by lan Whitcomb, Mel Bay Publications, Inc., book and cassette .
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
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January 2011
I read with great interest Edward E. Leslie’s article “Quantrill’s Bones” in your July/August issue. As a participant in some of the matters he discussed, I write to offer a few comments and corrections. The least of these is that in October of 1992, at the time of Quantrill’s burial at Higginsville, Missouri, I was not the “commander in chief of the Missouri division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans” but rather the commander in chief of the entire organization, which is international in scope, enjoys a membership of just over twenty-three thousand and operates from its headquarters at historic Elm Springs in Columbia, Tennessee.
Most discussions of Quantrill center on his famous raid against Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863. Quantrill’s men killed an estimated 150 men—no women or children as is often charged—it being their intention to kill every man of gun-bearing age in that town.
Contrary to the statement in the July/ August “Frontispiece” that “Congress ratified the 19th Amendment on August 26, 1920 …,” Congress does not ratify amendments. The states ratify them; Congress merely proposes them (U.S. Constitution, Article V). What Congress did on that day was to certify that the proposed amendment had been ratified by the required number of states.
Turner Publishing, Inc., 288 pages .
As soon as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was completed, people began leaving small objects there, and the National Park Service quietly began saving them in a Maryland warehouse. The collection, which now comprises tens of thousands of artifacts, is not open to the public; this book is the best view most of us will have of what is in it. Nobody making one of these offerings—a scribbled note, a worn baseball glove, a package of Kool-Aid and homemade cookies, a framed sonogram snapshot of a first grandchild—expected that it would be preserved or exhibited; each object represents an intensely private message to one of the names etched into the black granite. In this almost wordless book the most eloquent of these objects have been lovingly photographed and placed on the page, heartbreaking testament to war’s legacy of grief and loss, and to the Wall’s strange power to bring together the living and the dead.
by Thomas Mellon, foreword by David McCullough, University of Pittsburgh Press, 478 pages.
A few issues ago our columnist John Steele Gordon wrote about the curious paucity of good business autobiographies. His very slim roster omitted one of the best—for the good reason that until now you couldn’t read it if you weren’t a Mellon. In 1885 Thomas Mellon, the founder of the great Pittsburgh banking fortune, published his memoir with the proviso that it never “be for sale in the bookstores, nor any new edition published,” because it contains “nothing which concerns the public to know, and much which if writing for it I would have omitted.”
by Lester I. Tenney, foreword by Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale, U.S.N., Brassey’s, 220 pages .