January 2011

On my desk sits a two-inch stack of letters and emails from hundreds of subscribers who wrote us with words of encouragement after we agreed to rescue American Heritage . On behalf of my staff, thank you all very much for your support, which is critical for keeping this great American institution alive and thriving.

If the magazine seems revolutionary, it is—in the sense of turning back to an early state. While we will continue to publish cultural history and newsworthy pieces as in recent years, the magazine will focus on publishing thoughtful prose by the “best and brightest” historians and writers of the day. The founders of American Heritage said it best 54 years ago:

“We believe in good storytelling; that interesting writers can interpret history and restore it to the place it once occupied as the noblest branch of literature.”

By early morning of July 5, 1758, more than a thousand Albany-built bateaux, whaleboats, and three radeaux—cumbersome barges known as “floating castles”—crowded the calm waters of New York’s Lake George in orderly columns. They spread a mile and a half from shore to shore and extended “from front to Rear full Seven Miles,” as The Pennsylvania Journal reported. This inland navy bore more than 15,000 soldiers, the largest army ever seen in North America, along with a train of gunpowder kegs and barrels of flour and salted pork–provisions enough for a month–and 44 cannons, the heaviest weighing more than 5000 pounds.

To thousands of fresh young colonial recruits, many clutching the brand-new muskets issued to them only three days before, the spectacle was phantasmagoric. Nothing had prepared them for the sheer magnitude of this floating city that seemed to suffocate the crystal lakewaters.

Often, it is said that vast long-range economic and social forces, not the efforts of leading individuals alone, are what make history. The course of World War II refutes this seemingly rational thesis. Hitler began World War II; he and his principal adversaries—Britain’s Winston Churchill, America’s Franklin Roosevelt, and Russia’s Joseph Stalin—determined the conflict’s course and outcome. While the latter two effectively won the war in 1945, Churchill played a significant role by not losing it in 1940 and 1941.

If Churchill had not become prime minister of Britain in 1940 (or had the United States elected an isolationist, such as Herbert Hoover, as president), Hitler would have won. More than anyone else, Churchill understood that the entire British war effort depended on the United States. Roosevelt knew this, too, but it took him some time to recognize the full implications of the relations between the two nations. Among the war leaders, the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship would evolve into one of the most complex and decisive of the war.

America’s greatest leader was its first—George Washington. He ran two start-ups, the army and the presidency, and chaired the most important committee meeting in U.S. history, the Constitutional Convention. His agribusiness and real-estate portfolio made him America’s richest man. He was as well-known in his time as any star actor, rapper, or athlete is now. Men followed him into battle; women longed to dance with him; famous men, almost as great as he was, some of them smarter or better-spoken, did what he told them to do. He was the Founding CEO.

A quarter century ago, President Ronald Reagan delivered two masterful addresses within two weeks of one another: the so-called “Evil Empire” and “Star Wars” speeches. In them, Reagan laid out two great strategies for dismantling the Soviet Empire. He did it boldly without backing off, not permitting the economy, news media, polling numbers, or the permanent governing elite to intimidate him.

140 years ago, Harper’s Weekly’s cartoonist of genius, Thomas Nast, sired the Democrat donkey and the Republican elephant into ridicule. In an environment of flourishing editorial cartoons, Nast’s ready vocabulary of political symbols caught on. Within a decade the donkey and elephant had evolved from the focal points of partisan mockery into the popular mascots they are today.

Nast’s donkey (or “jackass” as it was known then) first appeared in Harper’s Weekly on January 15, 1870, kicking a dead lion. Published barely a month after the sudden death of Lincoln’s former Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, the cartoon was a scathing invective against the Democratic, “Copperhead” press (named for its snakeish insidiousness), which was abusing Stanton’s memory. Nast’s cartoon, entitled, “A live jackass kicking a dead lion,” suggested the reverse of the old proverb, “A live ass is better than a dead lion.”

Visitors don’t get a good look at the new facility at Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg National Military Park until they get close—and even then they could mistake it for an exceptionally large farm complex. That’s no accident. The design and location of the visitor center is in step with the park’s commitment to rehabilitate the 6,000-acre battlefield and surrounding area so it more closely resembles the landscape of July 1863 when the momentous battle took place.

Rehabilitation has involved everything from cutting down or planting trees, and building split-rail fences, to building an unobtrusive new center and making plans to demolish the previous facility, a dilapidated 1920s building that occupied land once a prominent part of the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge. By fall the round Cyclorama Building nearby, the former home for Paul Philippoteaux’s epic 360-degree battle painting, should also be gone, although preservationists have sued to save it. This new preservation strategy claimed the observation tower in 2003.

Last summer, while butchering a 50-ton bowhead whale off the coast of Alaska, Inupiat hunters found a more-than-100-year-old harpoon lance lodged deep inside its neck. John Bockstoce, the history of whaling expert at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, identified the harpoon as part of an exploding lance made on the southeast coast of Massachusetts in the late 1800s.

Bockstoce and his colleagues believe the lance was used between 1885 and 1895 because the lance was patented and supplies were used up quickly. Wildlife biologist Craig George from the Department of Wildlife Management in Alaska’s North Slope Borough surmises that the animal was a calf when harpooned; the lance exploded but failed to kill it.

New England whalers nearly hunted the bowhead to extinction, but the population came back after whalebone corsets fell out of favor. Today, international treaties ban commercial whaling, except for indigenous natives of Alaska, Russia, and Greenland.

The discovery of the lance adds to growing evidence that bowhead whales can live beyond a century.