At around three in the afternoon, four British naval ships riding at anchor opened fire on the waterfront as several boatloads of redcoats and emancipated Black Americans came ashore to torch the snipers’ posts. Terrified patriots scattered amid the barrage. After several buildings were left in smoldering heaps, the British and Loyalist troops returned to the ships.

The fleet’s passengers, many of whom owned homes and businesses on shore, were relieved at first to see that their town was still largely intact. Relief turned to horror, however, as pinpricks of flame sprang up through the darkened streets that evening. Soon the clouds “appeared as red and bright as they do in an evening at sun setting,” wrote one observer watching from more than a dozen miles away.

Fires raged for three days. When the blaze finally subsided, Norfolk, the largest city in the largest of the 13 American colonies, lay in ruin. Not one of its 1,333 buildings remained intact, and all of its nearly 6,500 residents were displaced. Never has an American city suffered such complete devastation.

The patriot commanders put the blame squarely on Dunmore and the fires lit by his troops. Newspapers repeated that assertion. Even the governor’s colleagues in the House of Lords expressed outrage. From Massachusetts, George Washington predicted that the burning of the port would persuade reluctant Americans to back independence—still a radical notion at the start of 1776.

The unprecedented disaster indeed encouraged Virginia’s patriot leaders to vote unanimously for separation on May 15. This stunning decision broke what had been a deadlock in Philadelphia and led the wavering colonies to adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4.

The owners of Norfolk’s burned homes and businesses, meanwhile, demanded compensation. In 1777, Virginia’s new patriot assembly created a commission to determine who was culpable. The results, which appeared that year, were unequivocal. The commission found that the patriots themselves had taken advantage of the British attack to loot and torch the town and were directly responsible for a shocking 96 percent of the destruction.

Central to this stunning revelation were sworn depositions from dozens of eyewitnesses, each of whom—to avoid conflicts of interest—was a confirmed patriot who did not own property in Norfolk. James Nicholson, for example, watched as patriot soldiers “went from house to house plundering and firing them,” and according to another local man, the soldiers explained they “had general orders for destroying all the houses.” The report made it clear that patriot commanders had lied about Dunmore’s culpability—and even the direction of the wind on that fateful night—to hide their guilt.

“The intent of these records was to set the record straight about what really happened in Norfolk,” said Greg Crawford, state archivist at the Library of Virginia. The meticulously researched report, written in the neat hand of a clerk, also provides some of the most dramatic and reliable first-person accounts of the American Revolution. Yet it was not publicly released at the time, and the story of Dunmore as perpetrator of a terrible crime remained unchallenged.

Sixty years later, the commission’s papers were discovered in the attic of the state capitol in Richmond. The decaying document had been relegated to the shelves of the state library and largely neglected. By this time, the myth that the British burned Norfolk was accepted fact; many history books today still repeat this false piece of patriot propaganda, and I even saw it displayed in an exhibit at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution. Who hid the report, and why, remains a mystery.

The only proof that the British were not to blame, aside from Dunmore’s protestations, were the recovered documents. But as the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding approached, the report was again in danger of vanishing—part of a quiet but alarming crisis threatening millions of paper records scattered across dozens of archives.

In the early 1900s, German chemists synthesized a soluble form of cellulose acetate, a film made of wood pulp (and later, synthetics) that proved useful for protecting playing cards, plane fuselages, and eventually, old paper. In the 1930s, a conservator named William Barrow at the Virginia State Library—today’s Library of Virginia—pioneered the practice of placing an archival document between two sheets of thin, see-through cellulose acetate. The resulting “sandwich” was then fed through a heavy press to heat and seal the page within, much like a laminated driver’s license.

Archivists in Richmond quickly embraced the technological advance, which seemed an ideal way to permanently protect aging letters, reports, and volumes. The library subjected two-thirds of the 97-page Norfolk commission collection to the lamination process, along with thousands of other documents. The procedure’s popularity also spread to archives in other parts of the Southeast as well as to Washington, D.C. “Institutions laminated documents with gusto,” wrote Library of Virginia archivist Eddie Woodward, the author of a 2017 study of the process. The National Archives in Washington, for example, bought a steam-heated flatbed hydraulic press to apply the technique to its documents, and Verner Clapp, deputy librarian of Congress, asserted in 1942 that Barrow’s approach had “withstood the test of time” and was “the standard method.”

