Congratulations to Stephen King on his review of the Beatles as the most overrated rock band. It is the scariest thing he has ever written.
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January 2011
There Stephen King goes again, pulling our chain, saying that the Beatles are the most overrated rock band—when everyone knows it’s The Doors.
Stephen King is probably correct in naming Creedence Clearwater Revival the most underrated rock band (May/June). Characterizing all but three Beatles songs as “ballads, music-hall spoofs, or jumped-up skiffle tunes,” however, is one of the author’s most frightening efforts.
On July 1, 1863, Robert E. Lee and his seventy-five-thousand-man army of northern Virginia collided at Gettysburg with the ninety-three thousand troops of the Army of the Potomac led by George Meade, whom Lincoln had placed in command just three days before. The three-day fight resulted in fifty-one thousand casualties, and the town’s twenty-four hundred residents were left with ten times their number in dead and wounded to care for.
Only four known photographs of Gettysburg existed before July 1863. Within days of the battle a small army of photographers descended, and the place became one of the most photographed in the world. The shot above depicts the aftermath of battle in the area of boulders known as Devil’s Den, where the fighting was so close and fierce that soldiers’ clothes caught fire from the blaze of enemy rifles. The image was long attributed to either Mathew Brady or his assistant, Alexander Gardner, and in an 1865 article The Atlantic Monthly said it had been taken one day after the battle.
During the summer of 1774 colonists throughout America reacted with rage and disgust to the Intolerable Acts recently passed by Parliament. In mid-May word had arrived of the first of these, the Boston Port Act, which shut down waterborne commerce into and out of Boston until that city paid reparations for the Boston Tea Party. The British government had expected Boston’s defiance to crumble as the other colonies abandoned it. Instead June 1, the day the act went into effect, was observed as a day of mourning, fasting, and prayer up and down the coast. Communities sent supplies to help feed their Boston brethren; delegates were chosen for the Continental Congress, set to meet in September; and public assemblies passed resolutions by the bushel.
Settlers on the Great Plains needed all the resiliency they could muster in the summer of 1874. Even as drought made prospects for the harvest uncertain, a financial panic was causing food prices to plummet. While serious, these troubles were not an immediate threat to survival; homesteaders could raise enough to feed themselves and hope for better luck the following year. Then the grasshoppers came.
Grasshoppers, also known as locusts, had been descending on the Plains sporadically ever since cultivation began, and presumably long before. By devastating crops in scattered areas, they had made themselves a nuisance, albeit a severe one. The 1874 infestation, however, was no nuisance but a plague of biblical proportions.
July 1874 saw the unveiling of three American technological advances that would have great importance in years to come. On July 4 the Eads Bridge in St. Louis was ceremonially inaugurated. The bridge consisted of three arches, each with a span of more than 500 feet, at a time when anything longer than 350 feet was thought to be unsafe. The controversial design worked because the arches were made of steel, which had just recently, with the introduction of the Bessemer process in the 186Os, become cheap enough to use in large quantities. Moreover, to anchor the bridge in the Mississippi’s muddy bottom, the designer, James Buchanan Eads, had sunk its piers all the way down to bedrock, 100 feet or more below the river’s swirling surface. As impressive as this accomplishment was, it had taken a heavy toll in lives.