Susannah McCorkle, who wrote “The Mother of Us All,” makes the following recommendations for recordings of Ethel Waters on CD:
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
by Spencer Klaw, Alien Lane, Penguin Press, 337 pages
Founded in 1848, the Oneida Community thrived for thirty years in upstate New York, a record that makes it America’s most successful experiment in communal living. Under the charismatic leadership of John Humphrey Noyes, some three hundred members supported themselves manufacturing traveling bags, animal traps, and lazy Susans. Work was shared, children were reared communally, and adults practiced a form of free love Noyes called “complex marriage.”
(2 volumes) edited by Bernard Bailyn, Library of America
Without this collection, to get what it contains you would have to read The Grand Convention alongside The Federalist Papers and What the Anti-Federalists Were For and then spend countless bleary hours going through hundreds of old pamphlets. And you would miss not only the elegance and clarity of the Library of America’s production but also the sense it contains of the ferment of argumentation at the time the Constitution was proposed. The two-volume work restores the debate’s original uncertainty and includes small newspapers’ opinions as well as those of the victorious Federalists. It follows the national argument like the transcript of an unbelievably eloquent electronic town hall.
The Huntington Library, in San Marino, has long been known for its extraordinary holdings, including tremendously broad and deep collections in American history. Now through the end of August, the Huntington offers what may be the largest gathering of Lincoln material ever seen in one place. Titled “The Last Best Hope of Earth,” the show concentrates strongly on Civil War material but also offers personal memorabilia, including the President’s marriage license and the white gloves he wore to the theater on the night of his assassination. The curators hope the public will draw from this assemblage of two hundred items the message that this is still Lincoln’s America, still the last best hope.
by John Edward Hasse, Simon & Schuster, 479 pages
edited by Mark Tucker, Oxford University Press, 536 pages
Today Duke Ellington stands higher than ever as a towering figure of American music. Right now he is the subject of a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian (“Beyond Category,” at the Museum of the City of New York through March 20 and then in other cities through September 1996), a major new biography, and an excellent critical collection.
Beyond Category is an affectionate musical biography by the curator of the Smithsonian show. Hasse reconstructs the Duke’s growth from a teen-ager playing rags for seventy-five cents a night to one of the great American composers. Ellington still hasn’t received the biography he deserves, but this good artistic portrait begins to restore the damage done by James Lincoln Collier’s patronizing attempt.
by Clifton Hood, Simon & Schuster, 335 pages
New York’s subway system has embodied the spirit of the city, for better and for worse, since its opening in 1903. The system was proposed in 1888 by Mayor Abram S. Hewitt, a fierce nativist who saw mass transit as the only way New York’s homegrown population could escape the encroachment of foreign hordes. He would have been shocked to see the polyglot town that resulted when subway lines allowed immigrants to establish new enclaves throughout the city.
There are many aspects to the story—engineering, social, economic—and Hood covers them all. He goes into particular depth on the political details, which at times can make a New York subway map look simple and which confirm a familiar maxim about public works: As hard as they are to design and build, keeping them going is often an even bigger challenge. Hood’s book will be instructive not only to New Yorkers and transit buffs but to anyone interested in our nation’s infrastructure.
by Douglas Southall Freeman, Collier Books, 792 pages
Douglas Southall Freeman spent the last eight and a half years of his life working on his monumental seven-volume biography of George Washington. Fifteen years after his death in 1953, an able abridgment appeared. Richard Harwell, who distilled the original 3,582 pages down to 754, wrote that “Washington’s life … has withstood many bad books. Freeman’s is certainly one of the few that it has deserved. George Washington is the true and complete story—fully researched, felicitously written, and unembellished by foolish myth or by false and pretentious piety.” Now the one-volume Freeman is back in print, in a hefty, handsome paperback edition. It is both a wholly absorbing narrative and a salutary reminder that its subject is every bit as great as you were told he was in grade school.
by Gerald Posner, Random House, 607 pages
The conspiracy-book industry seized on last fall’s thirtieth anniversary of the Kennedy tragedy for its latest barrage. Among all the new volumes, Gerald Posner’s calm and definitive study, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK , arrives at the most truly radical conclusion: “One man, acting alone, killed the President.” He asserts that the Warren Commission’s 1964 report was flawed but correct after all.