Steve Goddard's History Wire

Fan Letters, Then and Now

In his fan mail upon the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Walt Whitman received a gushing letter from one Ralph Waldo Emerson, who knew a thing or two about writing himself. He told Whitman that his new book "meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat & mean....I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start."

Just in case your college copy of Leaves has grown a bit dog-eared over the years, Penguin Classics has rushed in with a 150th anniversary edition, together with an introduction Whitman couldn't have procured even in his best years. It's by the omnipresent Harold Bloom.

Interstates Near Golden Anniversary

In Boston, Big Dig project officials announced this week that work on the final leg of the Interstate Defense Highway System would stretch into 1956, according to The Boston Globe. This assured that the largest public works project in world history will have taken a full half-century to finish. And you thought the European cathedral builders were slow!

President Dwight Eisenhower called for the Interstates to be a $50 billion project in 1954, at a time when the entire federal budget stood at $71 billion. Ironically, Democrats in Congress were responsible for trimming it back to $27 billion in 1956 along with projection a completion date of 1971.

The complete saga of how the Interstate highways came to be is told in Steve Goddard's book, Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the American Century.

Movies, Anyone?

The long Independence Day weekend looms ahead. And if you're not tempted by the summer blockbusters Hollywood is serving up, how about an oldie but goodie? The New York Times has an archive of its 1,000 best films, together with all films it has reviewed since 1960.

""Comic ideas waft through the movie like phantoms hoping to take shape," wrote Vincent Canby in The Times on June 23, 1989, about one classic. Give up? It's Batman.

Deja Vu All Over Again?

Much of official Washington has knitted brows about the proposed takeover of an American company, Unocal by China's National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC), pointing to the parallels to Japan's purchase of Rockefeller Center in the 1980s. Even as Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary John Snow raced to Capitol Hill to try to calm the waters, the Weekly Standard argues the China/Japan comparison is off-base:

"The current Chinese takeover movement is different from the earlier buying spree by Japanese companies. Japan was not a rival for influence in Asia, or in the world; China is. Japan was not a major competitor for scarce resources such as oil; China is. Japanese companies were privately owned; China's acquirers are state-run entities. Japan is a democratic country, and by and large an American ally; China most definitely is not. Japan did not engage in the wholesale theft of intellectual property, China does. Japan did not buy strategic assets: ownership of New York real estate has no implication for national security; ownership of oil resources does."

Book Mention / Black Rice

If you had thought that Europeans were responsible for introducing rice and techniques for its cultivation to the New World, think again, says UCLA geography Prof. Judith A. Carney in her new book, Black Rice -- The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. She contends that racism has obscured the role Africans and African-Americans played "in transferring the seed, the cultivation skills, and the cultural practices necessary for establishing rice in the New World."

Publishers' Weekly says of Carney's book, "Though this is a scholarly work, Carney's clear, uncluttered prose invites a wider readership."

Searching For An Earlier Dylan

Lovers of 1960s folk music will be overjoyed to hear that an album of hitherto released songs from the early (1962) Bob Dylan is coming soon, not to Borders' music department, mind you, but to a coffee shop near you. Yahoo News reports on the latest chapter of Starbucks' aggressive entry into the music business:

"In a deal aimed at rekindling cafe culture, Dylan 63, has sealed a deal with the US coffee chain to exclusively distribute an album of recordings of his 1962 concerts at New York's famed Gaslight Cafe. The 63-year-old folk idol is the latest of a string of musical legends to have albums sold over the counter at Starbucks cafes as the firm that introduced America to the expresso moves aggressively into the music business. The album, which includes newly restored."

Invaders from Mars (Not)...But From Where?

Humans seem to harbor a subliminal fear that our planet will someday be invaded by aliens from away. Steven Spielberg's new summer blockbuster, War of the Worlds, is only the latest chapter in what for some is paranoia and for others, being prepared.

Florida Today recalls some of the tales of invaders from another planet, from H.G. Wells 1897 novel The War of the Worlds to Orson Welles's 1938 radio drama of the same name. In 1953, George Pal reheated the casserole yet again, retaining the name:

"And now, more than five decades later, another film opens around the world, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise. It's the 21st century, yet it's another variation of War of the Worlds -- this time starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning and opening today. Somewhere along the way, the title lost the, "the." The new film also lost the Martians -- the invaders' home planet isn't named. "We've been to Mars," Spielberg has said, "And we know that nobody's there."

Not Everybody Loves Fame

Historian Shelby Foote was content to labor in obscurity and alone during the 20 years it took him to pen his 3,000-page history of the Civil War. Then Ken Burns discovered him in 1990 and, in the wake of Burns's TV epic on the war, Foote became an overnight sensation.

The Pueblo (CO) Chieftain reports that all the attention was unwelcome to Foote, who died yesterday at age 88. The celebrity, he said, was ‘‘a terrific disruption. People keep wanting me to come somewhere and speak,’’ Foote said soon after ‘‘The Civil War,’’ an 11-hour series by Ken Burns, first aired. ‘‘I’ve always managed to do very little of that.’’ Trouble was, he was so, so good at it.

A New Take on the Thou Shalt Nots

When Moses carried tablets with 10 commandments down from the mountain, could he have anticipated how historically resonant they would become? Given their status as a hot-button issue in American politics, the Supreme Court has skirted for a generation taking up the question of where they may permissibly be displayed on public land.

But during its 2004-5 session, the high court jumped in with both feet, and in its final day of rulings Monday, the Court gave something to both sides of the debate, according to The New York Times:

"A fractured Supreme Court on Monday, struggling to define a constitutional framework for the government display of religious symbols, upheld a six-foot-high Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol while ruling that framed copies of the Commandments on the walls of two Kentucky courthouses were unconstitutional."

Book Mention / The Unknown American Revolution

Conventional wisdom has it that colonists from the original 13 states stood monolithically against British oppression as they battled the redcoats in the Revolutionary War. According to UCLA history professor Gary B. Nash in a new book, The Unknown American Revolution, the truth is a lot more complicated than that:

"The Founding Fathers may have led the charge, but the energy to raise a revolt emerged from all classes and races of American society," each with their own vision of what American could and should be. As currents and cross-currents raged, conflict emerged between colonists as well as between colonists and the British.

According to Publishers' Weekly,"(Nash) especially succeeds in detailing the crucial role and often overlooked plight of Native Americans, adding the obscure names of men such as Cornplanter, Dragging Canoe and Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, who allied the Iroquois nation with the British, to the pantheon of the Revolution's players. By 1789 Washington was forced to commit a third of his army to destroying the Iroquois, explicitly ordering that their villages "not be merely overrun but destroyed."