January 2011

Willa Cather did not publish her first novel until she was almost forty. Then the cool, rich prose of such novels as My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, One of Ours (which won a Pulitzer Prize), A Lost Lady, and Lucy Gayheart established her reputation as one of America’s foremost literary figures.

As a young woman she worked as a newspaper critic and columnist, and as a teacher. She was born in 1873 in Virginia and raised in Nebraska, where she also went to college. She was teaching in Pittsburgh and writing short stories on the side when she came to the attention of S. S. McClure, the flamboyant editor and publisher of McClure’s Magazine, who offered her a job as associate editor on his magazine.

I N 1960, WHEN THE Florida archaeologist Robert S. Carr was in junior high school, he and another thirteen-year-old boy discovered what they thought was an undisturbed Paleo-Indian mound on the south bank of the Miami River. Every afternoon and summer for the next two years, they and their friends dug away at the mound, their interest maintained by occasional potsherds and animal bones. Finally they struck into the center of the sandy hill and “uncovered a huge mass of rusted iron. As we scraped away … we realized that it was the remains of an old, rusted Model T…”

I N OUR February/March issue Albert Macomber, living in Washington, D.C., in 1863, described a “dilapidated pile of bricks” just north of the U.S. Capitol as the residence of George Washington.

He was wrong, says John H. Rhodehamel, archivist of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association: Washington never lived in the city that bears his name. “The crumbling buildings that impressed Mr. Macomber were actually President Washington’s Capitol Hill town houses, designed by him in 1798 and subsequently built by William Thornton, first architect of the Capitol. Hoping by his example to encourage the development of the new federal city, Washington may also have responded to the old speculative impulse that led him to acquire tens of thousands of acres as a younger man. Within easy walking distance of the Capitol, the two adjoining buildings were to serve as rooming houses for the senators and congressmen who would soon descend on the city that still existed largely in the vision of its planners.”

I N THE LAST issue Victor Salvatore examined the origins of the myth that Gen. Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. In name at least, the game stretches back far beyond the general’s birth, and across the Atlantic. Herewith, some citations:

1700: Rev. Thomas Wilson of Maidstone, England, recalls in his memoirs: “I have seen Morris-dancing, cudgel-playing, baseball and cricketts, and many other sports on the Lord’s day.”

1744: In A Little Pretty Pocket Book , a rhyming alphabet primer that went through several American editions, the letter B stands for “base-ball”:

The Ball once struck off,

Away flies the Boy

To the next destined Post,

And then Home with Joy.

L AST OCTOBER’S issue, devoted to the American press, omitted one crucial bit of newspaper lore: those deftly constructed square hats that pressmen would whip together from a sheet of newsprint at the beginning of the working day to keep ink, grease, paper lint, and oil out of their hair. Here is how the pros do it, according to the New York School of Printing, which distributes these instructions to its students, and which tells us that pressmen were wearing paper hats folded along this pattern as early as 1748.

T HE STRIKING pictures of the San Francisco earthquake that appeared in our February/March 1983 issue bear ample witness to the dedication and grit of J. B. Monaco, the local photographer who took them. But this was not the only time in his career that Monaco recorded a San Francisco phenomenon: were it not for his enterprise, the sensation of the 1915 PanamaPacific Exposition would have been forever lost.

Nobody knows quite why Stella made such a hit. As Alfred Heller tells the story in World’s Fair , an attractive quarterly devoted to international expositions (P.O. Box 339, Corte Madera, CA 94925), the painting of the full-blown nude by an artist named Nani had been shown around the country to apathetic audiences for some time before the fair and had come to rest in a St. Louis garret. Her owner, Norman Vaughan, decided to give her one more chance and sent her west to the fair—where she caused an uproar. More than threequarters of a million people paid a dime to see her, and she became the most popular attraction in “the Zone,” the fair’s midway.

The men who were there—on the ships and battlefields, and in the planes—write a vivid history of their own kind. Professional historians tell us what happened and try to tell us what it meant. The participants speak of fear and blood, boredom and elation, death and triumph. It is this kind of history we present in a special section on World War II: extraordinary eyewitness accounts by the Americans who fought it.

The man who knew what to do …

In 1941 Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer drew up a broad strategy for global war, at the request of Gen. George Marshall. Wedemeyer had been an exchange student at the German War College in the thirties—he already knew what Blitzkrieg meant. Perhaps more than any one man he was responsible for the plan that won the war. An interview by Keith E. Eiler.

The men who did it…

“Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” Many joyful sermons were preached on these words of the Psalmist in August: the first cable had been laid across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and the Old World was in telegraphic communication with the New. Back in 1843 Samuel Morse had predicted “with certainty” that this would happen. In 1854 Thoreau had observed that Americans were “eager to tunnel under the Atlantic,” but he was not impressed with the idea; England and America might have as little to say to each other as Maine and Texas.

The Blue Eagle—the American thnnderbird with outstretched wings- began to appear in office and plant windows in August, soaring above the proud motto “We Do Our Part.” This was the emblem of the National Recovery Administration established by Franklin Roosevelt in the hope that American industry, in a spirit of selfless concern for the commonweal, could and would regulate itself, stop destructive competition, rehire the jobless, and stimulate spending. Congress suspended the antitrust laws for two years and authorized the formulation of legally enforceable industrial codes designed to shorten hours, raise wages, and so forth. The public was urged to boycott businesses operating without the Blue Eagle and, to some extent, it did.

On September 14 appeared Sexual Behavior in the Human Female by Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, and Gebhard of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University. It caused quite as much stir as had the companion volume on men, published five years earlier- more of a stir, perhaps, for those were days before the media had made fodder as familiar as the television listings of women’s hopes, fears, troubles, and joys. And it was then a given that only men talked openly about sex. That women consented to answer Kinsey’s questions was in itself something of an innovation. “Neither younger girls nor older women discuss their sexual experiences in the open way that males do,” said Kinsey.