In November 1998, the scientific journal Nature ran a headline that would have seemed more at home in The National Enquirer: JEFFERSON FATHERED SLAVE’S LAST CHILD. The article was based on a study of DNA tests on descendants of Sally Hemings, a slave owned by Thomas Jefferson. It received widespread coverage in newspapers and magazines and on radio and television. Two months later, the geneticist Eugene Foster, who had led the original study, clarified his findings: He had not proved that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally’s son Eston Hemings, merely that some undetermined Jefferson male was. The retraction received much less notice.
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January 2011
If Thomas Jefferson were around to— day, he would feel right at home standing in his vineyard on Monticello’s southern slope. He’d be surrounded by an exact recreation of the vines and split-rail trellises he installed there in 1807. The expansive view across the Blue Ridge Mountains from the birthplace of American wine still evokes the landscapes of Bordeaux and Tuscany that inspired him, and although he never quite succeeded in making great wine at Monticello, he would doubtless be pleased to find that a skilled European vintner is now producing the splendid Monticello Sangiovese there. Like Filippo Mazzei, Jefferson’s own winemaker, the creator of Monticello Sangiovese, Gabriel Rausse, is Italian. Rausse, who is also Monticello’s assistant director of grounds and gardens, began planting in 1995, using grapes and early winemaking techniques, such as crushing and pressing in wood, that Jefferson would instantly recognize.
In The Penguin Dictionary of American Folklore , edited by Alan Axelrod and Harry Oster (Penguin, 527 pages, $18.00 [paperback]), in keeping with the protean nature of the field, one can read about everything from genuine folk customs (some African-Americans believe “a dream of paring one’s nails portends disappointment”) to justly forgotten popular fads (the “little moron” jokes of the 1930s). There are also a great many entries on folklore writers and scholars, on musicians and artists whose work includes folk elements, and even on such figures as Babe Ruth and Gen. George S. Patton, who seem to have been included because stories are often told about them.
L. Douglas Keeney was at the National Archives researching his book Air War Europe when he stumbled across a photograph of a soldier on the front lines with a puppy. This led him to look for more like it, and he eventually came up with hundreds (plus a few of mascot birds, monkeys, and cats). Many of them are nearly irresistible, including one of a ninepound boxer named Max who jumped from a plane five times to qualify as a full-fledged paratrooper with the 505th Parachute Infantry. Keeney has gathered all the photographs he found in Buddies: Men, Dogs, and World War II (MBI Publishing, 156 pages, $24.95).
Book Carole Bess White and L. M. White, Collector’s Guide to Lunchboxes (Collector Books, 2000). Web site
Everyone remembers what lunchbox they carried in grade school, according to my cousin, who had a Barbie box. The choice was one of the only truly crucial decisions left up to a child in the 1950s and 1960s. That’s probably why lunchbox salespeople called their store displays “whine racks.”
The first of the decorated lunchboxes was introduced in 1950. It was a red or blue box with a decal depicting Hopalong Cassidy on the side. It cost $2.39, which would have bought a lot of paper bags in those days, but within a year or two, lunch kits were an industry, with commissioned artwork for both the box and the thermos bottle inside. TV and movie stars, cartoon characters, dolls and toys, rock bands and folk heroes: More than 450 subjects ended up on the boxes between 1950 and 1980. The most ephemeral captured the rise of such fads as UFOs, surfing, and Flower Power.
Stephen E. Ambrose’s article on the B-24S (September) was a welcome reminder of how the best of mankind and the fruits of his labor came together at a critical hour in human history to alter destiny. The role these airplanes and the men who flew them played cannot be overstated. Inevitably, there are criticisms in hindsight about how this particular weapon was applied. In the end, however, all we can do is recall the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, a decade and a half after V-E Day, addressed himself to critics who claimed the war might have been concluded earlier if he had tried different tactics. “The only answer I can give you,” he said, “is, we won.”
I enjoyed the article on Halloween (October) very much, especially because it has cleared up a question that has bothered me for years. As a child in Detroit, I went door to door with my siblings and friends, wailing in a pitiful voice, “Help the poor!” Years later, when my children began the annual Halloween trek about the neighborhood (now in Oklahoma), they were astounded when I told them what we had said. They said I had to be wrong, and all my friends claimed they’d never heard of such a thing. Now I know it must have been a vestige of the old Irish-immigrant custom.
In “Elsenhower the Dove” (September), Douglas Brinkley writes of “the unnecessary cost of lives in the Korean War” and mentions Americans having been killed “in a useless conflict.” I suspect that these are Brinkley’s sentiments and not Ike’s. The lives lost in Korea were not squandered; they had helped defend South Korea against naked aggression by North Korea. Any visitor to South Korea would argue that the conflict was anything but useless.