January 2011

Book: The Bakelite Book , by Corinne Davidov and Ginny Redington Dawes (Abbeville Press, 1988). Web site: http://costumejewels.about.com/hobbies/costumejewels/library/blbake/eqa.htm . Auction search terms: Bakelite; plastic jewelry; Catalin (a colorful commercial plastic). Dealer: Terry Rogers & Melody, 1050 Second Avenue, #30, New York, NY 10022 (212-758-3167).

This fall, American Heritage invites you to travel with editor Richard Snow on a seven-day exploration of the sites where the outcome of the Civil War was determined. Visit the fields where Lee’s famous Special Order 191 was found by a Union soldier, tour Gettysburg, Harpers Ferry, and the Antietam battlefield, and walk in the footsteps of Confederates from Spangler’s Woods to the trees at the Angle. For more information, see the advertisement on page 80 or call 800-556-7896.

For information on the Delta Queen’s cruises along the Gulf lntracoastal Waterway, call 800-543-1949 or visit www.deltaqueen.com . Another cruise line, RiverBarge Excursions, which bills its Explorer as “the first and only hotel barge on America’s waterways,” also follows that route. Unlike its counterparts that ply European rivers and canals, it uses three vessels at once. One, holding spacious accommodations, is tied to another used for meals and socializing, and a small but powerful towboat moves the whole operation along (888-282-1945; www.riverbarge.com ).

Among the variety of American travelers, those who visit a place ostensibly lacking any feature other than mere existence aren’t numerous, although by educating ourselves as peregrinators, we may be increasing that number. Undoubtedly, the growing hordes crowding national and theme parks and any piece of sand leading to waves anywhere in the country encourage some of us to find places more obscure than a travel agent might suggest. Like George Mallory and his Himalayan mountain, this other kind of traveler, resolutely curious, goes to a somewhere simply because it’s there. If the possibility of discovering a place for all humankind hardly exists any longer, that joy will always remain for personal discovery. A mundane place, if we’ve never seen it before, can astonish us in a way that oftenpictured Yellowstone or Epcot cannot.

Daniel Akst’s article “The Forgotten Plague” (December) took me back to my days as a graduate student at the University of Georgia in the 1960s. I needed a dissertation topic, and my major professor had been looking for someone to work in medical history. I seemed a likely prospect. Because I was studying social history, I decided to investigate an endemic rather than an epidemic disease in the hope that it would act as a mirror to the culture. Since I lived in the South and had little money for travel, I narrowed the choices to two: hookworm or pellagra. I did not think I could bear to spend months reading and writing about latrines and privies, so by default, I opted for pellagra.

The February/March 2001 “Time Machine” refers to the silver three-cent piece as “perhaps the most useless American coin ever.” Although there have been a number of useless denominations—the three-dollar piece, the two-cent piece, the half-cent piece, and especially the twenty-cent piece—the silver three-cent piece and successor nickel three-cent piece are not among them.

The first half-century of U.S. coinage was largely a failure; U.S. gold and silver coins were undervalued and flowed out of the country to be melted almost as soon as they were minted. This left Americans with a nondescript assortment of wildcat bank notes and underweight foreign coins. The silver three-cent piece was introduced in 1851, after the postage rate had been decreased to three cents. It was the first subsidiary coin, worth only about two and a half cents as silver bullion, and thus didn’t suffer the fate of other silver coins. The experiment was successful enough that two years later the other silver coins were reduced in weight to become subsidiary coins.