean of grass will be transformed into an ocean of waving fields of grain.” At the same time a Kansas newspaperman wrote with prophetic insight: “Kansas will be to America what the country of the...
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Mansions On Rails
   The rising tide of wealth and the gratification of the social ambitions of the well to do that characterized the post Civil War years in the United States asserted themselves in a number of forms: seagoing steam yachts, villas at Newport, titled sons-in-law, collections of old masters and libraries of first editions, membership in the United States Senate, mistresses of...
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Prison Camps Of The Civil War
On the tenth day of November, 1865, a pale, black-whiskered little man named Henry Wirz, a used-up captain in the used-up army of the late Confederate States of America, walked through a door in the Old Capitol Prison at Washington, climbed thirteen wooden steps, and stood under the heavy crossbeam of a scaffold, a greased noose about his neck. On the platform with him—with him, but separated...
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Murder At The Place Of Rye Grass
In July of the year 1847, only four months before their murder at the hands of the Indians they had crossed the American continent to Christianize, Dr. Marcus Whitman and his high-minded, high-spirited wife, Narcissa, entertained a wandering Canadian artist at their little mission in the wilds of the Oregon territory, just west of present-day Walla Walla, Washington. The artist was a painter from...
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A Rich And Varied Record Of Indian Life
All the paintings and sketches are from the Kane collection in Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, with whose kind permission they are reproduced here.
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Yours Truly, John L. Sullivan
On Highway 11 on the outskirts of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a roadside historical plaque bears this inscription:On Highway 11 on the outskirts of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a roadside historical plaque bears this inscription: JOHN L. SULLIVAN DEFEATED JAKE KILRAIN FOR HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP IN A 75-ROUND FIGHT ON JULY 8, 1889, AT RICHBURG, 3 MILES SOUTHWEST OF THIS SPOT. THIS WAS THE LAST...
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Harold Murdock’s “The Nineteenth Of April 1775”
Few episodes in American history lend themselves more easily to romanticizing than the stand of the embattled patriots on Lexington Common. It has all the necessary ingredients: good American farmers shot down, virtually on their doorsteps, by bloodthirsty British troops outnumbering them fourteen to one; farrnhouses burned; a civilian population involved. For six generations our desire to think...
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Builders For A Golden Age
Architecture was not the least of Thomas Jefferson’s formidable talents. In his designs there was much of the monumental dignity of the classical models which all his life he sought to emulate. Could not America revive the glory that was Greece and Rome? In the early years of the Republic, his aspirations—and those of the men he so profoundly influenced—were focused increasingly on the sprawling...
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Reading, Writing, And History
Aristotle and Pandora The Basis for Slavery Who Is Superior?
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Aristotle And Pandora
When the Spanish and Portuguese explorers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries broke through the established horizons and compelled their fellows to get acquainted with the unknown, they turned the medieval mind loose in a world of fantasies and marvels. New myths were created and old myths regained credence. Columbus suspected that he had found either Japan or the true...
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The Basis For Slavery
The belief in racial inequality has been fairly expensive, considering the lives that have been spent because of it. Out of it we got, among other things, the institution of chattel slavery in the United States. Slavery is gone, but we fought a four-year war to make it go, and now and then it occurs to us that the war somehow grew out of the belief that there are in this world, by an...
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Who Is Superior?
For slavery was a holdover from the old colonial era, and in the increasingly mechanized, highly organized world of the mid-nineteenth century it could survive only by mutual consent. As Mr. Dumond remarks, “Few … institutions were ever so dependent as slavery upon tranquillity.” When the guns opened on Fort Sumter America’s tranquillity was violently shattered, and the conditions under which...
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Mr. Dooley Looks At History
I know histhry isn’t thrue, Hinnissy, because it aint like what I see ivry day in Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that’ll show me the people fightin’, gettin’ dhrunk, makin’ love, gettin’ married, owin’ the groceryman an’ bein’ without hard coal, I’ll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befure. Historyans is like doctors. They are always lookin’...
