January 2011

A neatly dressed, middle-aged black woman was riding home on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on the evening of Thursday, December 1, 1955. Her lap was full of groceries, which she was going to have to carry home from the bus stop, and her feet were tired from a long day’s work.

Mrs. Rosa Parks was sitting in the first row of seats behind the section marked “Whites Only.” When she chose this seat, there had been plenty of empty ones both in front of and behind the “Great Divide.” Now they were all occupied, and black passengers were standing in the aisle at the rear.

From the winter of 1935–36 until shortly after America’s entry into World War II, hundreds of artists were engaged throughout most of the nation in compiling a graphic record of surviving artifacts from the American past. Antiques shops and old farmhouses, private collections, historical societies and museums, California missions and Shaker barns, were ransacked for evidence that would accurately and colorfully picture the story of our early arts and crafts. The program, organized under the Works Progress Administration, was aimed at maintaining and improving artistic skills that were languishing in the trough of the Great Depression for lack of employment. The Index of American Design that resulted from that program is the most extraordinary and most comprehensive collection of its kind in the world. (It is now in the custody of the National Gallery in Washington.) At their best these fascinating renderings are more revealing than photographic records.

Sixteen years after General James Wolfe’s famous assault on Quebec, the city was subjected to another siege—and another storming—that, though less celebrated, was vitally important to Americans in the early months oj their revolution.

It was a dramatic episode in Revolutionary history that is exceptionally well documented. This article, based mainly on firsthand accounts by participants, has been adapted by Michael Pearson, an English author, from his new book about the Revolution, Those Damned Rebels , Io be published this winter by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

The perspective may seem strange to some readers, since, as the title of the book suggests, the action is seen not from the American viewpoint but through the eyes of the British, who, in Canada in the winter of 1775, were in a situation that appeared very grave indeed.

On New Year’s Eve it began to snow again. The wind blew up suddenly from the northeast and howled cold across the icy wastes of northern Canada.

Historical reputations have strange, chafneleonlike lives, changing hues with changing times. Herbert Hoover has long occupied a prominent role m the demonology of American liberalism. It would seem natural, therefore, that the historians of the New Left, who are unsparingly critical of most of the nation’s past leaders, would be even harsher in their judgment of the Great Engineer. Tel astonishingly enough, Hoover’s views have won respect from some “revisionist” historians, as the remarks below reveal. Professor William Appleman Williams, of Oregon State University, one of the earliest New Left scholars, was asked by AMERICAN HERIT AGE for a comment on the foregoing article and replied with the following estimate of Hoover—which leads to intriguing speculations on what other once-condemned American conservatives may become tomorrow’s revisionist heroes .

Pittsburgh, God knows, was no fourth-century Athens, but around 1900 it did have a remarkable group of industrial leaders. The Pittsburgh barons exercised their power and made their fortunes in coal and coke, iron and steel, aluminum and oil, glass, rails, and heavy machinery. Five of them were commanding figures in their time and are legends in ours: Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse, Mellon, and Heinz. Allan Nevins has called such men the architects of our material progress. They have been called other things as well, all except H. J. Heinz.

Henry John Heinz chose in this most unlikely location—a city built among hills and based on the heaviest of heavy industry—to work at the primary business of feeding people. For fifty years he was a dominant force in developments that changed agricultural practices, the processing of food, and the kitchen habits of the nation. Heinz founded a giant corporation in a new industry, and he carried its products and philosophy to four continents with a promotional flair that probably has never been surpassed.

First there was the ice; two miles high, hundreds of miles wide, and many centuries deep. It came down from the darkness at the top of the world, and it hung down over the eaves, and our Michigan country lay along the line of the overhang. To be sure, all of the ice was now gone. It had melted, they said, ten thousand years ago; but they also pointed out that ten thousand years amounted to no more than a flick of the second hand on the geologic time clock. It was recent; this was the frontier, where you could stand in the present and look out into the past, and when you looked you now and then got an eerie sense that the world had not yet been completed. What had been might be again. There was a hint, at times, when the dead-winter wind blew at midnight, that the age of ice might someday return, sliding down the country like a felt eraser over a grade-school blackboard, rubbing out all of the sums and sentences that had been so carefully written down; leaving, barely legible, a mocking quod erat demonstrandum .

For four decades Henry Ford was one of America’s most original crusaders. At one time or another he was protecting birds, chartering a peace ship, proclaiming that every criminal was “an inveterate cigarette smoker,” exposing a scheming but fictitious character called the “international Jew,” declaring that he would stop making cars “if booze ever comes back,” or insisting that only a diet of soybeans, carrots, or wheat could insure good health.

But of all the auto king’s crusades, few were more exciting and none created more merriment than his attempts in the 1920’s to convince a jazz-mad generation that it was more fun to dance the Virginia reel than the Charleston and to listen to country fiddlers than to saxophonists.

In late February, 1775, three men in what they thought was Yankee farmers’ dress, “brown cloaths and reddish handkerchiefs round our necks,” boarded the ferry at the foot of Prince Street in Boston, bound for Charlestown, a half mile across the Charles River. At the ferry dock on the Charlestown side one of the “countrymen” dashed forward and muttered something to the redcoat standing sentry (probably “Don’t salute, mate!”), for he, like the sentry, was an enlisted man of the 52nd Regiment of the British army; the other two brown-clad figures were officers, Captain William Browne of the 52nd and Ensign [second lieutenant] Henry De Birniere of the 10th. They were bound on a secret mission for Lieutenant General Thomas Gage through what could only be called “enemy country,” although fighting had not yet begun. [See “Men of the Revolution— II ” in the October, 1971, AMERICAN HERITAGE .]