January 2011

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 terrestrial paradise; the flat Florida peninsula was believed to contain the authentic Fountain of Youth; the Seven Enchanted Cities of ancient legend were thought to lie, attainable at last, somewhere north of Mexico; and such creatures as dragons, griffins, unicorns, sea monsters, giants, and headless men with eyes in their chests were accepted as realities in the fabulous lands beyond the seas. Men who supposed that they had a fairly complete understanding of an orderly cosmos found themselves living in a world where almost anything might be true.

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 unalterable law of nature, a master race and a subject race.

Murder At The Place Of Rye Grass

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.

Yours Truly, John L. Sullivan

On Highway 11 on the outskirts of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a roadside historical plaque bears this inscription:

The Mennonites Come To Kansas

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 notorious beauty, diamond tiaras, boxes at the Metropolitan Opera, and mansions on Fifth Avenue or Nob Hill.

These might do well enough for the run-of-the-mine millionaire, but the supremely desirable authentication of social acceptance and economic well-being was the private railroad car “outshopped” to the owner’s personal specifications by the Pullman Palace Car Company, by Webster Wagner, or by one of several less celebrated carbuilders of the era. The private car was for two entire generations of Americans the capstone of financial and social achievement; no other ostentation was quite in its class.

Prison Camps Of The Civil War

The Wilderness: America’s Unique Possession

The discovery of America meant different things to different people. To some it meant only gold and the possibility of other plunder. To others less mean-spirited it meant a wilderness which might in time become another Europe. But there were also not a few whose imaginations were most profoundly stirred by what it was rather than by what it might become.

The wilderness and the idea of the wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit. Here, as many realized, had been miraculously preserved until the time when civilization could appreciate it, the richness and variety of a natural world which had disappeared unnoticed and little by little from Europe. America was a dream of something long past which had suddenly become a reality. It was what Thoreau called the great “poem” before many of its fairest pages had been ripped out and thrown away. The desire to experience that reality rather than to destroy it drew to our shores some of the best who have ever come to them.