January 2011

Richard Nixon’s twenty-thousand-mile pilgrimage to the center of Chinese civilization—“the week that changed the world,” as he put it—may not actually have changed the world, though it quite probably did turn a new page in world history by making it unlikely that the international politics of East Asia, at least, will ever be the same again.

But whatever their global effect, one thing the Kissinger-Nixon bold strokes of 1971-72 most strikingly did do was to open a new chapter in that small but curious subdivision of world history, the 188-year-old tale of Chinese-American relations.

To put the matter simply, America’s existence is relatively short and special, China’s existence extremely long but also special; and these two very different peoples—Americans and Chinese—have had an increasingly intense and complex relationship with each other over much of the past two centuries.

Poe’s witticism was not meant kindly, but it was actually a compliment. Without doubt Margaret Fuller stood first among women of the nineteenth century. It is surprising that, as America’s first liberated female, she is not today first in the hearts of her countrywomen. The primary responsibility for this neglect lies with her intimate friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, under the guise of loving kindness, defeminized, distorted, and diminished the image of her that has come down to us.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once celebrated Americans as a people “which insists in sending out yachts and horses and boys to outsail, out-run, out-fight, and checkmate all the rest of creation.” The concluding champion on his list was Paul Charles Morphy, whose youthful exploits in chess during the 1850’ won the admiration of poets, scientists, and thousands of ordinary buffs.

Born in New Orleans on June 22, 1837, Morphy early showed a flair for chess. By the age of ten he had learned the moves of the game by watching—propped up on books so he could see the board—his aristocratic Creole relatives play at gatherings in the elegant Morphy home on Royal Street. He was the leading player in New Orleans by the age of twelve, when he won two games and drew one playing with the touring Hungarian master Johann L’f6wenthal.

Caught in the crossfire of the Napoleonic conflict, America declared war on Great Britain in 1812 for what seemed to the government to be ample reason. The young Republic’s trade had been stifled, her seamen impressed, her ships seized by the Royal Navy. Western settlers feared British intrigue among the Indians. Canada, in contrast, loomed as an ever more inviting target for land-hungry “war hawks. ”

For two years the war sputtered along, mostly on the Canadian front, usually a bloody stalemate. Then, in the spring of 1814, came a dramatic development. Napoleon collapsed, freeing thousands of “Wellington’s Invincibles” for service elsewhere and allowing London for the first time to turn its full attention on the brash upstart across the Atlantic.

Good Britons relished the prospect. They felt they had been fighting for freedom—everybody’s freedom—only to be knifed in the back by their own ungrateful progeny. Now it was time to “chastise Jonathan. ”

In 1965 widespread interest was excited by the first publication of a fifteenth-century map showing “Vinland” and purporting to be the earliest cartographic representation of any part of the North American continent. [See “Vinland the Good Emerges from the Mists,” AMERICAN HERITAGE, October, 1965.] The Vinland Map tended to reinforce the conclusion long held by many historians that Leif Eiriksson (or Ericson) and other Vikings landed on the northeast coast of the continent around A.D.1000. It did little if anything, however, to encourage the idea that this Norse discovery of America was more than an isolated event, one that led neither to permanent settlement nor to important historical consequences.

To read Thomas Jones’s acerb History of New York during the Revolutionary War is to behold the outward man of the portrait—prim, carping, easily outraged, a nob who looks as though he had sniffed something odious. When he began writing this record in 1783, Judge Jones was prepared to particularize his hates. He was less concerned by then with issues than with people, and he divided his cast of characters into two simple categories: good and bad. Considering the authorship, it is not surprising that the book brims with bile or that rebel sympathizers are represented (to use a few of his phrases) as enemies to monarchy, haters of episcopacy, libellous dissenters, a seditious and rebellious multitude, or simply rabble. Yet Jones was impartial: he had spleen to spare for a legion of bunglers on the other side.

We lived in Indian summer and mistook it for spring. Winter lay ahead just when we thought June was on the way. The school, the town, and the people connected with both were coming to an end that seemed to be a beginning. They had been created by an era that was closing, and nothing like them would ever exist again because what had brought them forth was gone; yet twilight at the end of the day looks much as it does at the dawn unless you watch the shadows move, and for a little while time stood still. The shadows were not coming down the slope. They would dissolve when the sun rose, and the future—when it appeared: there was no hurryabout it—would wear a familiar image. What we were going to be was determined by what had gone before. We accepted the unbreakable continuity of the society that had produced us.

The systematic collection of the sources of local, as well as of national, history began in the United States with the organization in 1791 of the Massachusetts Historical Society. This small body, composed of clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and what used to be called merchants (now known as businessmen), undertook the preservation of books, manuscripts, and records that would conduce “to mark the genius, delineate the manners, and trace the progress of society in the United States.” They were fully aware that such sources must be collected before they could be preserved.

As this issue goes to press, Governor George Wallace of Alabama lies gravely wounded by bullets fired from the handgun of a would-be assassin while he was campaigning for the Presidential nomination in Maryland. It made us think, sadly, of this passage from an essay we published in October, 1970, by the late Richard Hofstadter, called “America as a Gun Culture”: