Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
To the Inland Empire
by Stewart L. Udall; photographs by Jerry Jacka; Doubleday: 222 pages.
In this book two separate stories—first, that of the early Spanish in America and, second, the specific explorations of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado—work together to challenge the standard view of America’s beginnings. Spain’s contribution to the exploration and settlement of the continent is vastly underrated, Udall contends; in fact, only grudgingly acknowledged, if at all. He suggests that the “Mayflower folk move over and allow the authentic first families … to share their symbolic front-row pew.”
The historical blinders that filter out a century of our history, says Udall, were the handiwork of Richard Hakluyt, the English “evangelist-patriot” who loudly championed English exploration and colonization at a time when anti-Spanish sentiment ran high in Queen Elizabeth’s court. Hakluyt managed to muddle events, dates, and what individual nations were doing until his concept of the “European experience” was accepted. Even today most Anglo-Saxons believe that their ancestors were the principal explorers of the New World.
Udall grew up in St. Johns, Arizona, where Coronado had passed in 1540 on his misguided search for the seven golden cities of Cfbola. Always fascinated with the landmarks described by Coronado and his men, Udall has traced the discernible footsteps and puzzled out the routes that the conquistadors must have taken. Jerry Jacka’s beautiful photographs move along with the text, specifically illustrating the vast spaces, the pueblos, the petroglyphs, the vegetation that the explorers might have seen.
One of the Spaniards describes his first encounter with those “monstrous beasts”—buffalo—so plentiful that he compared them to the fish in the sea. Coronado’s men were the first to explore the awesome grasslands that covered the center of the North American continent. His expedition also gave the Plains Indians their first look at a horse, the animal that would, within a few generations, change their civilization.
Udall ends his forcefully argued reinterpretation of America’s earliest years with a suggestion that the quincentennial, in 1992, of Columbus’s first voyage, sponsored by the Iberian monarchs, would be a fine time to “widen our horizons and pluck our Spanish century from the wastebasket of history.”
Sophie du Pont: A Young Lady in America
by Betty-Bright Low and Jacqueline Hinsley: Harry N. Abrams; 192 pages.
Sophie du Pont was one of seven children of E. I. du Pont, who emigrated to America from France in 1802 and established a gunpowder manufactory near Wilmington, Delaware. This volume is composed of sketches, diary entries, and letters beginning in 1823, when she was thirteen, and ending with her marriage in 1833. Well-researched and handsomely designed, the book provides a rare and entertaining look at family life in the early Republic.
Sophie’s writing is forthright and informative. “I’ve come to the conclusion that railroads are the most disagreeable means of travelling, & stages the most agreeable,” she writes after a day spent on the road. “Steamboats come between the two, convenience in a great measure compensating for ennui.” In one letter to her brother Henry, she wishes she’d been sent to West Point instead of him; in another, she records her impressions of portraits of herself and her sister just painted by Rembrandt Peale: “Eleu’s looks as if she were going to cry—mine has too red hair, but all to that it is thought a good likeness—he has stuck a couple of dirty looking rosebuds in my hand, which I don’t admire.” But the book’s greatest delight is its illustrations. Sophie called her watercolors “caries,” short for caricatures. They chronicle events that are completely ordinary but startling nonetheless because so few such pictures have survived. One drawing shows a chase after runaway black cats; another, titled “A Scene in Peach Season,” shows Sophie and her sisters eating fruit so juicy it drips all over the parlor. (Another picture shows Sophie, “by chance, throwing a handful of old pears” at an unloved chemist from the gunpowder factory.)
Almost all watercolors by young girls are dubbed charming. These actually are.
The Building of Manhattan
by Donald A. McKay; Harper & Row; 150 pages.
This is an engrossing book of the howit-works variety—one of those semireference volumes that visually cut things apart to show how they fit together. Combining crisp text blocks and the author’s clear and detailed line drawings, it covers the centuries-long construction of the world’s most important metropolis and how the city continues to be built today.
In sketching the historic background, the author pauses at signal events in building history to show and explain what happened: the coming of cast iron, the elevator, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Flatiron Building, the Woolworth Building. Finally he re-creates in some detail the building of the World Trade Center in the 1960s.
Next the book takes a tour of the city’s concealed infrastructure, the bewilderment of mostly underground systems that make modern life run—the subway, the water lines, the electricity network, the steam tunnels, the gas piped in from Texas and Louisiana, the phone lines, the ducts that carry it all, the sewage system, and the ways people get in and out to work on these systems. What follows is the best part of all. Over the course of sixty pages, a generic contemporary skyscraper goes up. Beginning with the demolition of a previous structure and test borings for foundations, and finishing with the bolting on of marble-veneered granite outer wall panels, we are led through—and see, in copious, pleasing drawings—all the busy stages of a complicated modern construction job.
