January 2011

1821 One Hundred And Seventy-five Years Ago

The autumn of 1821 saw the opening of two pioneering educational institutions: the Troy Female Seminary, in Troy, New York, and the English Classical School, in Boston. The former is generally called our country’s first secondary school for girls and the latter its first public high school. By showing that girls and the working class were capable of serious academic study, these two institutes led to a broadening of higher education and paved the way for today’s universal compulsory schooling.

The Troy school was run by the formidable Emma Willard, for whom it would be renamed in 1895. Formal education for girls was not unheard of at the time, but the instruction usually stopped at a very basic level. Girls whose families could afford the luxury of further schooling studied such genteel subjects as music, dance, drawing, embroidery, and the like, with perhaps a smattering of French. Willard had taught in academies of this type before her 1809 marriage, and in 1814, with her family in financial distress, she opened one of her own in Middlebury, Vermont.

1796 Two Hundred Years Ago

At first glance the September 19 issue of Philadelphia’s American Daily Advertiser looked no different from any other. Its front page was tiled with the usual assortment of notices from tradesmen and merchants, and with Congress in the middle of a six-month recess, there was no reason to expect any important government news inside. At the top of page 2 was an unobtrusive heading, “To the PEOPLE of the United States/Friends and fellow citizens,” followed by an expanse of solid type. Readers had to look halfway into the following page to learn the author’s identity: “G. Washington, United States, September 17, 1796.”

September 1996

Mother’s House

VANNA VENTURI USED TO SIT AT HER DINING ROOM TABLE AND TALK TO visitors about her house in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. “This facade will tell you a lot of stories, if you will listen to it,” she would say.

One of those stories is about how her son grew up to be counted among the most influential American architects since Frank Lloyd Wright. Another tells how the house came to be considered the most significant dwelling built in America during the last half of the twentieth century. Architectural critics consider it one of the major influences of the postmodern movement.

TO ARCHITECTS AROUND THE WORLD, THE modest structure is known simply as “Mother’s House.” Built in 1963-64, it was influenced by the pop art and the camp sensibilities of the early sixties. In the thirty-two years since its birth, the house has spawned offspring that have transformed the skyline of nearly every major city in the world.

The Last Powder Monkey

Thomas Jefferson Takes a Vacation

BY THE END OF THE FIRST CONGRESS, IN THE SPRING OF 1791, Thomas Jefferson badly needed a vacation. The first Secretary of State disliked the noise, dirt, and crowds of the capital, Philadelphia, and the cramped routines of office work. He had suffered near-constant migraine headaches for fully six months; one cause of them may have been his growing struggle with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who had views opposite to Jefferson’s on almost every issue facing the new government. Nor could he find peace in his rented house at Eighth and Market streets. It was on the main wagon route into the city, and besides, he had succumbed to his passion for remodeling; he felt he needed a library, a solarium, a new kitchen, and a larger stable, so for nearly a year the place had been torn apart and full of carpenters and bricklayers.

The Death Of Steam

As a railroad observer for the last thirty years, I couldn’t let a couple of items in John H. White, Jr.'s article “The Power of Live Steam,” in the April issue, go by without setting the record straight. First, Mr. White states that up until 1955, steam locomotives “were the dominant form of power on American railways” and, second, that steam locomotives disappeared from mainline railroads in five years. Both of these statements are untrue.

By 1955, contrary to what White asserts, steam was just about dead on the majority of main-line railroads in the United States. In fact, whole railroads, such as the New York, Ontario & Western and the Lehigh & New England, had completely dieselized by 1950, and several of the bigger systems, such as New York Central, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific, had ended all steam operations by middecade. By the time main-line steam operations in the U.S. ended in 1960, only three railroads ran steam locomotives in regular service (and a small number at that): Grand Trunk & Western, Norfolk & Western, and Illinois Central.

Stars And Bars

I was dismayed to read that Henry Wiencek, a person identified as “writing a book about the legacy of slavery” thinks he sees the Stars and Bars on the grilles of trucks or in the Georgia state flag (“The Road to Modern Atlanta,” April issue). Good grief!

The Stars and Bars was the original national flag of the Confederate States of America. It consisted of a blue field containing seven white stars and three broad “bars” of red and white. In the smoke and dust of battle, it was easily confused with the Stars and Stripes, so, not long after the war began, the Army of Northern Virginia adopted a distinctive battle flag that was gradually taken up by other Confederate armies.

This flag, with its cross of blue and thirteen stars, was eventually incorporated into revised versions of the national flag of the Confederacy, but it was never the Stars and Bars.

Sound Investment

A Brief Tour Of U. S. A.

“But Mostly U. S. A. Is the Speech of the People”

Dos Passos’s trilogy begins as it ends: with a young man walking. This is from the opening pages.

No job, no woman, no house, no city. . .

It was not in the long walks through jostling crowds at night that he was less alone, or in the training camp at Allentown, or in the day on the docks at Seattle, or in the empty reek of Washington City hot boyhood summer nights, or in the meal on Market Street, or in the swim off the red rocks at San Diego, or in the bed full of fleas in New Orleans, or in the cold razorwind off the lake, or in the gray faces trembling in the grind of gears in the street under Michigan Avenue, or in the smokers of limited expresstrains, or walking across country, or riding up the dry mountain canyons, or the night without a sleepingbag among frozen beartracks in the Yellowstone, or canoeing Sundays on the Quinnipiac;

January 2011

Enjoy our work? Help us keep going.