January 2011

by Drew Gilpin Faust , University of North Carolina Press, 326 pages, $29.95. CODE: UNC-7

“I HAINT GOT THE MONEY TO TAKE US of[f] so we will hafter stand the test,” wrote a Georgia woman in a letter to her husband in the Confederate Army, explaining her fear of the encroaching Yankees. Drew Gilpin Faust uses journals, letters, essays, poetry, and fiction left behind by the women of the Civil War South to create a collage of female perspectives on the war’s impact on the domestic front. She finds that women tended to become disillusioned with their traditional roles once they found themselves forced to take on responsibilities that Southern convention had previously denied them and began fending for themselves as slaveholders, providers, and mothers. One woman wrote to a friend that “anxiety, responsibility, and independence of thought or action are what are peculiarly abhorrent to my nature, and what has been so often required of me.”

by James M. McPherson , Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $25.00. CODE: OUP-13

by John E. Carter , University of Nebraska Press, 142 pages, $40.00. CODE: UNB-1

LIKE CHARLES CONLON’S CLASSIC pictures of baseball, the Western photographs of Solomon D. Butcher remain far more familiar than the man who made them. His glass-plate portraits of Nebraskan homesteaders in front of their sod houses—a cow on the hillside roof, card tables and chairs on the lawn, sometimes joined by a recently dead relative—are distinctive portraits of Western settlement. John E. Carter, curator of photographs at the Nebraska State Historical Society, has printed 120 of the thousands in the society’s archive.

by Thomas Parrish , Henry Holt, 490 pages.

Memories of the Cold War have already begun to dim a little since the Communist regimes toppled one after another in 1989. In alphabetical entries ranging from the Air Force’s A-1E to Soviet foreign minister Andrei Vyshinsky, the historian Thomas Parrish recalls more than forty years of Cold War culture. Here is an encyclopedia of the conflict’s political figures (Richard Nixon alone gets five pages), technological achievements, and its peculiar strategies (the Balance of Terror).

by Richard Brookhiser , The Free Press, 230 pages.

A traditional campaign biography divides the candidate’s life story into thematic sections (“Log Cabin Days,” “Courage,” “Duty”). What the political writer Richard Brookhiser calls his “moral biography” of George Washington is really just such a campaign life done very well, organized around the themes of war, the Constitution, and the Presidency. Brookhiser’s fluent appreciation of Washington is intelligent and inspiring without evoking the stony old caricature. Why does Washington remain more distant than his vivid peers Jefferson, Adams, or Madison? “Washington’s remoteness is partly his doing, partly ours. He wanted to put a gap between himself and his contemporaries. At the end of his second term as president, Mrs. Henrietta Liston, the wife of the British ambassador, told him that she could read the pleasure he expected from retirement in his face. ‘You are wrong,’ Washington insisted, ‘my countenance never yet betrayed my feelings.’”

The official name for the various high school teams was the Yellowjackets, and their home backers called them the Jacks. Not so fans attending away games. At any Vermont gym or field but their own, the players were referred to as the Prisontowners.

That defined Windsor, despite the Goodyear plant and the big automatic machine-tools place and the town’s historical background, which had seen early officials write the state constitution there. Montpelier was the state capital, Windsor the site of the state penitentiary. It was decided in 1807.

In the days when the North Atlantic was a crowded route, to choose a ship was to start the crossing. The fastest, the biggest, the newest: Often a single liner reigned as all three, with panache to spare for anyone who booked passage. Travelers who grew beyond mere statistics, though, peered into brochures and found the most stylish or amiable ship, or the most reliable. The record for the most comfortable one ever must certainly have been set by the German liner that returned to port unsteadily and slowly after its maiden season: too much furniture.

I did not have any such decisions to make last year when I crossed the Atlantic Ocean, Southampton to New York. To choose a ship today is to take the Queen Elizabeth 2.

If you don’t already have tickets to Olympic events, you may not find it easy to get them, but try calling 404-744-1996. (If you have a Touch-Tone telephone, punch 1 and then 0 at the start of the recorded message and you will be put through to a live operator.) For accommodations in the Atlanta area during the Games, call 214-851-4010, then punch 2 and 7.

The “Metropolitan Frontiers” exhibition at the Atlanta History Center is on view Monday through Saturday from 10:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. and on Sundays from noon until 5:30 P.M. For a schedule of special events at the history center, call 404-814-4000. To reach Civil War Tours for information about its trips to battlefields, call 770-908-8410. For a list of the many tours available through the Atlanta Preservation Center, call 404-876-2040. And for guided tours of Underground Atlanta, call Atlanta Heritage Row Museum at 404-584-7879.

At the turn of the century, a hundred trains a day converged on Atlanta, all coming in through a narrow east-west valley, and “Railroad Gulch” was becoming an urban headache—dirty, noisy, dangerous, and a continual source of gridlock as vehicles and pedestrians on the north-south cross streets waited and waited for the trains to pass.

Atlanta’s solution to the congestion was to rise above it. Between about 1890 and 1929 a system of viaducts was erected one level up to carry city streets across the gulch. Merchants cut new storefronts into the second stories of their buildings, using the original ground floors for storage or simply abandoning them. The fortunes of this subterranean quarter have gone up and down ever since. Now known as Underground Atlanta, it is a popular shopping center drawing tourists and locals alike. Here, with a little effort, visitors can picture the bustling commerce that filled Atlanta’s heart a century ago.