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January 2011
For thirty-five years now the editors of American Heritage have worked to verify the fundamental premise of the magazine, which is, simply, that history happens to everyone. We are all shaped by the great events that resonate about us, but so, too, do we shape those events, however minutely. Mostly we are unaware of our participation in the eternal process, but once in a while history can step out of the mist and give you a whack on the shoulder that leaves you both shaken and exhilarated at having been there. For this anniversary issue we asked a number of people, many of them prominent, to tell us of their brushes with history. The fascinating results range from William F. Buckley’s being on hand at the moment Joe McCarthy made possible the Presidency of John F. Kennedy to Herbert Mitgang’s revelation of why the Tower of Pisa is still leaning and not a pile of rubble. The replies add up to a brisk and intimate minihistory of our century.
There are two rules in the universe, says Neil Simon: the Law of Gravity and Everybody Likes Italian Food. John Mariani, who learned the second of these immutable truths early from an Italian grandmother, traces the history of the cuisine from its arrival on our shores to its current preeminence as America’s most popular ethnic food.
The world of our ancestors became our world in the single generation that brought the railroad to the landscape and the coal stove to the kitchen. John Steele Gordon shows how the Industrial Revolution changed the domestic landscape with a cornucopia of innovations unimaginable a few decades before.
This year’s offerings include a brilliant, frigid 1851 view of the Forest Queen steaming along the Ohio River in deep winter and a cocktail party at a New York painter’s Central Park West apart ment thirty years ago.
Governmental corruption through the years … Christmas in Newport… the worst of H. L. Mencken … and, with reckless seasonal exuberance, more.
by Tom D. Crouch; W. W. Norton & Company; 606 pages.
When Orville Wright was buried in Dayton, Ohio, in 1948, four jet fighters swooped low over the cemetery and dipped their wings in honor of the first man ever to fly. Forty-five years earlier above the windswept hills of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, heavier-than-air flight began when Orville spent twelve seconds aloft in the wood-and-cloth aircraft he had built with his brother Wilbur. Tom Crouch’s absorbing new biography of the Wright brothers explains how two bicycle makers from Dayton managed to succeed where others with far greater technical credentials and a lot more money had failed.
by Charles Solomon; Alfred A. Knopf; 336 pages.
Charles Solomon knows about animation. His definitive history of the art 154 form, Enchanted Drawings , traces its development from the traveling magiclantern shows of seventeenth-century Europe to 1988’s cartoon-and-live-action smash Who Framed Roger Rabbit . Solomon explains animation technology in clear prose and harbors a remarkable command of animation minutiae (for example, that the Smurfs were adapted from a popular Belgian comic strip known as “The Whatchamacallits”). His sly analyses of cartoon content make this illustrated volume more than just a marvelous picture book. On Popeye and Bluto’s admiration for Olive OyI, for instance, he explains: “It was never clear just what the two men saw in their skinny, often capricious inamorata: their devotion to her has to be taken as a given.”