January 2011

Henry Clay was spent and weary at the end of the negotiations that brought forth the Compromise of 1850, but he knew he’d helped stave off civil war for a few years at least, and he had something to look forward to.

He told a crowd that the “Union now seems safe,” and then he grinned and pointed. “There lives an old lady about a mile and a half from here with whom I have lived for more than fifty years, whom I would rather see than any of you.”

Henry Clay was spent and weary at the end of the negotiations that brought forth the Compromise of 1850, but he knew he’d helped stave off civil war for a few years at least, and he had something to look forward to.

He told a crowd that the “Union now seems safe,” and then he grinned and pointed. “There lives an old lady about a mile and a half from here with whom I have lived for more than fifty years, whom I would rather see than any of you.”

A few years back an English nobleman got the idea that that the 1944 invasion of France should be commemorated in the same way the last successful crossChannel invasion (in 1066) was: with a tapestry. The complex, colorful result is both good sewing and good history.

A trip through California’s gold country . . . another great American house style defined and illuminated: the Federal . . . the children of Gettysburg . . . and, because a happy reader is a loyal reader, more.

In the story “Silver Blaze,” the clue that most interested Sherlock Holmes was the dog that didn’t bark in the night. In reading the latest Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans, I was most impressed by the names that weren’t there. My own to be sure, alas, but also Astor, Belmont, Carnegie, Frick, Gould, Harriman, Morgan, and Vanderbilt.

At the turn of this century these names personified American wealth beyond counting, and today they are to be found on street signs, racecourses, universities, parks, hospitals, museums, concert halls, and libraries. But none of the descendants of these men are rich enough to be included, either individually or collectively as a family, by Forbes.

No question would seem simpler, yet none is more frustrating to historians. Determining the price of a town house in 1880 or a chicken sandwich in 1904 is easy; what’s tough is figuring out what the sum really meant to people. Now John Steele Gordon has taken on the task of finding out how to translate prices across the years, and he’s come up with a series of intriguing and useful rules that will help you figure out why your grandfather could flourish on twelve hundred dollars a year when you can’t afford new curtains for the dining room.

He was certainly smarter than the people who were raking in all that money on the television game shows, and one day in 1956 Charles Van Doren showed up at the offices of the producers of “Twenty-One” to give it a try. From this harmless, hopeful act flowed television’s greatest morality tale, and a furor whose ramifications still echo.

We have been greatly honored that you chose to show the painting of McSorley’s by John Sloan on page 54 of your November 1988 issue. It captures the light and life here as it was in Sloan’s time and, believe it or not, as it exists today, from the clock above the bar to the soup kettle on the potbellied stove.

If Mr. Sloan were to paint the scene “from blessed memory” today and were to compare that with reality, he would discover that nothing has change.

In the densely printed 51-page index to Taylor Branch’s splendid new chronicle of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, there are just three references to Paul Robeson, all of them inconsequential. To blacks and their allies of an earlier generation, Robeson’s relative insignificance in that struggle would have seemed inconceivable. As athlete and actor, singer and spokesman, Robeson had been perhaps the best-known black American on earth during the twenties and thirties. He was only fiftyseven when Rosa Parks refused to leave her bus seat and was still just sixty-five when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaimed his dream at the Lincoln Memorial, yet he no longer had any role to play. Martin Duberman’s new biography, Paul Robeson, traces the long, sad arc of Robeson’s career in meticulous, sometimes harrowing detail.

What did it cost? Media scandal The D-day embroidery Plus . . .

When I drove through Shidler, Oklahoma (population today 650), while preparing “Lost Horizon” for last April’s travel issue, I had not gone to see the people; I wanted to see the seven-foot bluestem grass, whose growth in the summer of 1987 was more spectacular than it had been in thirty years. Shidler lies on the scenic side of a massive tract that has been proposed as a prairie preserve, and that was, accordingly, what had brought me there. Still, I wrote, “Shidler is a town that lives on oil, a town that seemed in the Sunday heat to be dying, drying up.” And later: “It is a town where the children will go elsewhere to have their children.” Then I drove on to Tulsa. I was through with Shidler.