January 2011

Two excellent one-volume biographies of Hamilton are available: Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox , by John C. Miller (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), and Alexander Hamilton: A Biography , by Forrest McDonald (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). Albert S. Bolles’s three-volume The Financial History of the United States , first published a century ago, still gives the best, clearest account of the makings of the American economic system. An interesting exploration of the relationship between Jefferson and Hamilton is to be found in John S. Pancake’s Jefferson and Hamilton (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barren, 1974). To really get to know Hamilton’s thinking, the best source, by far is his own marvelously readable writing. The relevant documents were collected in a single volume by Columbia University Press in 1934 as Papers on Public Credit, Commerce, and Finance .

—J.S.G.

Like women’s lives, women’s swimsuits were repeatedly remodeled during the first half of this century. Unwilling to miss anything, photographers kept close watch, and a new pictorial genre came energetically and profitably to life. Although the female shape had been used in racy photographs since the beginning of photography, models were usually decked in stage trappings or else appeared in the artistic nude. Swimsuits were then so cumbersome that only stylized graphics could make them attractive, and wearing them made women look like heavily wrapped packages.

It is noteworthy that every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home, just as we have images of God’s saints.” So wrote one visitor to the United States, Paul Svinin, soon after the turn of the nineteenth century. Indeed, iconic portraits of the strong-jawed, steady-eyed father of this country were ubiquitous during the Federal period, not only on canvas and paper but on teapots, clocks, silver medals, wooden snuffboxes, cotton handkerchiefs, and, as seen here, on glass.

Washington’s inaugural speech on the balcony of New York’s Federal Hall in April of 1789 heralded an era of intense nationalistic feeling, when the old colonial loyalties began to dissolve. England and the Continent remained reference points in matters of culture, taste, and style, but there was also the growing emergence of a distinctly American point of view.

Port Townsend, Washington, is a place that residents would prefer to keep to themselves, a tranquil Victorian seaport on the Olympic Peninsula overlooking the Juan de Fuca Strait and Puget Sound. On a clear day the snow-covered peaks of the Cascade and Olympic mountains are visible in the distance, and almost every house in the center of town seems to have a view.

Water Street, Port Townsend’s main commercial thoroughfare, runs along the bay. Lining the street are handsome cast-iron buildings whose jutting cornices and narrow arched windows make them seem taller than their three or four stories. Behind Water Street is one more avenue of shops, and then a bluff rises sharply, separating the downtown from the residential district. A steep flight of steps leads up the bluff to a tidy neighborhood of two- and three-story houses, some modest, some with towers and turrets, nearly all built between 1870 and 1900.

For information about Port Townsend, including a schedule of events, contact the Washington Tourism Development Division, 101 General Administration Building, Olympia, WA 98504-0613 (Tel: 206-753-5600) or the Chamber of Commerce, 2437 Slims Way, Port Townsend, WA 98368 (Tel: 206-385-2722). Twice a year, in May and September, the town offers tours of its historic houses. These have become very popular, so be sure to make hotel reservations well in advance. Two of the handsomest Queen Anne houses are bed and breakfasts now: the Starrett House, built in 1889, and the James House, built two years later.

1890 One Hundred Years Ago 1915 Seventy-five Years Ago 1940 Fifty Years Ago 1965 Twenty-five Years Ago

Given control over the Presidency and both houses of Congress by the 1888 elections, the Republican party quickly seized its chance to admit new states from the solidly Republican Western territories. North and South Dakota, Montana, and Washington had earned statehood in 1889; Idaho and Wyoming joined this list as the forty-third and forty-fourth states within a week of each other in July of 1890.

Both of the new states had a unique provision about voter eligibility. Idaho’s constitution contained a Test Oath Act that disenfranchised the state’s large Mormon population, once a dominant voting bloc in territorial elections, because its religion advocated polygamy. The church abandoned the practice only two months after Idaho’s admission on July 3, but the state legislature refused to restore the vote to Mormons until 1896.

On July 3, the morning after a bomb had destroyed the U.S. Senate’s reception room, a German sympathizer named Erich Muenter shot J. P. Morgan, Jr., in his Long Island mansion for having represented the British government in the negotiation of war contracts in America. Muenter had taught German at Cornell and Harvard before disappearing after being indicted for poisoning his wife in 1906.

Last February, the White House was jubilant over the outcome of the election held in Nicaragua, where voters turned out the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front, which has run the country since 1979, as well as its president, Daniel Ortega. The new president is Violeta Chamorro, the candidate of the National Opposition Union (UNO), a coalition of anti-Sandinista parties backed by Washington as part of its long war against what the Bush and Reagan administrations styled a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. In the days just after the results were published, however, conservative commentators expressed anxiety over whether or not there could be an orderly transfer of power.

In fact, such a peaceful transfer is rare. This country ought to know; we almost failed at it 113 years ago. And whereas in Nicaragua, in 1990, there was no doubt about the legitimate winner of the election, it was not certain who was going to become President of the United States on March 4, 1877, until 4:00 A.M. on March 2.

Readers are invited to submit their personal “brushes with history,“ for which our regular rates will be paid on acceptance. Unfortunately, we cannot corespond about or return submissions. The Flight of the ‘Vin Fiz’ Advice for MacArthur