January 2011

Clio, the muse of history, can be quite fickle in bestowing her favors. Consider Aldous Huxley. It seems that nearly everyone who has ever been 14 years old has read his most famous novel, Brave New World. It has been in print for 70 years, along with dozens of his other novels.

And yet, although he was world-famous, hardly anyone noticed when Aldous Huxley died. The reason is simple enough: He died on November 22, 1963, and another death that day—a far more violent, tragic, and unexpected one—seized the attention of the world.

A similar fate befell the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. In 1871, it suffered one of the great natural calamities in American history, but hardly anyone outside Wisconsin even noticed.

The tragedy was a forest fire, a type of calamity much in the news these days. Last year, forest fires consumed more than 7,000,000 acres in the United States. That’s over 11,000 square miles, about equal to New Jersey and Delaware combined.

It’s not an easy thing to be a politician. One never knows when the media will suddenly pick up an offhand remark—the same sort of thing that one has said for years, really—and suddenly focus withering, national attention on it. No wonder most politicians prefer history to be an infinitely malleable subject, a record that they could rewrite at will.

Such was the case for Trent Lott, who not long ago lost his Senate majority leadership over remarks he made at a birthday party for South Carolina’s centenarian senator, J. Strom Thurmond. It was widely reported that Senator Lott, in recalling Thurmond’s 1948 run for the presidency as the candidate of the States’ Rights or “Dixiecrat” party, remarked upon how Lott’s own Mississippi was one of the few states to vote for Thurmond in that contentious election and how, if the rest of the United States had followed suit, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”

No American writer influenced so much with so little work as Raymond Chandler. His major contribution consists of a handful of novels and story collections (all reprinted last summer by Vintage Crime and available in two handsome volumes from the Library of America) and five film scripts, including Double Indemnity (1944), adapted by Chandler and the director Billy Wilder from James M. Cain’s novel; The Blue Dahlia (1946), his only purely original writing directly for the screen; and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), adapted from the novel by Patricia Highsmith. Chandler, more than anyone else, is responsible for the look and feel of an American style, film noir, which continues to enthrall audiences, writers, and moviemakers.

It was the mob’s biggest mistake: a full-scale powwow in a podunk hideaway that blew the cover off their secret society. The 1957 fiasco held the racketeers up to ridicule and touched off a long-term decline in the power of organized crime. It also turned Apalachin, New York, the site of the sit-down, into such a landmark on the crime map that eager crowds turned out last August when the house where the meeting was held, and the belongings of the host, went under the auctioneer’s gavel. So legendary is the Apalachin “convention” that the card table on which some of the nation’s top hoodlums may or may not have played pinochle drew a bid of $18,100.

In 1957 Joseph Barbara was a successful immigrant living near Binghamton. His hilltop estate boasted seven bedrooms and two horse barns. He also was “connected”: He had friends in what would come to be known as La Cosa Nostra. When those friends needed an out-of-the-way spot to get together, Joe’s house seemed perfect. The wiseguys figured the locals were more concerned with roosters than with rackets.

Celtic cavalry fought against Caesar’s invasion of the British Isles in 55 B.C., and cavalry helped carry the day for William the Conqueror at Hastings in 1066. But those are recent events in light of the earliest artifact to be shown at All the Queen’s Horses: The Role of the Horse in British History at the Kentucky Horse Park’s International Museum of the Horse, in Lexington, April 26 through August 24. On display will be the oldest example of human art ever found in Britain: a piece of bone incised with a beautifully drawn profile of a horse’s head—from 10,000 B.C.

Writers of books about the history of Indians face many obstacles in making their work readable. To do the job properly, you have to mention the Laurentide ice sheet, radiocarbon dating, mitochondrial DNA, Spider Grandmother, and Star Woman, as well as scores of indigenous words like sipapuni —and that’s just in the first chapter. This is the challenge that Jake Page bravely takes on with In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians (Free Press, $30, 480 pages). Don’t let the title fool you; Page’s book is clear-eyed and refreshingly nonpreachy, and he does not assume that his readers have acquired their views about Indians from 1950s Westerns. This lack of handwringing makes his book all the more affecting when he reaches the post-Columbian era and coolly describes the European settlers’ many cruelties.

When Walter Lord died Last May, the newspapers saluted his huge influence as a historian: all those books that vividly reconstructed events like the fall of the Alamo (A Time to Stand), the bombing of Pearl Harbor (Day of Infamy), and the sinking of the Titanic (A Night to Remember). But history wasn’t his first love.

As a young boy in Baltimore in the late 1920s, Walter began buying Bing Crosby’s records, and forever after he was hooked on American popular song. His New York apartment was cluttered with sheet music and with shelves of 78-rpm records of show tunes, movie songs, popular standards, and big-band numbers. He knew them all; I often played for him and other addicts who wanted to sing them around a piano.