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January 2011
Carnegie Hall, New York City’s fabled concert hall, resounded to its first jazz concert when Benny Goodman and his orchestra performed there on January 16. “A publicity man dreamed it up,” recalled the King of Swing years later. “My first reaction was, ‘You must be out of your mind.’” But the concert was a hit, and the recording made of the event sold like hotcakes. Harry James, Ziggy Elman, and Jess Stacy played, as well as soloists from the Duke Ellington and Count Basic bands. Today the concert is credited with introducing jazz to a wider audience and giving it a new, if unsought, legitimacy.
Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town opened February 4 at New York’s Henry Miller Theater. According to Life magazine, “First-night audiences were charmed with its simple sentimental story of life in a small New Hampshire community, took delight in the freedom and flexibility achieved by a few suggestive props.” The play won a Pulitzer Prize the next year.
It wasn’t a bad way to launch a trip into the Texas Hill Country. At an intersection, just east of Austin, our car stopped for an apparition: three small covered wagons bumped across the horizon, leading a line of horseback riders, among them children two to a horse. A few of the riders clutched Lone Star flags, stiff and square in the breeze. I could have been watching the first frames of a Western movie, with plenty of room for a title to materialize against the cloud-swept sky. In fact, these were members of a group called the Trail Drivers Association, out to relive a pioneer past that still holds fast here.
Thomas Harriot published his Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia in February, the first English book to describe Roanoke Island, the earliest English colony in America. Sent by Sir Walter Raleigh as the expedition’s scientific adviser, Harriot had investigated the country’s fertility, flora and fauna, commodities, and even its “naturall inhabitants.” These he described in scrupulous detail in his Report . Corn, he discovered, is a “graine of marvellous great increase,” and tobacco “purgeth superfluous phlegm and other gross humours.” After his adventures in the New World, Harriot returned to England, where he founded the English school of algebra and devised the greater than (〉) and less than (〈) signs.
On February 10, Britain, France, and Spain signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the fierce and bloody nine-year conflict called the French and Indian War. Amherst, Forbes, Wolfe, and their thousands of troops had won; North America belonged to Britain. And yet with the end of the war, twenty regiments of British regulars remained billeted in America. Their burdensome presence irked the colonists, who soon began to protest loudly to Britain for their removal.
Tennessee’s tippling houses were abolished on January 26, when legislators enacted a law that revoked saloon licenses and prohibited the sale of liquor in volumes of less than a quart. Enforcing the law was as difficult as the federal government found it some eighty years later, and within a decade the “Quart Law” was repealed. Anti-liquor forces remained prominent in Tennessee’s politics well into the next century.
On February 16, Kentucky became the first state on record to extend limited suffrage to women. On that day, widows living in rural areas who had school-aged children were granted the right to vote in school-board elections. This “school suffrage” was slowly adopted by other states, until by 1890 widows in nineteen states who fit the criteria could elect their school officials. Not until 1920 would the Nineteenth Amendment give women complete suffrage rights.