Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
by Leon F. Litwack
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Illustrations, 672 pages, $20.00
To understand, to feel, what freedom meant to the 4,000,000 former Southern slaves is perhaps impossible. Nor is it much easier to grasp the ex-slaveholder’s sense of betrayal as his blacks, his carefully husbanded chattels, made that first exhilarating choice, and walked out on him. This superb study of the splitting apart of the slave-based society, during and for the first few years after the Civil War, is as enlightening as it is engrossing.
Leon Litwack has worked almost entirely from primary sources, and in this book hundreds of black and white voices testify to the joy and terror of Emancipation.
by Elizabeth Kendall
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
20 photographs, 256 pages, $12.95
In the beginning, aesthetic (or freeform or barefoot) dancing was closely linked to feminism, the cult of exercise, and dress reform (fashionably corseted women couldn’t so much as raise their arms above their heads). Elizabeth Kendall tells the story through the lives of three remarkable innovators—Ruth St. Denis, Isadora Duncan, and Martha Graham. With their unhampered bodies in flowing costumes, they evolved new dance forms that provoked fierce arguments about Art and Sin. Kendall also shows how the emergence of modern dance was related to less exalted entertainments—vaudeville, ragtime, and partner dancing. This short, unusual cultural history is witty and intelligent.
by Sarah Stage
W. W. Norton
Illustrations, 304 pages, $10.95
This entertaining history of the Lydia Pinkham company is much more than simply an account of that ubiquitous lady and her Vegetable Compound. It is also an expert review of the sorry state of nineteenth-century medicine; a story of Lydia’s unloving descendants squabbling for control of the company she had founded; and a description, based on exhaustive company archives (the first such records ever made public by a patent medicine company), of the unctuous and devious methods developed to sell the stuff. The pitch may have been dubious, but Sarah Stage says that women before 1900 were probably well advised to “let doctors alone,” as Lydia Pinkham cautioned, and to rely instead on her mildly alcoholic, but otherwise innocuous, brew.
To his grandnephew, Henry Augustus Ward was an ordinary relative whose stuffed toys were gratifyingly larger than most. But to the world at large he was the “Museum Man.” He ran Ward’s Natural History Establishment at Rochester, New York, a crowded supply depot for the American museum business. If you wanted a stuffed lion or a cabinet of 20,000 labeled fossils or a freshly landed meteor, Henry Ward was the man to see. (His taxidermie supremacy was confirmed in 1886, when P. T. Barnum commissioned him to stuff the monumental elephant Jumbo after its epic confrontation with a train.) This picture of little Frederick Kemp Ward, Jr., seated atop one of his great-uncle’s specimens was taken about 1905 and sent to us by his sister Caroline of Dobbs Ferry, New York. The taxidermy department was in chronic need of newspapers with which to make papier-mêche bodies, Miss Ward recalls, and “in the winter my brother and I collected newspapers from the neighbors each week, tied them in bundles, and pulled them on sleds to the museum, which paid 50 cents per hundred pounds. If we earned 50 cents a trip we felt we were very rich.”
In an age more sanguine about the benefits of progress than our own, Scientific American enthusiastically reported on man’s inventive genius every week. On March 9,1878, its readers learned all about the Hat Conformator (Fig. 1, below), a bewilderingly complicated French tool used to measure men’s heads in order to block their hats properly.