February 2011

On November 14, 1910, a professional “aviationist” named Eugene Ely stood by his plane on a temporary platform built over the foredeck of the USS Birmingham, a scout cruiser moored at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. On this rainy day, the 24-year-old pilot proposed to be the first man to fly an “aeroplane” from a ship at sea, seven years after the Wright Brothers’ initial flight.

Designed by Glenn H. Curtiss, pioneering pilot, aircraft manufacturer, and the Wrights’ chief competitor, the biplane’s body was crafted from bamboo, fabric, and wire. An open lattice made up the airframe. From a chair on the lower wing, forward of the “pusher” engine and propeller, the pilot controlled lateral and vertical motion through an automobile steering wheel and a pair of pedals. The wingspan measured some 30 feet; the entire 26-foot-long contraption rested on a three-wheel landing gear. Its 50-horsepower engine had not yet arrived.

In the summer of 1947, Ansel Adams and his 14-year-old son, Michael, undertook a six-week journey through Alaska that would have notable consequences for the history of conservation. Adams was already close to a household name for his masterful landscape photography, particularly the powerful shots of Yosemite Valley. A 1941 visit to Glacier National Park had sparked his interest in the north country. “Imaginatively inclined,” Adams recalled in his autobiography, “I felt Alaska might be close to the wilderness perfection I continuously sought.” On this relatively short trip, he would take one of his most iconic photographs and do much to encourage Americans of all stripes to visit Alaska and persuade them of the value of the National Park System.

In June 1842, Army topographer Lieutenant John Charles Frémont and 22 men left Chouteau’s Trading Post near present-day Kansas City to survey a wagon trail that would lead through the northern Rockies to Oregon. By August, a small splinter group led by Frémont and his most famous scout, Kit Carson, snaked their way through the Wind River Mountains, determined to plant a flag on what was believed to be the continent’s highest peak.

Fresh from Williams College’s history program, the author entered World War II as a 24-year-old combat historian, earning four combat medals and a Bronze Star. He would go on to become a leading presidential historian, writing a two-volume biography of FDR, the second book of which won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He has also written notable books on John F. Kennedy and the subject of leadership. American Heritage's Editor, Edwin S. Grosvenor, interviewed Professor Burns and assisted him in writing this essay.
 

Early in July 1944, I joined American forces on the tiny island of Saipan in their latest onslaught, an operation resembling so many others as we cleared one Pacific island after another, each grim step moving us closer to Japan and final victory. The Allies would land fast and hard against desperate opposition, then often spending weeks rooting out an enemy who would not surrender.

At 7 p.m. on Thursday, December 20, 1860, some 170 men marched through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, walking from St. Andrews Hall to a new meetinghouse amid the cheers of onlookers. Half of them were more than 50 years old, most well-known. More than 60 percent were planters who owned at least 20 slaves. Five had been state governors, four U.S. senators.

Meeting in secret earlier that day, this august group had approved a basic ordinance of secession that “dissolved” the “union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states.” Now they were to sign the document in a public ceremony. When they reached Institute Hall, soon to be renamed Secession Hall, they found its galleries crowded and the atmosphere jubilant. First, the state seal was affixed to the document. Then, as each delegate signed it, the crowd broke out in wild applause. The ceremony lasted two hours.

Just six months before the presidential election of November 1860 and only days after winning his party’s nomination, Abraham Lincoln received some stunning advice from one of his chief supporters, William Cullen Bryant. The influential editor of the pro-Republican New York Evening Post beseeched him to “make no speeches, write no letters as a candidate, enter into no pledges, make no promises.” Only three months earlier, Bryant had urged a large audience at New York City’s Cooper Union to pay heed to Lincoln’s every word. Now, warned Bryant, silence was the only way of “preventing any mistake on your part.”

The irony of this strategy was not lost on Lincoln: just two years earlier he had vaulted to national prominence largely on the oratorical skills he had exhibited during seven wildly successful public debates with Stephen A. Douglas in a race for an Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate. Although Lincoln lost the contest, the lengthy debates were printed in newspapers across the nation and appeared in book form, setting the stage for his bid for the presidency.