January 2011

Many things can be said about the architectural legacy of Thomas Jefferson, but his influence on the spatial fabric of this country can never be overrated (“Overrated & Underrated,” October 2002). At the University of Virginia, which he founded and designed, he combined elements and materials from across Europe and America into a m»lange that would have horrified his idol, the renaissance architect Palladio. Jefferson did it to provide not a dry re-creation of old Italy but a living classroom for his students to learn about the classical orders and their varied applications.

But Jefferson’s greatest architectural legacy lies in his ideas, not in his buildings. The University of Virginia’s Rotunda is most significant because it served as a library rather than a church, a temple to learning instead of to God. Jefferson’s deviation from the practice of placing a church at the center of university life may have been heavy-handed, but it presaged the radical new direction of American life.

Just we went to press, we learned that Barbara Klaw, a valued friend and colleague, had died at her home in West Cornwall, Connecticut, on December 14. Born in New York City in 1920, the daughter of the historian Carl Van Doren, she married the writer Spencer Klaw and in 1944 published her first book, Camp Follower , about the travails of being a young wife in wartime. Bobbie came to this company in the early 1960s and stayed for more than a quarter-century, working first at Horizon magazine and then at American Heritage . She was good at every editorial duty, especially, perhaps, at winnowing the mustard seed of a fine article out of a 500-page book manuscript and conducting interviews for the magazine —among them memorable ones with Marian Anderson and Lady Bird Johnson. She was unflaggingly good-humored, possessed of a keen and sometimes mischievous wit, and was the object of affectionate respect for everyone who had the privilege of working with her.

In the FDR Library in Hyde Park, among the effects of Anna Roosevelt Halsted, the only daughter of Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, there is a scrap of yellowing paper, about four inches by five. It is covered with a penciled note in the kind of cryptic shorthand most writers I know and I myself use when insight or inspiration strikes. It begins, “ER: her garlic pills (Sis could smell them on her breath).”

BARBARA KLAW, 1920-2002 THE KEY TO ABUNDANCE OVERRARED AND UNDERRATED OVERRARED AND UNDERRATED OVERRARED AND UNDERRATED OVERRARED AND UNDERRATED 50 YEARS OF SPECIAL FORCES

Military historians sometimes write biographies of people they call military intellectuals. Such people are interesting because they can have a vast effect on history, and also because they combine in one career two modes of life normally considered incompatible, the life of thought and the life of action.

In 1990 the Human Genome Project set out to map the basic genetic makeup of our species. Celera Genomics, a private, for-profit corporation, eventually challenged the international nonprofit undertaking represented by the Genome Project and began its own effort. In June 2000, the Genome Project and Celera made a joint public announcement that they had successfully mapped about 90 percent of the genome, with the rest to be completed shortly.

Those involved with the Genome Project reject any connection with the all-encompassing biological determinism that was at the core of hard-line eugenics. While they hope to produce significant therapies for genetically influenced or controlled diseases, they deny any wish to revisit the kind of reductionism that seeks the roots of every human quality or quirk in a single gene or a set of them.

This full-page ad for the works of Lothrop Stoddard appeared in the first issue of Time magazine, March 3, 1923. A lawyer and graduate of Harvard, Stoddard became a full-time writer and lecturer. Like Madison Grant, who wrote the introduction to The Rising Tide of Color , Stoddard was a hard-line eugenicist and racial anthropologist. Along with Grant, as well as Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, he was a member of the Galton Society and the American Genetic Association (originally the American Breeder’s Association.)

Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color is apparently the book that Tom Buchanan of The Great Gatsby has in mind when he praises “‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard.” Although he had the title and author wrong, he wasn’t all that far off. Henry Goddard was, in fact, the author of the famous eugenical study The Kallikak Family .

For information about tickets, vacation packages, and places to stay, log on to Colonial Williamsburg’s Web site, www.history.org , or call 800-HISTORY to ask for a brochure. Colonial Williamsburg is open 365 days a year. Spring and fall are good times to visit; if you go in summer, remember that a swimming pool may seem more important at day’s end than a four-poster bed, especially if you’re traveling with children. (Many of the Historic Area hotels have pools, but make sure.) Plan to spend at least four days; both Jamestown and Yorktown are close by, and Colonial Williamsburg is perhaps best enjoyed in several short bursts rather than one long campaign. Walter Karp wrote a wonderful article about Colonial Williamsburg in our pages in August/September 1981.