January 2011

On the morning of January 20, 1889, the New York Sunday Times carried an account of the elaborate preparations for the Yale Junior Promenade. On other pages were discussions of the prospects of the Harvard and Cornell crews for the coming rowing season. The balance of the paper bore foreign and domestic news of no startling importance. But tucked away in the obituary column there was a brief notice: [Died] M ACKENZIE —At New Brighton, Staten Island, on the 19th January. Brig.-Gen. Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, United States Army, in the 48th year of his age.

This was all the attention given to the death of a man who was one of our greatest Indian fighters and about whose Civil War services U. S. Grant had written: “I regard Mackenzie as the most promising young officer in the Army. Graduating at West Point, as he did, during the second year of the war, he had won his way up to the command of a corps before its close. This he did upon his own merit and without influence.”

Viewing this contrast between the life of virtue and the ways of sin, who could doubt that Nathaniel Currier was on the side of the angels? If, today, the famous New York printmaker seems unduly pre-occupied with morality—or the absence of it—we must remember that Americans of the mid-nineteenth century lived closer to the God-fearing Puritan and his homilies. Perhaps it was no accident that the confident dove perched in the branches of the “Tree of Life” looked like the American eagle.

“At 4, I took a wherry to London, Passed by multitudes of shipping & in an hour landed at King James’s Stairs, in Wapping: where I lodged; but could not persuade the Civil people who Entertained me, that I was born & educated in New England; & they wondered as much at my carriage & Deportment, as at the Fairness and accuracy of my language.”

This was an entry in the manuscript logbook of Thomas Prince, Colonial American historian and member of Harvard’s class of 1707. The excerpt appears in the fifth volume of an extraordinary and little-known historical project begun not quite one hundred years ago, in February, 1859, by a passionately single-minded man, John Langdon Sibley, librarian of Harvard University from 1856 until 1877. The project, which has few equals for magnificent impracticality, was nothing less than an attempt to write a biographical sketch of every man who ever attended Harvard from the time of its founding in 1636 to the present.

The history of Texas oil really begins on a dramatic morning in January, 1901, when the Lucas gusher, afterward world-famous as Spindletop, was brought in near Beaumont. (The name Spindletop is said to be derived from a tree in the vicinity shaped like an inverted cone.)

Beaumont in January of 1901 was an obscure and unpromising lumber and rice market. But then the Lucas gusher was brought in, four miles south of the town, and overnight Beaumont became a mecca. Adventurers flocked from far and near. Every Texan began to dream of a fortune under his ranch, farm, or town lot; and many of the dreams came true: within two years Texas’ oil production increased, twentyfold.

Nowadays tourists visit the West Indies by air, and sooner or later most of them avail themselves of one or other of the local services that, originating in Puerto Rico, hop from island to island southeastward along the chain of the Lesser Antilles to Trinidad and Georgetown, on the coast of British Guiana. During the brief passage from Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe to Roseau in Dominica—a scant hundred miles—the tourist might well spare a glance through his window down at the blue Caribbean. Should he do so he will find himself flying over a basin of water some fifty miles by twenty, delimited by Guadeloupe and Dominica to the north and south, by Marie Galante to the east, and the group of the Saintes to the west. The scene is very beautiful, dominated by the towering heights of the Grande Soufrière and Morne Diablotin; and it was there that 69 ships of the line fought the battle which ended in a staggering defeat for America’s Revolutionary War ally, France, and yet, oddly enough, contributed powerfully to the final recognition of American independence.

Long before his death, more than forty years ago, Jim Hill had become a legend in the American West. Whether lie was hero or villain matters little. He died something of a giant in the vast region where many contemporaries came often to think him less a man than an elemental force. Time has not diminished his stature; neither has it quite managed to condemn him nor to put him safely on the side of the angels.

First of all came the blizzards. Then the droughts. Then the grasshoppers, and hard on the leaping legs of the parasites came fames Jerome Hill, Jim Hill, the Little Giant, the Empire Builder, the man who made the Northwest,or who wrecked it—Jim Hill, the barbed-wired, shaggy-headed, one-eyed old so-and-so of western railroading.

“As for the White House, all the boy’s family had lived there, and, barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson’s reign, had been more or less at home there ever since it was built. The boy half thought he owned it, and took for granted that he should some day live in it. He felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President was a matter of course in every responsible family; he had two in his own; three, if he counted old Nathaniel Gorham, who was the oldest and first in distinction. Revolutionary patriots, or perhaps a Colonial Governor, might be worth talking about, but anyone could be President…”

From The Education of Henry Adams
Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1918, pp. 46, 47

When the world’s first nuclear-powered merchant vessel, now under construction at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation, was named Savannah , it was belated vindication for another Savannah , which in 1819 became the first steampropelled ship to cross the Atlantic. The original Savannah was actually a hybrid—half steamship, half sailing packet. In addition to three masts carrying a full set of sails, she had a one-cylinder, go-horsepower steam engine—no bigger than the engine in a small speedboat today, but powerful enough to keep the loo-foot, 320-ton Savannah moving through the water, unassisted by wind or current, at a speed of six knots.

On every warm summer week end on Coney Island a great swarm of people may be found heading for a slow-moving line that leads always to the same entertainment device. Typically, they will wait nearly an hour to enjoy a ride that lasts for perhaps one mildly exhilarating minute, fudged as a thrill, the ride packs about as much punch as a cup of cambric tea. Yet it is a sale bet that at any given moment there are youngsters standing in this line whose lathers and mothers stood here a generation ago, and the odds would not be too high that there are even some whose grandfathers and grandmothers pressed patiently forward toward the same admission gate.