January 2011

Evans likes to refer to The American Century as “history for browsers.” There are searching essays at the start of each chapter, but most of the book consists of page spreads concerning particular people or events.

These are driven by pictures culled by Gail Buckland, the book’s photographic historian, from archives and collections around the United States. Buckland, an associate professor at New York City’s Cooper Union, has been the curator of many photographic exhibitions, including the New-York Historical Society’s “Shanties to Skyscrapers” and the Statue of Liberty’s centennial, “Visions of Liberty.” The author of eight books of photography and history, including Travelers in Ancient Lands, Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography, and, with Cecil Beaton, The Magic Image, Buckland has produced hundreds of images that have rarely, if ever, been published before. A selection accompanies this interview.

I know nothing at all about Kevin Randazzo, except that, three summers ago, he was 18 years old and had a job taking tickets and helping children onto the wooden horses at Nunley’s Carousel and Amusements in Baldwin, Long Island, and that, when, at the end of the 1995 season, the owners felt it was time to sell the merry-go-round, he said this to a New York Times reporter: “So many lives have been on here. The only consolation I can think of is if, like, everything lasted forever, it would have no value. If it never came to an end, I guess it wouldn’t mean so much.”

Built in 1894, Lakemont Park in Altoona, Pennsylvania, is the eighth-oldest amusement park in the country—and it contains a noble relic: the oldest wooden roller coaster in the world. The Leap-the-Dips, built in 1902 by the Philadelphia Carousel Company, is a side-friction figure-eight, for many years the classic coaster configuration. Season after season for eighty-three years, the chain would haul the two-seater cars to the ride’s fortyone-foot zenith, then release them to glide along 1,470 feet of track at a decorous pace that never topped ten miles per hour. In 1985 the ride, already ancient by coaster standards, closed down.

Fortunately, however, it remained standing, and today the veteran is undergoing a million-dollar renovation that will have it working by next summer—in plenty of time for the Leap-the-Dips to rattle into its centenary.

—Larry McKee

I’ve been a roller-coaster enthusiast all my life, but it was not until 1993, at the age of twenty-eight, that I discovered American Coaster Enthusiasts (ACE). My reaction was nearly the same as that of practically every other ACE member: surprise that there was a club for people like me! Since then I have traveled extensively in the United States and abroad with the notion of finding more roller coasters. Over the years I have been on nearly three hundred different ones in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Asia, and uncharted hunting grounds still await me in Japan, South America, and Australia.

These suggestions for the best American coasters are entirely my own and should not be construed as a recommendation by ACE, since the organization does not rate or rank coasters. I’ve tried to list not only my personal favorites but also the best of certain genres of coasters.

Thank God for failed screenplays and the ideas they set free.

Some years ago, when I suffered from a fitful delusion that it would be fun to write for the big screen, I sentenced one of my characters to be married on the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. This scene, like so many others I had written, promptly disappeared into my drawer, where it soon crossed that mysterious line past which food becomes garbage and screenplays become paper. But then, equally mysteriously, it progressed farther along the spectrum—onto my list of things to do. And so it was one wretched winter night that I surprised my girlfriend, Leslie Fratkin, by making the Cyclone a condition of my marriage proposal.

She cried for a while. Then she said yes.

Eighty years old and bedridden, her legs no longer capable of supporting her 240-pound bulk, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was scarcely disposed to attend the annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association being held in Washington, D.C., in January of 1896. It was perhaps just as well. Even if she had shown up on her own two feet, the likelihood was that they would have been knocked out from under her. Stanton, together with her long-time friend and collaborator Susan B. Anthony, had founded the Woman Suffrage Association a quarter of a century earlier, and Stanton was now its president. But she knew that many of the delegates to the meeting were in no mood to be bound by feelings of historical obligation.

On the night of March 22, 1901, as fierce rains battered his campsite in the wildest reaches of Luzon Island, Frederick Funston pondered what awaited him the next day. In a career that had been full of mortal risks, he was about to take by far the greatest risk of all. Ten miles to the north lay his prey, Emilio Aguinaldo, formerly dictator of the Philippines but now, having tailored his title to fit American expectations, president of the Philippine Republic. Aguinaldo’s Filipino soldiers had long been at war with the United States, a bizarre consequence of the momentous events three years earlier.

Not long ago, I was lecturing in my course on medical history about people who had accused themselves of smearing feces on a crucifix or committing some equally sacrilegious act. In fact, their beliefs had been delusional. They had done nothing of the kind, but one manifestation of their illness was this untrue self-reproach.

After the lecture, an older student, a woman in her thirties, came up to me and said, “I’d like to talk to you.”

We went back to my office. She said, “You know those patients you mentioned with that kind of idea? I’ve been having those same thoughts myself.” She had been depressed.

“Are you being treated by someone?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’ve been seeing a psychoanalyst.”

My heart sank. Of all the treatments available for such a complaint, she had chosen the worst.

I had been drawing to two pairs and inside straights all afternoon without success. My patience was dwindling along with my monthly wages. I could feel my irritability rising. Gambling made me sweat, and I disliked it. Gambling also made me distrustful, and I disliked that too. But weeks of patrolling Denmark Strait, rolling, heaving, and diving on a destroyer in those turbulent, freezing, and dangerous waters, reduced most emotions to indifference, and gambling was all that remained.

Suddenly I felt a surge of warmth, my heart raced, my palms moistened, my interest zoomed. I held the five, six, seven, eight of hearts and the jack of clubs. Bets were being placed, check, raise, raise again, then again. I added my money to the pot quietly, saying nothing, trying to show no emotion. The final cards were dealt. Slowly, ever so slowly, I shuffled my cards and then exposed them very carefully. It was there! My God, it was there! The nine of hearts was there. I had it. My straight flush.