January 2011

It has become as firmly established an autumn ritual as Halloween or Thanksgiving, as Stephen Linn explains in his just-published The Ultimate Tailgater’s Handbook (Rutledge Hill Press, 224 pages), and it can get very elaborate indeed. Linn gives instructions on how to tailgate at every level from equipment checklists to recipes. In this excerpt he also offers an exploration of tailgating’s past.

The modern tailgate likely has its roots in college football, first played at College Field in New Brunswick, New Jersey, between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869. Local author-ities insist it was both a fine game and a fine party. The party and its basic elements, though, might have earlier origins. Two historical events in particular are worth mentioning. Each occurred only a few years before the landmark Rutgers-Princeton game, and together they speak to both the role of managed conflict in bringing people together socially and the basic American approach to a fully mobile, vehicle-based cuisine.

Tailgating: The History New Deal Color Why Do We Say That? C’est Daguerre L.A. Observed Deconstructing Cheeseburger Soup Whose Line Is It Anyway? The Buyable Past

How does a great republic sustain itself? How do we keep the democratic ideal before us in a world preoccupied with instant gratification, with allegiance to tribe and creed above all else?

A democracy must always face in three directions at once, confronting the future and the past just as unflinchingly as it does the present. The greatest test of maturity for a nation, as for an individual, is the capacity to plan ahead. And how well we perceive the future depends in good part upon how well we have learned the lessons of the past. This may all seem obvious enough, especially to readers of a history magazine. But, as a nation, we often seem unable to remember such concepts. Recently, a number of disturbing reports suggest that we are not doing nearly as well as we should, either in commemorating the 9/11 terrorist attacks or in preparing for the attacks that are sure to come.

50 Years Ago

September 24, 1955 In Denver, President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffers a heart attack that will keep him hospitalized for seven weeks.

100 Years Ago

August 5, 1905 Japanese and Russian diplomats join President Theodore Roosevelt onboard the presidential yacht, the Mayflower, and sail to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where they will attempt to resolve the war they are fighting. On September 5 the two sides sign a peace treaty that is less unfavorable to Russia than observers had feared, though the parties agree to place Korea under Japanese “protection.” Roosevelt will receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the settlement.

150 Years Ago

On September 23, 1780, three Continental militia men stopped a  man riding  a horse south near Tarrytown, New York. He gave his name as John Anderson, and he seemed nervous and confused, so the men searched him. Hidden in his shoes, they found information about the Continental Army’s planned maneuvers and a detailed description of the construction and defenses of its fort at West Point.

The captive was Major John André of the British army, and he was in big trouble. Under normal circumstances, he would have been treated as a prisoner, but, since he was wearing civilian clothes, he was considered a spy and thus subject to execution. After being handed over to a colonel in the Continental Army, he wrote a desperate letter to General George Washington, explaining his actions and begging for mercy. It was to no avail; André was hanged on October 2.

“In 1976 my daughters and I put together a bicentennial box,” writes Judy Ivery, from St. Louis. “We asked family members to add to our collection, we sealed it up, and we vowed not to touch it until the year 2000. The years went by, and in February 2000 we held a big party and opened the box [above]. Although it had been sealed for 24 years, it had weathered well. One by one we went through the items; we didn’t keep a list of what we had packed.

Thank you for James Sorensen’s delightful description of his odyssey in search of Stonewall Jackson’s arm (April/May 2005). It reminded me of my lunch-hour search for Gen. Daniel Sickles’s leg (which he lost at Gettysburg) when I was a law student in Washington, D.C., in 1964. I found it on display in the Army Medical Museum at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Georgia Avenue. Is it still there?

The name has changed to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, but General Sickles’s leg is indeed still there, along with fragments of other celebrated people, including vertebrae from John Wilkes Booth and President Garfield.

—Editors

What’s astonishing and fair about your February/March issue is its inclusion of one article praising Confederate generals (“General Longstreet and the Lost Cause,” by Stephen W. Sears) and another exposing the pervasiveness and profitability of slavery, which was the institution those generals fought to preserve. I commend David Brion Davis for setting the record straight about slavery in America.