I have subscribed to American Heritage for more than thirty years and am still fascinated by the celebration of our history. The special copy celebrating our Constitution’s 200th birthday is particularly appreciated. I am delighted with the emphasis that you have shown since American Heritage was acquired by Forbes.
The “Special Constitution Issue” of American Heritage (May/June) is a masterpiece. It is outstanding. It deserves a place in the National Archives of the Library of Congress. As an avid student (for the past fifty years) of American history, 1 delighted in the many articles. Especially “A Few Parchment Pages “Unexpected Philadelphia,” and the interesting, well-done “The British View.”
I am delighted to receive the bicentennial edition of American Heritage. I am reading it with great interest and appreciation. The photographs are wonderful. Congratulations.
With few exceptions, the constitutional amendments suggested by experts in “Taking Another Look at the Constitutional Blueprint” have been discussed in the legal literature and in recent books. But one surprise among your list was the amendment to dismiss the exclusion of the foreign-born from presidential eligibility, suggested by Hiller B. Zobel and John Kenneth Galbraith. The Canadianborn Galbraith gets top honors for combining insight and whimsy as he muses at how his life (and ours) might have been different had such an amendment been adopted in his early years.
I was appalled by your article “Taking Another Look at the Constitutional Blueprint.” Only five comments made any sense—those of Dan T. Carter, John Lukacs, Patricia K. Bonomi, Don E. Fehrenbacher, and Herman BeIz. None would add anything to the Constitution. The rest of the comments are extremely parochial.
When preparing to teach American history, professors are always mentally assembling and revising the names, dates, events, and trends of the past so they make sense and are easy to grasp. One possible thumbnail outline of a course in the great political achievements of the past three hundred years might read: Eighteenth Century—the Freeing of the State; Nineteenth Century—the Freeing of the Slaves; Twentieth Century—the Freeing of Women.
All these freedoms are related, of course, and all of them seem inevitable. But as any student of history or life knows, it all might have been different: The Revolution might have ended with the Founding Fathers hanging from the gallows in the streets of Philadelphia and Richmond; the North might have sacrificed the slaves for the sake of a negotiated peace; male pride might still be standing guard against women at the ballot box and at the gates of every profession. All these freedoms were won in time and might be lost in time—none can be taken for granted.
The author recommends Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe , by Laurie Lisle (University of New Mexico Press, 1986); the autobiography, Georgia O’Keeffe (Viking, 1976); and Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz , published in 1978 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. A retrospective show of O’Keeffe’s paintings (sponsored by the Southwestern Bell Foundation) will open in November at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and then travel to Chicago, Dallas, and New York to celebrate the centennial of her birth. The show’s catalog will be co-published by the National Gallery of Art and New York Graphic Society Books/Little, Brown.
Other men,” Ralph Waldo Emerson told an admiring crowd in Boston’s Odeon Theater toward the end of 1845, “are lenses through which we read our own minds.” The eminent philosopher then went on to tell his audience of the importance in their lives of “Representative Men,” such as Plato, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. “These men correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us considerate, and engage us to new aims and powers,” Emerson concluded. “Thus we feed on genius....”
Emerson’s lecture series “Representative Men” became one of his most famous, for Emerson spoke directly to his listeners’ need for new models of action in the tumultuous decades before the Civil War. To this day his phrase “Representative Men” reverberates, reminding us not so much of the heroes Emerson identified in 1845 as of Emerson himself and the men he inspired during New England’s flowering: Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and many more.
Although there is no accurate single-volume account of all three sisters’ lives, Megan Marshall recommends several books about the individual women: Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, American Renaissance Woman , edited by Bruce A. Ronda (Wesleyan University Press, 1984), is a good selection of Elizabeth’s correspondence that emphasizes her connection with the famous men of her time. Louise Hall Tharp’s Until Victory, Horace Mann and Mary Peabody , written in 1953, was reprinted in 1977 by Greenwood Press and covers Mary’s life. As for Sophia, her son, Julian Hawthorne, wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife in 1884, and the memoir was reprinted by Archon Books in 1968. He quotes many of his mother’s and father’s letters, but with modifications that somewhat tamed his parents’ passionate prose.