January 2011

History has always been one of my great interests, and I certainly enjoyed . reading the very interesting personal recollections of the people who felt they had “A Brush with History.”

I think “A Brush with History” is fascinating, and I admit to having taken some time out of my day to enjoy the various recollections. My congratulations for continuing to publish a magazine of such high quality and interest.

I read with great interest the special section in the November 1989 issue on the U.S. census. The extraordinary contributions of the decennial census to American history are quite expertly explored by Messrs. Carson and Weisberger.

However, I must point out that records for 1900 and 1910 are available without restriction. The general public, including amateur or professional genealogists, has free and unrestricted access to microfilm records of the 1900 and 1910 censuses at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and at the eleven Archives branches throughout the country. Further, the Archives will be able to provide public access to the 1920 census records in 1992. There is a seventy-two-year period before census family records can be released.

The green-shaded gas lamp depicted on page 111 of your December issue in John Steele Gordon’s article on the effects of the Industrial Revolution on Americans’ everyday lives is described as ornamented with the metal figure of a “Turkish soldier.” Any Civil War buffs among your readers will recognize that the figure is actually that of a Zouave, especially in view of the date of the lamp’s manufacture, roughly the Civil War period.

The term “blast from the past” may be a vulgar way of putting it, but that’s exactly what Bill Barol’s article on Chantilly silverware did to me ("American Made,” November 1989). My grandmother inherited a huge set of it, bought sometime after 1912, from her stepmother. It was originally for sixteen, but time and moving from the city to the country reduced its number to the odd twelve, fourteen, ten, and in an extreme case, five! My grandmother died in 1978, when I was still a boy, but the picture of these silver pieces conjured up many a Christmas and Thanksgiving supper wrought by her hands, occasions that deserved nothing less than these gleaming utensils that saw the light twice a year. Thanks for the reminder.

The ability of Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. (“Stonewall”) Jackson never showed itself more vividly than during three days of battle in May 1863 around a rustic crossroads called Chancellorsville. At the battle’s denouement, which might be considered the highest tide of the Confederacy, the two Virginians capped a reversal of fortunes as dramatic as any recorded in more than three centuries of American military affairs.

Every issue of your magazine is a total joy. I can’t tell you how much valuable information it has given me, or how much pleasure 1 take in every detail. For a while last year I was afraid you were going over to pictures altogether. But you keep putting out great issues. It’s the best publication in the country. Thank you kindly.

In your excellent thirty-fifth-anniversary issue (December 1989) I have found one of my own experiences recounted in the feature “A Brush with History.” While John Mack Carter was musing on the presidential manner of Lyndon Baines Johnson in the light of his use of the pepper mill, I was watching the gigantic mill, as it perched between Robert Stein, then editor in chief of Redbook , and the President. Having not shared the mill, as Carter notes, with any of us, LBJ also managed to deny its use to Mr. Stein, in whose easy reach it was. Every time Stein reached for the mill, LBJ, without pausing in his disquisition, without so much as a glance toward the interloper, removed it from Stein’s reach and ground more of the stuff on his own dish. After a while Stein’s reach and LBJ’s grasp became a Chaplinesque ballet.

Those of us who were watching may have missed some of the things the President said, but none missed his rewriting of Browning: “a man’s reach should exceed his [neighbor’s] grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”

In the “Bombs Away” segment of December’s “A Brush with History” John Kenneth Galbraith alleged that Allied bombing of Germany during World War II didn’t really hinder the German war effort very much. Apparently Professor Galbraith has read mainly his own report on the subject.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments, provided a much different report. He stated that on numerous occasions German industry was spared even more severe disruption only because the Allies didn’t understand the extent of the damage their bombings were inflicting. This, he felt, often precluded follow-up raids that would have been completely crippling. He specifically pointed out the raids on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing works as one case in point.

These “might haves” are of course conjecture; however, it is factual that vast numbers of German troops were withheld from the fighting fronts to man antiaircraft batteries, thus shortening the land battles.

As a history buff and an avid reader of American Heritage, I found your thirty-fifth-anniversary issue (December) to be the “icing on the cake"—thank you. I’d also like to take this opportunity to congratulate you for thirty-five years of interesting and thought-provoking articles. I thoroughly enjoyed the personal recollections of those who wrote about their “Brush with History.”