March 2011

 On the grounds of the Ewa Plantation School just west of Honolulu stands a bronze statue of a young Abraham Lincoln with ax in hand, forearms rippling after splitting logs. Fifteen years before Hawaii became a state in 1959, school officials unveiled this statue, a symbol of Lincoln’s popularity in Hawaii during the American Civil War, when many Hawaiians enlisted in the Union Army and Navy despite the kingdom’s official neutrality.

Strong anti-slavery sentiment motivated some to serve in African American military units, supporting the Union cause against the seceding slave-holding South. These views, plus Lincoln’s personal relationship with Hawaiian ruler, King Kamehameha IV, strengthened Hawaiians’ affection for the American president.

In 1865, shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, the Honolulu newspaper Ka Nupepa Kuokoa expressed the sorrow of the Hawaiian people at the death of what it called the “people’s friend.” It argued that “no parallel for this great crime can be found in the world’s history since the Crucifixion.”

On this Lincoln’s birthday, as in years past, Ewa’s students will wreathe the statue in leis.

 Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder 

By Gus Russo and Stephen Molton

A new report on the Kennedy and Castro brothers reopens the assassination case with 30-years-worth of breakthrough research and interviews, positing that Bobby Kennedy’s push for Fidel Castro’s murder accomplished instead the death of his own brother; and that Lee Harvey Oswald killed a beloved president, but his crime may have prevented a third world war. 560 pages. Bloomsbury, USA (October)

Champlain’s Dream: The European Founding of North America

By David Hackett Fischer 

The first biography of Samuel de Champlain in decades traces his early years fighting in France’s religious wars and sailing the high seas. Remembered today as a great explorer, Champlain was also a visionary, committed to a tolerant and peaceful colony in New France. 848 pages. Simon & Schuster (October)

Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War 

By Edwin Burrows 

On July 27, 1848, a tall, raw-boned Whig congressman from Illinois rose in the House of Representatives to challenge the Mexican War policies of President James K. Polk. An opponent of what he considered an unjust war, Abraham Lincoln mocked his own meager record as a militia captain who had seen no action in the Black Hawk War of 1832. “By the way, Mr. Speaker, did you know I am a military hero?” asked Lincoln. “Yes, sir . . . I fought, bled, and came away” after “charges upon the wild onions” and “a good many struggles with the musketoes.”

It happens that three of the most critical and momentous occasions in our nation’s history converge in this issue.

Few events have received more scrutiny than the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. Why did Lee Harvey Oswald do it—and did anyone help him? Over the past 45 years, many have weighed in, from the members of the Warren Commission and the congressional investigators to historians and, of course, conspiracy buffs. After so much has been written, how could there be anything new to say?

Investigative reporters Gus Russo and Stephen Molton have spent the last three decades digging into the case, and their insights (“Did Castro OK the JFK Assassination?” p. 20) are shocking. They pull together such a compelling framework for the events in Dallas that you can’t fully appreciate that horrible event if you don’t know these details.

Not until 2:30 p.m. on July 3, 1863, did the ear-splitting bombardment finally slacken on the rolling farmland of southern Pennsylvania. Nothing like it had ever been experienced before in America, or would be again. “The very ground shook and trembled,” wrote a witness, “and the smoke of the guns rolled out of the valley as tho there were thousands of acres of timber on fire.” For close to 90 minutes, 163 Confederate cannon had blanketed the Union battleline in a bedlam thick with smoke and deadly iron fragments. The Union guns replied at a more measured pace, saving ammunition for what was to come, but still added their measure to the unendurable din.

Then, as the thunder died away, it appeared that a god of battles was stage-managing the scene: a breeze sprang up to part the thick curtains of smoke and reveal ordered lines of Confederate troops in their thousands striding out of the woods across the open fields toward Cemetery Ridge. Up on the ridgeline, the ranked Union soldiers took in the sight and involuntarily cried out, “Here they come! Here comes the infantry!”

The first “permanent” settlement in English North America could hardly have been a worse squeaker. The tragic saga that began in 1607 is now well known, given the tercentennial celebrations last year and the worthy effort to set the record straight vis-à-vis the popularity of the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. Most Virginia settlers died, while the few who lived endured unspeakable mayhem, murder, disease, cannibalism, brutal warfare with Indians, and the heartbreak of false rescue.

History professors Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith of the University of Tennessee and University of Kentucky, respectively, follow the fortunes of nine English ships that set sail to bolster Jamestown in 1609 with 600 “passengers, livestock, and provisions . . . the largest [fleet] England had ever sent across the Atlantic” in The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America.

 Author Kate Clifford Larson does not have any axes to grind in The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln, the story of the first woman hanged by the U.S. government. Larson makes no claims to correcting the record or offering new evidence about Lincoln’s assassination. Instead, she simply relates the largely overlooked story of the woman who ran the Washington, D.C., boardinghouse that became the locus of the Lincoln conspirators. “Surratt was no innocent bystander who, as some sympathizers would claim, was duped into complicity by her co-conspirator son, John, or the wily and handsome young actor John Wilkes Booth,” she writes. If Larson is not completely successful in the telling, it is because so many details of Surratt’s story still remain clouded in obscurity, obliging her to sprinkle the text liberally with qualifiers such as “perhaps,” “may have,” and “remains unknown.”

For the counter-culture crowd of the late 1960s and early 1970s, reading Hunter S. Thompson was de rigueur. His best-known books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1972) and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973) marked a hypercharged, drug-fueled new style of writing, which came to be called “The New Journalism.” While writers such as Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer were re-defining the role of journalist by creating highly-stylized and proudly-subjective accounts of political and cultural tumult in the 1960s, Thompson was pushing the genre even further by blending outrageous and frankly false commentary along with his occasionally brilliant reportage. He called his style “gonzo journalism,” and his persona ended up inspiring the character Duke in the comic strip Doonesbury.

EMI Classics has just released Paul Robeson: The Complete EMI Sessions 1928-1939, a seven-CD set featuring 170 digitally remastered tracks that include American plantation songs and spirituals, British folk songs, art songs, and popular hits of the day, such as “Ol’ Man River” from Show Boat. Robeson recorded this diverse repertoire for EMI’s HMV label while living in London.