January 2011

Everything you need to know about Columbus

With the inexorable approach of the semi-millennium of his epochal voyage, you’re going to be hearing more and more about him in the months ahead. Here, in brisk Q & A format, is what you’ll need to flesh out half-forgotten facts and purge old myths.

Detroit iron

How confident they look now, those American cars of the 1950s, exuberant with chrome and blatant colors, emblems of an era when nobody in America had even heard the name Toyota. A handsome photographic portfolio surveys the field, while Brock Yates tells what made the cars special.

The business of boxing

When this particular industry experiences a dramatic upswing, it really is dramatic. In a tangy tour Joseph D’O’Brian surveys the pivotal fights that have built the modern sport.

Plus …

Early in 1973 a woman named Jan Wollett applied for a job as a flight attendant with World Airways, based in Oakland, California. Her previous job had been as a secretary for the actress Jennifer Jones; she loved to travel and felt that working for an airline would give her a chance to see the world while earning a living.

What reader has not been infuriated at having to look up something in a book with no index? Serious books written in this century usually are indexed. But, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, this was not the case, and one reader of the time was so annoyed by the lack of indexes in his books that he supplied a number of them himself.

Exactly how many books Thomas Jefferson indexed is unknown because a fire on Christmas Eve 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the library he had sold to the government to form the nucleus of the Library of Congress. Of the surviving books, three have short indexes written by Jefferson. Two are copied onto blank end pages; one is on a separate sheet bound into the book.

For a long time, I have wanted to write about a vision of my father I experienced on a New York City subway train while riding downtown to a literary meeting. As a historian, I am skeptical of visions. I pride myself on my rationality, I rely on facts. But, as a novelist, I believe in visions. Now, I see a way to tell the story in the context of other visions of my father that have pursued me lifelong.

Ever since I came to New York, I saw him whenever I drove down West Street, the wide cobblestone road along the Hudson. Every morning at 6:00 in the year 1898, my father got off a ferry from Jersey City and sold copies of the New York World there.

Your article “What Ever Happened to New Math” (December 1990) brought back memories, pleasant and otherwise, of my days as a “new-math kid” while growing up in Fresno, California. Because I was not introduced to new math until I began algebra in the eighth grade, my adjustment was not as traumatic as that of my classmates struggling with the new-math approach to seventh- and eighth-grade arithmetic, learning such useful concepts as counting in the base-twelve number system. Mr. Miller made one error in his article, however. He stated that SMSG referred to something he characterized as the School Mathematics Study Group. This is utter nonsense. As any student attending Alexander Hamilton Junior High School in Fresno during the early sixties could tell you, SMSG stood for only one thing: “Some Math, Some Garbage.”

I enjoyed reading your article on the new math, but I believe that it neglected the positive side of the whole episode. I am apparently a contemporary of the author, having graduated from high school in 1969.1 attended a suburban Indianapolis school system that participated in the early new-math projects. At first we even used SMSG workbooks. I do not know how our teachers were prepared, but they clearly comprehended the concepts in the new math.

I received average math grades throughout secondary school, and my college experience with mathematics confirmed that I had no interest in or aptitude for the subject. I did, however, start taking computer programming courses. There I found myself working in base two, eight, and sixteen. Using these alternative numbering systems was easy and natural. My fellow students who had no effective new-math experience were at sea, and many who were far brighter than I didn’t perform as well as I did.

The generally balanced report on Robert E. Lee in the May/June issue is not very complimentary toward his Revolutionary hero father, Henry (Light-Horse Harry) Lee, saying he deserted his family. After financial and physical afflictions, he did spend the last few years of his life in the West Indies. Previous to that he served under Washington in the Revolution and was governor of Virginia. As a member of Congress he wrote the resolution on Washington’s death: “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

As did the financier of the Revolution, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, Henry Lee expected that the new nation would develop faster than it did. Like Morris, Lee invested heavily in land and went to debtors’ prison when he could not pay what he owed. In part due to mistreatment of such patriots, the people of the United States abolished debtors’ prisons—those sad remnants of old England—and put in place the bankruptcy provisions of the new Constitution.

Another story about Gen. R. E. Lee—how disgusting! R. E. Lee was a slave owner who fought against the Union, and by his actions many young men died, yet he survived unhurt. In other parts of the world, he and Jefferson Davis would have been executed for treason. I do not think of him as a great warrior but as a traitor.

Not long ago, while I was in the midst of preparations for an exhibition on early American trade with India, an extraordinary memento of that trade serendipitously appeared at the Peabody Museum of Salem in Massachusetts. Anne Halliday, a retired social worker from Cape Cod, brought in a large, ornate, inscribed silver-gilt presentation cup that had been in her family for many years. Miss Halliday said that her father, a great explorer of the nooks and crannies of Cape Cod during the twenties, had probably acquired the cup for his small collection of sea chests, ship’s clocks, and other things from New England’s sea-faring past. But Miss Halliday didn’t know for certain where the cup was from; she’d seen it for the first time when the family sorted through the father’s things shortly after his death in 1928. The cup spent the next half-century on her brother’s farm in Tennessee. Not until it was returned to her a few years ago did Miss Halliday notice the inscription and realize the object’s historical significance.

Tangible evidence of New England’s flourishing nineteenth-century ice-harvesting industry has been scant for decades, but that’s about to change. Now almost completely restored and already listed on the National Register of Historic Places is a small icehouse in South Bristol, Maine, where for more than 150 years ice was cut from a nearby one-acre pond, stored, and then sold year-round by five generations of the Thompson family.

Technically, since the Thompson icehouse was a strictly local business, it does not reflect the scope of the international ice export trade that boomed throughout New England in the days of the squarerigger. Nonetheless, the methods and tools used by Asa Thompson and his descendants—all preserved in exhibits and photographs at the Thompson Ice House Museum—are not very different from those used in the better-known ice export trade.