January 2011

Both the Guthrie Chamber of Commerce (405-282-1947) and the Oklahoma Tourism and Recreation Department (800-652-6552) offer information on local attractions and accommodations. Guthrie has several fine bed and breakfasts, and at least one organizes “mystery weekends” with a historical flavor. Every April the town marks its founding with an eighty-niner celebration. This year the Cherokee Outlet, thirty miles north, celebrates the centennial of the largest rush.

The Guthrie trolley runs hourly on weekends. Visitors may also rent bicycles from Guthrie Bicycles for a tour around town that is manageable in about two hours.

“Miles of wagons; a welter of horsemen; random shots fired in the air … from the four corners of that land besieged by settlers one cry goes up, ‘Oklahoma! Oklahoma!’” wrote the Cuban revolutionary José Martí, who was on hand to see the first Oklahoma land rush just over a century ago. Although most of the downtown area’s nineteenth-century buildings still line the wide streets, it’s difficult to imagine Guthrie as the capital city during those frenzied times, for the pace and purpose of the town have changed so dramatically. Guthrie is chiefly remembered today as one of those towns that sprang to life overnight not because of oil or gold but because of the free land the federal government offered in one of five Oklahoma land runs a century ago.

The chronicles of our time will someday record how President Clinton struggled in the earliest months of his administration to find an appropriate response for the United States to the civil war and “ethnic cleansing” taking place in Bosnia. As a historian and an American, I’ve watched the agonizing process with no rigid opinions, but with a deep sense of sadness and resignation to the inevitabilities of history. There will be no easy or permanent solution to the murderous clash of nationalities that has followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. That nation itself was an artificial creation, a union of convenience among hostile peoples. It emerged in 1919 from what was then the bloodiest war in history, and it took the form it did partly because an American President had an idealistic vision. There is something like the tragic fulfillment of a historical curse in the events that bring Bill Clinton to wrestle with dilemmas unsuccessfully addressed by Woodrow Wilson three-quaters of a century ago. Before criticizing other nations for what they do or do not do in the situation, Americans should recall the record.

If Rodney Dangerfield weren’t a comedian, he’d probably be an executive. They don’t get any respect, either. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and has, naturally, a long entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica and numerous cross-references. But his father-in-law, Gardiner Hubbard - who merely invented AT&T, made Bell, by far, the richest inventor of the 19th century, and gave the country a phone system that has been the envy of the world ever since - goes entirely unmentioned.

Even the government gets into the act. Recently, the Clinton administration proposed that executives be the sole job category in the United States that, in effect, is subject to government wage controls. The plan is to limit the deductibility of executive salaries from corporate income taxes.

Russell Baker on the not-so-new trend of in-your-face humor … Wilfrid Sheed tells how Broadway’s songwriters migrated to Hollywood and, complaining all the while, gave us our greatest popular music … how a pocket watch made possible our mightiest nineteenth-century industry … and, to banish melancholy as the days draw in, more.

Two extraordinary women, both over a hundred years old, tell their story in their own words—brave, clear-eyed, and with the greatest good humor. It’s a tale that stretches back to slavery days, through Harlem in the 1920s, and on up until now. As Sadie and Bessie like to say, it is not “black” or “women’s” history; it belongs to us all.

John Steele Gordon takes on a subject about as wide as the sky—the whole history of the American environment—and fashions it into an absorbing narrative that shows us living at odds and in harmony with our surroundings from prehistory to the present day.

He told Abraham Lincoln he was better than any officer on the field at Bull Run and got the Army’s top job. He built a beaten force into a proud one, and stole a march on Robert E. Lee with it. He was twenty-four hours away from winning the Civil War. Then he fell apart. Gene Smith examines the most fateful failure of nerve in American military history.

The destruction of Fighting Joe Hooker Saving ourselves from ourselves The Delany sisters’ century Plus …

There is an important 1884 book with a very long title: The Field of Honor: Being a Complete and Comprehensive History of Duelling in All Countries. The Judicial Duel of Europe, the Private Duel of the Civilized World, and Specific Descriptions of All the Noted Hostile Meetings in Europe and America.