January 2011

Allatoona Pass, Georgia

Atlanta’s sprawl threatens to engulf the scene of a fight in October 1864 for one of Gen. William T. Sherman’s supply lines.

Mansfield, Louisiana

The Red River Campaign battleground owes its precarious status to adjacent lignite mining and residential development.

Brice’s Cross Roads, Mississippi

An influx of traffic surrounding the location of a humiliating 1864 Union defeat may squeeze it off the map.

Raymond, Mississippi

Grant’s victory here in May 1863 encouraged him to move on to Jackson. Today, that city’s development is encroaching on the wooded valley.

Fort Fisher, North Carolina

There were 35 men from Bedford, Viriginia, in company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division—one of the first two assault regiments on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. By the end of the day, 19 of them were dead and 2 more had mortal wounds. Bedford, with a 1944 population of 3,200, suffered the highest per capita death rate of any American community during the Normandy invasion, making it an apt site for a monument to teh Allied Forces on D-Day. The National D-Day Memorial, punctuated by the 44-foot, 6-inch Overlord Arch, ws dedicated on June 6. In the surrounding nine acres, a traditional English garden pays homage to the country where the Allies planned the invasion, and a 20-foot sculpture depicts soldiers struggling up Omaha’ seawall. A 2,000-seat amphitheater and a three-story education center are scheduled for completion in 2004. For more information, call 800-351-DDAY or visit www.dday.org .

Book: Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures by Robin Jaffee Frank (Yale University, 2000, $35.00). Galleries: The Gibbes Museum of Art (135 Meeting Street, Charleston, SC 29401) has a collection of 500 miniatures. The Huntington Library (1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108) features two cases of superb miniatures. Internet search terms: Try miniature portraits and miniature paintings . To find the out-of-print books vital to the study of the form, use the plural, miniatures .

The word miniature comes from a Latin word, but not the one for “little"; it comes from the word for “red lead ink.” In the Middle Ages, a miniator was a person who drew fine-grained pictures, often with an overflow of scarlet, in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. After the printing press arrived, miniators survived only by switching to something entirely new: painting “miniature” portraits for nobles. The typical size was an oval about three inches high, and from it came the English usage of the word.

Miniatures reflect a particular style, as much as any genre in painting can, in that razor-sharp clarity was the standard from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. The heyday of the miniature was from 1650 to 1860. After that, people didn’t want to sit still for four or five days letting a miniaturist see behind their eyes, not when they could stand still for a few moments with a photographer.

FOR EVERYDAY ENJOYMENT

Many important things tend to get overlooked in New York City, including its historic places. The nation’s first President was inaugurated there, and the general who saved the Union is entombed there, yet at the sites of both these events, you will usually find more people outside buying hot dogs than inside experiencing history. Even more neglected than Federal Hall and Grant’s Tomb is the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, a National Historic Landmark that celebrated its one hundredth birthday this spring.

The Original Hall of Fame THE BUYABLE PAST FURTHER RESEARCH REMEMBER D-DAY The 10 Most Endangered Battlefields SCREENINGS EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF JOINTS OUT OF TIME JACKIE’S FAVORITE THINGS ON EXHIBIT

The 1960s were the Go-go years, when senior managers reached for rapid growth as never before. IBM found its opportunity in computers. For some, however, lasting prosperity proved elusive, and Pan Am provided a cautionary tale.

The airline had flourished for decades by winning favor with Washington. It had gotten its start during the 1920s as an exercise in subsidy. Its founder, Juan Trippe, won its status as the only American carrier authorized to carry mail to Cuba, and he swiftly parlayed this federal privilege into an extensive network of routes serving Latin America. In 1935 his big Clipper “flying boats” bridged the Pacific, and, a few years later, the Atlantic. They stayed aloft throughout the war, and afterward Trippe proceeded to build Pan Am into the world’s largest airline. In October 1955 he stunned the aviation world with a $296 million order for Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 jetliners. They were expensive, but his competitors knew that they’d have to follow suit. And so the commercial jet age was born.

No small part of the new prosperity was generated by new technology. Although World War II was the greatest human disaster of the twentieth century, it was not an entirely unalloyed one. The enormous pressure of total war always accelerates technological development, and what emerges often turns out to have major civilian applications. The development of radar and of very large airframes for bombers made the modern airtravel industry possible years before it would otherwise have grown up.

The jet engine, developed too late to be important in the war, revolutionized air travel a decade later (in the process killing both the ocean liner and the longdistance passenger train). Not only did air travel become one of the driving forces of the postwar American economy, but aircraft construction became a major enterprise and a vital part of America’s exports. American planes, especially those manufactured by the Boeing Corporation, continue to dominate this extremely capital-intensive industry.