January 2011

Shoal of Time , by Gavan Daws (Macmillan, 1968), is a fine one-volume history, and Hawaii in the Insight Guides travel-book series contains well-written history as well as good general information. No introduction to Hawaii’s past is complete without a visit to the wonderful Bishop Museum, in Honolulu. The hotel at the volcano is called Volcano House (808-967-7321); the one in KailuaKona is the Hotel King Kamehameha (800-227-4700). The Hawaii Visitors Bureau has offices in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

1788 Two Hundred Years Ago 1863 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago 1888 One Hundred Years Ago 1913 Seventy-five Years Ago 1938 Fifty Years Ago 1963 Twenty-five Years Ago

DeKalb, Illinois, our nearest city, is the site of Northern Illinois University. Some 25,000 young people, mostly urban, from Chicago and environs, make Northern their home. The school publishes a quality daily newspaper called Northern Star. Staff photographers roam the community and fill vacant spots in the paper with artistic shots. Not long ago one such photo ran with the title “Grain Elevator Spanning Northwestern Tracks Clues DeKalb’s Rural Origins.” Actually the photograph showed the abandoned coal chute on the east edge of the city.

The picture brought a flood of memories back to haunt me, along with the realization that a generation had reached maturity since the demise of steam trains, and the youth of today did not recognize the essentials that kept a steam locomotive running.

In 1630 this slice of Boston was part of a cluster of three hills known as Trimountain, the domain of a hermit named William Blaxton. Over the centuries the wilderness gave way, and by 1899, the year of the photograph below, only the name of the broad thoroughfare—Tremont Street—hinted at a green and hilly past.

Most likely the 1899 view was the work of Boston’s Transit Commission, which often used photographs to document its activities. While launching the nation’s first subway system in 1897, the commission made certain that no detail escaped the camera’s eye. According to Elinor Reichlin, director of archives at the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, in Boston, this picture was probably meant to demonstrate the “vast improvement of the traffic flow on Tremont Street after the removal of the surface tracks that had previously rutted the street and, more particularly, after the removal of the electric trolleys that had often made it impassable.” The wires that powered the electric cars finally came down a few months after the 1899 photograph was made.

Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.

Radios: The Golden Age The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God

by Philip Collins; Chronicle Books; 119 pages.

by Charles E. Rosenberg; Basic Books; 437 pages.

When Thomas Jefferson was President, there were two hospitals in America, one in Philadelphia and one in New York, and to be accepted into one of them, a patient had to be judged morally worthy. A man with a venereal disease or an unwed pregnant woman need not apply. Nor did the hospitals aceept anyone with a “contagious” disease—including tuberculosis and cancer. Society leaders, esteemed for their high moral character, ran the hospitals, and no one questioned their Christian stewardship.

There wasn’t much hospitals could do for their patients anyway. They could offer food and shelter, a degree of cleanliness (high by the era’s standards, appalling by today’s), and a bed. At that time most of the sick were cared for at home, and society’s outcasts landed up in almshouses, which maintained a few beds for people to die in as well as serving as repositories for the destitute and insane.

by Amy Stechler Burns and Ken Burns; Aperture, Inc.; 128 pages.

There is both beauty and surprise in this elegantly crafted book. Interspersed with splendid modern photographs and touching archival ones, a text—much more profound than most on the subject of the Shakers—describes the rise and demise of that amazing sect.

On the road again …

A year ago we published an issue devoted to travel. Unlike others who deal with the subject, we visited places both as they are and as they were—and in so doing suggested how the past informs the present everywhere in the country. Readers responded warmly enough to spur us to go back on the road this April. Among the journeys:

Unfolding the nation …

Wherever you’re driving, the one clear indispensable is the road map, and the country is so thoroughly charted with a red and blue web that one might think it had always been so. It wasn’t. The road map came along a good deal later than the automobile, and it was born in a series of guidebooks like the one put out in 1908 by the White Auto Company that included such directions as, “At the next corner turn left passing ‘Mike’s Place’…” and in which every destination was a branch of the White Company. Ben Yagoda traces the eventful career of the road map through the days when Rand McNally and the oil companies brought order to the motorist’s universe.