January 2011

As an amateur genealogist I am sure that Peter Andrews is right in saying, “We want to go home, ” but there is more to it than that. Anyone who gets beyond strict dates and places finds information about ancestors that brings American history alive in much the same way that A MERICAN H ERITAGE does.

I have discovered many fascinating things about my forebears and can now help my children place themselves within the context of American history, American hopes, and American dreams. I can tell them that, while they have ancestors who came over on the Mayflower , their parents also are fifth cousins once removed; one of their relatives invented Cream of Wheat; another was last seen in a saloon in St. Joseph, Missouri; another was jailed as a Tory during the American Revolution; another bought a substitute during the Civil War; and yet another lost his family farm during the Depression.

Congratulations on an excellent article, “Genealogy: The Search for a Personal Past,” in the current A MERICAN H ERITAGE . As a thirty-year member of the DAR I was gratified to note that you stuck to facts about that organization, which is the largest lineage-based society in our country. As a professional genealogist for more than fifteen years, I believe the information in your article was much more accurate than most of those on genealogy I have read in the last years of booming interest in that subject.

I was surprised, however, that you mentioned the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and their publication begun in 1870 rather than the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s periodical, The Register , which has been in continuous existence since 1847.

Edward Sorel is apparently so caught up in worry over Fascism and sexual equality that he contrived to make Krazy Kat into a female (“Krazy Kat, a Love Story,” August/September 1982). In doing so he blithely ignores the fact that the cartoonist, George Herriman, obviously regarded Krazy as a male, as indicated in the first two panels of the black-and-white comic strip reproduced on page 75. Ignatz Mouse, referring to Krazy Kat, says, “That’s him, sure as the moons is cheeses.… And to think I cant reach him with this nice, amiable brick—s’ awful.”

FROM A DISTANCE , it looks like any other factory scene. Women, seated at small tables, hunch over piecework, their hands moving in quick, accustomed ways.

But up close you see this is not a common factory, not the usual piecework. A woman, her adhesive machine hissing like a gosling, is pasting lacy red pages into a folded card. Next to her a worker deftly glues three tiny Styrofoam blocks to the back of a big-eyed paper moppet and sticks it to a blueflocked card emblazoned in gold: “Be my valentine.” This is a greeting-card factory. Hallmark, to be precise.

I have always respected A MERICAN H ERITAGE ’S accuracy and historical information. But the June/July 82 issue has an article with so many inaccuracies and so much blatant political bias that it makes me wonder about the credibility of past issues. I am referring to “Does the West Have a Death Wish?” by Dyan Zaslowsky. She rehashes some articles of the 1940s by Bernard De Voto which were answered and rebutted by other authors at the time. She makes statements about the ecology of the West that can be easily proved inaccurate. She is misinformed about much of the history of this area. And she rails against the American way of life—private ownership of land and property. She seems to think that public ownership of the “public lands states” of the West is historic and best for the preservation of this land.

Wisdom isn’t much use to the old, but to be young and wise, that’s what I would call striking it rich!—Stephen Vizinczey

AS BEST we can determine, older people plank down real money for A MERICAN H ERITAGE while young people read it on the cheap)—in the homes of their parents and grandparents and in thousands of school libraries across the country. That doesn’t surprise or bother us in the least. From its beginnings this magazine was expensive compared with the mass publications. Moreover, the fact that it dealt with that dread subject “history” made it seem appropriate for a mature, sober-sided burgher—the kind of person who tells the young to do things that are good for them, like eating greens and reading serious books.

FEW ARE AWARE of a major publishing project that has been sponsored by the federal government and some of our leading citizens over the past eight decades. It is a lavishly illustrated history of the United States in our times and it comes in parts—on postage stamps, to be precise. The story it tells may say as much about how we see ourselves as about what we’ve done since 1900.

There are some fifteen hundred stamps in the national album, more than three-quarters of them issued in the last half-century. From the very first issue of two stamps in 1847, until 1893, they carried portraits of Presidents, Founding Fathers, and military men. (Seven 1869 stamps showed contemporary and historical scenes, but they were considered vulgar and were replaced within a year.) In 1893, to mark the Columbian Exposition, sixteen stamps were issued depicting scenes from the life of Columbus. They were the first “commemorative” stamps and they inaugurated our age of numerous issues.

Philosophie Graffiti Genial Genealogists Genial Genealogists Gender Problems Land Use

Even for a city that prided itself on being a preeminent center of European musical activity, the Parisian concert debut of Louis Moreau Gottschalk on April 2, 1845, was a singular occasion. Startlingly, the pianist was a youthful American, and, of course, it was well understood in Paris that Americans were devoid of cultural refinement. When the ballerina Fanny Elssler had announced her intention to tour the United States four years earlier, the Paris journal Charivari threw up its hands at the thought of such an exquisite artist showing herself to “these savages, these trans-Atlantic Arabs, these coarse, ill-mannered, thick-headed, bad-hearted descendants of renegades and rebels.”

As a retired photo editor ( Newsday , Long Island, N.Y.), I know how hard it can be to get pictures that specifically mesh with the text, but they did flash together in my mind while reading “Looking for the Good Germans,” by David Davidson in the June/July issue. Looking through my wartime file, sure enough, there was the slogan, in Munich, “Dachau, Velden, Buchenwald, I am ashamed to be a German.” Mr. Davidson had a couple of concentration camp names wrong, but let’s not carp or nit-pick; his recollection is pretty good for the time span. One must admire the guts of P. H’pll, the creator, as he signed it. It was even painted, not chalked, so it resisted the elements. Later I do remember seeing the added “Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe—I am proud to be a German,” but cannot come up with a photo, if indeed I ever took one. At that time, I was a first lieutenant in the 166th Signal Photo Company, 3rd Army (under General Patton) photo unit.