Yet applying intense heat and pressure to fragile documents could activate the natural acids in paper and ink—particularly the iron-gall ink that was favored by writers from medieval times until the early 20th century. This in turn could speed up decomposition. When Barrow became aware of this issue, he developed methods to de-acidify paper and ink before running pages through a press; he later added a plasticizer to the cellulose acetate film to increase its strength and flexibility. Yet acidity remained a problem, and over time, the plastic dried out, shrinking and warping documents.

What seemed a permanent solution to the problem of decay proved to be maddeningly temporary. Librarians found themselves shelling out money to re-laminate their holdings. Many documents grew discolored, and by 1973, the National Archives acknowledged that the process was “not without some harmful effects” and began phasing it out, though other institutions continued to use it well into the 1980s.

A 2015 study that surveyed 52 institutions found that three-fourths of them held laminated material. Moreover, at least 2.9 million laminated documents were stored in the nation’s private and public collections. These figures are almost certainly understated by some margin; the State Archives of North Carolina alone estimates that it has some two million laminated documents. Since the Barrow process varied over time and from institution to institution, the extent of damage in American collections is hard to quantify.

“There are millions and millions” of documents in disrepair, Woodward said. “We are put in the unenviable position of deciding if we should spend our money on the more costly, heavily deteriorated documents that are possibly of more historical value, but might not be salvageable, or to opt for the more easily treated documents.”

In 2025, the Trump administration moved to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the only federal agency dedicated to funding libraries. A federal judge struck down this move, and in April, the administration withdrew its appeal of this ruling. The White House, however, has proposed withdrawing all funding for the institute in 2027, so its fate now rests with Congress.

By early this year, the Norfolk commission collection, particularly those pages that underwent the lamination process, were “in dire need of conservation,” said Crawford. About half of the 97 laminated leaves were heavily damaged, and some were barely legible.

In early February, Crawford put the archival box containing the pages into a shipping carton and loaded it into a library van. He drove to South Boston, a small town near the North Carolina line, and met Matt Johnson, director of Conservation-NC, a private lab in Greensboro specializing in document conservation. Johnson then ferried the box to the lab, a one-story, nondescript building on the edge of town, securing the papers in a concrete vault.

On a recent visit in June, conservator Amber Pegram stood in front of aluminum pans, the sort used in cafeterias to keep food warm, soaking one of the laminated leaves in acetic acid, the liquid that forms the basis of table vinegar. Then, she said, “you can peel a layer off, clean, and repeat.” She pulled a paper out of the solution and placed it in a lightbox as a fan blew the fumes away.

Once the laminate-free paper was dry, Pegram’s colleague Emily Bell took over, soaking it in fresh water for as much as a full day and changing out the liquid periodically to remove dirt and residue. “The first time I saw someone wash paper, I thought they were insane,” she said, placing a page on a mesh drying rack. “But the paper is actually quite sturdy.”

Conservators must neutralize the natural acid in the iron-gall ink, a highly water-resistant substance made from tannic acid and iron sulfate. They do this by drenching the paper in calcium phytate, a mineral salt that stabilizes the ink.

Bell then took the dried material to her workbench to mend the pages tattered by age and the lamination process. She placed the pieces on a sheet of Japanese kozo paper, a material derived from the paper mulberry shrub that is tough, durable, and very light, and then used wheat glue to hold them in place. Bell lightly heated the pages using a miniature iron and placed them in an acid-free folder for their return trip to Richmond.

“As awful as lamination can be, if they had not done it, then it is possible some of these documents would have been lost forever,” Bell said. “Of course, people in the future may roll their eyes at the process we use, but our goal is to conserve in a way that is at least 98 percent reversible.”

The process has been time consuming as well as expensive; the cost of conserving fewer than 100 pages totaled $24,269—a hefty sum for any archive. The money comes from a $200,000 fund, paid in part by donations, set aside to stabilize Revolutionary War documents held in the Library of Virginia. Crawford has given priority to documents not widely known to the public that shed light on the lives of all Virginians during the Revolution, including Loyalists, women, enslaved and free people, and frontline soldiers.

Researchers soon will have access to digitized versions of all the documents. That the stories they contain are now being preserved is a fine birthday present for the nation.

