On March 3, 1865, the day before Abraham Lincoln was to be sworn in for the second time as President, a New York private named William Johnson, just one of the thousands of Federal troops who had voted for their Commander-in-Chief, mailed him a gift, along with a painfully scrawled (and spectacularly misspelled) letter:"mister ole Abe: herbi Plese find inclosed won (1) Pare of reeinlistment Stripes I am a vetren which hev Bin warin sed Stripes, thinkin that as how U had reeinlisted i thot i wood Cut em Off & Send em to U hopin they ma cum handy, they Cost Forty (40) Sents i wood send U A pare with gold Stuf on the Ege of em if I cood git em them wons Costs A good Ele more tho. hev em Sode on with Blu thred. my Resins For Sendin em is these Firstly U Air my Stile of A man & Besides is Onist. Seconly U Air intitled to Sed Stripes For inlistin Again & things is verry hi now. I mus put Out my lite in a fu minuts.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
3-volume set (1951-67), Atlas Video .
This compilation of extracts from baseball newsreels of the 1950s and 1960s proceeds year by year in a seasonal cycle: spring training, with sunny warm-ups and jug-eared rookies chewing gum, followed by the mid-season All-Star game, and finally the World Series. In between these exuberant reports (“Lids Off on Spring Grind”) we see baseball miscellany—“warm applause for Mrs. Gehrig” at an Old Timers’ game at Yankee Stadium, the stoic hitter Ralph Kiner grinning anxiously before his wedding. The narration isn’t exactly fresh; each spring offers another chance to say of the Cleveland Indians, “The Tribe is on the warpath,” but after a while that becomes part of the charm. It is worth noting that in more than one hundred newsreels the only reference to money is to Mickey Mantle’s 1957 raise, which nobody questioned.
directed by Tom Johnson and Lance Bird, narrated by Jason Robards, Direct Cinema, 83 minutes .
It is usually true in the editorial world that every story will be improved by a bit of cutting, but when this documentary on the 1939 New York World’s Fair was pruned to fit into an hour-long time slot on PBS, it was diminished by the process. In its full form the movie manages to give those who missed it a very real sense of why virtually everyone over the age of fifty-five seems to have radiant memories of this fair. It sparkled briefly between the twin darknesses of Depression and war, and the poignancy of the hopes for an industrial Utopia that it embodied echoes in Jason Robards’s perfect-pitch narration. Indeed, we see movies, taken with the family’s Kodak Keystone, of ten-year-old Jason enjoying the fair as he absorbs its gospel of aerated bread and city planning and catches a glimpse of the surprisingly naked young women in the amusement area.
by Cathy Luchetti, Villard Books, 238 pages.
Luchetti has drawn from letters, diaries, travelers’ accounts, and cookbooks to produce her culinary history, and although her writing is uneven, her subject is endlessly fascinating. Her scope is broader than her title and subtitle suggest; in addition to cowboy fare, she describes the food aboard immigrant ships, in the Army, on farms, in towns, at church suppers. She touches on Native American, Spanish-American, and African-American cooking, and she includes recipes for invalids and antidotes to poisoning.
Most of the recipes are intended to be read rather than followed: To make coffei for one hundred Army men, “Take five pounds of roasted coffee, grind, and mix with six eggs. …” For barbecued squirrel, “Put some slices of fat bacon in an oven. Lay the squirrels on them and lay two slices of bacon on top.” The photographs—of cooks, kitchens, restaurants, picnics, campfires, barbecues—make a pleasant accompaniment to the rest of the meal.
by Mark Neely, Jr., Harvard University Press, 207 pages
As an introduction to the sprawling field of Lincoln studies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark Neely, Jr., offers a compact one-volume biography that gets the sixteenth President engaged to Mary Todd by page 32 and into the White House less than thirty pages later. Even at this pace Neely has real authority as he shows that Lincoln’s politics were practical and his ambition was vaulting but without any grand object through the early years. “At one critical juncture,” writes Neely, “[Lincoln] seriously weighed the choice between becoming a lawyer or a blacksmith !.” Lincoln wrote in 1832 that he had “no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed by my fellow men.” Neely convincingly traces his hero’s evolution from country lawyer and Whig canvasser to congressman, Republican candidate, and President. He doubts that Lincoln ever assumed he would end up the great man he became.
T. A. Heppenheimer, who wrote “Build-down,” recommends several books on the military in the wake of our wars. Makers of Naval Policy, 1798-1947 , by Robert Greenhalgh Albion (Naval Institute Press, 1980), is a thorough and highly knowledgeable treatment of the major trends in the growth of the U.S. Navy from the days of the Barbary pirates to the dawn of the atomic age. The Army in a lean time is the subject of Edward F. Coffman’s The Old Army (Oxford University Press, 1986), a lively and atmospheric anecdotal survey of the Regular Army between the two world wars. And, finally, there is the great flagship itself, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s immensely influential The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 , reissued by Dover Publications in soft cover in 1987 and quite compelling with its grand and sonorous tribute to the Royal Navy: “Those far distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.”
by Alexander O. Boulton, Rizzoli, 128 pages.
by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and David Larkin, Rizzoli, 312 pages.