January 2011

Contact the Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau at 800-657-6910 or visit www.nashvillecvb.com for information about the city’s historic sites as well as present-day activities and places to stay, eat, and enjoy music of every kind. I was delighted to check in at the top-rated Hermitage Hotel built in 1910 and recently brought back to the elegance, typified by the stained-glass ceiling in the lobby, that had made it the center of Nashville life for decades. In fact this was the headquarters for both sides of the women’s suffrage movement, until Tennessee cast the definitive vote in favor. The hotel has a superb restaurant, and in its vicinity is a men’s room of such Art Deco perfection that a sign outside invites women to have a peek, when possible.

These days, airports try to evoke some of the flavor of the communities they serve, and, in Nashville, the airport corridor leading from the arrival and departure gates is enlivened by walls full of linear posters, at once stark and vigorous, of country music stars. They bear the unmistakable stamp of Hatch Show Prints, one of the oldest working letterpress printshops in the country, still flourishing in the city’s downtown.

The house of labor has divided against itself once again, and predictions are rife that it is about to fall. When Andrew L. Stern led his Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and three other key unions out of the AFL-CIO during its convention this past summer, it seemed to many a nearly suicidal move, considering how badly the ranks of American labor have already been diminished by globalization, the changing nature of the workplace, and a hostile federal government. The four departing unions constitute about one-third of the organization’s total membership. Yet, if history is any guide, look for this division to rejuvenate those unions that are staying and going.

Half a millennium after he flourished, Leonardo da Vinci is still making news. Earlier this year researchers found a previously unknown studio where Leonardo worked on some of his most famous paintings. His mystique is invoked in The Da Vinci Code , the popular and controversial fiction bestseller now being made into a movie. And he remains a favorite subject for cable television, including a two-part series coming up on the History Channel in December.

Was Zorro the first superhero of American pop culture? He has certainly proved to be one of the most enduring, having lasted now for 86 years and spawned countless progeny and imitations. And 2005 may well be his biggest year yet. May saw the publication of the novel Zorro , the first serious fictional treatment of the character, by the Peruvian-born California writer Isabel Allende, and a new Zorro comic-book series by the writer-artist team of Don McGregor and Sidney Lima. (The first Zorro story, serialized in 1919 as The Curse of Capistrano , is still in print under the title The Mark of Zorro .) But the biggest Zorro news of all was the recent release of The Legend of Zorro , the follow-up to the hugely successful 1998 film The Mask of Zorro .

“History Now: Lincoln Heard and Seen” (February/March 2005) gave me the welcome opportunity to introduce to your readers a rediscovered life portrait of Abraham Lincoln, but not quite the way it should have been viewed. Even in this new age of scanning and digitizing, images can still get flopped—the old-fashioned way—and I’m afraid the long-lost J. C. Wolfe painting of Lincoln somehow appeared on your pages in mirror image.