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In 1977, Martin Scorsese was working in a cocaine-filled, insomniac frenzy to complete The Last Waltz, his film about The Band’s final concert. One evening, he and his housemate, the group’s guitarist, Robbie Robertson, invited friends to watch a rough cut. Francis Ford Coppola, one of the guests, disliked what he saw—not about the film but about what the boys were eating. Coppola decided to cook dinner, giving Robertson precise instructions to prevent the marinara sauce from sticking as it simmered. The rocker left to see a dealer, and the sauce burned; Scorsese told everyone to praise the food anyway. Before leaving, Coppola gave a stern lecture about eating better. One onlooker summarized the tenor of the remarks: “This is like your father talking. ‘You’d better shape up with the food.’ ”

Journalist Mark Binelli reproduces this set piece in Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film, which is presented as the first major biography of the prodigious director. Movie buffs will recognize the encounter from a famous scene in Scorsese’s masterpiece Goodfellas (1990), in which a similar stir-the-sauce directive plays out against a riot of helicopters and drugs. The echo is telling: Scorsese was able to capture the frantic paranoia of Goodfellas because he had lived it. After unspooling his life story, Binelli found that Scorsese’s movies began “to feel like smuggled chapters of an autobiography.”

Just a Shot Away is a detailed, funny, and insightful biography worthy of its subject’s mighty stature, although it neglects the back half of his life. Now in his 80s, Scorsese remains remarkably busy even as he shifts into valedictory mode. He has at last been feted with the Oscar for best director (for 2006’s The Departed ) that the Academy long denied him  and appeared as a sort of metafictional grandfather of cinema in 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Last year, he was the subject of Rebecca Miller’s excellent five-part documentary Mr. Scorsese. These milestones deal in iconography, reinforcing our image of the bushy-browed, fast-talking cineaste who may be film’s greatest booster. Yet Binelli writes that the man behind the persona has proved elusive and warrants unpacking.

Scorsese grew up in Manhattan’s Little Italy, where outsize characters and Old World customs shaped his outlook. A black-bordered letter from home meant a death in the family; drinking plain, cold water supposedly eliminated the need for doctors. Scorsese’s first-generation parents drilled into him the need to be careful about the Mafia figures he saw every day: Don’t use names; see nothing and say nothing. With characters like Jimmy Balls and Paulie Lefty roaming the streets, it paid to be wary. Observation came naturally to Scorsese, a diminutive asthmatic who nevertheless dressed like the big shots and absorbed their patter. A brief stint in the seminary ended when he grew into his hormones.

Binelli follows Scorsese through film school at NYU and then into early projects, including a short-lived assistant director position for the 1970 concert movie Woodstock. He got fired. “You could picture the fusillade of movie references, musical opinions, and passionately argued editorial choices, delivered at the speed of Marty at Sicilian-supper-table volume to his stoned colleagues,” Binelli writes. The experience prefigured Scorsese’s uncanny ability to edit film to rock music and helped him hone his craft. Marginal notes that he wrote in another director’s script in the late ’60s were full of brisk confidence. “Maybe start on Fat Man’s stomach fast zoom out and up to his face as he turns quickly to stare at camera,” went one.

After breaking through in Mean Streets (1973), Scorsese went on to win critical acclaim and success with Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980)—a gritty trio built on a remarkable partnership with the young actor Robert De Niro. Other pictures flopped, like New York, New York (1977) and The King of Comedy (1982). During these years, Scorsese consumed heroic amounts of cocaine, quaaludes, speed, and other drugs, as screenwriter Mardik Martin’s previously untapped recordings and transcripts from those years show. A snapshot of the artist at work, these materials display Scorsese conceiving, in real time, scenes with blocking, camera moves, and narrative beats fully formed, demonstrating an extraordinary cinematic facility.

He hit rock bottom and nearly died from drugs and exhaustion in 1978. Binelli complicates the linear redemption narrative presented in Mr. Scorsese that has De Niro delivering harsh wisdom and offering Raging Bull as a fresh path forward. In truth, Scorsese’s addictions and anxiety persisted for years. He continued to alternate studio hits such as The Color of Money (1986) with daring flops like The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), remaining an underdog and something of a Hollywood outsider.

