January 2011

Itzhak Perlman, violin, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, conductor, EMI Classics 5 55360 2 (one CD) .

Cover Story The Bomb The Bomb The Bomb For the Duration

In this issue Jocelyn Knowles, a “lady brakeman” who took the place of a railroad man called away to serve in World War II, tells how she and her sisters won a forgotten but very significant victory for organized labor. Hers was not the first generation of women to wield track wrenches and throw switches—or the first to do it capably, as the easy confidence of this group suggests. These are railroaders doing the work of trainmen called to World War I, photographed in the Cheyenne, Wyoming, yards of the Union Pacific by a local cameraman named Joseph Stimson.

In the last year or so CD-ROMs have begun to deluge bookstores and computer stores. Quite a few of them, especially at the beginning, have been hastily assembled arrangements of pre-existing material, throwing together sound, pictures, movies, and text in a format slower and harder to use than any book ever published. But lately CD-ROMs have been created with greater and greater thought and sophistication, and several recent titles stand out as of interest to the readers of American Heritage .

edited by George W. Hilton, Stanford University Press, 631 pages .

When Ring Lardner wrote his classic baseball stories in the 1910s, he seamlessly mixed his fictional players with real ones, setting their adventures in the context of the actual major and minor leagues of the time. For dedicated readers part of the fun has always lain in identifying the real-life people and events that pop up in the adventures of Jack Keefe (hero of the “You Know Me Al” stories) and Lardner’s other homespun characters.

Now George W. Hilton, a UCLA economics professor who usually writes about railroads, has gone through the corpus from Lardner’s golden age and footnoted every name, place, and incident that has some connection to real life, even speculating about whom fictional characters might be based on. In addition, Hilton discourses on such Lardner precursors as William Makepeace Thackeray and delves into the historical statistics of the Central League’s Terre Haute club.

by Peter Grose, Houghton Mifflin, 641 pages .

Allen Dulles’s life, as this fat biography makes clear, both reflected and shaped the American century we still inhabit. Born in 1893 into a family of diplomats and high government officials, Dulles and his even more famous brother, John Foster, showed up in all the right places from the start. At the end of the First World War both attended the Paris Peace Conference; later they worked for the powerful Wall Street law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell; and eventually they stood at the ramparts of the free world, from their respective positions as director of Central Intelligence and Secretary of State. Peter Grose, a former executive editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and a New York Times bureau chief, never met Alien Dulles, but he tackles his subject’s professional and personal life in cool, graceful prose that serves him well as his defense against the charm of the man.

For information about subscribing to the Prodigy on-line service, which carries the weekly American Heritage Picture Gallery feature (described in this month’s Letter From the Editor), call 1-800-PRODIGY. Prodigy also offers a host of news, shopping, reference, entertainment, and chat services and full Internet access. Madeline Rogers, who is in charge of American Heritage Picture Gallery , is also the editor of Seaport magazine, put out three times a year by the South Street Seaport Museum. Seaport takes as its subject several centuries of New York waterfront life, covering the history of everything from speakeasies, dance halls, and sailors’ brothels to the New York Yacht Club and the Port Authority. Two decades old, it demonstrates that there’s far more to the city’s maritime culture than scrimshaw and dirty songs. A thirty-five-dollar three-issue subscription to Seaport also buys you a museum membership. The museum is at 207 Front Street in Manhattan (212-748-8600).

by William Otter, Cornell University Press, 248 pages .

Federal-period America produced autobiographies by preachers, surgeons, philanthropists, politicians, war heroes, and newspaper editors, but the people who worked anonymously with their hands left few histories behind. William Otter’s is a powerful exception, but then Otter would be the first to insist he was no ordinary man. He was both a prominent plasterer and a ruffian.

Enoch Kelsey’s crumbling house was scheduled for demolition when in 1979 the advance guard of the recently constituted Newington (Connecticut) Historical Society and Trust asked if it could try to uncover some unusual wall paintings rumored to be there. The members, most in their mid- to late sixties at the time, could hardly have envisioned the work ahead.

The group’s first foray into the simple, circa 1799 dwelling uncovered remarkable floral sprays and garlands that had been lying dormant under a half-dozen layers of wallpaper. This led to a thirty-day reprieve for the house, a successful first stab at fundraising, and the gift of a meadow to re-site the structure from Dr. Gideon Wells. Its roof temporarily removed, the old house made an overnight journey to a new setting.