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January 2011
No presidential speech has been as widely analyzed, memorized, or canonized as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It has inspired more words to amplify and celebrate its mere 10 sentences than any oration since the Sermon on the Mount: articles, recitals, chapters, set pieces in films and plays, and, at last count, seven major books, most notably, until now, Garry Wills’s Pulitzer Prize– winning Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America .
Yet Gabor Boritt’s new The Gettysburg Gospel (Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $28.00) bears the almost defiant subtitle The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows . To Boritt, director of the Civil War Institute at, appropriately enough, Gettysburg College (and, to fully disclose, a longtime colleague and occasional co-author), twentieth-century politicians and historians were guilty of inappropriately viewing Lincoln’s rhetorical triumph through the prism of modern experience.
A book entitled George Nelson in the Compact Design Portfolio series succinctly summarizes its subject’s career in words and pictures. Original Nelson/Harper/Miller clocks are available from dealers who focus on vintage items. One of them, Evan Snyderman of R 20th Century (
George Nelson said he got into furniture design by accident, and indeed the architect didn’t actually create many of the mid-twentieth-century modernist icons synonymous with his name. The bubble lamp, the coconut chair, the sling sofa, and others he’s commonly credited with were styled by associates in his New York City office.
courtesy of the mount vernon ladies association.2006_6_7
What did George Washington really look like? We have a lot of familiar pictures of him, but they never quite agree with one another, and more were made when he was old than when he was young. So, when the people who run Mount Vernon, Washington’s estate on the Potomac River in Virginia, wanted exact life-sized likenesses of him at the ages of 19, 45, and 57 for their new visitors’ center, they turned to the tools of forensic anthropology. Those tools produced arresting and utterly convincing results.
25 Years Ago
December 17, 1981 Operatives from the Red Brigade, an Italian terrorist group, kidnap U.S. Brig. Gen. James Dozier in Verona. He will be rescued after six weeks in captivity.
50 Years Ago
November 6, 1956 In a rematch of the 1952 presidential election, President Dwight Eisenhower wins a second term in a landslide over Adlai Stevenson.
November 13, 1956 U.S. Supreme Court declares laws of the state of Alabama and the city of Montgomery requiring segregation on buses to be invalid.
75 Years Ago
December 10, 1931 The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to a pair of American peace activists, Jane Addams, founder of the settlement-house movement, and Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University.
100 Years Ago
On December 24, 1906, in a wooden shack crammed with equipment in the seaside Massachusetts community of Brant Rock, a 40-year-old inventor named Reginald Fessenden made the world’s first radio broadcast. The program consisted of a phonograph recording of a Handel piece followed by Fessenden playing “O, Holy Night” on the violin, reading from the Bible, and wishing his listeners (mostly crewmen on United Fruit Company ships, which had been equipped with his apparatus) a merry Christmas. This broadcast and a second one on New Year’s Day were heard as far away as the West Indies. In fact, in November, a test transmission had been picked up in Scotland.