All led up to Goodfellas, a film of huge audacity and technical brio, from its camerawork to its editing, narrative structure, and production design. It moves at the speed of sound: Needle drops come thick and fast, featuring Tony Bennett, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Muddy Waters, and many others. The gangsters depicted in the movie lived in the world where Scorsese grew up; he glamorized their lifestyle and then horrifyingly upended it as the party decisively stopped. Goodfellas, Binelli writes, “synthesized everything he’d done before into a style he’d revisit, refine, and intensify in the years to come.”

Yet there the book ends, suddenly and disappointingly. Just a Shot Away covers the first half of Scorsese’s life and work but crams a huge and worthy filmography—Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, and many others—not to mention decades of living into a nine-page epilogue. This is a mistake. Just a Shot Away should be the first of a two-volume project, with Binelli well positioned to undertake the back half. There is plenty to choose from in the Rolling Stones catalog for the follow-up title. Sadly, for the reader, it may be “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

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“Poor devil,” you might think. Murder, you feel, like almost all human action, is nuanced. Yet its protagonist, Jessica Fletcher, is never in doubt about the act, no matter how much sympathy she might feel for the perpetrator. She lives in the small Maine town of Cabot Cove, and her morals are as solid and unpretentious as the bedrock she stands on.

The series ran for 12 seasons. At roughly 22 episodes a season, you get a lot of murders happening in Jessica’s vicinity. Sometimes the deed is done in Cabot Cove, her own back yard, so to speak, and she naturally enough becomes involved in solving it. For the murders that occur in the larger world, where she, a renowned mystery writer, sometimes finds herself, either a police friend or someone close to either the victim or the suspect will ask for Jessica’s help. Looking perplexed and reluctant, she agrees to do what she can. In the the nine seasons I’ve watched thus far, Jessica has never failed to solve the mystery. She is not only sympathetic and morally certain, she’s astute.

Besides highlighting Jessica’s unfailing sense and her sensibility, these episodes have something else in common—a moment when something that Jessica sees or hears, or even something she says herself, triggers a new understanding and reveals the answer. More than the discovery of a missing piece of the puzzle, the crucial insight gives new meaning to a piece she already holds. “I think I know who the murderer is,” she says, in surprise and then relief. It’s an oft-repeated moment, like the virtually compulsory one in which Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, when asked how she solved the mystery, might murmur that the murderer reminded her of someone she once knew.

People are people—now, 10 years ago, or at any time. We are not individuals; we are copies.

Now that Jessica knows who the murderer is, she focuses on proving it. With almost no word of explanation to whoever is with her, she hurries off to prepare the grand finale and the murderer’s self-reveal. When finally she has pulled it off, she shakes her head—not quite in sadness but in rueful acceptance of foibles and ineptitudes and the people embodying them. And yes—there is also a bit of humor, a flash of fun when the work is over. It is as if the terrible chapter just concluded of someone’s life were in a book such as she might write—fiction. Challenging, fun, exciting, with a lesson on caprice or greed thrown in.

I began watching the show during the pandemic, after seeing it on a list of available programs and recalling that my Tennessee grandmother had watched it with her friend Donna back when it first appeared in the mid-‘80s. My grandmother? Murder? I corresponded with my grandmother during those years, and I made several visits, but all I really knew was that my uncle had left home to get married and that my grandmother, widowed and from Upstate New York, and her friend, a spinster from the Bible Belt, watched this show about a childless widow from New England solving crimes up and down the country. What would the show be like? I watched an episode. Then another. I was hooked. And then distressed when it was removed from the platform where I watched it.

Last year, to my surprise, it returned.

I am older, Jessica keeps getting older, and Donna, who was around 50 when the show aired, 25 years younger than my grandmother—making her my father’s contemporary in age—would surely have gotten much older as well. Time passes for all of us, but it doesn’t pass at the same speed. For some, time is a breeze, and you push into it and wrap your sweater tighter. For others, it’s a whirlwind that twists your hair and dries your skin and knocks out your balance. When my grandmother died in 2008, my father was still strong, robust, completely capable. Ten years later, in the clutch of Parkinson’s, he no longer was. It was during the period of his steady decline that I watched Jessica solve the mysteries. I drank English tea. My dad read Maigret mysteries, perhaps with a glass of burgundy. Those mysteries were a different kettle of fish, with the murder on a few occasions committed even before the story opens. I don’t remember ever mentioning to him that I was watching the same show my grandmother had watched.

