January 2011

As one of the highlights of the year 1913 (“The Time Machine,” November 1988), you listed the upset victory of the Notre Dame football team over Army, due mainly to the exploits of the passing combination of Knute Rockne to Gus Dorais. Your report, however, seemed to support the old myth that the forward pass as we know it today is dated from this game, that it was the famed Rockne-Dorais duo that brought the forward-pass play kicking and screaming, so to speak, into the twentieth century.

This widely held misconception apparently got its start because of Notre Dame’s unexpected and stunning win over a highly favored Army team, a victory that the shocked football powers of the East could accept only on the basis of what was to them a new and thitherto unused tactic on the playing field. But this conclusion does an injustice to a little-known football team from the Midwest and its innovative coach.

During the recent Third Battle of Manassas—the struggle in northern Virginia between a shopping-mall developer and the Manassas National Battlefield Park—I noticed among the flying brickbats a letter to the Washington Post from a William Heyman. Mr. Heyman wanted to see the shopping mall built on ground where the Second Battle of Manassas was fought for what struck me as a novel bit of reasoning. “Battlefields glorify death,” he wrote. “Shopping malls celebrate life.”

Antietam is the Civil War battlefield least marred by commercialization and development, but it has been—and still is—under heavy threat. Among these threats have been a TV transmission tower to be built on the highest ground overlooking the field; a housing development in the area from which the Federals launched their assaults on Bloody Lane; town houses behind the Confederate lines at Bloody Lane; and a shopping center where the famous photographs of Lincoln and McClellan were taken after the battle. Some of these threats are now only in abeyance, and new ones are appearing. The essential problem is that the government owns, or has protective easement rights on, far too small a portion of the battlefield to safeguard it from encroaching development. Until this situation is remedied, organizations such as the Save Historic Antietam Foundation (P.O. Box 550, Sharpsburg, MD 21782) will continue fighting the Second Battle of Antietam, which has already lasted a good deal longer than the first battle.

—S. W. S.

Springfield bills itself as “Mr. Lincoln’s Hometown,” but it has never been entirely clear what it thinks of its First Citizen. On my last visit several years ago, the streets were filled with green signs pointing the way to what were then still called “Lincoln Shrines,” but it was possible to eat at the Ann Rutledge Pancake House and to visit a spectacularly tawdry Lincoln wax museum. The signs have since been secularized to “Lincoln Sites,” neither the wax museum nor Ann Rutledge seems to be in business any more, and the downtown has been spruced up, but this time I noticed that the “McDonald’s Lincoln Museum” has opened up just around the corner from Lincoln’s law office.

Whether you consider them sites or shrines, the places in and around Springfield most intimately connected with Lincoln’s life provide a tangible record of his rise. You can still get a sense of Lincoln unavailable anywhere else.

NEW SALEM STATE PARK

Great Books, Great Problems Great Books, Great Problems Football Credits Football Credits Block Island The Light and Life

Natives of eastern Connecticut like to say that, except for Boston and Philadelphia, the village of Lebanon stands first in America in Revolutionary importance. While that may sound like typical small-town puffery, the remark contains a large measure of truth. Consider the following categories:

Politics? Lebanon produced Jonathan Trumbull, the only man in America so well regarded by his compatriots that he served as governor of a colony and of a state, a man whom George Washington nicknamed, with affectionate respect, Brother Jonathan.

Military? Most local historians deem Brother Jonathan vital to the war effort, for the aged governor turned Connecticut into a supply center for the patriot troops. Washington himself wrote, “But for Jonathan Trumbull, the war could not have been carried to a successful conclusion.”

In his perceptive account of the Great Books program (“The War of the Great Books,” February), Benjamin McArthur, perhaps unwittingly, points out the central paradox in Mortimer Adler’s and John Erskine’s approach to the ancients. To pluck works of literature, philosophy, and history out of context—as Adler and Erskine did—is to enter the very intellectual vacuum that so many scholars today decry. If we do not give any account of the milieu that produced the words that we are reading, as well as the reverberations and reinterpretations of these texts through time, what makes Homer’s Iliad more worthy of our attention, or more self-improving, since that is what Americans seem to want, than the latest best seller?

My wife and I are on the inter-state, headed north toward Johnson County, Wyoming. Ten years ago, I prowled this country doing research for a novel that used material from the Johnson County War of 1892, when powerful cattlemen—in what is called “the Invasion”—attacked hardscrabble newcomers who were threatening their hegemony. Ten years ago there was no interstate, and Highway 87 was the north-south artery, frequented by pickups with rifle racks in the rear windows, its blacktop notable for the amount of mashed wildlife displayed. When I asked the librarian in Buffalo, the county seat, for materials on the Invasion, she said she had none. Animosities still existed in the county.

The route of the Invaders, and ours, begins in Caspar, a town that grew up around a crossing of the North Platte River. Half a million Western emigrants passed this way in the mid-1800s, on the California, Oregon, and Mormon trails, and the Bozeman Trail struck north not far from here.

It was the bloodiest day in American history. Four times as many Americans fell in Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, as did on the beaches of Normandy during D-day. They were Confederate and Union soldiers who fought in the Battle of Antietam. Though this clash was a pivotal one in the course of the Civil War, the battlefield haunts our cover for another reason. This is our annual special issue devoted to traveling with a sense of history, and the fields of Antietam may be the best site anywhere for seeing and feeling how a great Civil War battle happened.

Like three Bostonians out of four, I live on a site that was originally underwater. My house is on River Street, an alleyway that was built for stables at the bottom of Beacon Hill in the middle of the nineteenth century. Until my wife, twenty years ago, redesigned the carriage house we live in, no humans had resided there. Out of the back of the house we see the spire of the Church of the Advent, a late-nineteenth-century Gothic-revival creation that has the best music, and the highest Episcopal service, in Boston. Outside the front door stands the Charles Street Meeting House, originally built in 1804 as the Third Baptist Church—by the waterside for baptismal convenience. A favorite meeting place for abolitionist orators, it became an African Methodist Church, and serves today as an office building.