March 2011

More than 200 years ago, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton witnessed the power of the Passaic River crashing over falls in northern New Jersey and saw America’s economic future. He founded Paterson, which quickly turned into a manufacturing powerhouse, “a place of supreme importance in the annals of American economic history,” notes historian Ron Chernow. Paterson’s river-powered mills ran factories that produced the first mildew-resistant cotton sailcloth, the first Colt revolvers, the first motorized submarine, more locomotives than any other American city, and a greater amount of silk than any other place in the world.

On March 30, President Obama signed an omnibus parks and historic preservation bill that created the 118-acre Paterson Great Falls National Historic Park, the third New Jersey historic park after Morristown, where the Continental Army camped during 1779–80, and the West Orange estate of Thomas Edison.

Forty years ago, a few rich kids hatched a nutty idea that became an event that rocked the nation, then morphed into a movement whose legacy lives on. This summer, the young Museum at Bethel Woods in rural New York commemorates the anniversary of that idea, the zeitgeist that spawned it, and the phenomena that flowed from it—all of it evoked in one word: Woodstock.

Recalling his museum’s planning stage, director Wade Lawrence said that “early on, it became clear that the story was more than the three days” at Woodstock. The celebrated Music and Art Fair “was the punctuation point of the decade,” the 1960s, which had begun so hopefully with President Kennedy’s New Frontier and ended in such seeming confusion. The finished museum building, which recalls the round Shaker barns of upstate New York, features films and photo murals that immerse visitors in that roller-coaster period of American history and its epic issues: the clashing cataclysm of the Vietnam War, the watershed Civil Rights acts that set African Americans on the march and Old Southerners to foot-dragging and worse; the complacency of prosperous suburbia that sent teenagers into rebellion.

The game of baseball was not always the well-ordered sport we know today, played on elegantly manicured fields bordered by crisp white lines. As historians have debunked the widely held myth that Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York, invented the sport out of whole cloth in 1839, they have discovered its deeper American origins. In 1787, the same year the Constitution was written, a Worcester, Massachusetts, publisher printed A Little Pretty Pocket Book, the American edition of an English book for children, which included a poem and illustration dedicated to “base-ball.”

150 years ago on a “frigid and repulsive” January day in New York, 30-year-old William G. Sewell departed on a steamer for Barbados, the first stop on a tour of the Caribbean island colonies of the British West Indies. Doctors had recommended that the New York Times editor travel south because of tuberculosis. While recuperating, he would file a series of articles on a topic that would prove of enormous interest to Americans: how had the colony’s islands been affected by the abolition of slavery 25 years earlier? The British West Indies had suffered its fair share of economic difficulties, and argument ensued over whether abolition had helped or harmed. The relevance to America’s situation was obvious: the United States held 4,000,000 people in bondage, and the debate over the peculiar institution’s future threatened to tear the nation apart.

 When economic times get difficult, we feel the call to look back at our history more urgently than ever for context and inspiration. 

Several of the stories we bring you this issue address how Americans over the centuries have dealt with adversity and give us useful clues for today. We asked one of the nation’s most respected historians, William E. Leuchtenburg, to walk us through Herbert Hoover’s administration as it tried to cope with the stock market crash and Great Depression. A longtime Contributing Editor of American Heritage, Bill first published a piece with us in 1957 about the Spanish American War. (Click on www.americanheritage.com and type in “Leuchtenburg” and “1957.”)

 Matters of Debate

IN THIS BICENTENNIAL YEAR of Lincoln’s birth, one of the hundreds of offerings about the 16th president brings his voice to life with particular power: BBC Audiobooks has released a 16-hour audio recording of the famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and his great rival, Stephen Douglas, for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858. The seven debates, each held in a different Illinois congressional district, would prove a major force in propelling Lincoln to the presidency two years later.

 Abraham Lincoln is the most written-about person in American history, and the third-most in world history—ranking below only Jesus and Napoleon. The deluge of books about the Great Emancipator has only increased with the bicentennial of his birth this year. Lists of the “essential” Lincoln books have been published, and one renowned Lincoln scholar has even suggested that a book be written on the worst, so readers will know which to avoid. In 2008 and into the first months of 2009, many notable books on our 16th president have appeared, but some exceptional ones stand above the rest.

The keen 19th-century observer of the American scene, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” In this issue we celebrate some of this country’s and North America’s most remarkable pioneers—no copies here—ranging across four centuries of our history. Pulitzer-prize winner, David Hackett Fischer gives us insight into the enigmatic Samuel de Champlain, the master cartographer and explorer who charted northeastern North America. Historian Peter C. Mancall writes about the strange interactions between explorer Henry Hudson and the Lenape people of New York. Writer Victoria Pope gives us a peek into the work of Jackie Cochran, the racing pilot and celebrity who established the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) and proved that women could fly airplanes. And, Clay Carson, the director of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s papers at Stanford University, examines the civil rights leader’s groundbreaking oratory. 

 Last fall, Lake Champlain Maritime Museum’s master shipbuilder, Dale Henry, above, steers the oak-and-pine bateau he built for Fort Ticonderoga into the La Chute River. In the large, roadless upstate New York of the 18th century, the scene of much fierce fighting during the French and Indian War and the Revolution, the clumsy, flat-bottomed bateau became the vehicle of choice to transport troops. Henry based his replica on the remains of a bateau recovered from Lake Champlain, one of 1000 bateaux that carried General James Abercromby’s more than 15,000 soldiers on their disastrous offensive against French-held Carillon, later renamed Fort Ticonderoga, in 1758. (See “Battle for the Continent,” by John F. Ross, AH Spring/Summer 2008.) Easy to build and maneuver, even for green soldiers, the bateau slid easily over shallows and shoals, although its weight—at about 1000 pounds—and two-dozen-foot length made portaging difficult. The bateau is on display at Fort Ticonderoga National Historic Monument, 

www.fort-ticonderoga.org.

 “I endeavored to shriek–, and my lips and my parched tongue moved convulsively together in the attempt–but no voice issued from the cavernous lungs which,  oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent mountain, gasped and palpitated, with the heart, at every elaborate and struggling inspiration,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in his chilling description of a man who has found himself buried alive in the 1844 short story “The Premature Burial.” The maestro of terror and the macabre, who wrote such classics as “The Raven” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” was born 200 years ago in Boston, an event celebrated by the U.S. Postal Service’s issue of a 42-cent stamp in Poe’s honor. Baltimore (www.poe200th.com), Richmond (www.nevermore2009.com), and three others cities where Poe lived have planned events to celebrate the man who also refined the art of literary criticism, invented the detective genre, and inspired modern science fiction.