I did tell a friend. She encouraged me to write to Donna, and using the very few details I remembered, she helped me track Donna down. Soon I had an address, and to send off a letter was all I needed to do to give Donna a warm greeting from the past. “Funny,” I would write, “how connections last and how much I think of you.”

I never took that step. Seven years have passed. My father has died. I imagine Donna has, too. My friend is out of the picture as well—not the big picture of life but my little corner of it. These disappearing acts that keep occurring—they used to be events. Deaths and broken hearts in my youth were breath-stopping, startling developments in the story of my life. I knew they were inevitable, and yet I thought they might be side-stepped. Now is different. Leavings—they occur as frequently and easily as somebody rising from the chair and wandering away from the dinner table. You feel a waft of air, as if from a door left ajar, and someone you know has drifted away. People do this all the time—they move on while you are deep in conversation with someone across the table. Or just when you are distracted by new arrivals who squeeze in. Where will we all fit? You make room. Everyone does.

The room grows crowded, though here and there a table opens up. It seems someone shifting to provide a space has shifted right out of the scene, out of the room, out of life. It’s that easy, this disappearing act, and it requires no great drama—no announcement and no drum roll. No trick or magic in the leaving.

In “Just Beyond the Moon,” a song from 1967, the narrator tells the story of his parents, married for 50 years. When his father died, everyone wondered why the mother didn’t cry. Whenever the family asked her, she’d just shake her head and go outside and stare at the moon. But on her deathbed, she finally answered. Her husband, when he was dying, had reminded her of their promise to each other to never leave. He was asking her now not to leave. He said, “I’ll walk just beyond the moon, then I’ll stop and wait for you.”

Better to wait out there, with a good view and a fresh breeze, than just beside the table over close to the door, where the occupants would note the chill from beyond. They are not yet accustomed to that chill air, and might be uncomfortable as they hunched a little closer to each other at the table.

The post Just Beyond the Door appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

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She exercises great caution and care when sourcing the insects for her installations. “When at all possible, I used farmed insects,” she says. The insects “have been accumulated over a period of nearly 20 years now, and they’re reused from exhibition to exhibition.” If a piece breaks, Angus repairs it, then places it well out of viewers’ reach when she next displays it. As she planned out the Great Plains Art Museum exhibition, she thought about how to turn Victorian-era taxidermy—something she calls “horrifying” and “arrogant,” demonstrating how “people probably weren’t aware that one day these large mammals would be fighting for their lives”—on its head. What if the animals, instead of being consumed, were invited to a dinner party together? “Predator and prey would sit side by side,” she says, along with insects who not only act as pollinators but are essential links in the food chain for other creatures. The whooping crane, for example, migrates through the Great Plains region, feasting on insects and crabs, but has stayed on the endangered species list for 56 years due to over-hunting and environmental degradation. “When we see fewer birds, fewer reptiles, is it because there are fewer insects?” she asks. And if so, “why are there fewer insects? Loss of habitat, climate change, pesticides. So let’s create this empathy. Let’s educate people about pollinators. We have to stay hopeful. If we don’t have hope, we don’t have anything.”

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The carpet was the largest ever manufactured: It could cover the 440-meter length of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie. Because this is the Met, and the rich now like to pretend to feel ambivalence about their wealth, the text accompanying the presentation of “A King’s Carpet” (on view through March 5, 2028) states that it was most likely made by children employed for their small, nimble hands. I mean, so was the polyester shirt of the woman standing next to me, probably.

It’s true that the knotted-pile wool textile was made by orphans from L’Hôpital de Bon Port, though this sounds worse than perhaps it was. Starting from the age of 10, children would begin an apprenticeship lasting six years, and several different factories had arrangements with orphanages. After that, they would either graduate as journeymen or register with the maîtrise—the mark of mastery that allowed them to start their own businesses. It was essentially free vocational training at a time when guilds were the only path to job security and financial stability in many fields.

France’s textile industry was originally established under Henri IV (who reigned from 1589 to 1510) to compete with Ottoman and Persian manufacturers. The royals had expensive taste in textiles, but with so much French treasure being sent east to pay for such goods, they thought it would be wiser to create a local industry from the ground up. According to Pierre Dupont’s Treatise on the Manufacture of Turkish Carpets (1632), before French artisans could compete, they first had to learn how to replicate the knotting techniques of their Eastern rivals. That plush texture required a density in the knots that the French had to learn through corporate espionage. Dupont traveled abroad to spy on Turkish weavers, then brought back carpets for his technicians to take apart row by row, which helped them redesign more heavy-duty looms that could support the weight.

