January 2011

EMBATTLED, SCRUTINIZED, POWELL SOLDIERS ON, ran the headline on the front page of The New York Times, as if the writer was astonished to find Colin Powell still at the State Department despite his disagreements with some of the more overweening members of the present administration. Somehow, for all his defeats in various different policy debates, we were informed, the Secretary of State kept “doing his best to justify the administration’s view to often-critical allies around the world.”

No one familiar with Secretary PowelPs character or his record of public service should be surprised that he values the welfare of his country above all. And contrary to what the media like to believe, disagreement and debate at even the highest levels of a functioning democracy are refreshing and, in fact, vital.

Besides being an enormous human tragedy, the sinking of the Titanic is a fascinating scientific and technological study. Visitors to Titanic Science, on display at the Science Museum of Virginia, in Richmond (800-659-1727; www.smv.org ), from October 5 through January 4, can try to steer a simulation of the liner out of harm’s way, feel how cold an iceberg is, pilot a model of one of the robot vehicles that are used to salvage artifacts from the wreck, and see an IMAX film about the sinking. For stay-at-homes, www.titanicscience.com has a wealth of technical information about the Titanic and its brief life, with an activity guide for students and teachers.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT EARLIER THIS year that military archivists had found nineteenth-century plans for a German invasion of America attracted curiously little attention in this country. There are several possible explanations: The idea of Germany’s being a warmonger is hardly news; any date starting with 18 might as well be in biblical times for the average American; and, most likely of all, the announcement coincided with the NBA Finals.

The goal of the planned invasion would not have been to conquer and hold the United States under the German flag. Instead Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to “put America in its place” and exact concessions in return for withdrawing. Of particular concern were Germany’s hopes to expand its empire into the Pacific. With America preparing to annex Hawaii and build a canal through Panama, the Germans feared being crowded out of that region.

NEARLY HALF A CENTURY AGO Illinois schoolchildren donated pennies—$45,000 worth in all—to help purchase a handwritten copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for the state’s official history collection in Springfield. At last Lincoln’s towering call for “a new birth of freedom” would be on view in his old hometown.

In the introduction to her Rodeo Queens and the American Dream (Perseus, 320 pages, $26.00), Joan Burbick writes: “Telling the stories of rodeo queens necessarily raises the history of settlement and conquest, ethnic conflict, racism, blindness and greed.” So does telling the story of anything else if you’re a professor of American studies, which Burbick is at Washington State University. As she describes her experiences traveling the rodeo circuit and interviewing queens past and present, the author makes many incisive observations about Western history and myth. And during breaks in the how-I-wrote-this-book format, she gives some of the queens a welcome chance to speak for themselves.

Eating crow and talking turkey are venerable American metaphors for different forms of speech, in the first case to consume that most unpleasant of all dishes, one’s own words, and in the second to speak plainly. Both appear to come from nineteenthcentury jokes.

With the holidays approaching, we asked Tim Zagat, the creator of the slim, ubiquitous oxblood guidebooks that have colonized America’s dining-out habits, to choose his favorite historic restaurants. Herewith a baker’s dozen, along with excerpts from their write-ups in Zagat’s surveys.

A Table With a Past WHY DO WE SAY THAT? EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF LAVISH LEGACY The German Plan to Invade America ON EXHIBIT

Your historical “Celebrity Boxing” (“History Now,” August/September 2002) was cute, but you got Jefferson Davis all wrong. He would never have sent another to fight his battles. Whether it was against the nation’s “enemies” (Mexico), or in political contests (read about the Mississippi governor’s race with Henry S. Foote, in which debates frequently devolved into fistfights), Ol’ Jeff never ran from a scrap.

While I was living in the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area I remember the old burlesque house shown in the photo on pages 52-53. The bluenoses finally won around 1960. But parts of the building still live. The reclaimed brick was better than new and much sought after for local building. The house next door to ours was built of it, and our neighbors swore that in the still of a summer night they could hear ghostly laughter and applause.