January 2011

In 1937, the American economy, which had been slowly rising from the depths it had reached in 1933, suddenly reversed course and sank once more. While this new economic trend enlarged the misery of the American people, it also gave the economists a new problem: what to call it.

Since the start of the 19th century, an economic downturn had been called a depression, but in 1937, the country was already in a depression. So the economists, probably delighted to have a problem they could actually do something about, pressed the word recession into service. Because of the iron law of euphemism (weak terms drive out strong ones), recession took hold, and we have not had a depression since. Today that word effectively belongs to the 1930s and, indeed, is often capitalized to indicate its now unique meaning.

Whenever I begin the research for one of these columns, I am gratefully surprised to find that what I recall as a simple story turns up new questions and insights, as if I were unfolding an unsuspectedly intricate and lovely paper cutout. My latest rediscovery began in a search for historical parallels to a currently rising “tax revolt.” Last fall, many state gubernatorial candidates played to the discontents of heavily taxed real property owners. Nationally, the first version of a deficit-reduction package of taxes was shot down by the House.

In 1903, when President Theodore Roosevelt visited Yellowstone National Park, the naturalist John Burroughs accompanied him. “No bird escaped John Burroughs’ eye,” Roosevelt wrote; “no bird note escaped his ear.” (On this trip the only game Roosevelt bagged was a gray mouse, which he skinned and sent back to the Smithsonian on the chance that it might have been an unknown type.) It’s still possible to go on safari through the animal haunts of Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons with a guide in the Burroughs mold, someone who can scan the horizon and spot two brownish dots a half-mile away that binoculars reveal as a grazing moose and her calf. Someone who has permits to swing his four-wheel-drive from the often crowded main roads of these Wyoming parks onto the high prairie land to track at a careful distance the movements of fifty wild horses.

by Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett; Harry N. Abrams, Inc.; 304 pages; $49.50 .

Brick buildings in early America were inevitably painted bright yellow or red with every seam precisely outlined in white. Kitchen and bedroom floors were often decorated with beach sand swirled with a broom. Someone trying to read a book by candlelight might have to snuff out the wick forty times per hour to keep it from guttering and going out. When George Washington lay ill in New York, residents chained off the streets nearest his home and spread adjacent streets with straw so that he wouldn’t be disturbed by the racket of passing carriages. When Louis Philippe, soon to be king of France, traveled through the South in 1797, he found that “nowhere are there chamber pots; we asked for one at Mr. J. Campbell’s and were told that there were broken panes in the windows .”

by Christopher Hibbert; W. W. Norton & Co.; 375 pages; $29.95.

The British historian Christopher Hibbert has made a career of writing books that are highly readable, informative, and accessible. This is one of the reasons for his unpopularity among academic historians. He is treading on their turf and having a good time doing it. Not for him is the dusty tone endemic to many professional scholars. Like the late A. J. P. Taylor, he flies in the face of the Oxbridge establishment, pulling the odd beard and upsetting the occasional household god by Grafting carefully reasoned histories that both entertain and reward the amateur historian. In his latest book, Redcoats and Rebels , Hibbert makes no pretenses about his aims: “This is a narrative history … intended for the general reader rather than the student, although I hope the student to whom the field is new may find it a useful introduction.”

The decade we scarcely knew was a decade The father of rock ’n’ roll Plus …

When many of us were living through them, the 1970s seemed like a sort of nondescript breathing space between the ardent sixties and whatever lay ahead. Now Nicholas Lemann resesses that ten-year span and finds a clearly defined and portentous era.

For thirty years the musical historian Samuel Charters has pursued the ghostly figure of Robert Johnson across the flat Mississippi Delta country, seeking the source of a handful of scary, passionate, compelling songs. Those songs have nourished rock music from the very start; this spring a reissue of Johnson’s recordings sold well over 350,000 copies and won their author a Grammy more than half a century after he was murdered.

For eight years, Charles LaRocca, a high school history teacher in Orange County, New York, has worked with small groups of students on a research project aimed at determining if a specific local Union regiment was a model for the troops in Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage, which is known to be based roughly on the Civil War battle of Chancellorsville. First at O’Neill High School in Highland Falls, near West Point, and now at nearby Pine Bush High School, LaRocca and his students have searched through regimental histories, Crane archives in Newark, New Jersey, newspaper accounts, and numerous other historical sources. The students have combed all the existing biographies and studies of Crane that they could find. They talked to local historians, visited the battlefield, and studied the records of individual soldiers. Here is a summary of LaRocca’s report on what he and his students found:

The article “Prescott’s War” startled me while I was reading your February/ March issue, as Linzee Prescott was a 1942 member of my 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment Intelligence Platoon— later to be part of the 82d Airborne Division.

He was quite a bit off the wall even then, but the regimental commander, Col. James M. Gavin, was always high on Prescott’s artwork as a morale booster, and he was a regular contributor to our raunchy unit newspaper, The Static Line .