When Carl Graham Fisher, best known as the builder and promoter of Miami Beach who started the Florida vacation craze, died in 1939 the New York Times pointed out that he brought about a far more significant change in the life-style of modern America in his earlier and less conspicuous role as the creator of the idea of the Lincoln Highway, the first automobile road from New York to California.
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January 2011
James Parton (1822-91) wrote the first studious biography of Aaron Burr, published in 1857. In it he makes these remarks on the use of contemporary evidence in the study of history.
As we go to press with this issue the country is swept by a new fad—“streaking,” or running naked through public places. Rapid movement is of the essence in this phenomenon, perhaps to reduce the participants’ embarrassment as well as the threat of apprehension by the authorities. On the whole it is not, we think, an evil or unpleasant spectacle, sometimes even giving rise to distant images of golden boys and girls, forever panting, streaking after each other around Olympic racecourses, mulberry bushes, or antique urns. In Victorian America a streaker would have been indignantly arrested before he or she had streaked ten strides. Yet a Victorian forerunner, so to speak, of today’s fad is shown here—a sample of the photographic studies in human motion, anticipating the movies, made by Eadweard Muybridge about 1885. An article on Muvbridtre and his interesting obsession will appear in a forthcoming issue of A MERICAN H ERITAGE .
It would have been no pleasant thing for any defendant to hear John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts colony, declaim the serious charges brought against Anne Hutchinson at her trial in 1637. In the Puritan society of early Massachusetts they were among the gravest that could be imagined. As recorded by the court reporter, they seem to evoke the gravity with which John Winthrop must have delivered them: “Mrs. Hutchinson, you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth and the churches here. You are known to be a woman that hath had a great share in the promoting and divulging of those opinions that are causes of this trouble.… You have spoken divers things, as we have been informed, very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and ministers thereof. And you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.”
The first and most unusual battle of the American Revution began in earnest when the seven hundred British regulars under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith left Concord and started back for Boston on the afternoon of April 19, 1775. For sixteen bloody miles the king’s troops got their first taste of a kind of fighting in which all their famous discipline and the terrible rolling volleys that could break armies in the formal patterns of continental warfare would avail them not at all.
In 1954 Lawrence A. Fleischman, a young, determined collector of American art in Detroit, took a puzzle to Edgar P. Richardson, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The problem was a painting that Fleischman had bought for $15,000, the work of an obscure Philadelphian named Thomas Anshutz. Who was Anshutz? If anybody knew, surely it would be Richardson, who was then engaged in writing his splendid book Painting in America: The Story of 450 Years (1956). Richardson could say only that no book about Anshutz existed, that “probably somewhere in Philadelphia there was information” about him, but he did not know where. It was known that he was a pupil and friend of the great Thomas Eakins, that he had been a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and that was about all.
It is much too early to know who will represent Mexico in the long-distance races at the next Olympic games, but if they should finally choose one of my Tarahumara paisanos from the high sierras of Chihuahua, I am willing to bet five pesos even money that Mexico will win the marathon. As a matter of fact, I’ll raise the ante to ten pesos if the Olympic officials will kindly consent to make all competitors run in their bare feet.
The Tarahumaras will probably run barefoot anyway, because no decent, self-respecting Indio would demean himself by wearing sissified, toepinching shoes in a footrace.