Putting all this into one slim volume is an ambitious task, but the book is the work of a blessedly clear mind as well as years of research. The author’s sharp presentation of detailed and sophisticated information should make the book appeal equally to children—older ones, at least—and adults.
The Mask of Command
by John Keegan; Viking; 368 pages.
The first day of the Battle of Shiloh in the spring of 1862 ended with a third of the Union force dead, down, or fugitive and the exhausted survivors dreading the dawn that would see the Confederates push them into the Tennessee River. With the darkness came rain, and William Tecumseh Sherman found his commander, Ulysses Grant, standing out in it, chewing on the omnipresent cigar. “Well, Grant,” said Sherman, “we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we.”
“Yes,” said Grant. “Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.”
And so he did. The victory was not, as John Keegan makes clear in his engrossing new military treatise, merely the result of the blunt optimism suggested by the remark, the simple doggedness to which some still attribute Grant’s successes. Rather, he finds in Grant, the “greatest general of the American civil war,” a keen intellect coupled with an uncanny ability to put himself in the mind of his opponent and the largest grasp of what it means to be a commander in a people’s war—the populist touch mirrored in Grant’s “ultimate readiness to command by consent rather than diktat.”
Grant is the third of four men Keegan has selected to show the progress of military leadership in various times; the others are Alexander the Great, the Duke of Wellington, and Adolf Hitler. Keegan not only conveys freshly and crisply the accomplishments of each of his subjects but uses their characters and careers to illuminate the cultures that shaped them.
Keegan’s prose is always lively. He retrieves Alexander’s personality from the mists of antiquity and suggests the scope of his accomplishment by positing a George Washington who, “having endured the long winter of Valley Forge and the setbacks of the middle years of the War of Independence, to exult at last in the capitulation of Yorktown, conceives the ambition of ridding all the Americas of foreign government. Imagine him embarking the Continental Army in the ships of the new-born United States Navy to voyage south, clear Mexico of Spanish troops, garrison the West Indies with Virginians or New Englanders and make a landing on the shores of South America. Then, victorious in Peru, he crosses the Andes, defeats the Spanish army of the east, and expires on the approaches to the empire of Brazil.”
For years senior lecturer at Sandhurst, Britain’s military academy, Keegan is capable of astringent tactical assessment: “For all their operational expertise, Lee and Jackson proved men of limited imagination. … Both thought in terms of defending the South’s frontiers rather than exhausting the enemy. The defeat of the Confederacy was in part the consequence of their essentially conventional outlook.” But he also has a sharp and humane interest in every other aspect of his subjects’ lives, so that we are treated to a comparison between the prose styles of Wellington (good) and Grant (great) and to a marvelous review of the latter’s memoirs: “He had the novelist’s gift for the thumbnail sketch of character, dramatic setting of mood and introduction of the telling incident; he had the historian’s ability to summarize events and incorporate them smoothly in the larger narrative; he had the topographer’s feel for landscape and the economist’s instinct for material essentials; and he had the philosophical vision to balance the elements of his story into the argument of his apologia pro sua vita—which is how a just triumphed over an unjust cause. The result is a literary phenomenon. If there is a single contemporary document which explains ‘why the North won the Civil War,’ that abiding conundrum of American historical enquiry, it is the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant.”
America on Display: A Guide to Unusual Museums and Collections in the United States and Canada
by Joyce Jurnovoy and David Jenness: Facts On File: 280 pages.
Well, sure, if you come to New York, you know to go to the Metropolitan, and if you visit Washington, you’re not likely to forget about the Smithsonian. But chances are you could pass through Marion, Ohio, and never know you’d missed the Wyandot Popcorn Museum and its collection of gleaming turn-of-the-century poppers, each with an elegant little steam engine spinning the drum. America on Display will keep you from overlooking many of the nation’s most engaging and occasionally unlikely (The Museum of Ancient Brick) curatorial efforts. The more than two hundred entries range from the elegant and various collections in the Forbes Galleries beneath our editorial offices to the Streitwieser Trumpet Museum in Pottstown, Pennsylvania; from San Francisco’s Tattoo Art Museum to the National Bowling Hall of Fame in St. Louis.
Close Cover Before Striking
by H. Thomas Steele. Jim Heimann. and Rod Dyer; Abbeville Press; 96 pages.
Matchbook covers are little posters and this lavish gallery of them displays their bright and forthright graphics to splendid advantage. Here are deco hotels rising in scintillant cubes of green and orange, streamlined locomotives pulling silver cars, ecstatic redcaps hurrying out to help, hula dancers, longhaul truckers, fighter planes, and endless restaurant interiors, all severely geometric, all inexplicably inviting. The introduction begins with the deadening information that “fire, along with air, water, and earth, was long regarded as one of our planet’s four basic elements” but soon picks up with the pioneering Henry C. Traute’s 1894 sale of ten million matchbooks with printed covers to the Pabst brewery—an order that opened floodgates that, despite disposable lighters and the surgeon general, still have not closed.
