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.
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by Leonard L. Richards; Oxford University Press; 245 pages, $19.95. No one has ever been quite sure why John Quincy Adams agreed to become a congressman from Massachusetts after being defeated for réélection as President. His son Charles Francis, who regarded his father as a man “whose feelings I could not penetrate almost always,” felt that it was a dishonor for an ex-President to accept such a lowly job. His wife, Louisa, hated Washington politics and felt she had already put up with enough of it. Adams’s own explanation was that it was his patriotic duty, a sentiment that his family considered pure humbug. The most probable reason for Adams’s decision to go back to Washington, Leonard Richards feels, is that he had an insatiable passion for politics and that the “calm of retirement” seemed to him, in Louisa’s words, like a “total extinction of life.”
by Richard McLanathan; Abrams; 159 pages; $35.00. He is best known for the unfinished portrait of Washington in which the President seems to be emerging from a bank of cumulus clouds. What the millions of children who first saw it hanging on the classroom wall could not have guessed was that the rosy, powdered, taut-lipped head is as fine an example of the Western art of portrait painting as can be found anywhere. Nor would they have known that it is only one of dozens of similarly brilliant works by the man his contemporaries called the father of American portraiture.
The photograph above, of a Detroit street scene in 1910, became an immediate favorite of ours when we turned it up for an article about banking in the April 1984 issue. Later, a staff member who grew up in Detroit glanced at the picture and recognized the location and the bank building itself. Built in 1900, the People’s State Bank of Detroit was the first and, as it turned out, only example of the work of McKim, Mead, and White in the city, occupying a prime location at the corner of Shelby and Fort. Here, in the central business district, on the site of eighteenth-century Detroit, archeologists recently uncovered timbers of the British-built Fort Lernoult. Upon discovering that the bank building still stood, we started wondering how this same spot might appear today. A photographer was dispatched to the scene, and the results appear at right.
For the magazine of American history to publish a major article about a day in the life of Winston Churchill may be puzzling. He was a very great man, to be sure, but first and foremost he was an Englishman. In fact, it is not hard to justify our decision. During the Second World War, England and the United States needed each other desperately. For us a German victory would have meant a moral and political failure that would have shaken the foundations of the world we know; for England such a calamity would have meant invasion, occupation, and the ignominious destruction of the nation.
Churchill spoke for all of us when, in 1941, he said to Hitler: “You do your worst and we will do our best.” He spoke to all of us when, addressing the younger generation, he said: “Don’t be frightened. Do not despair. Keep your head. Strength will be given when it is needed....”
Like Lafayette and Kosciusko before him—allies who fought for us and gave us courage—Churchill will always be considered an honorary citizen of the United States, a title given to him by the Congress in 1963.