March 2011

“Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion,” lamented American writer and wit Samuel L. Clemens (alias Mark Twain), whose star went out 100 years ago this April. Perennially short on cash and obstinately fascinated by inventions without promise, Twain hatched a scheme for a children’s history game in 1883 that he hoped would net millions. Beginning that year, Twain began to routinely push aside his nearly complete manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to labor over the game, which he patented in 1885 as “Mark Twain’s Memory-Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of FACTS and DATES.”

Winter weather canceled the sold-out gala banquet to celebrate the opening of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Saturday, January 30. But come Monday morning, glad throngs braved the cold to commemorate the day, 50 years earlier, when the civil disobedience of four young men in a luncheonette snowballed a change for America.

They were the “Greensboro four”—Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Jibreel Khazan (then Ezell Blair Jr.), and the late David Richmond—four freshmen at the local state college, who sat at the whites-only counter at the F. W. Woolworth five-and-dime store, ordered coffee and doughnuts, and held the first sit-in protest that launched a movement felt throughout the nation.

An Outstanding Issue!

The short vignettes in the 60th Anniversary issue contained so many juicy tidbits: why the Pilgrims survived when preceding settlers failed (Charles Mann’s “Smallpox Epidemic”); how New York got its name (Russell Shorto’s “British Take Manhattan”); “little Jemmy Madison’s” finest moment (Joseph Ellis’s “Virginia Plan”); and Polk’s pivotal role in our nation’s expansion (Robert Merry’s “Mexican War”). I commend these outstanding authors for making us realize once again how tenuous and fortunate our nation’s fate has been from the very beginning.

—Jack S. Schroder, Jr.

Big Canoe, GA

Great Line-up, But I Want More

This issue we ride back to the Old West and encounter the Battle of Little Bighorn and re-live the Pony Express, two of the most mythic and fascinating subjects to shape our view of the American past. One of our favorite writers, Nat Philbrick, the National Book Award-winning author of books on the Mayflower, Wilkes Expedition and whaleship Essex, gives us a rollicking, insightful look at Custer and Sitting Bull.

We also asked Chris Corbett, one of the foremost authorities on the Pony Express, who will keynote the upcoming 150th anniversary celebrations this summer, to write about the legendary venture. Several of us in the office have already planned trips this summer to visit the Little Bighorn and canter a few miles of the 2,000 mile re-ride sponsored by the National Pony Express Association. (Take a look at the guide in the back of this issue—we’ve created a map and listing of sites so you can plan your own trip and perhaps ride the trail yourself.) Saddle up!

Ten thousand delegates, reporters, and spectators poured into Chicago from 24 different states and territories the second week of May 1860—all fully believing, as one put it, that their choice “would be the next President of the United States.” That year’s Republican convention would prove to be one of the most important political gatherings in U.S. history.

These Republicans, assembling for only their second presidential convention, represented a wildly diverse political party: old Whigs, antislavery former Democrats, high-tariff Easterners, and onetime anti-foreigner Know Nothings. Probably their only point of agreement was that Sen. William H. Seward of New York would be nominated.

Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution

by Richard Beeman

(Random House)

This timely book offers a thoughtful history of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which produced one of the most astounding and important documents in history. The book’s central theme reveals a truth too often forgotten: that the key to finding enough common ground to unite and move forward lies in compromise. Giving the major players their due, Beeman demonstrates that, as one reviewer wrote, “compromisers may not make great heroes but they do make great democracies.” 

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

by Antony Beevor

(Viking)

In one thick and dense yet readable volume, a British historian re-creates a nearly minute-by-minute account of the invasion that was the beginning of the end of World War II.

The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy’s Art

For a good part of 1864—the year he faced reelection—Abraham Lincoln had little faith that he would win or even be renominated. Despite the decisive Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg the year before, the Confederacy had sustained recent victories outside Richmond at the Crater and Cold Harbor. Three long and bloody years of war, with still no end in sight, had rallied significant political support for peace. The Democratic challenger, his former general, the popular George B. McClellan, bowed to his party’s convention vote for peace, even though he personally believed in continuing the war. Powerful politicians such as Salmon Chase, Benjamin Wade, and Horace Greeley opposed Lincoln because they believed he could not win.

The presidential contest of 1864 would determine whether the United States would compromise its fundamental purposes. The war, triggered by an election, would see another election stand as the pivotal point of the entire conflict.

What the USS Monitor’s crewmen remembered most about the moments before the battle on the morning of March 9, 1862 was the silence.

“Every one was at his post, fixed like a statue,” Paymaster William Keeler recalled. “The most profound silence reigned” on board the ironclad, and “if there had been a coward heart there its throb would have been audible, so intense was the stillness.” All 58 men on board the Monitor had reason for the deepest foreboding. Their vessel, untested in battle, had barely survived its maiden voyage from New York to Virginia, where its Confederate foe, the former Merrimack, now reborn as the CSS Virginia, lay in wait.

The dead woman was one of the lowly Indian slaves known as Panis. Near Detroit in August 1762, she had helped another Pani to murder their master, a British trader. The outraged British commander in North America, Baron Jeffery Amherst, ordered them executed “with the utmost rigor and in the most publick manner.” By putting them publicly to death, Amherst meant to demonstrate that the Indians had become colonial subjects answerable to British law. Earlier in the year, the French provincial authorities had surrendered their forts around the Great Lakes to the British under the Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War. Emboldened by victory, Amherst vowed to impose a harsh peace on the Indians who had so long and ably supported their French allies. The Pani man broke his leg irons and escaped, leaving the woman to hang in late April 1763.