January 2011

Carolina rice inspired sweet dreams among Southern planters, some of whom were so grateful to the cereal grass for their prosperity that they enshrined its image—in the form of low-relief carvings—on their bedposts. Paramount among South Carolina’s early crops, rice was introduced there shortly after 1670, when colonists first settled along a bank of the Ashley River, about seven miles from present-day Charleston. The low-lying coastal region, with its abundant marshes and swamps, was ideal for rice cultivation, encouraging settlers to create plantations along the fertile wetlands.

New Castle, Delaware, may be the closest thing to a ghost town on the East Coast. It was never deserted, of course; no place in the East ever is. But it had a rich and turbulent history until about a century and a half ago, after which history turned and went elsewhere, leaving the place almost fossilized as the colonial capital and handsome Federal-era town it had once been.

Turn off Delaware Route 9—the usual noisy highway with its cluttered commercial strip—two miles south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge and you plunge into a warren of narrow streets lined with centuries-old houses. After several blocks you emerge on a village green platted by Peter Stuyvesant in 1655 and dominated at one end by an Anglican church built in 1703 and at the other by a 1732 courthouse where the colonial assembly governed, where the Declaration of Independence was read in 1776, and where the first constitution of the state of Delaware was drafted later the same year.

Almost everyone knows that the destruction of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor brought America to war with Spain; less familiar is the fact that through a heroic engineering effort, the Navy raised the ship, refloated her, and then sank her again. On the 100th anniversary of the modern battleship (the Maine was first in a class of ship that today only the United States continues to maintain), Carmine Prioli tells the story.

Very, according to David Hackett Fischer whose book Albion’s Seed asserts that generations of historians have ignored the strong connections with specific regions of England that continue to shape the American character. A lively interview by Bertram Wyatt-Brown shows that Fischer is well equipped to wage the fight his important study has ignited.

One of the things that sets Bennington, Vermont, apart from other small towns is that a succession of four first rate professional photographers has been busy there from the time the camera first opened its eye on America, and a great body of their work has survived in one place. Oliver Jensen presents some of the best and most telling examples.

The last flight from Danang—a terrifying memoir of the final days of the Vietnam War . . . the latest in our American House Styles series looks at the Greek Revival . . . Henry Ford’s memorial to the America he and his world-shaking Model T changed forever . . . and, to further amplify gratitude in the Thanksgiving season, more.

You had better shove this in the stove,” 29-year-old Sam Clemens wrote his older brother, Orion, in 1865, “for … I don’t want any absurd ‘literary remains’ & ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain’ published after I am planted.”

The young Clemens might not have appreciated the first two volumes of Mark Twain’s Letters that have now been published by the University of California Press, but the rest of us should be grateful that neither Orion nor a good many of his brother’s other correspondents did as they were told. Both books are models of scrupulous scholarship, containing everything the reader could conceivably want to know: the gross profit of a Manhattan market in the year in which young Sam Clemens bought some fruit there; the dates of arrival and departure for every steamboat on which he served; the title and full publishing history of a book he may have sent his sweetheart.

One evening in the early 1950s, Oscar Hammerstein II unexpectedly encountered his Broadway partner, Richard Rodgers, at a reception. “Well, fancy meeting you here,” he said. “Who’s minding the score?” Hammerstein, like most poets, couldn’t resist a pun. But anyone in show business in those days could easily have answered the question: Both of them, thank you, and very well, too.

My files bulge of late with stories that tell unedifying tales of cupidity and stupidity in world and national credit markets. There is the S & L scandal—the story of how hundreds of savings and loan institutions failed through unsound investments, while supposed regulators looked the other way. The bill for their “bailout” climbs toward some new megabuck horizon, it seems, every time there is a fresh disclosure. Some of the stricken banks held quantities of the infamous “junk bonds,” that is, risky securities backed mainly by the expectations of their issuers, rather than by solid assets.

And passing to the international scene, there are Third World nations such as Mexico and Brazil looking for debt relief as they struggle (and fail) to meet interest payments on money borrowed for development purposes. Their banker-creditors answer that before any loans can be renewed, the delinquents must stop squandering money on inefficient state-run enterprises and popular social programs.

You know what Mr. Willkie reminds me of?” It was nine years ago, and I was sitting with Geoffrey Ward, then the editor of this magazine, listening to Franklin Roosevelt’s ghostly irritation at his rival in the fall of 1940. Actually, there was nothing ghostly about it; the FDR emanating from the old Wollensak tape recorder was full of life. Vigorous, annoyed, urgent with cheerful energy, the President told us: “He reminds me of a carnival barker—one of those men who you know is cheating you, but wants to get you in. … You know he’s not telling you the truth, in order to get your money in.”

Geoff and I were privy to this interesting conversation because Roosevelt had for a short while made secret recordings in the Oval Office, and a historian named R. J. C. Butow had discovered them in the FDR Library and sent us a copy. The publication of the story won American Heritage more press coverage than the magazine had ever before received, but it had farther-reaching ramifications than that.