January 2011

WHEN DRAKE MCFEELY OF W. W. NORTON proposed an updated and enlarged edition of my book The Disuniting of America , he thought it might be a good idea to add an all-American reading list. What are the dozen or so books, he wondered, that everyone should know in order to have a sense of the American experience? McFeely, as the son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Ulysses S.

The sun scorches down on the car, baking the black vinyl seats. They feel pliant as new tar. Tank top and shorts—the uniform of choice—offers no respite, and my bandanna is soaked in minutes. Sweat stings my eyes. The wind through the car’s open windows feels like a steady breeze from an oven: constant, unbearable. This is Vietnam in mid-July.

I am on my way to visit the site of the 1968 My Lai Massacre during the American war. On that day, March 16, soldiers from Charlie Company spent four hours firing and slashing away at the villagers of Tu Cung in what the Americans called Pinkville in Quang Ngai province. At the same time, in the nearby hamIet of Co Luy, members of Bravo Company were murdering dozens of civilians. A total of 504 unarmed people were killed.

The young man dressed in a monk’s costume chats with me as he hands out candy to children celebrating Guavaween. He works in Tampa’s Cuban community, Ybor City, in a well-stocked vintage-clothing store, and people are walking in to look for costumes for the local Latin-flavored Halloween celebration. He says that he’s disillusioned with the area, which had its start in the late 1870s as the base for a thriving handmade cigar industry and also supported many local shops. In more recent times, he tells me, Ybor City has been overtaken by some city official’s dream of turning the main strip, Seventh Avenue, into a Bourbon Street replica. For many Ybor City residents this has meant watching the slow disappearance of much of the area’s Latin heritage as shops cede their leases over to landlords who then open up raucous bars. Even Guavaween seems like not much more than a collection of hot dog and beer booths. But after spending an afternoon there, I found that Ybor City’s heritage is not gone, just somewhat obscured by the commerce that is trying to save it. The tranquil Tampa-St.

On January 24, 1848, one hundred and fifty years ago this month, a man named James Marshall was inspecting a millrace that he had just constructed on the American River, not far from Sacramento, California. He had turned the water into it the night before to clear the debris, and now something “about half the size and the shape of a pea” glinting in the water caught his eye. “It made my heart thump,” he remembered later, “for I was certain it was gold.” To his workmen, he said, “Boys, by God, I believe I have found a gold mine.”

He had, indeed.

Susannah McCorkle’s superb biographical essay on the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith (November), is by far the most gripping account of Bessie’s life so far—and I have read them all, including Chris Albertson’s. I first heard Bessie wailing “Trombone Cholly” (1927, with Charlie Green, to whom the title of the song refers) on a jazz recording broadcast from Hartford, Connecticut, when I was a four-teen-year-old away at prep school in 1961; by the end of that year, 1 had all four Columbia albums of reissues, and in subsequent years I bought the entire award-winning collection of remastered recordings which Columbia sponsored.

Along with his brothers and sister, Leon Fichman got into movies on the ground floor. “By 1923 there were about forty kids registered at Central Casting, and we were called to work in all the studios in Hollywood,” he writes. These two photographs show young Leon on the sets of two pioneering silent movies. In Hollywood’s first big Western, The Covered Wagon (1923), at top, he stands second from the left. “I was supposed to shoot an Indian warrior attacking our wagon to save my father. I couldn’t pull the trigger on an old frontier gun, so they had to get an older kid.” Below he is the third from the left among cast members of Cecil B. DeMille’s epic of 1927, The King of Kings . “All the kids were street urchins in Bethlehem,” he writes. “I remember burning my bare feet on the cobblestones during the summer shooting.”

The vast empty space on the facing page serves as a parking lot for Mead Johnson Nutritionals, an Evansville, Indiana, company that manufactures vitamins and baby formula. But to this day it is called the “shipyard lot,” a term that harks back to World War II, when workers here turned out the huge landing crafts called LSTs that helped win the war.

The wounds of Pearl Harbor were still fresh in February 1942, when planning began for the U.S. Navy Auxiliary Shipyard along an undeveloped strip of property on the Ohio River, a mile west of downtown Evansville. In months the yard was ready to go, despite the fact that neither the Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron Company—the Navy’s partner in the project—nor most of its workers had any ship-building experience. As the photograph at left shows, they caught on fast.

On March 23 seven men appeared in a Washington, D.C., courtroom to be sentenced for their parts in the Watergate burglary, a break-in by Republican operatives at Democratic-party headquarters the previous June. At 10:00 A.M. Judge John Sirica made his entrance, but before announcing the sentences, he declared that a “preliminary matter” had to be taken care of. He then read a letter he had received from one of the defendants, James W. McCord, Jr. By the time Judge Sirica was finished, a few minutes later, the Watergate affair had exploded from an incident into a scandal.