March 2011

 Welcome Back

I am a second generation subscriber. The editor’s letter in your Spring/Summer issue called the return of American Heritage “revolutionary . . . ‘in the sense of turning back to an early state.’”  That issue carried out that promise brilliantly. I felt that in recent years the magazine had leaned a little too heavily upon what you described as “cultural history and newsworthy pieces.” This new issue is a worthy successor to the days when the hardbound American Heritage was first making a name for itself. I am thrilled to be part of that tradition as it moves into the future. 

—Rev. John E. Hissrich

Pittsburgh, PA

Toil and Tears 

For the first time in a long time, the 58-year-old American Heritage Archives and History Library are under one roof in our new offices. We thought we’d bring you a sneak peak at just a couple of the hundreds of thousands of photographs, prints, drawings, maps, documents, and other artifacts that have been accumulated over five decades by the editor of the magazine.  

Perhaps you remember the talented caricaturist Oscar Berger’s take on the presidents from Adams to Monroe using contour drawing—never lifting the pen from the paper—which appeared in our April 1959 issue. Or a series of Revolutionary War figures painted by Don Troiani, such as the Private 4th New York Regiment, 1977, which appeared in the December 1975 issue. Or the battlefield sketch by a Harper’s Weekly correspondent at the Second Battle of Manassas during the Civil War.

Stay tuned in future issues for more treasures from our American past.  ~The editor-in-chief

 Welcome Back

I gave up my subscription in the recent past and felt like firing three volleys and sounding taps. Some difference now.  Opening up the Winter 2008 issue was like answering the front door and seeing a long lost friend standing there, smiling. 

—Dale N. Davis

Portales, NM

As one who grew up reading the white hardbound American Heritage and was a subscriber for more than 25 years, I mourned the cessation of the publication earlier this year. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to go through the mail and see my dear old friend!  

—Donald Atkinson, M.D. 

Sewickley, PA

Women Warriors

As a female war veteran, I was enraged when I read your article, “Women at War.” You need to go reread your history books if you believe that this is the FIRST time women have fought alongside their male counterparts! 

In the “Time Machine” column for May/June you write that the 1936 Schmeling-Louis bout was a “world championship” contest. It was not. Max Schmeling was a thirty-one-year-old former champion, having lost the world heavy-weight title in 1932 to Jack Sharkey. Joe Louis was an undefeated twentytwo-year-old contender. Their second bout, on June 22, 1938, was for the title, which Louis had won on June 22 the previous year by stopping James J. Braddock in the eighth round in Chicago.

The spare and vigorous gentleman on the opposite page, William Graham Claytor, Jr., superintending the departure of a local out of South Sun-Porch Station, D.C., at his brick house in Georgetown, is the only man in Washington, or anywhere else in the country for that matter, who runs two big passenger railroads. His other layout is the 25,000 miles, more or less, of Amtrak, with headquarters a few miles away at the newly restored Union Station. There, with great gusto and success, Claytor is propelling this country’s remaining passenger-railroad service into the future. At home, with his toy-train collection, he lingers happily in the atmosphere of the past, the great days of railroading, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The July/August “Time Machine” mentions Jeffery Amherst’s 1763 suggestion that the colonists try to spread smallpox among the Indians. In fact, the campaign went further than that.

Amherst suggested to Col. Henry Bouquet, the commander of Fort Pitt, that he “send the small pox” among the tribes that had risen in the Ohio Valley. “ We must ,” he wrote, “Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.” Bouquet agreed to try to spread an epidemic using infected blankets.

Bouquet was off campaigning, but his second-in-command, Simeon Ecuyer, had anticipated Amherst’s suggestion. In late June he gave two blankets and a handkerchief that he had taken from the beds of smallpox patients to two Delaware Indians, Turtle’s Heart and Mamaltee.

The number of Native Americans carried away by Amherst’s strategy is unknown; but it was obviously an order to commit germ warfare, and this order was carried out.

Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire gave sexual and moral scope to the humble T-shirt and thus unleashed the romance of all neglected plebeian garments. From this moment in the early fifties, the look of the desirable American male was changed forever. The savvy trench coat, the insouciant white tie, and the ingenuous lounge suit were rejected, replaced by the garb of the hip and the beat. Migrant workers, miners, and longshoremen added their components to assorted forms of sports gear and work clothes to forge the new romantic style in men’s dress, one that has held sway for more than a generation.

This image of John F. Kennedy in 1962 connects and combines many themes. First is the American individual personality, dressed to suit its inmost self, but here flavored with suggestions of traditional oceangoing strength of will. Along with this go a lack of self-consciousness or need for display and an easy familiarity with simple materials that everyone knows and uses—plain wool and cotton, like sea and sand. The huge commercial empire of Ralph Lauren is essentially based on this sartorial distillation of high American class. It embodies an ideal devoid of rigid British hierarchies or restraints. Instead, it promotes the sense of a self-made aristocracy free to rise and succeed, to attain through desire—to fashion itself.

Our usual picture of the Soviet Union and its history is strictly political and economic. We trace the many struggles for leadership power and the ups and downs of the Soviet economy. We chart the rise of Stalin and the battles for party domination that followed him, and we watch Mikhail Gorbachev avow glasnost (political openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring). And we hope that our fundamentally different values in these spheres can increasingly influence the Soviets—just as the Soviet Union believes its own values have long influenced the world.

Germ Warfare, 1763 Premature Championship Still Being Made Still Being Made More Fast Food More Fast Food Hinton Historian The War No One Wants