January 2011

Travelers might want to schedule their visits around one of the Virgin Islands’ unusual holidays, including Emancipation Day (July 3); Bastille Day (celebrated by St. Thomians of French descent, this year on July 12); or Carnival (late April or early May). The high tourist season is in January and February.

St. Thomas and St. Croix offer a wide selection of historic hotels and guesthouses that would enhance any visitor’s stay, including the Hotel 1829 in Charlotte Amalie and Pink Fancy and Club Comanche in Christiansted. Just outside Frederiksted is Sprat Hall, a former plantation house that operates as a hotel with its own private beach. General guides to the Caribbean like Frommer’s and Fodor’s give useful descriptions of hotels and restaurants. Good histories are harder to find. I enjoyed Florence Lewisohn’s Divers Information on the Romantic History of St. Croix (St. Croix Landmarks Society, 1964), and St. John Backtime, Eyewitness Accounts from 1718 to 1956 , compiled by Ruth Hull Low and Rafael Vails (Eden Hill Press, 1985).

When Ralph Waldo Emerson mounted the pulpit in Cambridge’s First Parish Church on August 31, his audience expected to hear the usual Phi Beta Kappa address given the day after every Harvard commencement—another rendition on the topic of the American scholar. For decades it had been squeezed and wrung for all it was worth. But that day Emerson gave new life to it.

August 4: The Republic of Texas petitions the United States for annexation. In order to avoid conflict with Mexico and to prevent the slavery issue from being stirred up, the Van Buren administration denies the request.

The headlines of July 3 stunned the country: EARHART PLANE DOWN … AMELIA LOST IN THE PACIFIC , they read. AE MISSES ISLAND ON LONG HOP … LADY LINDY LOST. Nine years earlier Amelia Earhart had captured the nation’s heart when she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a plane. But she had made that journey as a passenger and didn’t feel her fame was justified until 1932, when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Since then Earhart had broken numerous speed records, solo records, and transcontinental flight records, securing a prominent place for herself in aviation’s pantheon of heroes. It seemed incredible that this vital, golden-haired woman of thirty-nine, who said she flew for the fun of it, could be lost somewhere in the endless Pacific.

Otto Friedrich’s article in the April issue, “Traveling with a Sense of History,” was well written, factual, and entertaining. However, you should never send a Yankee to write about the War Between the States in Virginia. Friedrich refers to “half-forgotten” battles his great-grandfather recalled. For the record, the fighting prior to surrender at Appomattox was at “Sayler’s Creek” (named after Mr. V. Sayler), not “Sailor’s Creek” as printed. After all, the “sailors” were on the Monitor , and their battle ended in a tie with the Merrimac .

Harry Tracy was hardly the “last survivor of Cassidy’s Wild Bunch,” as mentioned in the April “Matters of Fact” column. The twenty-seven-year-old Tracy was found dead, an apparent suicide, on August 6, 1902, in a field near Creston, Washington, after leading dozens of lawmen on a bloody two-month chase through Oregon and Washington, following his escape from the Oregon State Penitentiary.

Whether Tracy was even a Wild Bunch member is a matter of some dispute. In any event, he died, boots on, before most of the gang, including Cassidy (d. 1908?), the Sundance Kid (d. 1908?), Kid Curry (d. 1904?), Ben Kilpatrick (d. 1912), Matt Warner (d. 1938), Elzy Lay (d. 1934), Bub Meeks (d. 1912), and Walt Punteney, the last survivor of the Wild Bunch, who died in his late eighties in Pinedale, Wyoming, on April 19, 1950.

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

Manhattan ’45 Steam, Steel & Stars Industrial Eye: Photographs by Jet Lowe from the Historic American Engineering Record

by Jan Morris; Oxford University Press; 273 pages; $17.95.

The English historian Jan Morris says she chose the title of this book because “it sounded partly like a kind of gun, and partly like champagne, and thus matched the victorious and celebratory theme of my book.” The theme, of course, is New York City on the sunny cusp of its existence, the year 1945. “Ask almost anyone who remembers Manhattan then,” says Morris, “and they recall it with proud nostalgia, even if they were poor and lonely. … Few cities in the history of the world can have stood so consciously at a moment of fulfillment, looking into a future that seemed so full of reward.”

The American Antiquarian Society, which houses two-thirds of all the material known to have been published in this country from 1640 to 1821, this year is celebrating its 175th anniversary. Located in Worcester, Massachusetts, it is an organization of great distinction as well as unique gentility. Its membership, limited to five hundred at any one time, has included twelve Presidents of the United States and forty-eight Pulitzer Prize-winning authors.

The work as well as the atmosphere of this superlative depository of our history was described by an appreciative English scholar of children’s literature who originally published her impressions of the society in the London Times Literary Supplement:
 

1787 Two Hundred Years Ago 1837 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago 1937 Fifty Years Ago