January 2011

During the last century and the early part of the present one, elocution books, designed to “per fect the principles of per fect pronunciation,” enshrined in their pages such gems as: I said “a knap-sack strap,” not “a knap-sack’s strap”; His exclamation was, “Chaste stars!” not “Chase tars!”; The old cold scold sold a school coal-scuttle; Bring me some ice, not some mice; and, Did you say a notion or an ocean?

Early America

Reaching back into the early period of American history, recent audio-visual aids supply realistic impressions of those distant years. Library and museum items constitute the chief materials in the 35mm. filmstrip, The Age of Exploration (Museum Extension Service, 10 East 43rd Street, N.Y. 17). Pictures, portraits, maps and prints reveal the widening of geographical knowledge. Major steps in the unfolding of the world horizon are traced in many colorful, contemporary materials. The treatment is impressive but incomplete.

Restoration of an early Nineteenth Century industrial area along the Brandywine Creek has recently been undertaken by the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation of Wilmington, Delaware. On a 168-acre tract where Eleuthère Irénée du Pont founded the Du Pont powder works in 1802, the Foundation is now establishing an industrial museum which will portray the extensive milling operations of flour, paper, textiles, and gunpowder that once flourished along the Brandywine. Also planned are the reconstruction of some of the early Du Pont powder mills.

In co-operation with the University of Delaware the Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation has established two $1,800 fellowships in American history available to candidates for the master of arts degree. Fellows spend half of each week in the research and museum activities of the Foundation and the remainder in study at the University of Delaware.

Dr. Walter J. Heacock, formerly at Colonial Williamsburg, is directing the Foundation’s restoration and research.

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The East India Marine society, organized in Salem in 1799, was made up of shipmasters and super-cargoes (owner’s representatives) who “shall have actually navigated the Seas near the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.” The Society, which had 403 members before the last India captain died, had three purposes. One was to help the needy families of mariners engaged in a hazardous enterprise. Another was to gather a library of information tending to improve navigation. The third was to form a museum of objects found on distant shores.

To each member bound to sea the Society gave a blank journal, to be filled with the log of the voyage, descriptions of channels, ports, reefs and headlands and, in some cases, with sketches or even water colors of coastlines and foreign craft. Salem mariners made the first navigational charts of the waters in and around the Malay archipelago. Their sea journals now stand, row on row, in the Peabody Museum of Salem, a unique record of an era in maritime history.

The Lowering Clouds: the Secret Diary of Harold Ickes . Simon and Schuster. 695 pp.

The first American was, above anything else, a worker in wood. Wood was his only raw material of any consequence, but it was extremely abundant, and the early American knew how to use the ax and the adz, the whipsaw and the drawknife. So he set to work to build the structures that he needed in his daily life—houses, barns, fences, sheds, bridges and whatnot—and in the process of doing it he developed a pleasing and distinctive architecture which gives its own flavor to the American landscape.

This architecture gets intelligent and understanding treatment in Eric Sloane’s new book, American Barns and Covered Bridges , which is one of the most completely delightful evocations of the American past to appear in a long time. Mr. Sloane writes about American wooden structures and the men who built them, and he sketches them as well, and he does both jobs with uncommon skill.

Cities in the Wilderness: 1625-1742 (500 pp. $6.95) and Cities in Revolt: 1743-1776 (480 pp. $7.50), by Carl Bridenbaugh. Alfred A. Knopf.