January 2011

Two centuries ago William Blake said with some prescience, “Energy is spirit, and the spirit is within us. ”

You ask: What can history teach us about energy? It can teach us that inattention to its problems contributed to the fall of civilizations. Plato describes in Critias how Attica had already become ”… a mere relic of the original country … all the rich, soft soil has moulted away, leaving a country of skin and bones.” The Greeks (and the Romans, Carthaginians, and so on) cut down their trees for firewood and made barren much of the Mediterranean littoral. In North Africa (the ancient granary of Rome) the Arab is not only the child of the desert but also in part its father.

How did we get into our present troubles? Bit by bit. Beyond absurdity, this is stuff for the theater of the bizarre. It is not so much a question of villainy as of myopia.

Now and again, on a picnic hill, when the incense of hamburgers and hot dogs grows thick and stupefying, I am moved to rise on my hind legs with a spatula in one hand and a bun in the other and give voice to an atavistic howl, a nasal, high, drawn-out ululation like that of a muezzin from a minaret or a coyote from a river bluff.

“Welllllll, they’re all hot, they’re all ready-uh! Faaaamous Coney Island red-hots! It’s a loaf-a-bread-a-pound-a-meat and all the mustard you can eat for a thin skinny little dime, folks! Step oooooovah!”

My grandchildren, embarrassed, interest themselves in ants and other small objects in the grass.

“Wellllll, it’s hot hamburgers, hot coffee! Ice-cold sweet milk, buttermilk, and nice fresh homemade pies! Step right up folks, get yours!”

The edgy young man with the hatbox wanted to see Dr. Couney—a personal matter, he said. The doctor assumed he had something to sell and sent him away. The man took his hatbox and left to spend hours wandering amid the dancing elephants, scenic railways, and carnival din of Coney Island. At last he reappeared; could Dr. Couney see him now? This time Couney said yes. The man opened the hatbox. Inside was a premature baby, tiny and red and struggling for breath.

Dr. Martin A. Couney knew just what to do; in fact, he knew more about “preemies” than anyone else in the United States. He was the first American to offer specialized treatment for them and could boast, toward the end of his career, that out of 8,000 in his care, 6,500 survived. “I can’t save all the babies,” he said, “but the percentage of loss is not large, and every parent knows I took good care of his baby until God took its soul. I never had a complaint or an investigation.”

The editors have invited me to write an occasional column on history as encountered in movies and on television. The assignment is welcome to one who has been irregularly a film critic as well as regularly a historian. But the job may not be so simple as it first appears. For the relationship between history and film takes a diversity of forms—from film as rendition of past history to film as material for future history.

I expect to write mostly about the cinematic depiction of the past. Still, one should note that the film has become itself a historical source. Younger historians especially are turning to movies as a means of entry into the recent past. Two periodicals— Film & History and The Journal of Popular Film —tease historical meanings out of flickering images, much as historians of ancient Greece or China tease meanings out of potsherds and grave rubbings. The recent book American History/American Film , edited by J. E. O’Connor and M. A. Jackson (Frederick Ungar, 1979), presents a variety of styles of historical analysis.

Shortly after the turn of the century, the historian Francis Trevelyan Miller began writing collectors, photographers, historical societies, and retired military men asking for photographs of the Civil War. In many cases he asked too late; a Mr. Bender, for instance, who owned over one hundred thousand glass plate negatives, had scraped the images off them in order to sell the glass to gauge makers. Nevertheless, Miller and his associates turned up enough fine material to publish, in 1911, their Photographic History of the Civil War . With much of its text written by men who fought in the war, and its thousands of photographs reproduced from original prints, this magnificent ten-volume work has remained unsurpassed for seventy years. But those seven decades have seen more and more pictures of the conflict come to light, and six years ago William C. Davis, backed by the National Historical Society of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, under-took the daunting project of assembling a photographic history worthy of standing beside Miller’s.

The nineteenth century was, according to the stereotype, ashamed and fearful of all things sexual. It was an era when, as one visitor to America swore, teachers put “modest little trousers with frills at the bottom” over the “limbs” of their pianos. The Victorian woman’s lack of passion was proverbial, her frigidity extolled by the popular hygiene books and marriage manuals of the day.

But were Victorian women in fact passionless? In a remarkable survey that historian Carl Degler found in the Stanford University Archives, it appears that at least one group of Victorian women defied the stereotype: they approached sex with gusto. This survey, though very small, appears to be the earliest systematic study of the sexual habits and attitudes of American women, including information on sexual desire, frequency of intercourse, and orgasm.

From the beginning it was clear—in this case the beginning was December 2, 1942, the day the first man-made nuclear reactor was nudged to criticality in a squash court beneath the west stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field and incidentally the first day of wartime gasoline rationing—that the fissioning atom radiated heat energy and that such energy might, in the fullness of time, be applied to make electricity for power. Fifteen years would pass before nuclear electricity was generated in any quantity in the United States. That is rapid development or surprising delay, depending upon one’s perspective, but the fact is that despite its imposing technical lead in nuclear matters, the United States did not arrive first at the production of commercial nuclear power. Great Britain did. On a smaller scale, even the Soviet Union preceded us. The reasons are intriguing. How the United States contrived to back into the nuclear power business is instructive. “There are overtones in this development,” wrote the physicist and statesman J.

The twentieth President of the United States was shot in a Washington, D.C., railroad station on July 2, 1881. He died seventy-nine days later from infections resulting from his wound.

Recent historians have not included James A. Garfield among the nation’s immortals, and it is difficult today to convey the grief and outrage his assassination precipitated a century ago. Garfield was not, to his contemporaries, one of Thomas Wolfe’s “gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces” who presided over the country in the decades after Lincoln. Rather, he was the embodiment of the American ideal: a poor Ohio farm boy who had scrambled to obtain an education and to make his way in Republican politics. He was a family man, a pillar of his church, and a major general of volunteers during the Civil War. Now he was dead at the very outset of his administration.