I just got back from DC. It was good to get away for the week. The weather was glorious. We went to the Frederick Douglass house on Friday, which was something special. I intend to blog about it later in the week. Right now I am winding down with a cup of coffee and the Red Sox-Dodgers on the radio.

Going through the pile that is my in-box, the one thing that leaped out at me was the death last Sunday of the great Albert Murray. I intend to write more about Murray too, but am too exhausted at the moment to do so. I first heard of him when working on a project in library school about his great friend Duke Ellington. Coincidentally an article about Murray appeared in the September 1996 issue of American Heritage, a magazine I read avidly at the time and eventually outgrew. If nothing else it gave me an introduction to Murray and his ideas. It’s funny how things work that way sometimes. I once saw him in the Strand bookstore and he looked up at me with the mischievous smile. I did not say anything to him, but it was obvious that he knew I was aware of who he was. I will never forget it. I could go on but think I will save it. Obituaries here and here.

. . . and yours truly is taking the week off. Posting will resume on the 26th. Enjoy these final days of summer.

the wife, the mother-in-law, and yours truly atop Castle Williams

The heat is on here in DC, though thankfully not before we squeezed in a trip to Antietam yesterday. Blogging will continue to be light the rest of the week, though I wanted to share a few pics.

We visited the Unites States Capitol on Saturday. A book I cannot recommend highly enough is Guy Gugliotta’s Freedom’s Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War. Among the many ironies was Jefferson Davis’s outsized role in its creation. You can’t help but think of how much he must have wanted the Capitol for his own Confederate States of America.

Burnside Bridge

As I mentioned the other day, my first trip to Sharpsburg, in 2009, was one of the biggest turning points in my intellectual development. Seeing Burnside Bridge for myself forced me to challenge my assumptions about the war and by extension everything else. We had some interesting interactions at Antietam yesterday. We discussed the fighting in the West Wood with a twenty-one year veteran of the Army’s artillery branch, and met a couple from Wales who participated in the Pickett’s Charge hike two week’s ago on July 3rd. Apparently the American Civil War is part of their regular routine, because they mentioned being there for the 145th as well.

Speaking of challenging premises, a fascinating piece came through my in-box today about one man’s revelations about his Lost Cause assumptions after a recent visit to Gettysburg. It is worth reading the whole thing.

Hey all, I took the Boltbus to DC. The Hayfoot and I are going to Rock Creek Cemetery and the Old Soldiers Home tomorrow. I noticed that today is the 130th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge and thought I would repost this from 2011. The Bridge is one of the special places in NYC. Enjoy your Memorial Day Weekend.

Earlier this spring I read The Great Bridge, David McCullough’s magnum opus about the creation of the span connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan.  One reason for doing so was because, after spending so much time reading about the death and destruction of the Civil War, I wanted to turn my attention to something being built not destroyed.  The bridge is down the street from where I work and I often have my lunch there.  It is also where I took my wife after our wedding reception.  Yesterday was the one hundred and twenty eighth anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brooklyn Museum Collection

I sometimes think many New Yorkers assume the bridge has always “been there,” a natural part of the landscape.  Actually it was the brainchild of German-born John Augustus Roebling, who was wounded on the construction site and died prematurely years before the bridge’s completion.

Brooklyn Museum Collection, Gift of Paul Roebling

It was up to his son, Colonel Washington Augustus Roebling, to complete the task.  He did so, but at great personal expense.  Roebling contracted caisson disease, or the bends, from his frequent trips below the water to the excavation site and suffered in horrific pain the rest of his long life.  He lived until 1926.

Roebling was an officer in the Army of the Potomac and participated in many of the war’s most important events.  He fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness among other places.  He also personally witnessed the engagement between the Monitor and the Merrimac in 1862.  Roebling married Emily Warren, the sister of General Gouverneur Kemble Warren, in January 1865.

Looking at the bridge today…

Harpers, 1890

…it takes a leap of faith to imagine it as it was just after its completion.

