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The Selling Of Samuel Morse
In February 1837, Treasury Secretary Levi Woodbury called for information from the “most intelligent sources” to help prepare a report to Congress on the propriety of establishing a “system of telegraphs” for the United States. Of the 18 responses he received, 17 assumed that the telegraph would be optical and its motive power human. The only respondent to envision a different operating force was...
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Current Books
LOVE IS ETERNAL THE LEATHERSTOCKING SAGA STORMY BEN BUTLER ABRAHAM LINCOLN THE WHITE AND THE GOLD LINCOLN AND THE PARTY DIVIDED THE REMARKABLE MR. JEROME BOHEMIAN BRIGADE THE JACKSONIANS THEY CALLED HIM STONEWALL BY THESE WORDS A DANGEROUS FREEDOM ADVENTURE IN FREEDOM THE STORY OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE THE LIGHT OF DISTANT SKIES GLORY, GOD AND GOLD FURNITURE TREASURY...
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Love Is Eternal
by Irving Stone. Doubleday...
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The Leatherstocking Saga
by James Fenimore Cooper, edited by Allan Nevins, illustrated by Reginald Marsh. Pantheon Books. 833 pp. $8.50. This book should help restore to his proper status as an artist in fiction a writer whose position in American literature has been considerably underestimated in recent years. At the very least, it will bring to the attention of the present generation one of the greatest of...
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Stormy Ben Butler
by Robert S. Holzman. The Macmillan Company. 297 pp. $5. Nobody ever felt neutral about Ben Butler. He was a great hero to some, and an unmitigated scoundrel to others, but he was always impressive. His career extended from 1818 to 1893, and while he devoted himself chiefly to the personal advancement of Ben Butler he did play an important role, in war and in peace, during some of the most...
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Abraham Lincoln
by Carl Sandburg. Harcourt, Brace...
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The White And The Gold
by Thomas B. Costain. Doubleday...
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Lincoln And The Party Divided
by William Frank Zornow. University of Oklahoma Press. 264 pp. $4. A careful examination of the presidential campaign of 1864, showing why and how the opposition to Lincoln within the Republican party collapsed, and discussing the failure of the Democrats with insight and understanding. In the final canvass, the author concludes, the only real difference between the parties was the...
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The Remarkable Mr. Jerome
by Anita Leslie. Henry Holt...
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Bohemian Brigade
by Louis C. Starr. Alfred A. Knopf. 367 pp. $5. Here is a useful discussion of the work of newspapers and newspapermen in the Civil War. The author is much less concerned with the editorial influence exerted by the war-time press than with the speedy, though somewhat imperfect, development of the concept of the newspaper as primarily a news medium rather than a political organ. A revolution...
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The Jacksonians
by Leonard D. White. The Macmillan Company. 593 pp. $3. The purely administrative system of the Federal government has an importance often overlooked by historians, and in this book Dr. White goes far to remedy this oversight. He examines the results of the advent of Jacksonian democracy, when the people laid their own hands on large parts of the administrative mechanism, and concludes that...
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They Called Him Stonewall
by Burke Davis. Rinehart...
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By These Words
by Paul Angle. Rand Mc-Nally...
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A Dangerous Freedom
by Bradford Smith. J. B. Lippincott Company. 303 pp. $3.95. The great distinguishing mark of American life, says Mr. Smith, is the principle of voluntary association to gain a desired end. We are individualists, but we have an uncommon knack for working together, and it is this rather than a spirit of tooth-and-claw competition that is our greatest characteristic. This has meant, century...
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Adventure In Freedom
by Oscar Handlin. The McGraw-Hill Book Company. 282 pp. $3.75. In this book, Dr. Handlin considers the three centuries of Jewish life in America as “an adventure in freedom.” Seeking to provide an interpretation rather than a complete history of the Jews in the United States, he remarks that when the Jews came to America they moved into a society unlike any that they had previously met....
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The Story Of The Declaration Of Independence
by Dumas Malone, with pictures by Hirst Milhollen and Milton Kaplan. Oxford University Press. 282 pp. $10. With an abundance of text and pictures, planned and arranged with excellent taste, the authors present their tribute to the great document itself. There is a remarkable presentation of portraits of all of the signers and pictures of their homes; certainly, this is the last word on this...
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The Light Of Distant Skies
by James Thomas Flexner. Harcourt, Brace...
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Glory, God And Gold
by Paul I. Wellman. Doubleday...
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Furniture Treasury
by Wallace Nutting. The Macmillan Company. $10.95. This seven and one-half pound volume includes all of the 5,000 illustrations of the original Furniture Treasury , first published in 1928 and reissued in 1948. It is the authoritative picture book on American antiques for both the amateur and the professional.
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The Tastemakers
by Russell Lynes. Harper and Brothers. $5. Taste, says Mr. Lynes, who is managing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is “our personal delight, our private dilemma and our public facade.” No one, certainly, has written on this intricate subject more entertainingly or more profoundly than the creator of “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” and Mr. Lynes takes his place beside the late Dixon Wecter...
