March 2011

In the mid- to late summer of 1860, billions of soft pink and white Gossypium hirsutum blooms broke out across South Carolina, Georgia, western Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, soon to morph into puffy white bolls. Nearly 3 million black slaves fanned across this flowery inland sea. By season’s end in early winter, their harvest totaled the largest on record: with the seeds ginned out, a crop of 4 million 500-pound bales.

A two-part traveling exhibit, “Discovering the Civil War,” which opened at the end of April in Washington, D.C., offers visitors a peek into the National Archives’ 160 million war-related documents, the most comprehensive collection in the nation. Curators have culled several hundred of the most interesting letters, photographs, and official documents, digitized them, and loaded them onto interactive touch screens. The exhibit also reveals how the researchers go about their work in studying these artifacts.

“Rather than present another chronological exhibit on the Civil War,” says senior curator Bruce Bustard, “we wanted to highlight the incredible range of National Archives records.” One social networking page reveals the prewar friendships between generals who would turn into bitter rivals during the conflict. Also on display are the original Virginia Ordinance of Secession, which attempted to undo the state’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and a private bill passed by Congress to award a military pension to a woman who secretly enlisted and fought in the Union army.

If HBO’s 10-part The Pacific series has fired your interest in World War II’s Pacific Theater, consider visiting the newly renovated and much expanded George H. W. Bush Gallery of the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas. Inside the 33,000-square-foot gallery, the architecture of which evokes an aircraft carrier, pill box, and a Pacific island beachhead, is a Japanese midget submarine and a B-25 bomber flown on the 1942 Doolittle Raid, along with exhibits about the war’s origins and the major battles from Coral Sea to Okinawa.

This isolated Texas town (population 8900), about an hour from Austin or San Antonio, and originally settled by German emigrants 150 years ago, is the hometown of Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. naval forces in the Pacific during World War II. In the 1960s, citizens offered their favorite son a museum in his honor, but Nimitz declined, unless it would honor all who served.

On March 10, hundreds of  active-duty female U.S. Air Force pilots accompanied more than 200 Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) into the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center’s 580,000-square-foot marble and glass Emancipation Hall for a long-overdue ceremony. Many of the WASP veterans had donned their original World War II navy blue uniforms, without letting out a seam. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked these women, now in their 80s and 90s, to stand up and be recognized for their role as a homefront Army auxiliary—and as the first women to fly military planes. Each surviving WASP, nearly a quarter of the original group of 1074 women who graduated from the program, received the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest honor for distinguished achievement.

 Bronco Charlie Miller

I enjoyed your article on the Pony Express in the Spring issue. As a 10-year-old boy in 1950, I lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My friend and I would play in the Tompkins Square Park, where we often saw an old man called “Bronco Charlie Miller,” who dressed in a western outfit, hat, and boots.

He told us that he was 105 years old and the last of the Pony Express riders. He had served as an Army scout during the Indian wars, knew Buffalo Bill, and appeared in his Wild West show. I remember several medals pinned to his leather skin jacket. He even showed us his creased and scarred hand, which he claimed had been injured by an arrow. We thought him senile!

Later I read a New York Daily Mirror story about him—and learned that he was who he claimed. His real name was Julius Mortimer; he lived in a home run by the Lutheran Church across from the park until his death in 1955. I look back and realize that my friend and I had spoken to a living, breathing part of history!

 —Charles Kowalski

From the early days when Bruce Catton took the helm of this magazine, it’s been our tradition to remain outside the political fray, not espousing one side or the other in the issue du jour. Rather we’ve looked to our common heritage and let our readers draw their own conclusions. And we’ve kept to that through the Korean War, Vietnam, Watergate, deadlocked presidental elections, soaring deficits, and a Wall Street meltdown.

This issue we stick to our traditions, but make a small concession. The current political environment of stalemate and outspoken rhetoric seems so counterproductive that it prompted us to ask five distinguished historians to take a look at situations in our past where entrenched opposites met on the political battlefield—and worked things out. It’s sobering to think how often our country has come close to collapse, yet inspiring to learn how our leaders found a way out of conflict. See “Finding a Way Forward,” starting on page 18.

Can serious history be presented on a cell phone? Handheld devices such as BlackBerrys, iPhones, and other smart phones (and even some not-so-smart) can play video, access the Internet, and display Google maps nearly as well as larger computers. Add in GPS capability, and anyone can hold a multimedia, geographically intelligent machine in the palm of one’s hand. So far, however, precious little programming has been developed to take advantage of these amazing devices beyond games, restaurant reviews, and a host of useful but limited applications.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the federal agency that funds research and public programming in history and other fields of the hum­anities, provides grants to spur innovative ways of bringing history to the public via new-media technology; several of the projects are already bearing fruit. (Full disclosure: I’m involved with one of them, which is described below.)

As Richard Snow rightly suggests in the subtitle to his compelling book, the Battle of the Atlantic was the longest and certainly one of the most consequential campaigns of the Second World War, if not in world history. To use a definition offered by a historian in the British Ministry of Defence, it was “the German war-long attack on Allied (and neutral) shipping, principally by submarines, and the Allied response to that attack.”

James K. Polk appears doomed to remain one of our least-appreciated presidents, despite Robert W. Merry’s valiant attempt to drag him from the shadows in A Country of Vast Designs. The problem lies with Polk himself, a man who even Merry concedes was “drab of temperament,” with “limited imagination,” and lacking in “natural leadership ability.” He was affectless, narrow-minded, and difficult, but so are many great national leaders.

Yet Polk could count himself a successful president indeed. When he left office in 1849—fulfilling a promise to serve only one term—he had stared down Britain into defining the boundaries of the Oregon Territory and waged a war with Mexico that, however bitterly challenged, conquered more than half a million square miles of the Southwest. In so doing, Merry writes, “Polk brought to his presidency imperatives of boldness, persistence, force of will, and guile that went beyond anything anyone had seen before in him.”

 Amidst the frenetic events leading up to the Civil War, the 16th president took a moment to write a letter, now on display, to a young student named George Patten. In May 1860, the eight-year-old and his father had traveled to Springfield, Illinois and shaken the hand of Abraham Lincoln at the Republican National Convention in May 1860. But, back at school in New York City, his chums refused to believe him. Such a brouhaha ensued that the headmaster intervened—and wrote to the president himself.