January 2011

by Anne Noggle; Texas A&M University Press; 161 pages.

Anne Noggle has produced a handsome tribute to fellow members of the World War II civilian unit that was the first group of women to ever fly U.S. military aircraft. As early as 1939 women pilots had approached the Defense Department to establish a military flight program for females. Citing women’s alleged emotional instability and dubious mechanical aptitude, the Pentagon rejected the proposal.

Frustrated, the pilots took matters into their own hands. In the summer of 1942 Jacqueline Cochran recruited twenty-five American women to ferry airplanes for the British Air Transport Auxiliary, which by then was desperate for trained pilots. Cochran’s crew performed with heroic efficiency.

Eagle Squadron Patent Power Patent Power Patent Power Old World Buffalo Real Gold Real Gold Found Folk Art

The traditional bottle of champagne that smashed against the bow of the USS Maine in 1890 christened our first modern capital warship and inaugurated the only battleship tradition that would last a century.

Great Britain pioneered the vessels’ evolution from ironclads of the late 1860s, but her tradition ended when the Vanguard was scrapped in 1960. France, the last nation other than America to keep battleships, discarded the Jean Bart eighty-five years after launching the Redoubtable in 1876. To be sure, the exact beginning of America’s tradition is debatable, but the Maine , originally designated an armored cruiser, was the first American warship launched that gained fame as a battleship.

You step into a dream. It is not your dream but somebody else’s. The fragments of this dream are scattered about. You must put them back together again.

This is difficult. Every piece is significant. Minute details become magnified: a piece of white dress, a clenched fist, a gold knob on a mahogany drawer, half of a crooked smile. You hold the sun as you search for the sky. You see a pair of laughing eyes and no face anywhere. Still you keep trying.

Americans have been inching their way to the completion of such dreams for generations, and most people can remember the feeling of satisfaction that finishing a difficult jigsaw puzzle brings. From the beginning, jigsaw puzzles have offered such feelings of accomplishment to children. Indeed, psychologists now endorse their benefits: teaching spatial relationships, helping develop powers of concentration, and, of course, nourishing problemsolving skills.

Not all Greek Revival architecture has monumental columns and an entablature. Other clues are:

Rectangular transom and side lights

Opennings above and on the side of the door.

Monumental frieze

The middle part of an entablature between the raking cornice and the architrave.

Monumental pilasters

Engaged columns, often no more than a board, especially at the corners of a building.

Shoulder architrave

The molding around a window or doorway that projects near the top of the opening.

Fretwork

This and the other boxes in this article are adapted from Albion’s Seed.

A distinctive pattern of participation in town meetings developed at an early date in Massachusetts. It low levels of turnout—normally in the range of 10 to 30 percent of adult males. But when controversial questions came up, participation sometimes approached 100 percent.

This pattern of very low participation, punctuated by sudden surges of very high turnout, has been characteristic of New England town government for three centuries—and very different…from voting patterns in other regions.

New England town governments tended to become very active in the life of their communities. The inhabitants voted to tax themselves heavily by comparison with the other parts of British America. On a per capita basis, levels of spending by local government in Massachusetts were two to four times higher than in many other colonies, though much below the cost of government in Europe. These relative patterns have also persisted.

The abolitionist indictment of slavery for its association with predatory sex had a solid foundation in historical fact. One thinks of Mary Boykin Chesnut’s response to the antislavery movement in the nineteenth century: “Like the patriarchs of old our men live in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds.…You see, Mrs. Stowe did not hit on the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor.” Mrs. Chesnut knew whereof she spoke, and was haunted by her knowledge of sexual predators within her own family. But she (and the abolitionists, and many historians too) were very much mistaken in thinking that the “peculiar institution” of race slavery itself was the first cause of this behavior. The same pattern had appeared in Virginia before slavery was widespread. It had also existed in rural England.

Following a week in Paris during which I watched with fascination each morning on CNN the debates between Gorbachev and his rivals at the Congress of the Communist party, I took another vacation that might seem more appropriate for the editor of American Heritage. This was a leisurely tour of Virginia from Mount Vernon to Monticello and Montpelier with special attention to what Virginians call the Peninsula—Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown, Hampton, Newport News, and Norfolk across the bay.