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How Does The Seller Feel Now?
The current Soviet “line” on the purchase of Alaska is essentially a reflection of Stalinist chauvinism, introduced into Soviet historiography in the mid-1930’s and carried to absurd heights in the period immediately following World War II. Thus, the article on Alaska in Volume II of the most recent edition of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia (1950) goes to great pains to praise Russian...
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Reading, Writing, And History
Defeating the Enemy Deep-Diving Whale From the Frontier
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Defeating The Enemy
One of the benefits that come from the study of history, which after all is nothing more than the examination of assorted human lives, is the recurrent discovery that the human spirit is basically unconquerable. This is revealed in big ways and in little ways—in the story of a nation, and in the story of a single individual—and wherever it is met it is like a bright light glowing in the dark....
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Deep-diving Whale
The fields of the historian and the novelist do overlap. In a sense, Parkman had the novelist’s talents —imagination, understanding, a feeling for literary form, a curiosity about the ultimate meaning of the things men do. And Herman Melville, one of America’s greatest novelists, had something of the historian in him, too, which is to say that he wanted to get at the truth of things. Moby...
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From The Frontier
Both Parkman and Melville looked for and found the authentic frontier. Parkman saw it at first hand on the western plains, and then went back to an eastern frontier (“mousing in the archives”) and breathed life upon it. Melville found it on the high seas, on whaling ships and on the Navy’s cruisers, and struck sparks from it, making a light for more settled folk in the eastern cities. Each one...
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A Vanished America In Stereo
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes walked down Broadway one day in 1860 on an unorthodox errand for that distinguished physician, poet, and essayist. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table had a gadget to sell—a contrivance he had made himself—a stereoscope. Readers of the Atlantic Monthly were familiar with the fact that Dr. Holmes had become fascinated by the three-dimensional photography which had...
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Saint Jane And The Ward Boss
If Alderman John Powers of Chicago’s teeming nineteenth waul had been prescient, he might have foreseen trouble when two young ladies not long out of the female seminary in Rockford, Illinois, moved into a dilapidated old house on HaIsted Street, in September, iSSg, and announced themselves “at home” to the neighbors. The ladies, however, were not very noisy about it, and it is doubtful if Powers...
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Names From The War
Once the land had no great names and no history. It was a good land, with wood lots holding shadows beside the hot fields, bine hills hazy on the horizon, country roads going in aimless meanders from creek bottom and country store to places of no particular importance. Nothing ever happened in it, except that men made homes and towns, with springtime plowing and autumn gathering...
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A Certain Nicholas Of Patara
The road and seaway from Myra in Asia Minor to your street corner and chimney at Christmas is a long one, and was long in the building. Nevertheless, it is there, and one traveler voyages the incredibly long and circuitous route each year. He is somewhat metamorphosed, to be sure, as a result of the journey, but he is still one and the same: St. Nicholas and Santa Claus. Tradition has it...
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The Peace Of Christmas Eve
I t was St. John’s Day, a gentle introduction to summer, and the road, Lowered by leafing elms and poplars and oaks, carved through lush grain fields and meticulous flower gardens. The two reluctant traveling companions had set out from Antwerp at nine that morning. For more than an hour they had been delayed at the River Scheldt, a crowded anchorage for British men-of-war, while petty...
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The Ordeal Of Cabeza De Vaca
A crude boat carrying forty exhausted Spaniards drifted close to the long Texas beach. “Near dawn it seemed to me that the tumbling roar of the sea could be heard. Surprised, I called the boatswain and he replied that we were near the coast. We sounded and found ourselves in seven fathoms. It seemed to the boatswain that we ought to keep to sea until sunrise and I took an oar and pulled on the...
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The Mighty Jeep
A few weeks before Pearl Harbor, the highest ranking officer in the Armed Forces, General George C. Marshall, described as our main contribution to modern war a new, small, bouncy army vehicle with the official designation of truck, quarter-ton, four-by-lour, but better known to practically everyone, then and now, as the jeep. No one is certain exactly where the name “jeep” came from. The...
