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January 2011
Pondering what to name an infant? Tired of the standard George, William, and John? Of Mary, Marjorie, and Joan? Or, for that matter, of Deirdre, Dawn, Rip, and Gary? Turn back then to a list of names borne (one might almost say, like crosses) by long-dead worthies of the ancient town of Norwich, Connecticut, once known in the old Yankee days as “The Rose of New England.” This interesting seventeenth and eighteenth century roster—including some of the best familiesseemed amusing as far back as 1845, when Miss Frances M. Caulkins gathered the names in her History of Norwich , something of a classic in the field of local history.
Finally, for those among our readers taken unexpectedly with quadruplets, let us not forget what Samuel Bliss and did about four daughters: He named them Desire, Thankful, Freelove, and Mindwell. It would be folly indeed to jump to twentieth-century conclusions about either Number One or Number Three, or, for that matter, about the submission of Miss Peck or the buttoned lips of Miss Leffingwell.
“Christmas,” a recent writer has pointed out, “is a holiday which New Orleans shares with other cities, but Mardi Gras is her very own.” So it is, and so it has been since 1857, when the first of the great carnival organizations, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, staged its first elaborate parade, tableaux, and ball. Civil War and Reconstruction dampened the Mardi Gras spirit through the 1860’s and much of the decade that followed, but after the departure of what loyal Louisianians still call “the carpetbaggers,” the merrymaking was again unfettered; from then until the century’s end the city’s annual carnival knew a veritable golden age. Here and on the following pages, as preparations for this year’s Mardi Gras near a climax, AMERICAN HERITAGE brings that golden age to life again.
— The Editors
The most frustrated man in New York at 4 P.M. Saturday, July 24, 1915, was a very proper German lawyer named Heinrich Friedrich Albert who stood helplessly in the middle of Sixth Avenue at Fifty-second Street, watching a streetcar glide uptown with his briefcase and the details of the $40,000,000 spy, propaganda, and sabotage ring he operated. Dr. Albert, officially in America as commercial attaché and financial adviser to the Kaiser’s ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff, had saved a taxi fare of perhaps $1.25, but it seemed likely that he had just booted the entire structure of the elaborate German secret service network that was flagrantly violating United States neutrality in the European war.
The people gathered on the Galveston wharf broke into cheers as soon as they saw him. There was no mistaking the tall, white-haired man in the Mexican sombrero and scrape descending the gangplank of the packet that had just docked. It was the old hero, Sam Houston, returning to Texas from Washington, where just a short time before he had completed his final term in the Senate. In cheering him that spring day in 1859, Texans felt that they were cheering Texas itself, so closely was he identified with the state, so great had been his part in its origin and development. More than that, they were honoring a man who could look back upon a career which extended over more than half the nation’s history—which, indeed, had contributed mightily to the shaping of that history.
Though it was only February in muddy and unfinished Washington, D.C., balmy breezes and mild weather had given the air a touch of spring. The year was 1844, and the capital—indeed, the country as a whole—was in an exuberant mood, filled with optimism and looking eagerly toward the unlimited horizons promised by the prophets of manifest destiny. The proposed and hotly argued annexation of independent Texas, at the risk of almost certain war with Mexico, was perhaps the foremost topic of the day, though President John Tyler was also of a humor to twist the British lion’s tail a bit over the Oregon boundary.
When the historian James Parton declared in 1867 that the piano was only less important to the American home than the kitchen stove, he was pointing to a significant social phenomenon, if not necessarily an artistic one. The sale of twenty-five thousand pianos a year at the time, not counting imported ones, clearly indicated that the piano was the basic instrument for introducing musical knowledge to the new country. Its influence in the shaping of the genteel tradition appears very early.