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A Check List Of New Books
Johnny Appleseed: Man & Myth , by Robert Price. Indiana University Press. $5. A biography of an American folk hero, John Chapman, known to all as “Johnny Appleseed” for the work he did in clearing land and planting seeds throughout the Middle West. Indians of the Plains , by Robert H. Lowie. McGraw-Hill Book Company. $4.75. A handbook on the culture of the first inhabitants of...
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News Of History
The gray, water-soaked, mud-stained skeleton of one of America’s first warships has been raised from the bottom of Lake Champlain and is now on the beach below Fort Ticonderoga. After thorough drying and protection, the hulk will form the nucleus of a naval museum to be erected on the shore below the towering battlements of the fort. Other naval relics will be on display with it. The hulk is...
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Investigation: 1862
The haze of a beautiful autumn hung over the Maryland countryside. The Northern soldiers holding the Potomac line above Washington in that fall of 1861 had never seen a region quite like it. They were delighted with the mild weather; they were impressed by the striking vistas of scenery that unrolled around their comfortable camps; they were intrigued by the queer, almost alien ways, of the white...
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Holiday Time At The Old Country Store
Millions of Americans, reared on a farm or in a country village, still treasure the recollection of December shopping expeditions to the old-time general store as one of life’s most permanent and agreeable memories. The crossroads store, around the turn of the century, was still in its full glory. A bazaar for all lines of merchandise required by its trade—which meant, in the words of the firm of...
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The Great Club Revolution
In 1936 in New York City there occured the 100th anniversary of the Union Club, oldest and most socially sacrosanct of New York’s gentlemen’s clubs. From all parts of this country and even from abroad there arrived, from lesser clubs, congratulatory messages, impressive gifts and particularly large offerings of floral tributes.At the actual anniversary banquet, however, as so often happens in...
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What They Did There
The sun goes down every evening over the muzzle of a gun that has been a museum piece for nearly a century, and where there was a battlefield there is now a park, with green fields rolling west under the sunset haze to the misty blue mountain wall. You can see it all just about as it used to be, and to look at it brings up deep moods and sacred memories that are part of our American heritage.Yet...
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Painters Of The Plains
It is a big country, sprawling all the way from the Alleghenies to the Rockies, and it puts its mark on the people who live in it. Its climate tends to be uncompromising— baking heat in the summer, hostile cold in the winter—and it has never done anything by halves. Where it had forests, they rolled for hundreds of miles, great stands of hardwood, green twilight under their branches; its open...
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George Catlin
A young Pennsylvanian, George Catlin, went west in the 1830’s with the purpose of preserving in art the culture and customs of the American Indian. For thirty years he traveled in Indian country, making a record of tribal life unmatched for thoroughness and accuracy.
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Karl Bodmer
A Swiss artist, Karl Bodmer, ascended the Missouri in 1833 with the German explorer-scientist Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied. At Fort McKenzie, where the Blackfeet Indians came to trade furs, he painted their chiefs in full regalia. He was watching early one morning when a war party of Crees and Assiniboins, jealous of the Blackfeet’s trading privileges, attacked the camp outside the...
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Alfred Jacob Miller
This young Baltimore artist was hired by a Scottish adventurer. Captain William Drummond Stewart, to join him at St. Louis and paint pictures to adorn the Captain’s castle in Scotland. They followed the Oregon Trail through hostile Indian country to Fort Laramie, where Miller painted this famous frontier post with its surrounding Indian encampment.
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Seth Eastman
As a young Army officer, who had received his art instruction at West Point, Seth Eastman was assigned in 1830 to Fort Snelling, near the present site of Minneapolis. During his ten years in the Sioux country he made a record of Indian life, including this picture of the Indian game which the French called lacrosse.
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Albert Bierstadt
Trained in the Düsseldorf school of dramatic, grandiose art, Albert Bierstadt devoted his life to painting the massive beauty of the Western landscape. He roamed the Rocky Mountain country in the 1850’s and 1860’s, painting the Indians, the buffalo, the wagon trains and, towering above all else, his beloved mountains. Bierstadt’s grandiloquent canvases left Eastern critics cold, but they...
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Frederic Remington
No one ever caught the Old West, either in spirit or in fine detail, as faithfully as Frederic Remington. An Easterner, a Yale student and a youth of independent means, he went west in 1880 at the age of nineteen to make his own way as a cowboy and gold prospector. Fascinated by what he saw, he began filling notebooks with on-the-spot sketches of men and animals in action. Years...
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Charles M. Russell
For twenty years Charles M. Russell was a working cowhand, riding the Montana range, wrangling the horses and singing to the herds at night. One long winter he lived with the Blood Indians, across the border in Alberta. Russell liked the Indians and keenly felt the tragedy of a proud warrior people left helpless before the engine of industrial civilization.
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Henry F. Farny
By the time Henry F. Farny visited the Sioux country in the 1880’s, telegraph wires spanned the ancient buffalo range and the Indians had been pushed onto reservations. A sympathetic observer of the Red Man baffled by the White Man’s scientific world. Farny helped to win him a measure of belated justice.
