It began in 1837 when a clever Columbia College student familiar with his school’s history discovered the perfect excuse for a party: Columbia’s fiftieth anniversary. Forget that the school had been founded in 1754. Forget that the old name, King’s College—alma mater of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Robert Livingston, among others—had been shed in 1784 in favor of Columbia. It was on April 13, 1787, that the New York State legislature ratified the school’s original charter, reconfirming the name Columbia and transferring control of the college from public to private hands. When that canny student of 1837 proposed a celebration to his 120 schoolmates, they gave it their hearty endorsement. Faculty, alumni, and trustees nodded their approval. “There is some idea of a little splutter for the occasion,” one sophomore wrote in his diary. “Very good, and the more fun the better.”
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April 16: The first comedy written by a native American and produced professionally appears at New York’s John Street Theater. It is The Contrast , by Royall Taylor.
Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, one of the Confederacy’s most skilled professional soldiers, recognized an opportunity when he saw one. Retreating from losses in Kentucky and Tennessee, Johnston’s army of fifty thousand had hurried south, pursued by Ulysses S. Grant and his forty-five thousand men. In Corinth, Mississippi, Johnston received word that Grant had halted beside the Tennessee River not far north near a meetinghouse called Shiloh Church, encamped with few defensive precautions to await reinforcement by Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s army of twenty-five thousand. If the next encounter was to be a Southern victory, Johnston knew he would have to attack before Buell arrived. On the morning of April 6, the Southern general swung into his saddle and led his troops into the Battle of Shiloh. Before it was over, thirteen thousand Union men and ten thousand Confederates lay dead.
Speaking of Supreme Court decisions on minimal labor standards, Professor William E. Leuchtenburg in “The Case of the Chambermaid and the Nine Old Men” (December 1986) writes that “many commentators even believe that the Court has forever abandoned its power of judicial review in this field.” This attitude seems odd to me. These commentators apparently don’t realize that the Supreme Court committed an about-face to achieve many of the later decisions. Can interpretational stability be founded on interpretational change? Can any Supreme Court decision be forever if political pressures bear upon Court appointments? Cannot the Supreme Court someday again take “judicial notice of the unparalleled demands” of some unforeseen economic calamity in the future?
The frontispiece of the August/September 1986 issue shows a painting of Edward Delano’s name with a reference to “clusters of Chinese figures set against Macao’s harbor.” But the walled city in the background with Spanish flags flying prominently over it is Manila, the figures forming the letters of the family name, Delano, are Filipinos in mid-nineteenth-century dress, and the painter, whose name appears in the lower left-hand corner, is the Filipino José Honorato Lozano. The human figures forming the name Edward are Chinese, who were important in the commerce and crafts of Spanish Manila. The painting is similar to the two Lozanos in the Peabody Museum of Salem, Massachusetts.
The author’s reply: Mr. Legarda is right. Ned Delano visited Manila several times; perhaps it was on one of these visits that he had this picture painted and another to match it, built around his mother’s name, Catherine Delano.
On a hot day around 1910, Santa Barbarans have ridden the streetcar out to the northern end of the line to take in a band concert at the Plaza del Mar. Santa Barbara early became a center of California tourism, and the Potter Hotel, at the far left, offered palatial shelter to the likes of Andrew Carnegie and Philip Armour after it opened in 1903. The string of black dots along the roof line of the nearest building are paper lanterns, and they signal an attraction that was as much a fixture of the era as band concerts and streetcars: the Japanese tea garden. The three-quarters of a century that stands between the pictures has seen sweeping changes overtake the shoreline, and they are eloquent not only about the wages of time but also of the difficulties of exactly pairing modern pictures with old ones.
Among recently published books that fall within our bailwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
by Robert Hendrickson; Viking; 230 pages; $18.95. Conventional wisdom to the contrary, American speech is not becoming homogenized into the accents of the evening network news, according to the author of this cheerful, pleasantly opinionated book. As immigrant English smoothes out through the generations into standard American speech patterns, new arrivals keep refreshing the language with their words, expressions, and accents. Los Angeles courtrooms, for instance, today provide interpreters for eighty languages. Also we have no national movement, such as the French do, to keep our speech untainted by alien influences. (A French company was recently sued by the Ministry of Culture for calling a new product “Ie fast drink.”) Examples of foreign words we have welcomed are far-ranging: kiwi comes from the Maori, for instance; lemming from the Laplanders; kayak from the Inuit.
edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie; Grove’s Dictionaries of Music Inc.; four volumes; $495.00.
by Jean Lipman, Elizabeth V. Warren, and Robert Bishop; Hudson Hills Press in association with the Museum of American Folk Art, New York; 199 pages; $45.00. The period defined as “young” in this folk-art history is the time between the Revolution and World War I, and the subject illustrated is how life was lived in those years. The authors, led by Jean Lipman (who was collecting folk art when many experts considered it junk), have included early photography and Indian art in the book, as well as the more expected paintings, carvings, quilts, weaving, weather vanes, toys, and trade signs. Some of the objects shown are astonishing; there is a walking stick, for instance, with a whole railroad train, including the engine, carved along its length. And a quilt, made about 1900, is elegantly appliquéd with Indian pictographs by an unknown Sioux.