January 2011

I am utterly shocked that in “The Time Machine” for April you give the figures for the dead at the Battle of Shiloh as thirteen thousand Union men and ten thousand Confederates. Such froth 1 would expect from Time, Newsweek , and their like, but from American Heritage ? Shame, shame. The numbers given are probably total casualty figures—killed, wounded, and missing.

Mr. Klose is right. The numbers given were total casualty figures. The correct figures are: Union dead, 1,754; Confederate dead, 1,723.

Most accounts of the defense of Wake are, like the action itself, scrappy, incomplete, fragmentary, and contradictory. Both American commanders, Devereux and Cunningham, published memoirs (Cunningham: Wake Island Command; Devereux: The Story of Wake Island), and while they are interesting as personal documents, neither settles the controversy between the two officers.

THROUGHOUT AMERICA GRADE SCHOOLS AND summer camps teach “arts and crafts.” In my rural school we mitered wooden boxes, hammered decorative copper, and crackle-glazed clay pots—all under the gaze of a man who wore a dirty smock and a white beard, marks of individuality unknown to other instructors. We worked as if within an ancient order (or, in our case, youthful disorder) of craftsmen. But no one ever explained why we undertook such labors—so unlike the multiplication tables for future engineers, the test tubes for future doctors, the books for future teachers. Why fifty minutes in any school day went to arts and crafts puzzled me. Since then I have learned.

Some good books on the Arts and Crafts movement include “ The Art That Is Life”: The Arts & Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920, by Wendy Kaplan and other scholars (A New York Graphic Society Book, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1987); The Arts and Crafts Movement, by Gillian Naylor (The MIT Press, 1971); Furniture of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, by David M. Gathers (New American Library, 1981); and No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 , by T. J. Jackson Lears (Pantheon, 1981).

Rainbow Row is indeed a typical Charleston street; however, it is not the street identified as such in a photograph accompanying “The Charleston Inheritance” (April issue). The street pictured is St. Michael’s Alley, an interesting street in its own right. The building with a wrought-iron balcony housed the law offices of one of America’s most distinguished jurists, James Louis Petigru. A staunch Unionist in a hotbed of secession, Petigru once observed, “South Carolina is too small to be a republic, and too large to be an insane asylum.”

The April issue included a very interesting article, “America in London,” by Brian Dunning. However, he states that “Maj. John André [was] shot as a spy by George Washington. …” Major André was hanged as a spy under the supervision of Adj. Gen. Alexander Scammell. General Washington or his staff was not present. General Washington offered to exchange André for Benedict Arnold, but the English refused.

Major André’s remains are buried beneath a stone slab in the floor of Westminster Abbey, opposite the elaborate panel mentioned in Mr. Dunning’s article.

In the article “Good Fences” (February/ March), by Alexander O. Boulton, it was stated that barbed wire was an “1873 invention.” While 1873 was the year that Joseph F. Glidden applied for his patent on an “improvement in wire fences,” it cannot be said, except in a strict legal sense, that barbed wire was invented in 1873. The invention of barbed wire, as with most successful inventions, was more a developmental process than an event.

Cleveland’s glittering shopping arcade, almost a century old and recently acclaimed the city’s best building by local architects, draws thousands of downtown office workers daily. But an informal poll taken beyond the city limits reveals that the monumental landmark is virtually unknown. Why this should be is a mystery. Here, after all, stands the world’s largest glass-roofed arcade, the prototype of the modern shopping center.

I hope I don’t sound chauvinistic, but the statement from Richard Reinhardt’s article on San Francisco in the April issue about “upstart towns like … San Jose” struck a nerve. After all, San Jose was founded in 1777, a year after Captain de Anza was scouting the area that would, quite a bit later, become San Francisco. Perhaps we in San Jose should regard San Francisco as the upstart town that shares our bay!

I have just read Richard Reinhardt’s excellent article on San Francisco in the April issue. The photograph of our Golden Gate Bridge is reversed! Inexcusable! May the ghost of engineer Joseph Strauss haunt your editorial offices on the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of this magnificent span!