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January 2011

by Howard Jones; Oxford University Press; 271 pages; $22.95.

That the story of the slave ship Amistad has been told more than once, both as fact and in fiction, is not surprising, because it is the only instance in American history in which blacks, captured in Africa to be sold into slavery, managed to fight back, win, and eventually get back home. The story is dramatic and complex, involving a handsome, forceful young black leader named Cinque, diplomatic and legal squabbling, the mounting emotional fury between abolitionists and Southern slave owners, and a former as well as the incumbent President of the United States.

Bernard Weisberger feels that Americans should study history because it’s good for them. True enough, but not an argument that will accomplish anything with the public. Also, the decay set in long before he said it did.

I can’t speak for college courses, because I never went, but I took high school history in the mid-1940s. I still recall that text as one of the dullest books I ever read in my life. If I recall correctly, our American history text was economic history, the fad that came before the ones Weisberger talks about. And, of course, economic history is important—which has nothing to do with the fact that 99 percent of high school students won’t learn anything from it. Fortunately I’d been infected with a liking for popular history at age eight by the historical novels of Kenneth Roberts, so I continued to read history. Everyone else in class tuned history out, and stayed that way. High school history texts certainly haven’t improved over the years; I have my son’s word for that.

The photographer and printmaker Samuel Chamberlain, pictured at right, was famed for invoking the gentle spirit of New England’s countryside and its small towns. Nevertheless, here he is, perched on a convenient packing crate at the ragged edge of the Chicago River. It is the summer of 1929 and Chamberlain is sketching the half-completed Daily News Building in preparation for a dry-point etching to be titled Soaring Steel.

Born in the last frenzy of the 1920s building boom, this ten-million-dollar limestone-clad structure at the corners of Canal and Madison marked the first attempt to bring architectural order to the jumbled riverfront. Previous arrivals nearby include the low, doubledomed Chicago and North Western Railway Station at the picture’s left, one of the busiest commuter terminals in the country, and the modestly Italianate brick warehouse topped by a clock tower at the right.

Recently my eleven-year-old son brought me a fifth-grade social studies homework assignment. It was on a single dittoed sheet, published by McGraw-Hill, and it contained drawings. While I find the idea of emphasizing cartoons and creative drawing as a way to teach history repellent in itself—a perfect example of the “history as a grab bag” that Bernard Weisberger describes in “American History Is Falling Down”—it was the text of the assignment sheet itself that made me angry.

The sheet was entitled “Colonial Cartoons” and indeed showed reproductions of some cartoons that had appeared during the American colonial period. The first one was a caricature of the British statesman Charles Fox showing him split between radicalism and royalism. Well and good. But the caption said: “This cartoon shows the problem of split loyalties. Many colonial leaders still felt loyalty to the colonies but at the same time felt loyal to the king of Great Britain.” As Fox was hardly a colonial leader, this caption does not relate to the cartoon.

Old rivermen used to talk of the first time the steamboat Yellow Stone reached the fur-trading posts on the upper Missouri. Belching smoke, roaring like a cannon, and spurting steam into the air, she penetrated farther up the river than a boat under its own power had ever gone before. Her owner, John Jacob Astor, never saw her, although from his New York office he sent fleets of ships on trading missions from Liverpool to Canton. By the 183Os Astor’s American Fur Company controlled most of the trade with the Indians east of the Rocky Mountains. He had been talked into building the steamboat by his manager, Ramsay Crooks, who had gotten the idea from Pierre Chouteau, Jr., who was in charge of the Western department of the company, with headquarters in St. Louis. The plan was not originally Chouteau’s either but that of Kenneth McKenzie, who managed that part of the business called the Upper Missouri Outfit.

Merritt Ierley of Teaneck, New Jersey, writes: “One summer day in 1892, in Yonkers, New York, Chester Webb posed for the camera in a wagon that his cousins Fred Webb and Walter MacNab were pretending to pull. Snap. In 1908, when Walter was twenty-six, his cousins came by, and somebody thought of re-creating the photograph. So a wagon was found and Chester dutifully hopped in. Snap. Twenty-seven years later, a dour Chester again did his duty, but by 1952 he seemed to be enjoying the tradition. Six years after that the cousins—now in their seventies—posed once more. Snap … for the last time. The pictures came to light after the death of Walter’s daughter—my mother, Margaret Ierley. They offer a look at life changing and yet not changing—and at the little boy that is in every man.”

The Constitution across the Nation

As Michael Kammen notes in A Machine That Would Go of Itself, celebrating the Constitution is no easy task: the very idealism that distinguishes it as a political document makes it elusive in the realm of daily life. Unlike the bicentennial of the Revolution, there are few events to reenact; only a small portion of the country was actually the site of any action; and in a sort of last revenge for the Articles of Confederation, even a definite anniversary date is denied the Constitution, since every state ratified it at a different time. Despite these difficulties, many organizations have plunged in and come up with programs that promise both to celebrate and to educate, scheduled around September 17—the day the delegates to the Convention signed the Constitution —or the day their state ratified, or, out of long-standing habit, July 4. (The bicentennial doings at Philadelphia are noted elsewhere in this issue.)

 

As Michael Kammen notes in A Machine That Would Go of Itself, celebrating the Constitution is no easy task: the very idealism that distinguishes it as a political document makes it elusive in the realm of daily life. Unlike the bicentennial of the Revolution, there are few events to reenact; only a small portion of the country was actually the site of any action; and in a sort of last revenge for the Articles of Confederation, even a definite anniversary date is denied the Constitution, since every state ratified it at a different time. Despite these difficulties, many organizations have plunged in and come up with programs that promise both to celebrate and to educate, scheduled around September 17—the day the delegates to the Convention signed the Constitution —or the day their state ratified, or, out of long-standing habit, July 4. (The bicentennial doings at Philadelphia are noted elsewhere in this issue.)

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