The stereotype of the genealogist has long been a familiar one in American popular culture. Like the Ichabod Crane schoolmaster and the prissy librarian, the genealogist was a specific type, easily recognizable and faintly ridiculous. She was the elderly lady in comfortable shoes examining musty records in search of enough cerulean in her veins to permit her to snub her neighbors with a clear conscience. He was the retired clergyman supplementing his pension by collecting fees for piloting nervous clients through the turbulent biographical shoals that stand in the way of admittance to patriotic societies. Genealogy, when it was practiced at all, carried an air of quackery about it. And even at its most serious it seemed a somnolent pursuit designed to help old people to while away their time.
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January 2011
Last March a letter arrived at AMERICAN HERITAGE from Barry G. Huffman of Hickory, North Carolina, a subscriber who had some kind words to say about the most recent issue of the magazine. But more important, she wanted to share with us a set of paintings she had been working on for the last four years. Her paintings, small oils on canvases about twelve by sixteen inches in size, are visual narratives of local history, and taken together they form a sequence that she calls “Catawba Journey.” She intends the group to be illustrations for a children’s book to be used in the local schools. We think they deserve a wider audience.
As a painter Huffman is a primitive in the sturdy tradition of American folk art. As a historical researcher she is a perfectionist. Consequently, horses in her pictures are appropriately harnessed, the hardware on a door is correct, clothes, guns, and tools are all just as Catawba residents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew them.
DEAL, ENGLAND: On August 30 the Quaker leader William Penn set sail for America, the “True and Absolute Proprietor” of the province of Pennsylvania, an awesome tract of forty-five thousand square miles of unsurveyed and largely unexplored territory.
The proprietorship had been granted by King Charles II in payment of a debt owed to Penn’s father—and also, it is suspected, because the King found Quakers something of a strain on his tolerance and was glad to have some of them move to the far-distant New World. As for Penn, he had given up his search for acceptance in England, sadly concluding that “the deaf adder cannot be charmed.” He had planned his new colony as a “holy experiment” embodying his beliefs in religious freedom, trial by jury, and the right of petition.
I was one of these moralists in khaki. A newspaperman and radio writer in civil life, only a few days after the German surrender in May, 1945,1 took my place behind a battered pine desk in a bomb-cracked building in Munich that originally had served as an old-folks home and later as headquarters for the German army service of supply.
An hour earlier, having driven in from Paris over a poppy-carpeted landscape, I had been confronted with a perfect, up-to-date expression of the ancient German conflict of “two souls in one breast.” Across the façade of the Rathaus, or city hall, somebody had chalked, “Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen—I am ashamed to be a German!” Directly below, another hand had scrawled, “Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe—I am proud to be a German!”
He went at his lectures obliquely, backtracking, leaving broken sentences scattered behind him. He assembled his arguments in such a seemingly haphazard way that occasionally one of his Harvard students would fret, “You can’t take good notes on Matthiessen’s lectures.” But again and again those of his students who had larger interests than tidy notebooks said he was the best teacher they had ever had. He taught literature, and he taught it tensely, angrily, exultantly. To him, ideas were things too spiky and potent to demean by folding them into the pat delivery of the “popular” professor. “When he gave a speech or lecture,” wrote one of his friends, “he not only spoke his whole mind but also engaged emotions which most people reserve for home.” And at his funeral, his colleague John Rackliffe saw “the sensitive, thoughtful, and grief-torn faces of students who had really learned and were still learning- ten, fifteen, or twenty years later—from Matthiessen.”
By the summer of 1863 the Western rivers were no longer battlegrounds but supply lines for the Union Army. With the fall of Vicksburg on the Mississippi, Lincoln wrote, “the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” Captain John M. Newcomb, however, was far from unvexed; federal authorities had some very trying plans in store for him and his brand-new steamer, the Idahoe.
FROM THE COMMANDING OFFICER Nashville Tenn: July 6/63
SPECIAL ORDERS
No. 29.
Lt. Col. Spalding Provost Marshal is hereby directed without loss of time to seize and transport to Louisville all prostitutes found in this City or Known to be here. …
The prevalence of venereal disease at this Post has elicited the notice of the General Commanding Department who has ordered a peremptory remedy.
The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis …
She was the last major U.S. warship sunk during World War II, and her loss was the worst open-sea disaster in American history: 880 died. When a Japanese submarine torpedoed the heavy cruiser Indianapolis on the night of July 29, 1945, the ship went down without getting off a distress signal. Nobody knew of the survivors fighting thirst, insanity, and sharks in the terrible heat of the summer Pacific. A MERICAN H ERITAGE tells their story in all its horror and heroism.
Genealogy: Every man the hero of his own saga …
As everyone knows, genealogy is big business today. But how did it happen that Americans abandoned their egalitarian wellsprings to establish pedigrees for themselves? Is it simple proof that everyone does indeed love a lord, or is something deeper at work? Peter Andrews provides some surprising answers in a major survey of an obsession.
A sunlit terrace by a graceful house in the countryside near Middleburg, with the Virginia hills shimmering in the distance. A tall man, slightly stooped but still remarkably handsome, his black hair mildly tinged with gray, his eye penetrating, his manners distinguished, his laugh disarming and infectious. This is Averell Harriman, the supreme public servant of our times, who, John F. Kennedy said, has held “probably as many important jobs as any American in our history, with the possible exception of John Quincy Adams.” Now in his nineties, he recalls his equally remarkable father.
You were born 102 years after George Washington’s first inauguration. This means you’ve lived nearly half the life of the republic. We’ve had forty presidents. You’ve lived in the administrations of eighteen of them—from Benjamin Harrison to Ronald Reagan.
I don’t remember Benjamin Harrison. McKinley was the first I was really conscious of.