January 2011

The day after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, while the actor turned-murderer John Wilkes Booth fled into the Maryland countryside and the nation recoiled in outrage and shock, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton commissioned the famous photographer Mathew Brady to take pictures of the crime scene at Ford’s Theatre. A century later, curators used those images to mount a major reconstruction of the theater and bring it back to its exact 1865 appearance. This February, on the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, the Ford’s Theatre Society and the National Park Service completed a second major renovation. All historical elements of the building have been preserved,” said the Ford’s Theatre Society director, Paul Tetreault, of the $50 million project. The theater’s walls, for instance, remain oddly white, although most theaters feature dark colors.

Washington’s newest attraction proves that progress can come to the capital city. Last December, just in time for President Obama’s inauguration, Congressional leaders proudly dedicated the new Capitol Visitor Center with ceremonies in its grand hall, which covers 1.3 acres and looks bright as the day beneath huge skylights with walls clad in Virginia limestone.

This impressive space is to a waiting room what Air Force One is to the Wright Flyer. Sure, it has clerks processing tickets and the familiar loading chutes of velvet ropes to corral milling crowds waiting to see the orientation film. Yet there’s a sense of modern grandness and of American legacy.

“I endeavored to shriek—and my lips and my parched tongue moved convulsively together in the attempt—but no voice issued from the cavernous lungs which, oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent mountain, gasped and palpitated, with the heart, at every elaborate and struggling inspiration,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in his chilling description of a man who has found himself buried alive in the 1844 short story “The Premature Burial.” The maestro of terror and the macabre, who penned such classics as “The Raven” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” was born 200 years ago in Boston, an event celebrated by the U.S. Postal Service's issue of a 42-cent stamp in Poe’s honor. Baltimore (www.poe200th.com) , Richmond (www.nevermore2009.com) , and three others cities where Poe lived have planned events to celebrate the man who also refined the art of literary criticism, invented the detective genre, and inspired modern science fiction.

The aeroplane seemed to tip sharply for a fraction of a second, then it started up for about ten feet; this was followed by a short, sharp dive and a crash in the field,” reported the New York Times about the crash of Orville Wright and Lt. Thomas Selfridge in Fort Myer, Virginia, on September 17, 1908. “Instantly the dust arose in a yellow, choking cloud that spread a dull pall over the great white man-made bird that had dashed to its death.”

A cavalry officer ordered his men to control the crowd of some 2,000, including top Army officials, who surged toward the wreckage. Rescuers pulled out the bloodied, unconscious forms of the 38-year-old Wright brother and Selfridge, a 26-year-old member of the Army Signal Corps, aeroplanist, and secretary of the Aerial Experiment

Association. Three hours later, Selfridge died, giving him the dubious distinction of being the first fatality from a powered aircraft.

Wright regained consciousness and survived a broken leg, along with fractured ribs and hip bones, which left him in pain for the rest of his life.

At dawn on Friday, May 19, 1780, farmers in New England stopped to marvel at the ominous pink hue of the sun. By noon the sky had darkened to midnight blackness, causing Americans, still in the throes of a protracted war of independence, to light candles and tremble at thoughts of the Last Judgment. As the birds quieted and no storm accompanied the darkness, men and women crowded into churches, where one minister commented wryly that “The people were very attentive.” John Greenleaf Whittier later wrote that “Men prayed, and women wept; all ears grew sharp/ To hear the doom-blast of the trumpet shatter / The black sky . . .”

Archaeologists for the George Washington Foundation have found the site of George Washington’s boyhood home on a bluff overlooking the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg, Virginia. While historians have long believed that Ferry Farm, a 113-acre National Historic Landmark site, encompassed Washington’s home, the exact location had not been determined until archaeologists uncovered stone-lined cellars, two root cellars, remains of two chimneys, and thousands of artifacts, including bone wig curlers and toothbrush handles, pieces of ceiling, 18th-century pottery, and parts of a tea service that may have belonged to George’s mother, Mary Ball Washington.

Six-year-old George moved here with his family in 1738 so that his father, Augustine, could reduce his commute to Accokeek Creek Iron Furnace. The excavations suggest that the house was a fairly substantial one-and-a-half-story residence, not the rude cottage of popular imagination. Little evidence survives from Washington’s early years, but if the future first president did chop down a cherry tree, it would have grown on the bluff overlooking the Rappahannock.

Sometime that seismic spring of 1776, 16-year-old Levi Hanford of Norwalk, Connecticut enrolled in his uncle’s militia company and went to war against the British. He expected to make short work of the enemy. Everybody knew how simple farm boys like himself had just sent the redcoats reeling from Lexington and Concord, then cut them down at Breeds Hill. But Hanford’s war got off to a slow start. Except for a brief stint building fortifications around New York City, his first year under arms consisted mostly of standing watch along the Connecticut coast of Long Island Sound and rounding up Tories. He missed the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, in which General William Howe’s redcoats captured a thousand American rebels. Neither was he present two weeks later, when the British swarmed across the East River onto Manhattan, seized the city, and rounded up several hundred more Americans. Hanford did not get his first real taste of action, in fact, until a cold, stormy night in March 1777, when he and a dozen other Connecticut men were surprised and taken prisoner by a Tory raiding party from Huntington, Long Island.

Deep Space, April 13, 1970

I felt the wall of the tunnel shiver,” recalls astronaut Fred Haise about the opening moments of a disaster that nearly marooned his Apollo 13 crew in deep space forever. At 9:08 p.m., the master alarm sounded in command module Odyssey, 205,000 miles from Earth. A short circuit had just ignited one of the liquid oxygen storage tanks and the ensuing explosion ripped through the service module attached below Odyssey, puncturing the remaining tank. As the life-giving oxygen slowly bled away into space, the last of the service module’s remaining fuel cell generators began to die.

Haise, pilot of the lunar module Aquarius, was on his first mission, headed with commander Jim Lovell and Odyssey’s pilot, Jack Swigert, for NASA’s third lunar landing. The 37-year-old from Biloxi, Mississippi, scanned Odyssey’s power gauges and saw that at least one of the two oxygen tanks was gone. “My first thought was—well, we’ve blown the lunar landing,” he later wrote. The situation was far worse.

Adrift on the Southern Pacific Ocean, Day Six, October 1942

Fifty-two-year-old Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s top World War I ace and the dapper president of Eastern Air Lines, looked with deep concern over his seven companions in three rafts bobbing on the Pacific. The desperate men had just consumed the third of their four oranges, the only food they had with them. They would have had nothing to eat at all had not Capt. William T. Cherry jammed the fruit into his flight suit just before their B-17D ran out of gas and ditched between Hawaii and New Guinea.

Ten months after America’s entrance into World War II, Rickenbacker, known fondly as the “Ace of Aces,” had been headed to deliver a top-secret oral message to General Douglas MacArthur from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, but malfunctioning navigation equipment had sent them far off course, causing them to miss their refueling stop at Canton Island, some 1,800 miles west of Hawaii.