April 2011

On March 15, 2011, Army Corporal Frank Woodruff Buckles was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. He was the last surviving American World War I veteran. His internment was joined by that of Albert Woolson (d. 1956), the last Union Civil War veteran, and Lemuel Cook (d. 1866), the last official veteran of the Revolutionary War, whose deaths signaled a major turning point in our history. A 16-year-old Buckles lied his way into the Army in August 1917, claiming that Missouri didn’t publish birth records. He served during most of the war in France, driving ambulances and later escorting German prisoners of war. In 1941, he happened to be in Manila on business when the Japanese invaded. He spent more than three years in a prisoner-of-war camp. Buried with full honors, Corporal Buckles now lies 50 yards from General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces during the war. The Great War is now—officially—history.

Recently, while conducting some routine internet research for her biography on a granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson, historian Ann Lucas Birle stumbled upon an obscure but intriguing reference: an 1880 bequest recorded that St. Louis’s Washington University was to receive a 3000-volume library, which contained many books that were “rare and of great value.”

The original owner—the granddaughter’s husband—was a known collector of Jefferson’s books. Birle contacted historian Endrina Tay, who had spent 18 months chasing down the remnants of an 1829 auction at Monticello for the Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries project, whose goal is to publicly inventory all the president’s books. Then, Washington University Libraries rar- books curator Erin Davis received an exhilarating if unnerving phone call, informing her that she could be within arm’s reach of a national treasure.

In a masterstroke of cultural diplomacy this past October, the Russian-American Working Group on Library Cooperation engineered an exchange of rare films between the Library of Congress and Gosfilmofond, the Russian state film archive in Moscow.

It turns out that Gosfilmofond has meticulously cared for nearly 200 American films given to them between 1910 and 1941, many of which are now the only surviving copies. Most films shot before 1950 appeared on silver nitrate stock, which was flammable and sometimes cannibalized for its silver content. Fires and theft destroyed 75 percent of the 200,000 silent films produced between 1893 and 1930 in the United States.

This October Gosfilmofond sent over copies of 10 titles, which include James Cruze’s 1919 movie Valley of the Giants, whose set piece includes a dramatic speeding train scene, and Victor Fleming’s The Call of the Canyon, featuring a complex love triangle that foreshadows the director’s future success with the 1939 film Gone with the Wind.

“Lightning never struck in the same place twice,” an overly confident George Pollard told a midshipman in November 1822 after assuming captaincy of his second command, the whale ship Two Brothers, in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Pollard’s earlier exploits were legendary: a sperm whale had rammed and sunk the whale ship under his command 1000 miles west of the Galápagos Islands. He and the crew of the Essex had drifted the North Pacific for 95 days and resorted to cannibalism. The incident would inspire Herman Melville to write Moby Dick in 1851.

On the Beach With Burns

I was much interested in James Mac-Gregor Burns’s article in the Fall 2010 issue, “The Naked Truth of Battle,” about his experience as a combat historian during the World War II battle for Saipan. I was a Marine Corps combat correspondent attached to the 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, during the Saipan-Tinian campaign. Like Burns, the Marine Corps CCs carried typewriters and carbines, and held the rank of staff sergeant. Burns, however, collected firsthand information as a historian for postwar historical records, while our assignment was to write news stories (we all were experienced news reporters) about the campaign that were distributed from Marine headquarters in Washington to wire services and newspapers nationwide.

Many people said we couldn’t do it: build a website in which you could search through hundreds of museum collections across the U.S. Without any government support. “Too ambitious,” said many archivists.

Well, we invite you to visit our revolutionary new Web site—www.AmericanHeritage.com and the National Portal to Historic Collections, created with our partner, the American Association for State and Local History. Now you can search collections from Antietam to the U.S.S. Constitution, and find fascinating artifacts that have been hidden on storage shelves and seen only by a handful of curators . . . until now.

Interested in muskets? Simply type that in the search field and you’ll instantly see hundreds from museums across the nation, pictures complete with museum-quality information. Ditto with naval paintings, swords, quilts, uniforms, spittoons, flags, or just about anything imaginable. Search a single collection, or all the museums in a certain locale.

Three years ago a tattooed, half-naked bodybuilder crashed a Boston conference to announce . . . something having to do with the Smithsonian’s Luce Foundation Center for American Art. For those in the know, his (temporary) tattoos depicted art objects from the center’s collection, the first of many clues in a new scavenger-hunt type of game based on the center’s collection of art and artifacts. Called Ghosts of a Chance, it explored the leading-edge world of alternate reality games (ARGs): Internet-based, mobile-phone-enabled games that blend real-world sites and situations with fictional plotlines and characters.

When I opened the recent issue of American Heritage and turned to Edward G. Lengel’s incredible account of the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, tears filled my eyes. The story looked in part at the contributions of 13-year-old Pvt. Ernest L. Wrentmore, the youngest U.S. soldier to serve in that conflict. He was my father.

Not only was I overwhelmed with pride, but the photograph of the young man in uniform hit me like a physical blow. Until that moment I had never seen a picture of my father younger than 55 years of age. Peering into his eyes I felt transformed, as though I was looking at a younger version of myself.