January 2011

When Groucho Marx asked, “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” on “You Bet Your Life,” he was offering unsuccessful competitors, battered by his heckling and bewildered by the game, a chance for redemption and some easy money. In return for Grant’s name would come a small prize, some audience applause, and a farewell handshake. As a last effort to reward a hapless guest, “Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?” soon came to symbolize the obvious.

Roanoke was a twice-lost colony. First its settlers disappeared—some 110 men, women, and children who vanished almost without a trace. Ever since, it has been neglected by history, and few Americans of today are aware that the English tried and failed to colonize this continent long before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Four hundred years ago, between 1584 and 1587, Sir Walter Raleigh and his associates made two attempts to establish a settlement on Roanoke Island, in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. One colony returned to England; the other disappeared in America. The effort at plantation was a dismal failure; later colonies survived, however, partly because of Roanoke’s costly lessons.

The illustrations accompanying this article are among the earliest European pictures of America. All are from a set of about two hundred marvelous drawings in ink and watercolors that was given to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York in 1983. Before that they were essentially unknown, hidden in a series of private collections since they were first found in England in 1867. They illustrate Francis Drake’s voyages in the Caribbean in 1572-73 and 1585-86, and his circumnavigation of the globe from 1577 to 1580. In 1586, after raiding Spanish settlements around the Caribbean and razing St. Augustine, Drake stopped at Roanoke and took Raleigh’s colonists from there back to England. About ten of the drawings—none of those used here—show plants, animals, and perhaps one Indian seen in Florida and on the Carolina coasts. But the most informative are those from the Caribbean and South America.

Rear Admiral Julian L. Latimer stood on the bridge of his flagship, the USS Rochester, as it nosed into the harbor of Puerto Cabezas, on Nicaragua’s northeastern Mosquito Coast. It was Christmas Eve, 1926, and the 57-year-old West Virginian had been called abruptly away from family festivities at the Canal Zone naval station at Balboa.

Latimer could see Puerto Cabezas clearly: with its sawmill and rows of workers’ shacks, it looked like a Georgia lumber town. But it was owned lock, stock, and barrel by the Standard Fruit Company, which used it as a shipping point for the mahogany produced by the company’s vast plantations in the interior. American-owned the town may have been, but the Rochester was there, along with two other warships, the Cleveland and the Denver, because Puerto Cabezas currently was occupied by people the U.S. State Department viewed as hostile.

If the West is an oasis civilization, as the historian Walter Webb once wrote, then Utah is the oasis civilization par excellence. It has a few more oases than Nevada, the only state that is more arid overall, but it also has more civilization, hard-won.

Utah’s terrain is rugged—the canyons and plateaus of the Green and Colorado rivers on the east and south, the Wasatch Mountains and their extension, the High Plateaus, in the middle, and the desert on the west. Settlement clustered where there was water, and there was most water along the Wasatch Front from Brigham City to Nephi, and in the fertile valleys between the plateaus. Even in the 1980s, three-quarters of Utah’s population live in the four central counties along the Wasatch Front. Much of the state remains a marvelously scenic, but humanly uninhabitable wasteland.

On a foggy Saturday morning in the last summer of World War II, a B-25 bomber smashed into the seventy-ninth floor of the Empire State Building, killing the crew and eleven civilians, mostly young office workers. As an undergraduate at Columbia, just turned eighteen, it seemed to me that this catastrophe on my doorstep was almost more momentous than the daily news of the war we were wrapping up in the Pacific. Even the announcement a week later of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed muted by comparison. (It took many months for the implications of the A-bomb to be fully absorbed by most people.)

Imagine yourself as a senior executive with General Motors in the years just after World War I. Your company had been founded in 1908, and by 1919 it had grown to be the fifth-largest industrial enterprise in the United States—a loosely knit confederation of dozens of automobile assembly companies and companies making automobile bodies, engines, gears, transmission systems, and so on.

Your boss, William C. Durant, has built this empire on the apparently sound assumption that the market for automobiles is unlimited. The only business problem that interests him is the problem of making enough automobiles to satisfy the public’s demand. He has never found it necessary to worry about coordinating the activities of the far-flung companies he controls.

YOKOSUKA 9·4·45

My dear:

The one totally breath-catching sight, of all the spectacles provided by our daily deluges of military drama throughout the recent weeks, was the first glimpse obtained of Fujiyama the evening of August 27. Late that afternoon, the leading ships of our armada crept slowly, prudently, into Sagami Wan. Remember that name—Sagami Wan. I’ll have more to say about it very soon. On that day the sky was heavily overcast morning and afternoon. Then at sunset the clouds lifted.

Five years before the 1876 Centennial Exposition celebrated the nation’s confidence in its technological prowess with towering displays of manufactured goods, a group of Philadelphia photographers, lithographers, and printers produced an elegant, leather-bound album paying tribute to local industry. They called it Gallery of Arts and Manufacturers of Philadelphia , and they pasted in fifty-eight black-and-white photographs, each mounted in a lithographed frame on its own gilt-edged page. Merchants no doubt paid handsomely to be included in the album, and they probably displayed it in their stores and in hotel lobbies, a proud exemplar of the business directory—a form that began in the eighteenth century with simple printed lists of tradesmen. By the 1820s these lists had evolved into pocket-sized, sparsely illustrated books, replaced, twenty years later, by individual lithographed sheets enlivened with pictures of fashionable shoppers and horse-drawn carriages. By 1856 this form of advertising was well enough established for J. H.