January 2011

The Internet doesn’t sound like a promising place to find good history. Cyberspace is too young and ephemeral to compete with a good research library or a well-stocked bookstore, but on my first visit to the World Wide Web, I stumbled onto a site called “On the Lower East Side: Observations of Life in Lower Manhattan at the Turn of the Century” and unexpectedly found myself transported back a hundred years.

Designed as an on-line “hypertextbook” by professors at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota, “On the Lower East Side” combines contemporary descriptions of New York immigrant life with wonderful photographs and drawings from the period. It wasn’t the photos or even the unfamiliar texts that moved me but a ghostly period map that materialized slowly on my screen after I clicked an icon. At home in Los Angeles I gently touched my finger to the street corner where my grandfather was born a century ago.

Even in the waning days of the Cold War, access to ARPAnet was limited to organizations doing federally funded research. Excluded graduate students and faculty members chafed, aware of all the cool new gear but unable to get their hands on it. In 1979 a group of graduate students at the University of North Carolina and Duke University collaborated to create their own network, which they called Usenet (having considered and rejected Arachnet and Chaosnet).

The internet seems so now, so happening, so information age, that its Gen-X devotees might find the uncool circumstances of its birth hard to grasp. More than anything the computer network connecting tens of millions of users stands as a modern—albeit unintended—monument to military plans for fighting three wars. Specifically, the Net owes its existence to Allied battle strategies during World War II, to the geopolitical pressures of the Cold War, and to preparations for the postapocalypse of nuclear holocaust (the never-fought “final war” with the Soviet Union).

He looked just as you always remembered him. There was that trim, dapper stance, the black hair sleek against the head, the signature black mustache. Unmistakably Thomas E. Dewey. The man who couldn’t lose the 1948 presidential election and nonetheless did. He was dressed severely in a dark striped suit, a bit more formally than any of the other guests on the yacht, the FORBES Highlander. But after all, he was a public eminence, somewhat grayer, older than he was when he was shaking up the rackets during my childhood or, later, when he was governor of New York and then running for president: in 1944, against Franklin Roosevelt and in 1948, against Harry Truman.

Many of Petersburg’s historic sites, as well as the inevitable antiques shops and crafts boutiques, are located in a compact section along the Appomattox River called Old Towne. These include a classic courthouse and the postwar Appomattox Iron Works (1-800-232-IRON), with a restored foundry, machine shops, steam engines, and other nineteenth-century industrial relics. The First Baptist Church, home of the country’s oldest African-American congregation (a reminder of the days when Petersburg had the South’s largest free black population), is within walking distance, as are several other historic houses of worship.

In these fading months of 1995, the political revolt against Washington is still in full cry, and in Washington itself. The congressional drive to return control of many federal regulatory and social welfare programs to the states continues strongly, and my sense of history tells me that we may be in one of those periodically recurring and ever-shifting power struggles between advocates of “centralism” and “localism” that have marked our history ever since the original Federalists and anti-Federalists went at each other.

The appearance of a new word in the language often signals to a historian that something was up at that moment, and the public consciousness had changed. For instance, although scholars trace the birth of the modern world economy all the way back to the middle of the eighteenth century, when machinery and the factory system began to transform the British textile industry, it was only in 1848, as railroads, the telegraph, and—in Europe—political upheaval were sweeping through the daily lives of the people, that the phrase "Industrial Revolution" was coined.

Some years ago, I traveled to Boston to meet for the first time the filmmaker Henry Hampton, who had just completed the magisterial “Eyes on the Prize” series for PBS. I knew from a mutual friend that he had contracted infantile paralysis in his youth, and when I got to his office I saw that he wore a brace on one leg and that when we started off for lunch he was not altogether steady on his feet. I’m not either, and for the same reason: I got polio in July of 1950, just two weeks before Dr. Jonas Salk formally applied to the March of Dimes for a grant to “undertake studies with the objective of developing a method for the prevention of paralytic poliomyelitis by immunologic means.”

These antic pictures were sent to us by T. W. Edwards, who wanted us to know about the pioneering work his father, Charles W. Edwards, had done around 1895 in Jersey City. If you haven’t guessed yet, each is a double or triple image of one person. At bottom left we have the photographer’s father enjoying a cigar and a beer with his double. His friend Henry Pelzer (top) shows up falling from a wheelbarrow he steers and playing poker with two of himself. Finally, we have Raymond Getches clobbering his doppel-gänger. T. W.