January 2011

The massive cannon seen in both pictures defended Fort Fisher at Wilmington, North Carolina, until, on January 15, 1865, the fort fell to a day-long bombardment and attack by Union Army and Navy forces led by Adm. David Porter.

The victory meant that Wilmington, the last deep-water port for blockade runners, was now closed to the Confederacy. Not long after, the victorious army brought the gun to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where it was photographed in 1865 in the yard of the old Ordnance Compound. In the picture at the left the two fellows lounging against it—enlisted men from the Ordnance Detachment—seem not at all awed by the power and size of this beast—one of the most formidable guns in the service of the South, the historian William C. Davis has called it, capable of firing its 150-pound projectile over four miles, its barrel reinforced with iron sleeves to protect against the ferocious oressure created bv the powder charge.

I was a rather dreamy and quiet student in public school until the sixth grade. In that year, because I had missed several months of classes the previous spring (my brother had died and I was sent to live with an aunt in New Jersey), I was shunted onto what today would be called the “slow track.” This was a class from which not much was expected, at least by the school system. But the system didn’t factor in Adele von Ebert. As her name suggests, she was the very model of the Prussian schoolmistress, even to her pince-nez eyeglasses, which blazed into every corner of the classroom. Her great virtue as a teacher was that she paid attention. Nothing you said or did went by her. I had never before really known what was expected of me in class, so I had kept quiet and dreamed. Now I was treated with the utmost seriousness—and the light went on. I discovered I could think, learn, and speak. I ended the year by being promoted to a “rapid advance” class—the fast track multiplied by two, so I eventually entered high school a year ahead of my former classmates and ever since have remained under the impression that I am younger than everyone else.

The best history of American education is Lawrence Cremin’s prizewinning three-volume work, culminating in his recent American Education: The Metropolitan Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). Three books on school reform in different periods, written from very different points of view, are: Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), on the pre-Civil War period; David B. Tyack, The One Best System (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), on the progressive period; and Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade (New York: Basic Books, 1983), on the period after World War II.

—C.F.K.

Emerson wrote that “there is properly no history; only biography,” so my brother and sister and I knew that the revered collection of diaries and papers that had once belonged to our grandfather, which, during most of our early lives, was in a closet in an upstairs bedroom, contained some serious stuff. Our mother was a professional journalist, and it was always assumed that she would write her father’s story. But she intended instead to write a novel based on his life. Her father—our grandfather Rudger Clawson—was president of the Council of the Twelve Apostles of the Mormon Church at the time of his death, in 1943.

In August 1902, a 12-year-old farm boy named Thomas Gilcrease, being one-eighth Creek Indian on his mother’s side, received a 160-acre allotment in the land of the Creek Nation, one of the Five Civilized Tribes, which occupied what yet remained of Indian Territory in America. Not long before, by act of Congress, the Creeks had ceased to be a self-governing tribe. By 1907, Indian Territory had become the eastern half of the new state of Oklahoma, and forty-two oil rigs were pumping high-grade petroleum out from under Tom Gilcrease’s land, which, by sheer good fortune, sat atop one of the greatest oil strikes in American history, Oklahoma’s fabulous Glenn Pool.

When Richard Nixon ran for governor of California in 1962, his campaign went badly from the very beginning, in large part because a secret $200,000 loan from the defense contractor Howard Hughes to Nixon’s brother Donald was no longer a secret. Everywhere the candidate went he was asked about it. His nerves were already taut when he arrived in San Francisco’s Chinatown to do more campaigning, and he nearly unraveled when he opened a fortune cookie to discover the message “What About the Hughes Loan?” It had been placed there by the Democratic political prankster Dick Tuck.

In 1871 the natty and lethal James Butler Hickok—“Wild Bill”—moved to Abilene. He planned to make a living at poker, but he also took the job of marshal. One night at the poker table in the Alamo saloon he heard gunshots in the street. Furious at the interruption, Hickok rushed into the darkness and shot an innocent bystander. Then, hearing someone behind him, he spun and killed his own deputy. Abilene decided it needed a more discriminating lawman.

George Washington sat for three portraits by Gilbert Stuart. The last, commissioned by Mrs. Washington, is the painting we all know—unfinished. That was so Stuart could honestly tell Martha he hadn’t quite finished her husband’s portrait, while he made copies of it that sold for one hundred dollars each. He turned out at least seventy while the Washingtons waited with mounting impatience. Finally George showed up at the studio and demanded it, but to no avail. The portrait was still unfinished when Stuart died in 1828.

Sylvester Graham, inventor of the eponymous cracker in the 1830s, believed that excessive sexual desire heightened by “rich dishes [and] the free use of flesh” led to insanity. But what got him into trouble, were his lectures on the evils of store-bought bread and red meat. The talks did not sit well with butchers and bakers, and they held a demonstration in Boston against Graham that turned into a riot.

During the 1890s the balls and parties of the supreme social arbiter Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish were covered on every society page, and aspiring hostesses studied her reception lists enviously. One morning after a particularly glittering gathering in her mansion, Mrs. Fish eagerly opened the New York Herald and discovered that the paper had inadvertently switched her reception list with the names of those who had held ringside seats at the previous night’s prize fight.