January 2011

In the “Editors’ Bookshelf” review of Paul R. Baker’s Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White (February), you have erroneously placed the old Madison Square Garden on Twenty-third Street in New York City. The old Garden was actually located at Twenty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue, now the site of the New York Life Building, which replaced it in 1928. The Garden, in its turn, had replaced the Hippodrome and prior to that the site was occupied by the Union Depot of the New York and Harlem Railroad.

As to the mention of a brief affair White had with model Evelyn Nesbit, it’s my impression that people remember her more as a showgirl ( The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing ) than a model and that White’s affair with her was more than brief.

Recognition and praise come so seldom to the one illustrious member of my family that I hasten to salute and thank Bernard A. Weisberger and American Heritage for the delightful piece on the hostage rescue of 1796 (“In the News,” February). At the risk of sounding like an ingrate, I must point to a few mistakes and misconceptions in Mr. Weisberger’s otherwise very fair and scholarly chronicle of Joel Barlow’s exceedingly hazardous and successful mission.

George F. Paul’s letter in the November 1989 issue says it was a fairly long wait until laterally cut disc recordings became either cheaper or better than vertically cut cylinders, which would tend to make one wonder how the disc won out.

In point of fact, the disc recording was both cheaper and better. Disc records were cheaper to make because they could be molded, while cylinders had to be individually cut: The “flashing” where the two mold halves meet occurs on the unplayed edge of a disc, but twice per groove in a cylinder. (Eventually, the cylinder people solved that, but it took a while.) That being the case, I imagine that either the price of disc recordings soon dropped below that of cylinders or an increased profit margin on discs encouraged dealers to push them.

Discs are also a far more compact storage medium. Discs stack flat, with little wasted space; when you store cylinders, you store a quantity of air inside each one’s center tunnel.

The Harvey Girls Vital Statistics on American Politics

by Lesley Poling-Kempes; Paragon House; 213 pages.

You might have found yourself in Waynoka, Oklahoma, or Gallup, New Mexico, but if you were a single woman venturing west in the late 1800s, working for Fred Harvey’s hotel and restaurant chain was the way to do it. Harvey was a Kansas restaurateur hired by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway in 1878 to establish a dining system along its route from Chicago to the Pacific.

I noticed that on the back cover of the February issue you had the insignia of the office of the inspector general of the Army placed sideways. Did you mean it to be that way? I was trying to figure out why you would have printed it in such a position.

Until recently historians believed that Abraham Lincoln was not painted before 1860, the year artists hurried to Springfield to produce likenesses of the presidential candidate. But in the summer of 1988 a lost portrait of Abraham Lincoln turned up on a farm in his home state of Illinois. Painted in 1856 by the itinerant artist Philip O. Jenkins, the newly discovered canvas captures the face of Lincoln the lawyer, political leader, and prominent citizen. It is the best portrait of Lincoln from the era that Carl Sandburg called the prairie years, and it is the only portrait of Lincoln before he was nationally known.

When the Civil War sputtered out early in May 1865, there were two huge Union armies within a few days’ march of Washington, D.C. One was the Army of the Potomac, winner of the war in the East, commanded by Major General George Gordon Meade. The other was the Army of the Tennessee, or the Western Army, the men who had marched through Georgia to the sea, commanded by William Tecumseh Sherman. What to do with these two very different bodies of men was a problem that vexed politicians in Washington.

George Thomas carried this pocket compass throughout the Civil War; now it belongs to his alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A profile of the highly capable and oddly dimly remembered general appears within.