January 2011

To follow americans’ changing views of war, one need only look at their posters. World War II posters were blunt, direct, and powerfully patriotic, while it goes without saying that a “Vietnam poster” will be antiwar, most likely decorated with flowers, dripping letters, and peace signs. In World War I, however, Americans still held romantic notions about war, and without radio, television, or sound movies, most propaganda had to be disseminated in print. The country’s greatest illustrators—Christy, Flagg, Gibson, Leyendecker—considered it a privilege to donate their services, even as modernism was starting to make inroads on the great age of illustration they embodied. The resulting display of poster art at its zenith can be seen in World War I Posters , by Gary A. Borkan (Schiffer Publishing, 240 pp., $49.95). Approximate prices are included for collectors.

In 1962 a rising young heavyweight contender named Cassius Clay made his movie debut knocking out Anthony Quinn’s “Mountain” Rivera in the film version of Requiem for a Heavyweight . It was the first meeting in what would become a rocky relationship between film and the most famous athlete in history. Forty years later the films with and about Muhammad Ali practically rival the literature (and this doesn’t even include such Ali-inspired characters as Apollo Creed, of Rocky fame).

“O.K.”

A good case can be made for O.K. as the great American word. It is understood nearly everywhere, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It also is a wonderfully mutable term. Variants include okay, okey-dokey, okley-dokley (popularized on “The Simpsons”), and the astronautical A-O.K. (introduced to the world by Alan B. Shepard when his Mercury capsule splashed down in the Atlantic in 1961). Yet its origin was for many years a matter of wild speculation, with guesses reflecting different episodes in American history.

25 YEARS AGO

April 18, 1977 President Jimmy Carter calls on Americans to respond with the “moral equivalent of war” to the threat of dwindling energy supplies.

May 29, 1977 Janet Guthrie becomes the first woman to race in the Indianapolis 500.

50 YEARS AGO

April 28, 1952 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower resigns as supreme commander of NATO. By the end of the year, he will be President-elect.

May 26, 1952 The U.S., Britain, and France formally end their occupation of West Germany.

75 YEARS AGO

April 1927 Heavy spring rains cause massive flooding in the Mississippi Valley. Hundreds of people are drowned, and 600,000 residents are cut off from their homes for weeks.

In April of 1902, Owen Wister’s Western novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains was published. It was an immediate hit, selling 50,000 copies within four months and 100,000 within a year. It remained in print for decades. Wister, a lifelong Easterner and the scion of an old Philadelphia family, never wrote another Western. But the success of his novel inspired hundreds of imitators and almost single-handedly established the genre as a mainstay of American entertainment.

Others had written Western fiction before, mostly lurid dime novels and short stories. Wister, an 1882 Harvard graduate, penned a few of the latter himself after spending several months in Wyoming in 1885 to recuperate from a nervous breakdown. Not until The Virginian, however, was the inherent potential for the drama of Western frontier life exploited with the inventiveness and literary skill of a talented writer.

In 1967, I was working as a reporter for the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville, Mississippi, covering civil rights, the courts, and municipal affairs. On April 9, Robert F. Kennedy, the junior senator from New York, and the other members of the Senate Labor Subcommittee investigating poverty and hunger in America flew to Jackson, the capital. That night, Kennedy and his staff (including Peter Edelman and Marian Wright, who later married) met with Mississippi’s liberal Democratic faithful at a dinner. Among the guests were Charles Evers, the brother of the murdered Medgar Evers, and my boss, Hodding Carter III, the editor and associate publisher of the Democrat-Times.

This is our 16th annual travel issue. When we started, in 1987, we were motivated partly by knowing that no other magazine was doing this:  tying an American passion for travel to an equally intense interest in the nation’s history. Years later, I suspect we still own this franchise and, at a time when those interests are even more closely entwined. In the months after September 11, the travel industry took a major hit, but America’s sense of self, fed by the wells of its past, has grown only stronger. And as our zeal for travel comes back to life, it will be fueled by our need to better understand our history.

“We knew we didn’t want to travel too far from home this year, and then we realized there was a lot we had never seen in our own state,” a Mississippi native told a New York Times reporter in November. “With everything going on, we just figured it was time to learn where we came from.”