April 2011

THE STEAMSHIP HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA was established in 1935 as a means of bringing together those amateur and professional historians interested in the history and development of steam navigation, past and present.

Incorporated in the State of Virginia in 1950 as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) educational corporation, SSHSA is the oldest maritime organization in America and a vital source and authority of the nautical and maritime history of engine-powered vessels, from the earliest steam-powered ships to modern ocean liners.

Today, with extensive collections of maritime photos, periodicals, artwork, official records, memorabilia and ephemera, SSHSA is the oldest and largest organization of its kind in the world.

The Hutchinson County Museum is a regional history museum in the Texas Panhandle. Our stories are that of a wild Oil boomtown settled by Texas Rangers and National Guard after Martial Law was established. Prior to that were two Red River War battles at Adobe Walls in Hutchinson County between U.S. cavalrymen and Southern Plains Indians. The museum building, constructed in 1927 during the Texas oil boom, was dedicated in 1977, and it highlights Hutchinson County history from the prehistoric era to the present.

We are a professionally managed county museum and have a wide variety of exhibits and artifacts.

Salisbury University Archives preserves, maintains and provides access to the records of the University, and also maintains important other historical resources.

It also manages three other important historical facilities:

1. the Edward H. Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture , which contains many of the important archival materials of the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland area,


2. the Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art, one of the world's largest collections of carved decoys, and


3. the Perdue Museum.

The Center is open to all scholars, historians and genealogists of all skill levels with an interest in the region of the Eastern Shore of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Many historians and genealogists have traveled from all across the country to visit the Center to acquire a richer understanding of the greater Delmarva region and to examine artifacts and documents from the area, the majority of which can be found only at the Nabb Research Center. The Nabb Research Center has been endowed by Edward H. Nabb, an attorney and philanthropist of Cambridge, Maryland, as a repository for material pertaining to the Delmarva Peninsula (Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia). The Nabb Research Center was established to provide a "laboratory" for history students and a liaison between Salisbury University and the lower Eastern Shore region.

Through educational programs, exhibits and events the Ward Museum builds upon the legacy of Lem and Steve Ward in order to bring young and old to a greater understanding of the human relationship to the natural world.

The Ward Museum is a premier educational facility for the study of material culture, living traditions, and environmental concerns for the school children, scholars, and artists who are a part of the community the museum serves.

In particular, it reflects the heritage of the maritime communities of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and similar communities throughout the United States and Canada, and explores and celebrates the impact of wildfowl upon natural history and human society.

The Museum is an educational program of Salisbury University.

The cover of this magazine should alert you to some of the surprises in this 60th anniversary issue of American Heritage. If you didn’t see that George Washington has been joined by ten notable Americans you might want to take a closer look.

For the past year, we debated how to celebrate this important marker in the life of a magazine with such an august tradition. At times our staff felt like young cadets at West Point gripped by “the far off hold of . . . the long gray line” of those who went before us. We kept coming back to the words of our founding editor, the great Civil-War historian Bruce Catton, who wrote: “We believe in good storytelling; that interesting writers can interpret history and restore it to the place it once occupied as the noblest branch of literature.”