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January 2011
The Meuse-Argonne offensive was the greatest battle American soldiers fought in the First World War—the greatest battle the American Army had ever fought up to that time, which was the fall of 1918. The battle was over twentyfive miles wide and thirty-five miles deep, it went on from September 26 to November 11, from first to last it involved something like 1,250,000 American soldiers, and as long as military history is written or remembered it will be recalled as one of the greatest and most costly of American military achievements.
The Eskimo were the first inhabitants of the New World to be seen by Europeans, for the Vikings encountered them at least as early as 1005, probably on the southeast coast of Labrador. Surprisingly, the numerous Norse sagas made little mention of them at first. But within another two centuries the Eskimo were already being described with the exaggeration and lack of understanding that later came to typify the European’s view of the natives of the New World. The anonymous author of the thirteenth-century Historia Norvegiae wrote: “Hunters have found some very little people, whom they call Skraelings, and who, when they are wounded with weapons while still alive, die without loss of blood, but whose blood, when they are dead, will not cease to flow.”
On a cool Massachusetts morning in April, 1764, a girl named Abigail Smith watched anxiously as a servant held a bundle of letters in a fire tongs over a smouldering flame. “Did you never rob a Birds nest?” she wrote her correspondent. “Do you remember how the poor Bird would fly round and round, fearful to come nigh, yet not know how to leave the place—just so they say I hover round Tom whilst he is smokeing my Letters.” For they were from her suitor, John Adams, now in the second week of quarantine for a self-imposed case of smallpox, and in the first of what would be a lifetime of separations from his lady love. How much longer would they be apart? Abigail wondered. “I dare not trust my self with the thought.” Meanwhile, the letters flowed back and forth between her home at Weymouth and Boston, where John’s were smoked upon leaving his house, thus disinfecting them, it was believed, against spread of the infection.
Weatherman Joseph L. Cline worked late in the austere quarters of the Galveston office Friday nicht, September 7, 1900. A twenty-nine-year-old bachelor, a nondrinkcr in a city where liquor Rowed, and a man who was fascinated by his work, Cline did not object to the hours. Furthermore, his own brother Isaac was in charge of the office and had helped him get the job; Isaac was, he reasoned, entitled to loyalty.
Still, Joseph (Mine was weary, and he was looking forward to sleep. In addition to handling his usual duties that day, he and his brother and a third observer, John D. Blagden, had become increasingly concerned about a tropical cyclone whirling somewhere to the southeast, over the tepid Gulf of Mexico.
A visitor from afar not habituated to our institutions might find it odd that the strongest government on earth, having elected a new national leader, must wait ten weeks before installing him in office, leaving the old chief bereft of political power and perhaps personally repudiated, but nevertheless fully responsible for the nation’s destiny in the interval. This year President Lyndon B. Johnson, who would have risked becoming a “lame duck” in the most classical sense had he sought re-election, took himself out of consideration early. His hope has been to increase his influence over events by putting himself above the campaign battle, freeing himself from fear of Election Day consequences, and eliminating suspicion of selfish political motives. It remains to be seen whether this lofty effort will be judged a success; but the complaints over his late Supreme Court appointments have already added to the generally contentious history of lame-duckery.