January 2011

Probably every American with access to a television, a radio, or a computer has heard the notorious howl with which Howard Dean ended his concession speech after the Democratic caucuses in Iowa. Dr. Dean’s weird outburst was immediately labeled a gaffe, comparable to the classic political gaffes of the past. And it was indeed comparable, being sudden, lingering—and completely ambiguous in terms of its actual consequences.

Just what is a gaffe? It can be a gesture as much as a spoken word. Al Gore’s alleged eye rolling during his first 2000 debate comes to mind, or George H. W. Bush’s checking his watch during his last 1992 debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. Or it can be a photo-op gone badly awry; see Michael Dukakis and tank. The use of outlandish words doesn’t help, as the Republican hopeful George Romney found out in the 1968 primary campaign, when he casually remarked that he had been “brainwashed” about Vietnam.

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, Alien Barra, American Heritage’s film reviewer and a wide-ranging historian and cultural critic, whose most recent books include Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends and Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Last Century, selects the ten biggest changes in popular culture. In other issues this year, our writers offer their choices of the half-century’s biggest transformations in politics; innovation and technology; business; and the home and the family.

There aren’t too many DVD releases of classic Hollywood films that justify an elaborate concept. For the most part, they’re filled with gratuitous commentary and frivolous interviews. The special two-disc issue of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine is a rare and lovely exception. More than just a nostalgic evening at the movies, the discs trace the film’s evolution into a classic and then look back to its legendary roots.

Like virtually all frontier lawmen, the real Wyatt Earp was no saint but a rough-edged character who spent most of his formative years in saloons—which, of course, was where most of the action was. (“We had no YMCAs,” he explained to his biographer Stuart Lake.) The most famous of all Western shootouts, the so-called Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, came about as the result of numerous professional and personal complexities, including Earp’s political rivalry with the shady Cochise County sheriff, John Behan, and, possibly, both of their affections for a young Jewish girl named Josephine Marcus, who ended up spending nearly half a century with Wyatt.

A longtime friend of this magazine, John Margolies, has spent the last quarter-century photographing America’s vanishing roadside architecture. He was among the first to find enduring appeal in mom-and-pop tourist cabins, concessions shaped like hot dogs, and gas stations ornamented with a windmill or a B-17. Now the U.S. State Department has organized an exhibit of 56 of Margolies’s pictures, which will tour through the end of 2006, appearing n museums and cultural centers in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. (Last month the show opened in Kiev, Ukraine; Ankara, Turkey; Vientiane, Laos; Maputo, Mozambique; and Kuwait City.) What message does the government hope to convey with these photographs of one-off homegrown design? “As cars became affordable for millions of people,” reads the exhibition brochure, “… the American free enterprise system responded….”

One prominent collector, Stuart Kaplan, suggests following the auctions held by 52 Plus Joker ( www.52plusjoker.org ), “very serious collectors” who deal in the “absolutely authentic.” Another group, the Chicago Playing Card Collectors ( www.cpccinc.org ), specializes in single cards but also sells some full decks.

No serious collector of antique and vintage cards from the United States can do without The Hochman Encyclopedia of American Playing Cards . Its more than 300 pages classify and illustrate hundreds of different decks, and cognoscenti use Hochman catalogue numbers as shorthand when referring to them. A softbound version costs $45 plus shipping, and a companion price guide is available for $15 more ( www.usgamesinc.com ).

The history of cards contains its share of controversy. A Swiss edict prohibiting them antedates the oldest surviving European examples, which were made during the fifteenth century. American decks began appearing after the Revolution and during the next century became wonderfully various and elaborate. Some collectors focus on single-ended faces, which have their suit symbols and numerical values or court ranks printed on one end rather than both, while others prefer unusual face designs or specific back motifs. Cards promoting businesses or brands ranging from General Electric to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer are highly popular. So are cards with patriotic themes and political subject matter, as well as those once sold as souvenirs of tourist destinations and railway routes. The list goes on and on.

The floor of the Atlantic ocean is littered with shipwrecks, but few approach the value, financial or historical, of the Republic . When it sank, it took with it $400,000 in gold coins, which could be worth as much as $150 million today. As of this writing, more than 1,700 coins have been pulled from the wreck by a marine salvage firm called Odyssey Marine Exploration.

In this issue Gene Smith writes about a city that has long fascinated him: Hudson, New York. In Hudson’s Merchants and Whalers (Black Dome Press, 224 pages, $24.95), Margaret B. Schräm describes how Hudson once had wealth and influence far out of proportion to its size, as can be seen in an 1847 lament to its decline: “There is no bustle of seamen along its wharves, no song of the ropemaker upon its hills, no throng of wagons from the interior, no crowds of men in its streets. The shipyards are overgrown with grass, the wharves have moldered away…. And yet the surrounding scenery is as beautiful as ever.”

Still a Great Hall After All Editors’ Bookshelf Worth its Weight in Gold? The Buyable Past To Learn More The Streets Are Paved With Wigwams Screenings