December 1, 1977 The Food and Drug Administration suggests warning labels be put on pre-digested liquid protein, a diet aid every bit as appetizing as it sounds, which has been held responsible for 31 deaths in the previous five months. 50 YEARS AGO November 4, 1952 Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected President with 442 electoral votes to Adlai Stevenson’s 89. The Republicans also win control of both houses of Congress. 75 YEARS AGO November 12, 1927 The Holland Tunnel opens beneath the Hudson River, connecting Jersey City and New York City. It is the nation’s first underwater automobile tunnel. December 28, 1927 Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg proposes an international agreement, later called the Kellogg-Briand Pact, to outlaw war. It will prove difficult to enforce. 100 YEARS AGO
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January 2011
ON NOVEMBER 1, 1952, ON the island of Elugelab in Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission detonated the world’s first thermonuclear explosion. Within seconds of ignition, there appeared a fireball three miles across, which slowly turned into a hundred-mile canopy of smoke. Elugelab was obliterated, replaced by a huge crater in the ocean floor.
Even to jaded weapons designers, this was something new. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 had killed 80,000 people, disfigured tens of thousands more, and destroyed untold amounts of property. This device was 1,000 times as powerful. One scientist who witnessed the test recalled it as being “so huge, so brutal—as if things had gone too far.”
History is a tangled web of stories, opinions, and mysteries. True facts are hidden by the mess found in the web. We are spiders, climbing around the web, searching for facts so that we may make our own opinions, yet only finding them drowning among everything else that has gotten tangled inside. Because of this, history used to be boring for me. The opinions that I found were not appealing to me and drew me away from it. Two things happened this year that completely changed my view of history. The first was September 11. The second was my first research paper.
Three years ago American Heritage inaugurated an annual contest, established in partnership with the textbook publisher Prentice Hall, in which students wrote essays on the theme WHAT HISTORY MEANS TO ME. This year, more than 5,000 essays came in to the Prentice Hall offices, where they were reviewed by the company’s social studies division. The finalists were sent on to American Heritage , where the editors chose two Grand Prize winners, one from middle school, one from high school. Their work appears in full on the following pages. We start out, however, with a brief anthology of excerpts from this year’s Honorable Mention winners. MIDDLE SCHOOLS Colin Brookes
Andrew Mellon Middle School, Mt. Lebanon, PA Sponsoring teacher: Catharine Shenefelt “History itself is a vast green land, painted together by golden deeds and heroic actions.”
EIGHT MONTHS BEFORE WORLD WAR II began , I was sent—a young recruit whose most recent equestrian experience had been as a five-year-old in an amusement park—to Fort Myer, Virginia, one of the country’s last cavalry posts. After showing myself to be a woefully inept horseman, I was selected as a member of the guard. I would be carrying an enormous revolver, a .45, that I had never aimed or fired, but which, I was told, could blow a man’s head apart. The post I was given to patrol circled the houses of the highest brass, including that in which General Marshall, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, and his wife lived. At about five o’clock on a lovely June afternoon I started out, walking carefully so as not to have my fearsome weapon detonate itself by banging against my hip.
I walked around the homes of the major and lieutenant generals. Very good; no saboteurs at cellar entrances, no spies signaling raiders in wait behind the nearby Arlington Cemetery wall. Finally I arrived at the back lawn of the Chief of Staff, checked my necktie, adjusted my cap, and walked through the gate.
THIS STORY TAKES PLACE IN the sandhills of Nebraska on April 20, 1920. I have just turned eight, and my sister, Bertie, is six years old. We are sitting on the top rail of our eight-foot-high wooden corral fence. It is a beautiful early-spring morning, and we are watching our parents riding east along a three-strand barbed-wire fence. They are on horseback and are on their way to vote. Mama will be 38 in three days, and she is voting for the first time in her life. Mama is dressed in her best riding habit and is riding a gentle but high-spirited sorrel-colored horse named Jeff. Mama always sat so straight and proud. We thought she was beautiful. Dad is dressed as usual, only he is wearing his good Stetson hat. I’m sure he shined his boots too. He always shined his boots before he left the ranch.
THIS IS A VERY INTERESTING PLACE TO WORK. TWO days after the September attacks, a group of us were standing in the hallway, listening while one of the editors explained, at length and with considerable passion, her view that President Bush could have behaved in a more statesmanlike manner during the hours after the assault. We were just outside the office of another editor, a notably quiet and hardworking fellow who, a few minutes into the diatribe, slammed shut his door with such violence that the in-boxes on the filing cabinets jumped and rattled.