by Nicholas N. Kittrie and Eldon D. Wedlock, Jr.; The Johns Hopkins University Press; 714 pages; $39.50.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
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January 2011
Rediscover America …
The next issue of American Heritage is given over to travel—and it will be different from any travel magazine you have ever seen. A number of distinguished writers journey to parts of the country that have a particular claim on them, and show how a knowledge of the past can deepen the enjoyment of the present. Among the journeys:
Traveling with a sense of history …
To the journalist and biographer Otto Friedrich, history is an indispensable working tool, and in the essay that serves as an introduction to this special issue, he tells how the past has served him on his travels, from the New England of his youth (where his Concord neighbors spoke casually of those families who had inhabited the town “before the fight” —meaning 1775), through the American South in the footsteps of a great-grandfather who served with a New York artillery outfit, to Bugsy Siegel’s rose garden in the evanescent city of Las Vegas.
Starting again in San Francisco …
In last year’s April/May issue, David McCullough gave a tour of Washington, D.C., in which he described the palpable presence of the past there. Washington today is so rich in national memories and so thoroughly synonymous with federal government that having the nation’s capital anywhere else is unimaginable. But for many citizens in the nineteenth century and even later, the transfer of the seat of government to a new and better location was an issue of the greatest importance. Only in recent decades has the idea of abandoning Washington ceased to be mentioned by serious people; in earlier times it never went away.
As Captain Beach explained in his essay on naval aviation (“Navy Power: A View from the Air,” October/November 1986), Pearl Harbor instantly made the aircraft carrier the capital ship of the Navy, and our survival depended upon our grasping that fact and acting quickly. We had already started a moderate building program, and we immediately accelerated it. But construction was the easy part; how could we quickly train the thousands and thousands of pilots and other specialized crew members who were needed to man the ships?
In December 1941 we had only eight aircraft carriers, and by the summer of 1942 we had lost two of these, with two more to be lost in a few months. We didn’t have enough ships to defend ourselves, let alone train more men to take the offensive.
The explorer Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, fell dead on March 19 in what is today east Texas, murdered in the wilderness by his own men. They had cause to hate him. Three years before, La Salle had led several hundred French men, women, and children to colonize the lower Mississippi, but he mistook Matagorda Bay far to the west for the river’s mouth, and they settled there instead. Disease, hunger, and Indians cut their number to thirty-seven; the colony was doomed. Men cursed La Salle and vowed to take vengeance for their dead and their lost fortunes. Had La Salle been remotely politic, he might have maintained his followers’ loyalty, but even the devoted Henri Joutel called him “too haughty.” He displayed a “rigidness towards those under his command,” Joutel wrote later, “which at last drew on him implacable hatred and was the occasion of his death.”
Katharine Hepburn said that nylons are the invention of the devil, but the culprit reponsible for the synthetic material was in fact Wallace H. Carothers, assisted by a team of chemists at E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company. On February 16 Carothers obtained a patent for nylon and the process for making it. Three years later ladies’ nylon hose became available, and Du Pont sold 64 million pairs; before long, nylon was being used to make everything from cargo nets, guitar strings, and clothing to carpets, brush bristles, and artificial fur.
Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.