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A King’s Funeral
 When King Edward VII died in 1910 President Taft appointed his illustrious predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, as special representative of the United States at the funeral. It was one of the last great gatherings of Europe’s royalty before World War I toppled many of the monarchs from their thrones. This remarkable account of the occasion was written by Roosevelt to a friend, David Gray...
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The Day They Burned The Capitol
Washington in 1814 was a capital city with no past to speak of, nothing much in the way of a present, and a future greater than any man then alive could imagine. It was a straggling country town, its dirt roads alternately ankle-deep in powdery dust and hub-deep in mud, with a general air of unfinished emptiness about it, and it was to become a great center of world power, imposing to look at, a...
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Henry Ford
One of the most remarkable facts about Henry Ford is that his fame and the Ford legend were born almost simultaneously, and born full-grown. Both came late in life, when he was fifty. The industrialist, we may say without exaggeration, was little known until he suddenly became a world celebrity. He was tossed into international eminence on January 5, 1914, when the Ford Motor Company startled the...
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The Old Fall River Line
It all began fittingly enough with Robert Fulton, who planned to vanquish Long Island Sound as he had the Hudson, even though he died, at an untimely fifty, just before the attempt was to be made. And the slow funeral cannonade from the Battery had barely died on the wind when his steamboat, unblushingly named the Fulton , paddled up the East River into the dreaded waters of Hell Gate, the...
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Acadia Country
The old house, many-hued in ruin, stands rotting, some thirty miles above New Orleans, farther from the changing river bed than in its youth, deserted, its records mostly forgotten; but it speaks of the land of the Acadians, of the Bayous Teche, Vermillion and LaFourche and of a distinctive people. Acadians lived here for many years. They did not build the old mansion, to be sure, for that was...
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Panamint: Suburb Of Hell
Senator William Morris Stewart, Yale ’53, the Father of American Mining Law, a quick man with a Colt’s dragoon revolver and admittedly the possessor of the most magnificent whiskers in the entire West, stepped from the swinging portals of Dave Naegle’s Oriental Saloon and reached for the grab iron on the side of Jack Lloyd’s Panamint...
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The Writing Of History
As I write this, crowds of sidewalk superintendents are peering down at the foundations of a great new office building to be erected on a bombed site in the heart of the City of London. What has drawn the crowds is the discovery, in the excavations, of a Second Century temple to Mithras, the God of Light so widely worshiped in the Roman army; the discovery not only of a “Mithraeum” but of the...
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The Oral History Project Of Columbia University
Ever since May, 1948, a remarkable operation has been going forward at Columbia University in New York, a program aimed at one of the most perplexing problems facing modern historians. In an age almost drowned in words, printed and broadcast, one of the great sources of history is drying up: eminent men are not writing letters or keeping diaries as they did in the past. They deal on the...
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The Personal Reminiscences Of Albert Lasker
Albert Davis Lasker made no speeches and wrote almost nothing for publication, and when he died, on May 30, 1952, very few people paused to read the obituaries; yet the newspapers and magazines in which they appeared carried his monument, in a sense, on nearly every page, for Lasker was accounted by many the father of modern advertising. He put over many of its great coups and slogans;...
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Great River
Great River is the story of the Rio Grande Valley and the four great cultures which have flourished there: Indian, Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American. The selection published here covers the story of the Spanish explorers, from the appearance of Pineda’s fleet at the river’s mouth to the bitter end of Coronado’s search for the golden city of Quivira. No other book of American history...
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The Song That Wrote Itself
 Just four days after the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the 12th Massachusetts marched through the streets of Boston on their way to the Worcester and Western Railroad Station. Every one of them was a volunteer, and proud of it, and everything that was youth and eagerness and adventure was in the air that April day as they passed in review for the crowds to see and cheer. This was the...
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Doctors In Pictures
  For anyone interested in pictorial history, the Bettmann Archive in New York City is known to be a small cellar brimful of priceless items which trace visually the progress of man. Its founder, Dr. Otto L. Bettmann, has spent the majority of his 52 years collecting pictures, and his medical files alone number over 10,000 old prints, woodcuts, and cartoons relating to every conceivable...
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Cities Of The Middle Border
One hundred and fifty years ago the story of America was a story of the open country—of rural people, living for the most part in villages or on farms. A great part of the country had not even been explored, and huge sections of it did not belong to the United States. By 1830, although the number of Americans living west of the Alleghenies was last approaching the number east of them, many...
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The Bustling West Of 1857
“The hurry of life in the Western part of this country, the rapidity, energy, and enterprise with which civilization is there being carried forward, baffles all description, and, I think, can hardly be believed by those who have seen it. Cities of magnificent streets and houses, with wharves, and quays, and warehouses, and storehouses, and shops full of Paris luxuries, and railroads from and to...
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Why They Impeached Andrew Johnson
Reconstruction after the Civil War posed some of the most discouraging problems ever faced by American statesmen. The South was prostrate. Its defeated armies straggled homeward through a countryside desolated by war. Southern soil was untilled and exhausted; southern factories and railroads were worn out. The four billion dollars of southern capital invested in Negro slaves was wiped out by...
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