January 2011

 

carla davidson2006_5_29

We’re not used to measuring history in great swaths of time in this country, where a hundred-year-old house is considered an ancient survivor. So, it was with a sense of going back in time twice over that I read about Virginia’s Grand National Jubilee of 1807. Two hundred years ago this coming May, veterans of the Revolution gathered to mark the bicentennial of the 1607 founding of Jamestown. America’s first permanent English colony briefly seemed to thrive, then, within decades, succumbed to drought and disease. The knee-breeched celebrants were at an exact halfway point, recalling an era played out by men in armor who were as distant to them as 1807 is to us.

The war in Iraq has been going on for three and a half years now. That’s about the same amount of time America spent fighting World War II. This seems almost impossible, considering how firmly the Second World War is embedded in our collective memory. We have even come to think of an entire generation—"The Greatest Generation"—in terms of that struggle. Cliché or not, we can still see the sharp cut of their uniforms, and those sharp 1940s civvies, the way they wore their hair back then, the America they lived in. We can still hear the music they listened to and the ebullient, confident way they spoke. Images of men shipping out to distant lands, storming the beaches of Normandy and Tarawa; fighting carrier battles over unimaginably vast areas of the Pacific; and riding in on the wind to bomb Berlin are all etched on our consciousness, whether gleaned from newsreels of the actual events or the countless movies, books, and television shows that keep rolling out every year. Their war seems to have lasted forever.

In 1935, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Huey Long of Louisiana spoke against a New Deal measure for more than 15 hours straight, digressing along the way to give tips on frying oysters and brewing coffee. As Richard D. White, Jr., makes clear in Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P.

“History is more or less bunk.” Most readers of this magazine, not to mention its editors, will disagree with Henry Ford’s famous assessment, but it is hard to argue with his choice of words, for bunk is a classic Americanism.

Stemming from a great nineteenth-century debate in the House of Representatives, bunk has gone on to enjoy a long and useful life. For instance, soon after Barney’s opened its doors in New York City in 1923, the clothing store plugged its wares with the slogan “No bunk. No junk. No imitations.” More recently Paul R. Charron, CEO of Liz Claiborne, Inc., told The Wall Street Journal : “There’s an element of art in this business. But this idea that 90% of what we do is art and 10% is science is bunk.”

The chill of autumn air carries a special charge for baseball fans, who know that pennant races and the World Series are at stake. And nothing makes the national pastime’s hopeful, anxious drama explode into excitement like the game’s signature act: hitting a home run.

Scan anybody’s list of the greatest moments in sports history, and you’ll find at least three October dingers—Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ’Round the World,” which won the New York Giants the National League pennant in 1951; Bill Mazeroski’s bottom-of-the-ninth shot in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series; and Bucky Dent’s fly ball over the Green Monster at Fenway Park in 1978… . All this is one reason my editors and I thought it was time to give the home run a proper biography ( Dingers!: A Short History of the Long Ball , recently published by ESPN Books).

If there’s a cruise in your future, you probably should pack Luxury Liners: Life on Board , by Catherine Donzel (Vendome Press, 240 pages, $50.00). The coffeetable-size book, following a chronology of embarkation to arrival, is filled with striking photos and memorabilia of the great ships—the Queen Mary , the Ile de France , the France of 1962, and dozens more.

“A tardy and subordinate genre,” sniffed Jorge Luis Borges about the American Western novel in a 1960s lecture. What Borges meant was that it took its lead from the Hollywood Western film, which had long since settled into the ponderous and predictable.

The few people whose names are today synonymous with furniture styles mostly worked for the rich, but one of them, Lambert Hitchcock, achieved fame by being the first to mass-produce furniture. By the late 1820s, when his factory was turning out 15,000 affordable, black-lacquered, brightly stenciled chairs a year, Hitchcocks could be found in countless homes. They still can, for the company has had two lives. But now its second incarnation has been put up for sale, and chairs with the famous name are again an endangered species.

Every successful musician sooner or later makes an album of standards, the familiar pieces he or she has loved and learned from over the years. Writers, too, love paying homage to their forebears, as can be seen from a pair of recent books: Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney, by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins, 320 pages, $25.95), and Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993–2006, by E. L. Doctorow (Random House, 192 pages, $24.95).