January 2011

Tales of the great longhorn herds which thronged the plains of Texas lured many fortune seekers there after the Civil War. One of them was an elderly livestock buyer named Upton Bushnell, who set out from Ohio in the spring of 1866. Bushnell had reckoned that beef fetching no more than three or four dollars a head in the poor and underpopulated Southwest was worth ten times as much up North—an opportunity for profit that many others were to discover after him. Although most of the 260,000 head of cattle driven north that year went only as far as the western Missouri railheads—Abilene and the other Kansas cow towns would have their heyday later—Bushnell planned to take his herd directly to the Chicago stockyards. That a sizable part of it reached its goal after incredible hardships was largely due to the efforts of his able head man, a young Indiana farmer named Perry Case. What follows is Case’s hitherto unpublished story of the long drive, told when he was an old man. Relying on a memory undimmed by age, and his carefully-kept diary, he dictated this account to a relative, Mrs. Nancy Gay Case Hughes of Chicago, shortly before his death in 1926.

The older arts, all seven of them—architecture, dance, drama, literature, music, painting, and sculpture—had their origins in the Mediterranean basin several thousands of years ago. The only new art, and the most universal, was born near the mouth of the Hudson River, and within the memory of living men. Three American geniuses—Thomas Alva Edison, Edwin Stanton Porter, and David Wark Griffith—individually and with others, created here a new means of depicting life.

This is the Moving Image, the eighth art, and today it is seen in living rooms, theaters, drive-ins, museums, classrooms. It is colored and black-and-white, wide and narrow, and often accompanied by voices, sounds, or music. It is free, subsidized, and charged for, preserved on celluloid and tape, transported in cans, over cables, through the air. It is projected on screens, shot from tubes, sometimes instantaneous, and always alive. It is the art of the twentieth century, and in the verbal confusion of our times it is also called cinema, film, motion picture, talkie, and television.

In Defense of Slavery

One century ago there were plenty of Americans who spoke and wrote in defense of the institution of human slavery. There was a wealth of literature designed to prove not merely that slavery was a necessary evil which could be eradicated only at the cost of a social and economic convulsion, but that it was a positive good, a proper way to get the world’s work done. To a comparatively large proportion of Americans this argument seemed logical and convincing.