Well, sentiments change,” said Lady Bird Johnson. She was speaking of the years when Americans would no longer support President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam policies. “It was a long war, it was an undeclared war, and it was fought in the living room through the medium of television. I don’t think there’ll ever be another war like that. If we ever got, heaven help us, into anything else, and may the Lord forbid it, it had sure better be preceded by an Alamo or a Pearl Harbor so that there is a clear-cut declaration and coalescing of the American people.”
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January 2011
I found your quiet tour along the rugged road of American history and origin of the Constitution most enjoyable reading. Of particular interest to me were the suggested alterations of the Constitution presented by former Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter.
Sir Oliver Wright provided a unique and enlightening assessment of the political circumstances in Britain that led to the American Revolution, Independence, and the Constitution. Additionally, the portrait of Philadelphia and wealth of information on upcoming bicentennial events are very useful to readers.
Thank you very much for your remarkable contribution to the celebration of the bicentennial of the United States Constitution. I am thrilled by the overwhelming enthusiasm over the commemoration and I am extremely proud to have the privilege of serving on the National Commission.
Your issue honoring the Constitution is both stimulating and entertaining. I treasure it not only for the history it portrays but for the excellent manner in which it is presented. It truly is a masterpiece.
In “Unexpected Philadelphia,” John Lukacs states, “The Independence National Historical Park project rose together with the reconstruction of Old Philadelphia that was the work of civicminded Philadelphians themselves … in what is known as Society Hill.… the rebuilding and repeopling of a long-decayed and abandoned portion of Philadelphia that now is not only teeming with tourists but pulsating with everyday life.”
Not so. The Society Hill area, which by the end of World War 11 had declined into rows of neglected warehouses and cheap rooming houses and retail stores, was redeemed by the federally assisted urban renewal program created under the Housing Act of 1949. Philadelphia was one of the first American cities to request such aid, and tens of millions of dollars were poured into Society Hill and a number of other projects, to subsidize the removal of blight and deterioration and make possible rebuilding and renovation.
The American heritage is a hell of a lot more than the Eastern liberal establishment and the New York, Boston, Washington yuppy axis. In short, American Heritage magazine, with its time-worn negative clichés about Nixon, and any other conservative, isn’t for me.
Before your May/June issue, I was afraid of the government. Now I’m afraid of Professor Appleby.
Our first reaction to the photograph immediately to the right was purely visual—the scene was so splendidly busy. Telegraph wires, trolleys, carriages, and purposeful pedestrians, the impressive fountain—all bespoke an American Main Street facing the twentieth century in peak condition. Then we found a label identifying the street as Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, Alabama, and the imperatives of history amplified the simple pleasures of the eye.
Prisons are a fact of life in America. However unsatisfactory and however well-concealed they may be, we cannot imagine doing without them. They remain such a fundamental bulwark against crime and criminals that we now keep a larger portion of our population in prisons than any other nation except the Soviet Union and South Africa, and for terms that are longer than in many countries. Furthermore, we Americans invented the prison.
It was created by humanitarians in Philadelphia in 1790 and spread from there to other cities in the United States and Europe. The stubborn questions that perplex us today about how prisons can and should work—what they can achieve and how they might fail—began to be asked almost as soon as the first one opened. The history of prisons in America is the history of a troubled search for solutions.