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“oh Amherst, Brave Amherst…
A fter two hundred years upland New England still bears his imprint: in a college town of western Massachusetts; at Lake Amherst, Vermont, not far from Calvin Coolidge’s birthplace; in New Hampshire’s Amherst on the old Boston Post Road. North from Charlestown, New Hampshire—the eighteenth-century military base that was once Fort Number Four—one can still trace the indentations of his 1759...
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A Lesson In Civics—but not what they teach in school
The democratic tradition—or so I am told—is nowhere more splendidly exemplified than in the small New England town. There the candidates are neighbors of the voters, and the presumption of those who grew up elsewhere is that, on the first Monday in March, the honest New Englanders soberly assess the known faults and virtues of these neighbors and invariably elect the most upright of men to be...
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Seward’s Wise Folly
America does not greatly love nor long remember her Secretaries of State. Upon this melancholy fact William Henry Seward of New York had more reason than most to rellect. In 1860 he stood at the pinnacle of a brilliant political career, and when the Republican party gathered in Chicago early that summer to choose a candidate for President, he was not alone in believing that the choice would...
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“a-h-h B-l-o-o-w-s”
When the barque Wanderer broke up on the rocks off Cuttyhunk, Massachusetts, in August of 1924, the wild Atlantic winds brought to an effective close New England’s most adventurous maritime enterprise. The Wanderer was the last square-rigged American whaler to put to sea, and her loss—even though some smaller vessels tried to carry on a few years longer—marked the authentic end of an era...
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The Sham Battle Of Manila
To most Americans, in 1898, the Philippine Islands seemed as remote as the Land of Oz. But suddenly, after Commodore Dewey’s smashing victory at Manila Bay, they appeared to be ours for the asking. But matters were not so simple, for the Philippine people were in revolt against the Spaniards, who had been their masters for three and a half centuries. When American troops finally landed near...
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Amherst: Hero Of World War Iv?
My father, who lived to a very advanced age, spread utter confusion among several successive generations of school children by asking them who won the French and Indian War, the French or the Indians. But I daresay that if we should use the phrase “French and Indian War” to an English schoolboy or the average British man-on-the-street, we could spread some confusion across the water, too. For...
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“The Isles Shall Wait For His Law”
Almost lost in the general rejoicing over the admission of Hawaii as our fiftieth state was a unique fact: unlike any other United States possession, this string of beautiful islands was first turned toward America neither by money nor by force of arms, but by an entirely unselfish impulse.The story goes back to the morning of March 30, 1820, when the brig Thaddeus, 159 days out of Boston around...
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The Ultimate Judge
It is given to men, sir, to attack the rights of others, to take their property, to attempt the lives of those who defend their liberty, and to make of their virtues a crime and of their own vices a virtue; but there is one thing which is beyond the reach of perversity, and that is the tremendous verdict of history. History will judge us.
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The Money-maker
How far back in American history can we find the old shell game in operation? Alas, pretty far. It is as old as money, or the shortage thereof. Even the first Puritan settlers of New England were able to let their eyes stray from regarding Zion to study the money problem, which was, Heaven knows, acute in those days. Hard English coin, silver or copper, was simply not to be had for ordinary...
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Hawaii Before The Missionaries
The easygoing Hawaiian way of life encountered by the American missionaries tan be glimpsed in the earliest pictures of the Islands by an outlander. He was Louis Choris, seen above in a self-portrait, a young Russian whose artistic talent earned him the job of draftsman on a Czarist round-the-world expedition which arrived in Hawaii in 1816, four years before the Thaddeus . Once ashore and...
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The Town That Stopped The Clock
My home town is probably the most regressive little city in the United States. When I left it thirty-five years ago it was as typically twentieth century as any post-war Gopher Prairie on the map. Some new store fronts—the first in my lifetime—had sprung up on the main street. The old knitting mill down by the depot, long in disuse, had been turned into a smoke-belching power plant. Mr. Fred...