The road in the top photograph is the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.  Below that in the same photograph is a new park being built along the Brooklyn side of the East River.  The waterfront has not been part of the daily fabric of New York life for decades, since the collapse of the shipping industry in the mid-twentieth century.  The city has been working hard to change that in recent years with a number of adaptive reuse projects.

(Author: H. Finkelstein & Son; Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The bridge has always been a favorite of painters and poets.

May 24, 1883 (Source: Brooklyn Museum Collection)

May 24, 2011

Last night I booked the hotel for the New York History conference in Cooperstown early next month. The NYSHA conference should be a lot of fun. With the cool weather we’d been having in New York, June seemed so far away until yesterday. Today, though, has been the warmest day of the year so far, and the rising temperatures had everyone talking about their summer plans. It is difficult to believe Memorial Day weekend is a few days away. This afternoon I submitted my annual leave requests for June-August. I will be splitting time between here and our place in DC. Today I also joined Shorewalkers, a group that hikes various points of interest in the New York area. There is a walk in August that covers the Civil War and other monuments of Hoboken and Jersey City that I am especially looking forward to. I intend to criss-cross the five boroughs this summer, in a group setting but also by myself, to explore New York history, especially out-of-the-way New York history. My list is growing.

I read with interest this morning of the death of architecture historian Henry Hope Reed. Reed’s passing marks the death of two great architecture critics this year; Ada Louise Huxtable died in January. I don’t believe they saw eye-to-eye on all things, but Reed and Huxtable at least shared the sentiment that the buildings and spaces we live, work, and unwind in matter in our lives. This was an especially important sentiment in the 1950s and 1960s, when urban planners seemed to have forgotten the importance of continuity and historical memory. Tension between the past and present is inevitable, and even healthy when kept in proper balance. Sadly, though, in New York it took the razing of Pennsylvania Station for some people to learn this lesson. Reed and Huxtable were on the right side in the struggle.

Reed was one of the founders, for lack of a better term, of the walking tour movement here. He led excursions of Central Park in the 1960s in which he taught people about the park and its history. Today we take Shorewalkers, Big Onion, and other organizations as a given, but in the New York of Mayor Lindsay they were anything but. It was something of an adventure in that much grittier and more crime-ridden era, and took a great deal of faith and foresight on the part of people such as Reed. Yesterday I took the train to Albany to visit the New York State Museum. The trip up the Hudson is scenic and majestic, especially when the season are changing. Near FDR’s Hyde Park one passes the Poughkeepsie Bridge, which is now the Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park. Such sites, broadly speaking, were made possible by the forward thinking of people like Reed. He had some misses too. He was vehemently against concerts and events he saw as intrusions in the park. Imagine the history of New York City, however, without such defining moments as Simon and Garfunkel’s Concert in Central Park. Still, Reed and people like him gave us so much to be thankful for. It’s something to think about the next time you are cutting across the Sheep Meadow.

(image courtesy NYPL)

I have been a wee bit under the weather the past few days with a minor but pesky fever. Yesterday was the worst of it but there was still one bright spot in the day: when I checked the mailbox I discovered that my copy of The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Lived It had arrived. In what has become an annual rite during the sesquicentennial the Library of America has been issuing an annual installment for each year since 2011. Each edition contain approximately 175-200 primary sources for the corresponding year. Included are well known but nonetheless necessary documents such as the South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession (Vol 1), the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (Vol 2), and Robert E. Lee’s offer to resign a few weeks after Gettysburg (Vol 3). What I love about the volumes, however, are the lesser gems like Henry Adams’s letters to his brother Charles, Herman Melville’s poem about the Battle of Shiloh, and Lee’s letter to his wife about rationing shortages in the Confederate Army during the winter of 1863. Each volume provides a flow for the events of that year, which is something I find helpful when reading about the war. It is important to remember the obvious, but easy to forget fact, that the people of the past lived their lives forward with no idea of what the future held. The Civil War did not follow a script. It is for this reason that I find it so easy to get caught up in each volume. Needless to say, I know what I will be doing for at least part of my weekend.

