January 2011

The airy elegance of the late Victorian wicker dressing stand opposite, made by the Heywood Brothers and Wakefield Company of Gardner, Massachusetts, exemplifies American wicker design at its best—exotic and imaginative while still remaining functional. This mirrored table brings together many of the stylistic techniques that ultimately endeared wicker to the general public: graceful cabriole legs, plied-reed detail weaving, intricate beadwork, and a profusion of the coiled tendril-like embellishments known as curlicues. One of the few forms of furniture developed in this country that did not rely heavily on existing European or Oriental designs, antique handmade wicker has enjoyed a nationwide renaissance over the past twenty years.

The North Dakota Parks and Tourism Department (800-437-2077) offers information on the American Legacy Tour, a circular route of about six hundred miles. North from Medora it’s a couple of hours to the newly rebuilt Fort Union, once the largest and most important fur-trading post in the West. Heading east and then south, back to Bismarck, you’ll find evidence of Lewis and Clark, including a state park named for Sakakawea, the Indian woman they met in a Mandan village who became their guide. The Mandans’ round earth lodges rise as replicas in Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park. At the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, sixty-five miles north of Bismarck, recent diggings have shown that an indigenous population once thought to have arrived in this area about six hundred years ago in fact took up residence here around 2000 B.C.

From the time, about seven years ago, that we decided to devote a column in this magazine to traveling with a sense of history, we’ve received our fair share of state promotional literature. Not all of it—precious little, in fact—has directly spoken to the way in which history can enrich travel. One packet that did so arrived on my desk last winter; it was the work of Tracy Potter, a history-minded tourism official from North Dakota who wanted us to know about the American Legacy Tour, creating an itinerary in the state’s western region, where, Potter wrote, “virtually the whole of American history can be traced at a handful of sites visited by some of the most famous people of the 19th century.”

President Clinton came into office determined to give his cabinet a new look of diversity, and this apparently meant naming a woman as Attorney General. It took him three tries to achieve the goal, but he has done so with Janet Reno, and it is a bold historical stroke. Unlike the junior cabinet posts in the “human services” areas occasionally held by women since 1933, when Frances Perkins became Secretary of Labor, the Department of Justice is long-established and powerful. Giving it a female boss is a major breakthrough. At the same time, in a pattern that seems characteristic of Clinton, he sent a conciliatory message to traditionalists: Reno, a prosecutor in a high-crime Florida county at the time of her appointment, was known as a tough and courtroom-tested law-enforcement official, and not as a feminist—or any other kind of revolutionary.

I came by my love of history naturally, for both my grandfathers were passionately fond of the subject and learned in it. Having been raised in the late 19th century they were also, of course, well acquainted with the classic authors who today are more honored than read.

I never knew my Grandfather Steele, who died suddenly in the 1930s, before I was born. But my mother remembered his reading Herodotus, Gibbon, and Macaulay for pleasure.

I was delighted to see John Demos’s gripping account of the Deerfield Massacre in the February/March issue. I am frequently asked why Deerfield is so well preserved and retains such a thorough record of its past. My reply is always that the massacre created a historical consciousness that is still with us and is responsible for the very existence of Historic Deerfield.

I was pleased to see Gordon Wood’s comments on the radical nature of the American Revolution in the December 1992 issue (“The Radical Revolution”). I disagree, however, with his emphasis on the Revolutionary War itself as radical or radicalizing. The fundamental break with the old order for most colonists came not during the Revolution but at the moment they or their ancestors decided to pull up stakes and emigrate to the Colonies. That was the beginning of the revolution in their thinking, which opened them up to new ideas, new opportunities, a new determination to improve their lot. The War for Independence confirmed and institutionalized the attitudes that had already taken root, ensuring that later immigrants, who would also undergo their own revolutionary conversion in deciding to go to the United States, would continue to find an open, revolutionary society to fit into.

Your frontispiece in the February/ March issue is a fitting tribute to the Buffalo Soldiers and the Fort Leavenworth monument dedicated to them. Your text, however, would lead one to believe that the statue is the only visible recognition of the importance of the 9th and 10th Cavalries in American military history.

Just inside the main entrance of Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where the 9th and 10th were once stationed, is a ninefoot-tall statue of a Buffalo Soldier designed and cast on the post by Rose Murray, the artist at the post’s Fort Huachuca Historical Museum.

I smoke, and I have no driving desire to spend twenty-nine dollars per year to be preached at by some antismoking fanatic. I can get all I want of that, free, anywhere I go; I don’t have to pay for the privilege of being attacked in my own home. You have the right to publish whatever you want on that subject or any other, but I have the right to not pay for it or read it.

Dr. Meyer convincingly summarizes the history of the development of lung cancer from cigarette smoke and artfully presents evidence refuting the tobacco industry’s post hoc rationalizations. If his article replaced every Joe Camel ad and was required reading for every student, many lives would be saved.