January 2011

The father of my colleague Carla Davidson was a newspaperman back in the racy violence of the Front-Page days; he was also an accomplished novelist and television writer and a historian of wide interests. But he never could bring himself to care much about what he called “short-pants history,” by which he meant that time in America before modern accessories like railroads had started to build the country we inhabit today. I know what David Davidson was talking about: the faintly claustrophobic world of wigs and quill pens and the grave men at the convention we see pictured on our money and trying to read a page where, as Thomas Pynchon put it, the S ’s look like F ’s.

From the combat information center (CIC) of the Destroyer USS Maddox, Commodore John Herrick radioed: “Am being approached by high-speed craft with apparent intention of torpedo attack. Intend open fire if necessary.” America claimed that the Tonkin Gulf was international water; the North Vietnamese thought otherwise.

The mission was Herrick’s, but the ship belonged to its captain, Herbert L. Ogier. As the boats reached the 10,000-yard mark, Ogier said to the Maddox ’s gunnery officer, Lt. Raymond Connell, “Tell Corsette, ’Slow salvo fire. Commence fire.’” Connell relayed the order via phone to Ensign Richard Corsette, stationed just above the bridge in the Main Battery Director.

Corsette called his gun crews: “Mount 51 and 52, slow salvo fire. Load.” Both acknowledged the order. Corsette replied, “Commence fire.” With a shattering blast, the five-inch rounds tore through the sky toward the enemy craft. These initial shots were meant as a warning to the boats to break off. They did not. Ogier gave the next order: “Continuous fire.”

For a calendar of special events, call the Edenton visitors’ center (252-482-2637) or check its Web site, www.edenton.com . Edenton holds a candlelit tour of private houses each December and a Pilgrimage every other April. (The next Pilgrimage is scheduled for April 22 and 23, 2005.) The Cupola House, the Barker House, and the James lredell House, built about 1773 by a man later appointed to the first U.S. Supreme Court, are open every day to those who sign up for a tour at the visitors’ center.

Groups can arrange for guided tours highlighting Edenton’s African-American history; individuals can pick up a pamphlet with a map and description of important places. An escaped slave named Harriet Ann Jacobs wrote a memoir of her youth in Edenton, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl . The houses Jacobs lived in are gone, but a self-guided-tour brochure points out a number of sites, including the attic where she hid from her white master for nearly seven years.

Since the beginning of the war in Iraq last year, a small tempest has arisen in the media over whether or not George W. Bush should attend the funerals of American servicemen and women killed in the line of duty. As of this writing, Mr. Bush has not done so, a decision that critics tend to view as indicative of the administration’s preoccupation with “spin” and its desire to avoid any negative images and associations. The White House has maintained, in its defense, that Bush’s first priority as Commander in Chief is to focus on the prosecution of the war and that to attend any one soldier’s funeral would obligate the president to go to all of them.

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 in the last half-century. We begin in this issue with Terry Golway—the political columnist for the New York Observer, whose books include Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America’s Fight for Ireland’s Freedom and So Others Might Live: A History of New York’s Bravest—selecting the ten biggest changes in politics. In the next four issues, we’ll follow with our other authorities’ choices of the half-century’s biggest transformations in innovation and technology; business; home and the family; and entertainment and culture.

The very words HIstorical and film taken together suggest some kind of mildly patronizing qualification, like “military music” or “detective fiction.” There aren’t many definitions of a good film that one could apply to Gods and Generals ; it is poorly paced, utterly lacking in dramatic structure (aside from the historical facts it is based on), and largely devoid of most of the artistic pleasures that we seek in movies (except, in this case, acting).

The eerily moving universes framed inside boxes that Joseph Cornell spent four decades creating are brought together in a truly sumptuous volume published to mark the centennial of his birth in December 2003. Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday (Thames & Hudson, 256 pages, $60) has more than 200 color plates, many of them full page. They lead irresistibly into his compact realms of paper birds, star maps, Medici princesses, and so-called ballets, but to get you even closer, the volume includes, in a sleeve in the back, a DVD-ROM with which you can explore many of Cornell’s boxes on your computer, viewing them from multiple angles, from close and far, and navigating inside them. The DVD also contains nine short, epigrammatic films he made, bringing his unique artistic vision to another medium.