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“General” Eaton And His Improbable Legion
When he wrote his classic History of the United States the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison seventy years ago, Henry Adams was inclined to look with mild disdain upon some of the sudden and uncertain forays in the foreign ReId undertaken under Jefferson in particular. Moreover, this most fastidious of the Adamses was generally not an admirer of the martial spirit. Yet he singled out fur...
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The Big Pay-off
The United States, as a newborn maritime nation, laced the age-old problem of securing safe passage lor its merchant ships, and we thus paid tribute to the Barbary States. A partial accounting of it follows. Morocco 1786: £5,000 for a treaty guaranteeing “no future presents or tributes”; 1795: the same sum for renewal of the treaty plus consular presents, fieldpieces, small arms, and...
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“Échec!”
On April 13, 1826, a strange-looking contrivance was wheeled into the assembly rooms of the brand-new National Hotel at 112 Broadway in New York City. It consisted ol the lifelike wooden figure of a turhancd Turk, seated before a table-high maple chest three and a half feet long by two feet deep. The figure’s right arm rested lightly beside a chessboard eighteen inches square permanently affixed...
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"As I Am Now So You Must Be”
Down the country road, behind the hilltop wall, hidden in the high grass near the white-spired church, not hard to find but rarely visited, lie the burying grounds of New England. No book, no building, no monument has quite their power to suggest the American past. For here, as the quick confront the dead almost face to face, so to speak, the years fall away, and over the abyss of change and lost...
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America & Russia
In politics as in nature, opposites clash but are also attracted. At any event they cannot escape one another; and no two contrasting nations have ever been more fatefully linked than the United States and Russia.Over a century ago Alexis de Tocqucville, as AMERICAN HERITAGE noted in an early issue (June, 1955), propounded what seemed at the time a most unlikely prophecy. “There are at the...
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Journey Into Our Times
The first time I worked with Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg was fairly early in the course of that change in his outlook on the world which one might call his long day’s journey into our times. He had been, to use his own description of himself, one of those “who had been so-called ‘isolationists’ prior to Pearl Harbor.” But “that day,” he wrote later, “ended isolationism tor any realist.” The...
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The Redskin Who Saved The White Man’s Hide
General George Crook, United States Army, angular and bearded, resisted the impulse to consult his watch again. From the opening of his tent he could have seen the wide stretch of sagebrush-covered hills to the west over the willow bottoms of Goose Creek, but he was tired of looking at it. Why didn’t Washakie come?The place was near Sheridan, Wyoming Territory, June 14, 1876. Crook, with eleven...
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Soldier In A Longboat
Some years after the Revolutionary War, Henry Knox, one-time major general and chief of artillery in the Continental Army, rose before the Massachusetts legislature to speak on a bill in behalf of his former comrades in arms, the Marblehead fishermen. Standing there, his hulking aSo-pound frame commanding every eye, Knox recalled the cold Christmas night in 177(1 when these brave men had ferried...
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The Harvard Man In The Kremlin Wall
John Reed was as American as apple pie and store cheese. Yet he was one of the founders of the Communist International, and his ashes lie under the Kremlin wall. From a mansion on Cedar Hill in Portland, Oregon, through respectable Harvard College, to the Kremlin wall in the heart of Moscow—such is the trajectory of his life. Except that his further evolution was cut short by untimely death, it...
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How Wilbur Wright Taught Europe To Fly
Most Americans know that Wilbur and Orville Wright were the first to fly a powered airplane; a few know that they were the first to build a practical powered airplane; but almost no one in the United States seems to know that these remarkable brothers not only inspired Europeans to revive their all-but-moribund ambition to fly, but, in 1908, revolutionized European aviation when the French had...
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Grant At Shiloh
For a time early in the spring of 1862, it seemed that Union armies were about to destroy the Confederacy in the west. A hitherto inconspicuous officer named U. S. Grant had, in close succession, captured the two major Rebel strongholds in Tennessee, Forts Henry and Donelson; an aggressive follow-up might well have overwhelmed the badly disorganized Confederates. But the Union high command...
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