In “A Postage Stamp History of the United States in the Twentieth Century” (December 1982) the following stamps were dated incorrectly: President McKinley stamp was issued in 1904, not 1902; Panama Canal stamp was issued in 1939, not 1913; Arizona stamp was issued in 1962, not 1961; Virgin Island stamp was issued in 1937, not 1938; President Hording stamp was issued in 1923, not 1925; President Roosevelt six-cent stamp was issued in 1966, not 1981; Eugene O’Neill stamp was issued in 1967, not 1981; Graf Zeppelin stamp was issued in 1930, not 1928; Puerto Rico stamp was issued in 1937, not 1949; George C. Marshall stamp was issued in 1967, not 1981 ; NA TO stamp was issued in 1952, not 1951; Ralph Bunche stamp was issued in 1982, not 1981; National Guard stamp was issued in 1953, not 1952; Peace Corps stamp was issued in 1972, not 1971; the American Woman stamp was issued in 1960, not 1961.
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January 2011
Archaeology in America has long passed out of the hands of the enthusiastic amateur stumbling across the occasional arrowhead. It’s the work of professionals fortified with all the technology of modern science. Their goal: to discover more and more of America’s past beneath the surface of the earth, water, and asphalt. Robert Friedman traveled the land from Manhattan to California, talked with the workers in the field and the scholars in their studies, and tells us who is digging, what they’re finding, and what it means. Radio grows up… In 1924 one-third of all the money Americans spent for furniture went for radio receivers; by 1934 almost half of all the radios in the world were owned by Americans. Herbert Hoover issued an early warning that this great medium should not be “drowned in advertising chatter,” but he went unheeded. Alice Marquis tells the great story of radio’s early days: a babble of sound that became comedy, music, soap operas, news, and religion. And of the unending struggle against the tyranny of sponsors.
ALL WARS , great and small, can be counted on to produce four things: misery, death, destruction, and refugees. As far as the first three are concerned, the Second World War differed from its predecessors only in scale. In the matter of refugees, however, the conflict produced a wholly new phenomenon: the mass transplanting of the intelligentsia of one continent to another continent. To quote Laura Fermi, herself a distinguished refugee and the wife of the great physicist Enrico Fermi, what took place in 1940 and 1941 constituted “a unique phenomenon in the history of immigration.”
Indeed, historians have argued that in the eighteen months between the German conquest of France and the American entry into the war, the United States enjoyed a cultural and intellectual windfall of unprecedented proportions. It was without parallel both in its scope and in its consequences. But it wasn’t a windfall.
It was good of artist Perkins Hafnly (“Interior America,” December 1982) to include a UCLA pennant over the piano in his 1910-11 painting of a California mission-style living room. However, that acronym was not created until 1929. The university opened in 1919 on Vermont Avenue, rather close to downtown Los Angeles, as the Southern Branch, University of California (SBUC). Ten years later, when the campus was moved to the Westwood area of the metropolis, the name was amended to University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Harnly simply was nineteen years ahead of time. I know this for sure, as I was a student there during the move.
I have always thought Lincoln’s face uncanny—peculiarly appropriate to the camera and also peculiarly difficult for the artist to capture—both haunting and haunted. Your selection of portraits (February/March 1983) confirms my hunch. Compare John Henry Brown’s ambrotype—not bad—with Preston Butler’s, where the lidded eyes convey so much more Lincoln’s sense of tragedy and melancholy. The lids are half closed in Brown, too, but the ineffable expression is gone. Of all the portraits, I thought Healy’s good, though not reflecting the fire of the man, and the best, Barry’s crayon study. Thank God for photography—Lincoln’s face was too deep for all but the best artists! I can’t imagine having a sense of the man without the photographs.
Peter Andrews’s interesting and informative article “The King of Pianists” (December 1982) touches on several of Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s amorous escapades, but I am disappointed that he does not mention Gottschalk’s love affair with the beautiful actress and journalist Ada Clare. The musician may well have been the father of Clare’s son Aubrey. If Gottschalk was the “American Chopin,” Clare was the “American George Sand.” Though Gottschalk never mentioned her in his writing, their relationship is mentioned not only in her newspaper columns but also in columns and letters written by friends who knew them both and in Vernon Loggins’s biography of Gottschalk.
In the long generation from its first issue until this winter day in 1983, the February/March issue of A MERICAN H ERITAGE surely must be the finest, most nearly perfect of them all. For variety, literary excellence, the scope and scale of learning offered, the pleasure of reading, the graphics, the design—all, it seems to me, have come together in a memorable treasure of publishing. The work of that forgotten photographer and his San Francisco earthquake photographs; the essay on the Ouija boards of my childhood; the unbelievable but authentic manuscript of one family’s odyssey in Kansas in the 187Os; Jacques Barzun’s essay on William James; those touching paintings of artists in their studios, and all the rest left me enthralled, impressed, and nearly stunned with appreciation for this masterpiece of periodical production.
SOME TWO hundred and fifty thousand people a year come to the little village of Cooperstown, in upstate New York, to visit the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame. They are drawn by the large, brick museum on Cooperstown’s Main Street, and many still cherish the belief that this is the place where baseball began; here it was invented and first played. The inventor is supposed to be the Civil War general Abner Doubleday; he is supposed to have thought up the game in 1839.This is a doublebarreled historical falsehood. Coopers town is not the birthplace of baseball, and Abner Doubleday had nothing to do with the invention of baseball.
Cooperstown, a community of twenty-four hundred people, was founded in 1787 by William Cooper, father of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and some of the local scenes figure in the Leatherstocking Tales. But how did Cooperstown and Doubleday get tangled up with the national pastime?
PARADISE LOST . It is a sweet and on the whole harmless vision that prettifies the past of America and the game dearest to its heart. Just as the romanticists among us imagine a golden age of unspoiled landscapes and simple, decent folk, so baseball fans pine for the days when the game was played not for money but for love—a legendary epoch identified with the time of one’s youth or, by those with some dim sense of history, with an Edenic nineteenth century.