January 2011

Not only tourists and battlefield aficionados but also the leading scholars of the Civil War have found inspiration in the Gettysburg Cyclorama. A new survey of prominent military historians shows some disagreement about how the painting should be displayed—but unanimity about its value to America’s past and future.
—H.H.

Gary W. Gallagher

The Gettysburg Cyclorama, when fully restored, will allow modern viewers to see the massive painting in the same setting as those who saw it in the late nineteenth century. It will form an invaluable bridge between the generation of Americans who lived through the conflict and those who flock to Gettysburg today in search of a direct connection to a gripping episode in our national past. (Gallagher’s many Civil War books include Three Days at Gettysburg: Essays on Confederate and Union Leadership .)

Stephen W. Sears

As a Park Ranger at the Gettysburg National Military Park for the past 20 years, Eric Campbell has given plenty of battlefield tours: “I always had to say, ‘See those trees over there? They were not there during the time of the battle. So imagine this area being wide open.’”

Now 576 acres of trees the combatants would not have seen are being removed as part of a 15-year plan to rehabilitate the Gettysburg battlefield. The entire 5,990-acre site is being returned to the way it was in 1863.

“It really is a new battlefield,” Campbell says. “The terrain hasn’t changed. The hills and ridges are still there. But now we can see how they relate to each other and how close they are.”

After two years of study to determine what was where in 1863, the Park Service approved a general management plan in November 1999. Since then it has spent $1.2 million of both federal and private funds on the effort, which is expected to cost $2.5 million.

Where have all the Civil War cycloramas gone? Most burned up in fires, suffered irreparable water damage during prolonged storage, were discarded by their exhibitors, or just vanished from history once the vogue for these giant attractions faded.

The notable exception is the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama , created in Milwaukee by William Wehner and the American Panorama Company in 1885 and 1886. Scrupulously researched and expertly painted by a team of 12 artists, the canvas depicts the moment when Maj. Gen. John A. Logan rallied Union troops to retake a half-built brick plantation house outside town on July 22, 1864. The Cyclorama, now 358 by 42 feet, made its debut in Minneapolis; it did not arrive in Atlanta until 1892. There, though it sees the battle from a Union perspective, it has remained a popular tourist attraction ever since—its warm reception probably made possible by the fact that Gen. William T. Sherman appears only in the distance.

NATHAN’S FAMOUS

Brooklyn loyalists maintain that the hot dog was born on Coney Island, the invention of a German immigrant named Charles Feltman. What is beyond dispute is that Feltman built a compact little empire of rides and beer gardens and clam bars, all based on the hot dog he sold for a dime, and that one of his roll slicers, Nathan Handwerker, left him to set up shop in 1916 on Surf Avenue. There he dispensed for a nickel hot dogs that were succulent and delicious then, and remain so today. Evil rumor has it that Nathan’s Famous may move soon, but as of this printing you can—and should—buy what for years the whole nation called a Coney Island red hot at the old stand. (Corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues, open 365 days a year)

GARGIULO’S

So far it’s been a good century for Dashiell Hammett. Last year saw the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of his first novel, Red Harvest , and this year is the seventy-fifth anniversary of his most famous and best-selling book, The Maltese Falcon . Vintage Books celebrated with new editions of all of Hammett’s titles, including a previously unpublished novella and a collection of his early pulp stories.

Hammett’s influence not only pervades the genre of crime fiction —as Raymond Chandler shrewdly observed, he “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse”—but extends beyond it. Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, the Mexican novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, and even the cyberpunk science fiction writer William Gibson all owe debts of varying degree to Hammett.