January 2011

“Yes, I read the illegal translation,” a Czech Internet correspondent known as “Hustey” wrote last summer, when the next, eagerly awaited book in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series— Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix —first appeared in bookstores. Hustey is part of a growing, worldwide fraternity of internet users who seem to have come to the conclusion that theft is morally defensible, so long as it only involves intellectual property.

One J.C., a 36-year-old man from Kansas City, not only admitted his theft, but threw in a review: “I thought it was a little slow until the second half, then it got much better”—a bit of chutzpah akin to having someone steal your car and then post a public notice complaining about its pickup.

With American Heritage approaching its 50th birthday in December 2004, we’ve asked five prominent historians and cultural commentators to each pick ten leading developments in American life during the last half-century. In this issue, John Steele Gordon, American Heritage’s “The Business of America” columnist and the author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, 1607-2001, selects the ten biggest changes in business. In other issues this year, our authorities offer their choices of the half-century’s biggest transformations in politics, popular culture, innovation and technology, and the home and the family.

For 77 years U.S route 666, the two-lane highway that runs some 190 miles northward from Gallup, New Mexico, through southwestern Colorado, and then west to Monticello, Utah, was known as the Devil’s Highway. This was because the number 666 is associated in the Bible with Satan or the Antichrist, though the devil is not mentioned explicitly in the relevant verse from the book of Revelation: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”

The history of Washington, D.C., is so intimately tied up with the history of the federal government that it’s easy to forget that the two are not always identical. Washington has many museums devoted to the government and the nation, but until now there was none about the city itself. Filling this gap is the City Museum of Washington, D.C. ( www.citymuseumdc.org ), operated by the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., in the old Carnegie Library at Mount Vernon Square. Exhibits include an interactive archeology laboratory and a multimedia show that, in the words of a museum spokesman, “uses surprising twists and turns, including fantasy and time travel, and nifty visual effects to bring Washington’s history to life.” A library with archives and manuscripts dating from the early 1700s is open to the public.

“I am a biologist,” writes Jeffrey C. Hall, a professor at Brandeis, at the beginning of The Stand of the U.S. Army at Gettysburg (Indiana, 415 pages, $49.95), “but I claim to know as much history as biology on one subject: The Battle of Gettysburg.” Unless he’s an amazingly good biologist, he’s being modest. His book is a fascinating, detailed account of the battle with more than a hundred maps. The author has several main points to make: that the Union’s strong position at the end of the first day was no accident; that Sickles’s big blunder on day two actually did the Union much good; that Union artillery and one little-known Ohio regiment were the main players in the defeat of Pickett’s Charge. He also proves himself broadly enough informed about history to reflect on how Meade’s performance after the battle compares with Spruance’s after Midway and how similar the action at Little Round Top was to the 1941 Battle of Crete.

Web: Sellers of vintage pens rely heavily on the Internet. The Pendemonium site and that of David Nishimura, a Rhode Island-based dealer, at www.pendemonium.com and www.vintagepens.com , offer essential collector information. Jim Gaston, an Arkansas hobbyist/dealer, shows a well of pens at www.jimgaston.com .

In 1884 a New York insurance broker named Lewis E. Waterman patented a pen that contained a capillary action to control the flow of ink from the reservoir. The earliest fountain pens had to be filled with eyedroppers, but they eliminated incessant dipping and sparked a revolution in writing.

Notwithstanding the ballpoint’s success during the past half-century, the venerable fountain pen lives on. Sam Fiorella, who with her husband, Frank, owns a vintage pen business called Pendemonium in Fort Madison, Iowa (a town known as the Pen City because it’s home to both Sheaffer and one of the oldest prisons west of the Mississippi), reports a growing interest in older models. That, she says, has kept prices stable or rising over the past several years.

Nostalgia? Only in part. Many collectors use their vintage pens, and Terry Wiederlight of Fountain Pen Hospital, a family-owned New York City specialty shop and repair facility, notes that a fine fountain pen’s solid gold nib flexes, causing it to slide along paper and make writing, which can be arduous, “smoother, much smoother.”

Last November the National Museum of American history (a part of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.) opened its biggest-ever exhibit, America on the Move , in the General Motors Hall of Transportation. This ambitious project includes everything from locomotives and antique cars to radiator emblems and a stretch of the original pavement from Route 66. The installations combine animated life-size figures with sound and lighting to create realistic vignettes, including (according to the museum) “a conversation between a Buick salesman and a young family buying a car” and, for those who crave such things, “a ‘commute’ into downtown Chicago on a December morning.” Elsewhere, displays examine issues like migration, gender, and globalization. The museum can be reached at 202-357-2700, or see www.americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove .

One of the most remarkable historically based films in recent years, HBO’s And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself , first aired last September and attracted a large viewership despite a puzzling lack of coverage from the mainstream press. Recently released on videotape and DVD, the film should gain even wider acceptance through word of mouth.

And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself is based on a true story so improbable that it doesn’t seem possible Hollywood could have ignored it for so long. In 1914 the former Doroteo Arango, a mestizo of Spanish and Indian blood by then known as Pancho Villa, was contacted by the Mutual Film Company and D. W. Griffith with an unusual offer. Villa wanted money to finance his Division del Morte army in its revolution against the despotic Mexican government of President Victoriano Huerta. Mutual would get exclusive rights to live battle footage and to close-ups of General Villa himself in action; in return Villa would get 20 percent of the revenues from all films using the footage that Mutual produced.