January 2011

Contact the Berkshire Visitor’s Bureau (800-2375747) or the Stockbridge Chamber of Commerce (413-298-5200; www.stockbridgechamber.org ) for a calendar of events and phone numbers for local inns. The Red Lion Inn (413-298-5545), right in town, is decorated for Christmas beginning December 1, and a pianist and a harpist play carols in the lobby. For something quieter, call the Egremont Inn (413-528-2111) in South Egremont or the Williamsville Inn (413-274-6118) in West Stockbridge.

For lunch, head to Theresa’s Café on Main Street, whose Tshirts remind patrons that it was “formerly Alice’s Restaurant,” celebrated by ArIo Guthrie in his 1967 ballad, when Stockbridge had “three stop signs, two police officers, one police car” and a dump that closed on Thanksgiving.

On the first Sunday in December, the village of Stockbridge in western Massachusetts decks itself out in Christmas lights and does its best to look the way it did in 1967. 1967? Why not 1773, when the Red Lion Inn began serving food and drink to travelers on the road from Boston to Albany? Or 1866, when the town cheered native son Cyrus Field’s successful laying of the transatlantic cable? Stockbridge celebrates 1967 because that’s the year Norman Rockwell painted Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas for McCall’s.

History is a self-correcting process. Every historian lives amid the culture of his or her own age and to a greater or lesser extent reflects that culture and its interests and assumptions. Every historian also has prejudices, personal interests, and blind spots. But over time one historian’s failings are matched by another’s strengths, so that a balanced, rounded portrait of an age and the people who lived in it can emerge.

As he counts down the last days of his second term, we can be assured that President Clinton is now focusing his thoughts exclusively on the one subject that has preoccupied him since he first took the oath of office: his place in history. Apparently, even back in his first term, Clinton asked his Faustian media adviser Dick Morris, “Where do I fit in?”

The story has it that Morris, displaying the same chutzpah that keeps him politically alive today, told the president, “Borderline third tier.”

As he counts down the last days of his second term, we can be assured that President Clinton is now focusing his thoughts exclusively on the one subject that has preoccupied him since he first took the oath of office: his place in history. Apparently, even back in his first term, Clinton asked his Faustian media adviser Dick Morris, “Where do I fit in?”

www.ushistory.org

The Congress of Websites, run by the Independence Hall Association, focuses, despite its grand name, only on colonial-era Philadelphia, but its lively graphics, impeccable research, and games pages will appeal to anyone interested in history. Viewers can embark on a virtual marching tour of the Revolution, learn Liberty Bell trivia, read the Mayflower Compact and the Articles of Confederation, and visit “The Electric Franklin,” a section with biographies, quotes, video, and photos related to America’s premier Renaissance man. Kids can learn how to re-create some of his safer experiments.

history.rutgers.edu

The Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War Il presents 133 interviews, throwing in the occasional Red Cross woman or OSS member among the soldiers.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate

As the last day of 2000 approaches, Americans will be reminded increasingly often that not just a year but also a century and a millennium are coming to an end. If history is any guide, we can expect a torrent of parties, lists, discussions, and reflections on the eve and ensuing dawn of a new era. To put it all in perspective, “History Now” takes a look back at the last time America celebrated the end of a century—in 1999:

Doomsayers predicted widespread computer failures, transportation tie-ups, power outages, and network crashes (although this last prediction, in 1999, was about as risky as forecasting rain in Seattle).

Deceptively large holiday sales by socalled dot-corns unloading merchandise at huge discounts gave rise to false hopes that a bunch of 23-year-olds would reorder American society by selling mail-order goods via computer.

In the disposable gallery of commercial art, whose canvases are cake-mix boxes and soda cans, masterpieces are fleeting, constantly redesigned in a quest to keep up with modernity. In a reversal of what happens in real life, the passage of time has made the Old Dutch Cleanser woman grow svelter, Betty Crocker less dowdy, and Aunt Jemima less mammyish. Unlike all these, Psyche, the White Rock girl, has never had the slightest reason to be embarrassed by her old yearbook pictures. That’s why she has had only one major overhaul, in 1947, since her 1894 debut.

DUCK AND COVER

Readers who enjoyed our Cold War coverage in the September issue and wish to return to those stirring days can do so through the offices of Something Weird Video , a Seattle outfit that preserves immense amounts of motion-picture ephemera, from 1940s B movies to feature films made in pornography’s 1970s “golden age.” The company is offering three cassettes of Cold War-era instructional films, among them: Survival Under Atomic Attack, Duck and Cover (which begins with an animated turtle using its shell to protect itself from a dynamite-wielding monkey), Radiological Decontamination of Ships , and You Can Beat the A-bomb (if you should get radiation poisoning, “lie down and rest”). Something Weird Video, P.O. Box 33664, Seattle, WA 98133; www.somethingweird.com .

THE MEN WHO INVENTED AMERICA

Among the essays that make up the recently published Life: Our Century of Change (edited by Richard B. Stolley, with Tony Chiu, Bulfinch Press, $60.00)—John Leonard on entertainment, Barbara Ehrenreich on shopping, Richard Rodriguez on race—is one on engineering, in which the computer scientist and critic David Gelernter has the audacity to nominate his choice for the Object of the Century: