January 2011

Smithsonian Collection of Recordings; 84 songs on 4 CDs or cassettes; 800-927-7377.

Photographs by Jim Schafer, text by Mike Sajna; Pennsylvania State University Press; 304 pages.

The Nile, we learned in grade school, was the cradle of civilization. It took this reader some years to understand that each river is indeed the cradle of its own civilization—ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny in every corner. All American rivers sweep their voyagers to new places, all of them, it seems, claim title to “highway to the West,” all nurtured Indian tribes along their banks, all saw the rise of “civilization” —towns and cities and industries that eventually turned their backs to the rivers and blotted them from sight. These days we have to get to know our rivers all over again, and The Allegheny River is a good place to start.

Pedestrians stroll across a narrow, wooden bridge spanning the Halifax River to the Ormond Hotel, social center of Florida’s Ormond Beach in 1903 and for many years thereafter. Located on a thinly populated stretch of a barrier beach between the river and the Atlantic, on what one historian says was previously a “bearinfested wilderness,” the hotel opened in 1888. Among the first guests was the great society portraitist John Singer Sargent.

In your special issue in which folks picked their favorite historical novels (October), there were numerous mentions of Tom Berger’s Little Big Man , which was published at Dial at the time I was running Dell/Delacorte and we had just acquired Dial. I know the book well and am an admirer of it. However, I subsequently founded Arbor House, and one of my early titles was Willie Remembers , by Irvin Faust. It is easily the most imaginative and hilarious and, by purposeful juxtapositions of events and historical figures, the best novel of Americana that I’ve ever read. Well, it’s somewhat rivaled by a more recent novel I’ve done in my eponymously named company called Outlaw , by Warren Kiefer.

Most of the former air bases have a local contact, usually an amateur historian, who enjoys showing people around. To get in touch with these resident experts, write EWACS at 35 Briardale, Stevenage, Herts. SGl, ITR, England. Some of the rescued wall paintings are on display at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford; the RAF Museum, Hendon, North London; the 100th Bomb Group Memorial Museum, Thorpe Abbots, Suffolk; and the British Legion Club, Bottisham, Cambridgeshire.

Shrouded by willow, hazel, and hawthorn bushes, the remains of more than 120 wartime U.S. 8th and 9th Army Air Force bases are still scattered across the landscape of East Anglia and Bedfordshire. Some of the buildings have been converted to workshops, pigsties and barns, poultry sheds and grain stores. Others are derelict, unroofed, buried under blackberry bushes.

But if you fight past brambles into the surviving ramshackle huts, and scrape away more recent distemper, you will confront still-vibrant wall paintings—some done in artist’s oils, others in aircraft dope or in whatever paint, pencil, or crayon came to the hands of servicemen stationed at the bases after 1942.

Only rarely did Thomas Jefferson speak directly of his second home, Poplar Forest, referring rather to “my property in Bedford” or employing some other casual euphemism. This obliqueness about a place in which he took so much pride was typical, another of the apparent contradictions in the Virginian who looms so large in our culture of contradiction—this highly public man who at the height of his political career built a second home to escape all the people and the attention he had attracted to the first.

In this spirited China-trade painting from the early nineteenth Century, a frigate displays the flags of all nations. Although each flag bears a number and is identified in the painted border, the American colors are bewildering: at no time in our history has the flag been composed of nineteen stripes and thirty-odd stars. The ship’s stern and the frame’s central cartouche are left blank, but the figurehead. The Goddess of Liberty by the sculptor William Rush, helps identify this as the United States , launched in 1797. The practice of hoisting flags to celebrate special occasions dates back to at least the sixteenth century, but the use of national flags led to squabbling over perceived slights: by the end of the nineteenth century, signal flags were substituted. Several versions of this painting exist, and the artist who painted this one may have left the title blank to increase his chances of attracting buyers enamored of other vessels.

In the eighth appearance of our popular annual feature, little-known but impressive works shed light on our past from the great days of New Bedford’s whaling industry the edge days of the Cold War. As in earlier years, each picture has something telling to impart about how Americans lived their lives, but this time there’s a new dimension: We’d like to invite you to come and see the show in the flesh, as it were. For details, please turn to the editor’s letter in this issue.