Salut,

When I was wrapping up my second masters degree at the CUNY Graduate Center in the fall of 2005 I vowed that when I finished I would take it upon myself to learn a second language. I had actually minored in Russian as an undergrad, but that had been a decade and a half earlier and my Russian was, to put it mildly, rusty. I chose Russian because my brother and I had made a trip to Europe in November 1989 that included West and East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union; when I returned to my studies in spring 1990, six weeks or so after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vague notions of learning the language and being part of the post-Cold War period in a direct and  immediate way. As you might imagine, it did not work out that way.

Maybe it is living in New York, or perhaps it is that my brother now lives in France, but I realized as I was finishing school in ’05 that one needs, if not full-fledged bilingualism, at least a working knowledge of another language. In the winter of 2006 when it was time to begin I narrowed it down to French and German. I chose French because I thought it could help me in more of the world than German probably could. I would still like to travel within the Francophone world. Things were going well in my studies until some major life changes required me to focus–quite happily–on other things.

Today, after a long hiatus, I pulled out my lesson books and came up with a plan to brush off the dust and bring my French up to where I want it to be. My goals are 1) to be able to converse in basic French when entering a hotel, restaurant, or similar social setting, and 2) to read and write at at the high-intermediate level. Certainly I can find 45 minutes a day to make this happen.

As I said in my post the other day about the 1960s, I have become increasingly aware of the need to think holistically and not pigeon-hole oneself. Currently, I am about a quarter of the way through the late Warren Zimmermann’s First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. Triumph tells the story of how Teddy Roosevelt, Elihu Root, John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Alfred T. Mahan did just that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The reason I say all this is because to me the book is reinforcing the importance of thinking wider than 1861-1865 to understand the Civil War. Hay is an especially interesting character because he started of course working for Lincoln in 1860 and was still serving his country and president three and a half decades later. This included several stints overseas. Often we think the people who fought in the Civil War, or who served in whatever capacity in which the served, lived hermetically sealed in those four years. Of course, they did not.

So, here I am up to my elbows in the imparfait and  passé composé yet again. It feels pretty good.

À bientôt

This morning I finished Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America by James T. Patterson. I often read in cycles, and Eve was the third of a three-part installment, if you will, in a project to read more about contemporary history. Five years ago, just prior to my first visit to Gettysburg, I made a conscious effort to raise my game regarding Civil War history. I feel I have done that, though I still have a ways to go. I have gained a great deal, but recently I felt I was losing my mojo in other areas. There are only so many hours in the day; every time you are doing one thing by definition you are not doing something else.I believe so many focus so intently on the Civil War, especially those who dwell on the minutiae of the battles, that they lose something. One cannot understand the war, or our complicated history, without context.

In his preface Patterson makes clear that no one year can “change everything,” as the blurbs and  subtitles often shout to us when we walk the aisles of the local bookstore. Life just doesn’t follow the calendar like that. Still, as Patterson shows, 1965 was a transforming year in American history. The assassination of Malcolm X, Selma, Vietnam escalation, Watts rioting, Voting Rights Act, immigration reform, the alphabet soup of Great Society programs that President Johnson felt secure to create after being given a mandate during his landslide victory in November 1864 and inauguration in January 1965. Not for nothing did Johnson proclaim during the lighting of the national Christmas tree in December 1964  that we were living in “the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” It was typical LBJ hyperbole, but as was the case with many of Johnson’s pronouncements it had a ring of truth. Ironically, America’s prosperity and hopefulness are what led to to the anger and cynicism of the era as it became clear that our many problems were not so easy to fix.

Culturally things were changing as well. The Beatles released Rubber Soul at the end of the year. It is hard not to believe that 1965 was the year that the sixties became The Sixties. I have added Patterson’s Grand Expectations, the United States, 1945-1974 to my short list.

73rd and Central Park West; 3:00 pm, 9 March 2013

I was at the New-York Historical Society today. Afterward I took advantage of the spring-like weather to have lunch on the benches across the street from the Dakota.