January 2011

In London, during the spring of 1774, Parliament enacted four punitive laws in response to December’s Boston Tea Party. In the wake of that shocking riot, most Britons saw the Bostonians as spoiled children, and the government’s program was meant to give them the spanking they deserved. After all, hadn’t Britain established the colonies, nurtured them from birth, and sustained them during their long era of unprofitability? Had they not clung to the skirts of the mother country during the recent French and Indian War? Yet ever since, they had balked at paying their share of the expenses.

Moreover, the colonists were protected by the world’s mightiest navy and benefited from Britain’s centuries of experience in statecraft. Despite all this, they talked of autonomy, even independence. And now they had not merely protested, not merely smuggled, not merely boycotted, but wantonly destroyed £9,000 worth of private property. The time had come for Britain to put its foot down.

On May 15, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, students from Harvard and McGill Universities battled in America’s first game of intercollegiate football. Some readers may be surprised at the preceding sentence: Didn’t Rutgers and Princeton play as far back as 1869? Traditionally, it is true, the two New Jersey schools have been awarded priority in college football. But it would be more accurate to call their 1869 match America’s first game of college soccer. Under the rules in force for that contest, carrying and passing were not allowed (although the ball could be batted with the hands), so it was almost entirely a kicking game.

I was interested by Roger J. Spiller’s “War in the Dark” (February/March) because as the son of a U.S. Army veteran of the Pacific theater, I occasionally watched war movies and television shows (usually “Combat”) with him while growing up in the 1960s. When asked how they compared with his experiences, he always dismissed them as hokum.

So I was very interested in his reactions to Saving Private Ryan . He took my mom and my son (his fifteen-year-old grandson) to see it. My wife and I were somewhat worried that my dad would be disturbed by the movie; he found a few parts moving (the hand-to-hand in the house) but thought it mostly hokum. He said, for instance, that no officer would invite a sniper’s bullet by wearing his bars openly. Moreover, he opined that the Tom Hanks officer character would carry a carbine, not a submachine gun. Even after all these years, it is amazing what a dogface remembers.

MARK HELPRIN’S “THE LESSON OF THE Century” (“Summing Up,” February/ March) is an excellent reminder that when men believe that they can act as gods in reshaping society—as both the fascists and communists did—the result is terror and bloodshed. He might also have stated that when men believe that they are acting in the name of God, the outcome is often equally bloody. Consider the Crusades and the Inquisition, which justified killing infidels and nonbelievers in the name of God. Unfortunately the examples are not limited to the distant past. The Taliban in Afghanistan, the fundamentalist regime in Iran, and the Hamas terrorist group share a belief that repression and killing are mandated by their God. Even closer to home, some white militia groups and fundamentalist Christians are quite prepared to impose their vision of heaven on earth in the name of their conceptions of God and to use violent means to achieve their goals.

Call the Virginia Tourism Corporation at 1-800-932-5827 with general queries, or turn to its Web site: www.virginia.org . Order the comprehensive pamphlet Virginia Civil War Trails by calling 1-888-CIVIL WAR. You can also use a toll-free “fax back” number, 1-800282-5682, to obtain a faxed list of current and forthcoming events pertaining to the Civil War. The visitors’ centers at communities along the route have helpful brochures; the one for Hopewell describes a walking tour of the old town of City Point. At Petersburg, a National Battlefield, be sure to pick up Christopher M. Calkins’s book From Petersburg to Appomattox .

IN HIS DECEMBER STORY “WHO WAS Wyatt Earp?,” Alien Barra paints an excellent portrait not just of Earp but of 1870s- and 1880s-era law enforcement—complete with the warts, as it were. As a kid growing up in the sixties, I always suspected that Guy Madison’s Wild Bill Hickok and Hugh O’Brian’s Wyatt Earp were a little far-fetched. (The one I felt sorry for, though, was James Arness’s Matt Dillon. Kansas Territory always seemed mighty big to me for one U.S. marshal to have to patrol all by himself.)

On a more serious note, a close friend of mine who had some law-enforcement experience in New Mexico in the 1960s would have agreed with Mr. Barra that at least 70 percent of the job is knowing when to bend the barrel of your pistol over some drunk’s noggin, haul him to jail, and let him sleep it off, as opposed to simply shooting him (or, nowadays, her) dead.

AS A PHYSICIAN I WAS VERY INTERESTED in Edward Shorter’s September 1998 article “How Prozac Slew Freud.” But as a pediatrician I was disappointed in his parting shots at the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Yet it’s Shorter’s observation that ADHD “is virtually unknown elsewhere” that your magazine’s readers might enjoy pondering. We now know that this genetic disorder is not just a disease of children but can continue into adulthood as well. ADHD mostly involves a triad of impulsivity, distractibility, and hyperactivity, but it can also hamper social skills and quicken a sense of boredom. Might this be the reason the United States consumes 90 percent of the world’s Ritalin? Could it be that restless, easily bored adults with hampered social skills (and thus less restricting social commitments) might have tired of the Old World and impulsively emigrated to the New? And if enough affected adults intermixed in this new breeding ground, couldn’t this result in the highest incidence of ADHD in the world?

It’s hardly more than the size of your bedroom, half of it living quarters, the rest the office. “What about a bathroom?” I ask National Parks Ranger Tracy Chernault.

It’s hardly more than the size of your bedroom, half of it living quarters, the rest the office. “What about a bathroom?” I ask National Parks Ranger Tracy Chernault.

“See the sycamore tree?” He’s kidding, of course. The first thing both armies did when making camp was to dig long sinks—latrines. So the sycamore performed no real purpose when for a few cold-weather months this century and a third gone this hut stood by it. Then the tiny wooden structure was taken away and reassembled for display in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. That was right after the war, in August of 1865.