Around 1900 a traveling photographer making his way through Heard County, Georgia, stopped at the home of Henry and Anna Jones. The couple dressed themselves and eleven of their thirteen children in their Sunday best and sat for a portrait. For their great-granddaughter Sharon Jones Richardson of Douglasville, Georgia, the result is eloquent: “My memory of first viewing this picture as a child is extremely vivid. As my grandfather Whit (second from left, first row) proudly pointed out his sisters and brothers, I felt an immediate kinship with these people of long ago. I vehemently asked him why the younger children chose not to wear shoes for such an important event. He calmly answered that they had none: shoes were purchased for the children when they became old enough to work in the fields! A commodity I take for granted was a luxury to them.
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By Amy Henderson; Smithsonian Institution Press; 202 pages. Broadcasting does not have a long history. The list of its pioneers and stars is etched in our national memory, and some of the early titans are still active: William S. Paley, George Burns, and Walter Cronkite chief among them. Others are gone but not forgotten: Jackie Gleason, Edward R. Murrow, Orson Welles. The Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Broadcasting’s 1988 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery placed them all together under one roof, and On the Air is the catalogue of that splendid show. Amy Henderson’s book is more concerned with individuals than specific technological breakthroughs, and its pages are filled with succinct biographies of the creators of America’s most pervasive national media. From the story of Marconi’s first transoceanic transmission to the political result of the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, On the Air is an amusing and informative look at the entertainment revolution.
Edited by John C. Dann; Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 352 pages. In Jacob Nagle’s forty-four years as a sailor, he lived through quite a lot. Beginning in 1780, the Pennsylvania native traveled to every inhabited continent. He sailed aboard men-of-war, privateers, merchants, and passenger ships. He helped establish the first penal colony in Australia and served under Nelson in the Mediterranean. In between he caroused, brawled with fellow sailors, and dodged press gangs. Near the end of his life, he sat down to write about it all. The authentic voice of the lower gun deck is rare enough; this one came to light quite unexpectedly when John C. Dann, director of the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, found an interesting-looking 161-page manuscript in a New York auction house and bought it.
Your “Then and Now” feature has always been interesting, and the look at Block Island in the September/October 1988 issue is no exception. I was especially intrigued by the caption for the photo of Old Harbor’s grocery store, which mentions “about 1890” as the time it was taken. Was the World War I-vintage Model T parked in front superimposed to give it a more “modern” touch?
Photographs by Dan Patterson, text by George Merva; Patterson Productions, Dayton, Ohio; 24 pages. The B-17 Flying Fortress was introduced by Boeing in 1935. The giant, long-range bomber was a success with the Air Force, and by the end of World War Two nearly thirteen thousand had been built. Almost a third of these were lost in combat over Germany and the Pacific; today fewer than a dozen combat-veteran B-17s are known to remain.
Edited by Annette Tapert; Times Books; 242 pages. “All I desire,” wrote Philip Powers, an officer in the Confederate army, to his wife, “is to drive them from our soil and secure peace—I would not shed another drop. . . .” He was being magnanimous; the Union army had just been defeated at the First Battle of Bull Run, and Powers’s regiment had been credited in the Rebel newspapers with “turning the tide of victory” to the Confederacy. Later in the struggle he could not muster such liberality. “How long will a merciful God permit this war?” he asked his wife after the death of Gen. Jeb Stuart. “And will the wail of the woe that rises from bloody battlefields never cease?”
I was very interested in your cover story on football (September/October 1988). It is a remarkable tale very well told.
The Visitor Center at Antietam National Battlefield is open from 8:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and from 8:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. the rest of the year. The park is open from dawn to dusk year-round. For more information, write or call the Antietam National Battlefield Visitor Center, P.O. Box 158, Sharpsburg, MD 21782/Tel: 301-432-5124.