January 2011

by Wm. Stage; ST Publications (407 Gilbert Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45202); 109 pages.

Even in a town that devours itself as voraciously as New York, dim survivors everywhere remind us of the city that was here before. When the noon light falls on the brick front of an art gallery near the American Heritage offices, you can make out on the legend: “To Let/Carriages/Coupes/Hansoms/Victorias/Light Wagons/Horses taken in board by the month.” A building is torn down, and there, surprisingly bright on the suddenly naked wall of its neighbor, the legend SEGARS or WHEELWRIGHT can be seen for a few months before a new building rises to shield it from the elements for another century. For five years or so the editors of American Heritage have puzzled over how to prepare a story on this directory of a vanished civilization; but we could devise no way short of the insanely expensive expedient of hiring a photographer to travel across the country scanning old brick walls. So we are grateful to Wm. Stage, who has done just that.

In our May/June issue John Steele Gordon established a series of postulates to help determine that most elusive of historical questions, What was money really worth in the past? The question is of particular interest to James B. M. Schick, a professor of history at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, who is now working on a book on the computer-assisted teaching of history. Some years ago he became interested in the same problem—specifically, how much did John Smith’s colonists have to spend to equip themselves for their voyage to Virginia?—and he went about seeking the solution in a heroically direct way. Schick’s hands-on approach to determining the value of currency nearly four centuries ago not only yields convincing results; it also offers us an oblique and informative look at America’s colonial beginnings.

I was so excited by Elizabeth Daniels’s article “The Children of Gettysburg” (May/June) that 1 could barely finish it. The “precocious eighteen-year-old” Henry Eyster Jacobs was my great-grandfather. He became an instructor at Gettysburg College and later professor, dean, and president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He was a leader in the church and a well-respected Lutheran historian.

Jacobs’s account of the battle exists in his memoirs, which my father, Henry Eyster Horn, edited during the late 1930s. In 1974 my father painstakingly typed the memoirs on mimeograph stencils, and I proofread, mimeographed, and collated them. He then sent the three volumes to Lutheran seminary libraries throughout the country, projecting their use as a source in American Lutheran Church history. As a librarian and holder of an undergraduate degree in history, I am thrilled to see “family” history become source material for “real” history because the material was made accessible to all.

Thank you, American Heritage and Ms. Daniels.

The past keeps no secrets more securely than those of the stage. Little that happens behind the footlights survives for long in front of them, and the theatrical enthusiasms of one era invariably puzzle the next: Sarah Bernhardt, universally admired onstage for more than half a century, looks ludicrous sawing the air on the silent screen; recordings of Paul Robeson’s rumbling Othello are filled with sound and fury that now seem to us to signify mostly overacting.

When several local businesses denounced the New York firm of Bowen and McNamee for failing to support the fugitive slave law in 1850, Henry Chandler Bowen replied in the papers that “we wish it distinctly understood that our goods, and not our principles, are on the market.” The threads of idealism and materialism formed the fabric of Henry Bowen’s life, but only rarely could they be disentangled as neatly as Bowen’s announcement suggested.

Trabeated construction

Built with vertical elements (post, columns, etc.) and horizontal ones (beams, lintels, entablatures, etc.). Typical of classical architecture, as opposed to …

Arcuated construction

Built with arches (curved structures supporting the mass of a building or surrounding the doorways and windows), of which there are two main types …

Segmental arch

An arch that (if imaginarily extended) forms a circle or an ellipse. Typical of classical, especially Roman, architecture.

Gothic or “pointed” arch

An arch composed of two curved members that meet at its apex. (If arches are placed in parallel succession, they form a vault. If the arches are at right or acute angles, sharing a common apex, they form a groined vault. The arch, vault, and groined vault allowed Gothic cathedrals to reach imposing and previously unattainable heights.)

The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Respectfully Quoted The Bishop’s Boys Enchanted Drawings High Honor Ghost Signs

edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris; University of North Carolina Press; 1,634 pages.

Sometime in 1912, the story goes, William H. Campbell invented “the South’s favorite candy.” He mixed peanuts and marshmallow into melted caramel, dipped it in pure milk chocolate, and took the concoction home for his infant son to try. “Goo goo,” the child gurgled happily, and Goo Goo Clusters were born. You find things like that in The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture , and you also find excellent brief accounts of subjects ranging from Jacksonian democracy to Huey Long. There are essays on the speech of whites and blacks, the development of a political “Southern strategy,” how to make different kinds of gumbo, and the civil rights movement.

edited by Suzy Platt; Library of Congress; 520 pages.

Sooner or later almost everyone in Congress wants to remind almost everyone else that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. And if they want to make sure they get the quote right, they check first with the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, which will tell them that although everyone thinks Jefferson said it, the closest the CRS can come is “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance,” from John Philpot Curran’s “Election of Lord Mayor of Dublin” speech before the Privy Council, July 10, 1790. The CRS will turn that citation up quickly, too, because the operation has had a lot of experience finding such things; for three-quarters of a century now, the CRS has been verifying quotations that members of Congress want to use in public debate.

The big push” is how the G-3 journal of the 103d Infantry Division described its attack against elements of the German 19th Army on November 16, 1944. At H-plus-15, American guns bombarded enemy lines, and the regiments moved forward. In Company F of the 410th Infantry Regiment, the future author of Wartime, 2d Lt. Paul Fussell, was about to receive his baptism of fire and his first Purple Heart when shrapnel tore up his elbow. That was near St-Dié, on the western slopes of the Vosges Mountains of Alsace.