January 2011

Some years ago, I had the opportunity to look through a collection of photographs of New York in the 1920s with the amiable old man who had made them then for a news agency. There were hundreds of pictures of every section of the city, and I was struck with the total absence of black faces in any of the busy street scenes. “Why was that?” I asked.

The old photographer looked at me as if I had lost my mind. He’d worked hard to arrange things that way, he explained; his boss docked his pay five dollars for every image in which blacks appeared; their presence made the pictures unpublishable: “Nobody wanted them.”

I can remember Mickey Mantle before he hurt his knees and the exact spiral of a pass from John Unitas to Raymond Berry, but I’m too young to remember the golden age of the American department store. That age occurred, I gather, from the 1880s to the middle or late 1950s, and people who care about shopping still grow misty at the memory.

And why not? The department stores of the golden age featured “reading and sitting rooms, ‘silence’ rooms for the frazzled shopper, specially lighted rooms where women could examine gowns to determine how they would look in ballroom gaslight,” not to mention “service [that] was defined by personal attention from store employees and in the stocking of exclusive or unique merchandise. …”

At 5:30 P.M. on December 14, along the dimly lit length of the Duke of Gloucester Street, thousands of people wait. Suddenly cannons boom out, making explosions of light and sound in the quiet evening air; a series of noisy, smoky musket volleys come from the militiamen stationed around the arsenal; and at this signal, lights simultaneously flicker on all over the city. In every window of every house a white candle is lighted, and flares stuck in the ground flame up to mark the entrances to the public buildings. It is the Grand Illumination, the ceremony that signals the beginning of Colonial WiIliamsburg’s Christmas fortnight.

Williamsburg is a large and well-organized tourist attraction with accommodations of all sorts at a wide range of prices, and if you want to spend time there during the Christmas fortnight, it is wise to make your plans well in advance. Start by writing or calling for complete information about accommodations and special Christmas packages that are offered each year. The address is: Colonial Williamsburg, P.O. Box C, Williamsburg, Virginia 23187, and the number, a nice touch, is 1-800-HISTORY. Also ask for a listing of the special Christmas festivities, because you may want; to make reservations for some of those before you go. I am told that some people sign up for events such as the Baron’s Feast as early as October.

The Williamsburg Inn offers the most elegant—and most expensive—accommodations at the restoration; it also administers twenty-four restored colonial houses where you can stay if you want to experience an eighteenth-century setting. There are also many modern places to stay.

1686 1936

Sir Edmund Andros arrived in Boston in December to assume the governorship of the Dominion of New England, a vast territory that would shortly embrace all the land from the St. Lawrence in the north and the St. Croix in the east to the Delaware in the west. Consolidated into one royal province, the all-too-independent colonies could be better defended from Indians and—of chief interest to James II—more easily made subject to taxes, tariffs, and assessments.

Remarkably, Andros met no resistance in establishing his government. He was accompanied by one hundred Grenadiers —”a crew that began to teach New England to … drink, blaspheme, curse, and damn,” a colonist complained—but that was hardly a sufficient number to put down any serious unrest. In fact, Andros’s task was eased by the support of merchants and landowners who anticipated that the new governor would usher in a pro-business regime.

Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson was regarded as an entirely inappropriate consort for Edward VIII. She was a commoner, an American, and a once-divorced woman still married to her second husband.

Any sort of liaison with such a person was opposed by the royal family, the prime minister, the archbishop of Canterbury, and all the governments of the Dominions. But the king was determined to marry Mrs. Simpson, even if it meant the loss of his throne. To the astonishment of the world, it came to that. On December 10, Edward VIII signed an instrument of abdication, and the next day he gave a farewell address that was broadcast around the globe. “You must believe me,” he told his listeners, “when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King … without the help and support of the woman I love.” The former king then followed Mrs. Simpson to the Continent, where they would live in exile for most of the remainder of their lives.

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

Home: A Short History of an Idea A World of Watchers Ford: The Men and the Machine

by Witold Rybczynski; Viking; 256 pages; $16.95.

During the six years of the author’s architectural education, he writes in the foreword to this arresting book, the subject of comfort was mentioned only once—by an engineer talking about air conditioning. That such a basic need should be ignored in teaching students how to design buildings seemed so surprising to him that he set about exploring the history of comfort.

The concept is not an old one. In fact, the word in the sense we use it did not even exist until the eighteenth century. The precursors of comfort—privacy and intimacy—first became important in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century and flourished with the growth of a middle-class devoted to family and home. The first comfortable furniture appeared in the eighteenth century, and when people accepted the idea of arranging chairs and sofas in the room instead of along its walls, “a landmark moment in the evolution of domestic comfort” had been reached.

by Joseph Kastner; Alfred A. Knopf; 256 pages; $25.00.

According to a recent survey, there are about two million bird watchers in America expert enough to recognize more than one hundred species of bird, and three times that number who can spot at least forty species, making bird watching one of, if not the , most popular outdoor sport in America. It is high time, then, that all these enthusiasts should be treated to a history of their passion. This first such study is a delight.