January 2011

Unlike almost everyone there, I didn’t go to the Florida Keys to dive or fish. I went there to follow the path of a railroad that once left the continent and traversed miles of open water and uninhabited tiny islands to reach Key West. The railroad was built between 1904 and 1912 and blew away in a hurricane in 1935. Subsequently its bridges and roadbed were rebuilt into the highway that connects the Keys.

The railroad was the final creation of Henry Morrison Flagler, who sat at the right hand of John D. Rockefeller during the golden age of Standard Oil and used his resulting millions to build up Florida. In 1904 he decided that if he pushed his Florida East Coast Railway down from Miami to Key West, that island’s deep harbor could become the most important port on the Gulf of Mexico. He said at one point, “It is perfectly simple. All you have to do is build one concrete arch and then another, and pretty soon you will find yourself in Key West.” The railroad took the same route that you now take by car.

T he Florida Keys: From Key Largo to Key West , by Joy Williams, published by Random House, is an exceptionally good all-around guide. The author—a novelist—is witty, sharply perceptive, and seems to know every restaurant and motel as well as every roadside or historical curiosity. The Railroad That Died at Sea , by Pat Parks, published by Key West’s Langley Press, gives a fuller story of the train line. For a lavish brochure that gives information and rates for virtually every accommodation in the Keys, dial 1-800-FLA-KEYS. For other general information, call the State Tourism Office, 904-487-1462.

The extraordinary lilac bouquet on the opposite page is a “puffy” table lamp, a distinctive breed of lighting fixture that flourished in American living rooms at the beginning of this century. Puffies were the creation of the Pairpoint Company in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and this splendid example, produced around 1910, demonstrates the maker’s preoccupation with idealized, floriferous subjects. It was a common preoccupation of the times.

Readers are invited to submit their personal “brushes with history,” for which our regular rates will be paid on acceptance. Unfortunately, we cannot correspond about or return submission. ”…And Justice for All” Wilderness Seder Second Gunman

In 1954 my father was stationed at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and we lived on the now-defunct South Post of Fort Myer. My friends and I had a grand time romping through the nearby Civil War battlefields, taking turns being Yankee and Rebel. I couldn’t decide whether to favor the Blue or the Gray. At the age of eight I’d really never thought about the issues that fueled the fighting.

Then, one day in the first week of September 1954, at the beginning of the year for our small military elementary school at Fort Myer, there were new faces in my class—and reporters from United Press and Army Times taking pictures. They were photographing the class while I led the Pledge of Allegiance for the first integrated class in the formerly Confederate state of Virginia. The two new students were black, and to me and the rest of my third-grade classmates they did not seem any different from the rest of us kids. But 1 was very proud to have been chosen to lead the Pledge of Allegiance on that day.

In 1934 I was in my early twenties and was unemployed. When President Roosevelt offered the youth of America one temporary way out, I jumped at the opportunity to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, which had been designed to take young men like me off the streets and send them into the forests.

Before I knew it, I found myself in Montana, along with three hundred other city boys who were coming into close contact with nature for the first time. The towering blue-gray ranges of Glacier National Park were majestic, and the cedars, pines, and sycamores rose so high that they made my apartment house back home seem small.

In the middle of April, spring and Passover came together. There were only twenty-six Jewish men in our company, and most of us thought of the Seders back home. We talked it over and decided to have our own ceremony out there in the wilderness. I was chosen to be part of a three-man delegation that went to see our commanding officer, Capt. Daniel M. Wilson.

“This gray man in gray,” wrote Bruce Catton of Robert E. Lee, “rode his dappled gray horse into legend almost at once, and like all legendary figures he came before long to seem almost supernatural, a man of profound mystery.” Thirty years after the end of the Civil War, the Confederate leader was no longer merely a Virginia hero, or a Southern one; he was a national hero, revered by North and South alike. When a later generation of biographers came to try and seek out his personality, they found it almost beyond reach. Now the Civil War historian Stephen W. Sears pursues the true character of a figure who remains as elusive as he is compelling. And in an accompanying essay, Lamar Herrin, author of the novel The Unwritten Chronicles of Robert E. Lee , tells how the general seized control of his book.

New York City is famous for devouring its past, but in fact the endless skyscrapers hide a surprisingly rich legacy of great and humble houses that documents three and a half centuries of tumultuous life.

“Comrades! We’ve been screwed”: the riotous epic of cultural misunderstanding born of Stalin’s importing a group of American blacks to make a movie about racial injustice in the United States; how the gas cooking range transformed the domestic landscape; Geoffrey C. Ward on a great, newly published Union soldier’s memoir; and, lest the darling buds pall, more.

In the spring of 1891, nearly twenty years after Henry Morton Stanley introduced himself to Dr. David Livingstone on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, Oxford University awarded the grizzled, stumpy explorer an honorary degree. As he made his way forward to receive it, an undergraduate shouted out, “Dr. Stanley, I presume.”