And though the first French carpets replicated Eastern designs as well as their knots, soon the looms were being used to produce designs more recognizably French: fleur-de-lis, royal iconography, floral designs, and mythological figures. The carpet at the Met is a mess of blues and golds, bursting with flowers and a nude Venus with Cupid and curlicues and whatever else its creators could think of. It has that showy nature of the era—“Hey look at what our 12-year-olds can do!”

Because the King moved the royal court from the Louvre to Versailles in 1682, and the carpet had been custom-made to fit a room that no longer hosted official functions, by the time it was completed, the carpet wasn’t put to use. It was cut up into panels and redistributed as gifts, or else resold. One of the rugs at the Met was sent to Spain by a French ambassador, stored in a convent during the Spanish Civil War, then bought by one of the wealthy Americans who went shopping for European goods in the aftermath of World War II. It has survived revolutions and wars, transatlantic shipping, and now an unstable art market to find its way to the Met.

The carpet is housed in one of the reliably quiet parts of the museum, the furnishings and housewares department. One of the pieces is laid out for repair work, and you can watch weavers patch up damaged areas. It’s surrounded by the Met’s permanent collection of decadent ceramics, silverware, glassworks, and other decorative objects created between the 15th and 20th centuries, all originally meant to be lived around, with, and through, to be touched and handled and used, but now sitting a little sadly behind glass. Too delicate to be touched, but also not interesting enough to draw crowds.

But then who would want to live through these objects today? Our ruling class is hostile to the decorative and the frivolous, the millennials all live in gray boxes with gray floors and gray walls and “neutral” (gray) clothing, our tech overlords rarely bother to wear more than poorly fitting T-shirts and fleece vests. Even the RETVRN guys who bemoan the ugliness of contemporary culture and yearn for Gothic cathedrals, French interiors, and realism in art are not exactly signing up to learn masonry or glassblowing.

So what about our current White House? Donald Trump’s taste has often been described as “rococo,” but by that most people just mean a cluttered, fussy style. There’s gold on everything. From the gilding of Oval Office knickknacks and the spray painting of plastic wall adornments that may or may not be from Home Depot, the president has not so much redesigned his residence as simply added a lot of stuff that lacks aesthetic coherence.

Besides, real rococo design showed off actual skills. Look at how delicate we can make this, look at how elaborate. How fine the stitching, how thin the glass, how detailed the gold work. The Savonnerie manufactory was for a time required to make carpets only for the crown, thus rendering both its work and the monarchy more valuable, since you had to trade favors with the king to access those beautiful, sumptuous carpets. Their quality was a tribute to the nation of France, which is why they had to be the best in the world.

The Trump Aesthetic is more about what he can make people do without being questioned or stopped. Consider the attempted refurbishment of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. Or the spray paint-like gilding on the monuments near the Lincoln Memorial. Or the proposed Triumphal Arch.

The message is not, Look at how good this looks. It’s Look at all that I am able to make someone do.

For all the big talk Donald Trump made during his campaign about the return of manufacturing to the United States, none of his policies, including the tariffs, has done anything to nurture a healthy ecosystem for manufacturers and craftspeople.

The restoration of American Made isn’t only about investment and training. It’s also about reputation. A New York Times profile of Jacob Long’s American Woolen Company, which recently opened a textile factory in Connecticut with which to make textiles, reveals one surprising obstacle to finding clients: the poor reputation that the United States has for quality goods. Luxury fabrics come from Italy. The United States produces … well, not that much at all.

Long had bought the plant from Loro Piana, the Milanese luxury textile and clothing brand. But none of its client base transferred to American Woolen. “Everyone told us they were buying from us,” Long told The New York Times. “Nobody did.” Soon, the factory learned to pivot to more industrial fabrics and American clientele. It currently has a contract with the U.S. military.

Times of artistic and aesthetic flourishing, where craftspeople are employed and skills are in demand, isn’t just a matter of opening a factory or starting an arts school. It’s a whole system that requires delicate maintenance and balance, with government support and public investment. Two recent books, Christina J. Faraday’s The Story of Tudor Art and Ulinka Rublack’s Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World, give holistic perspectives on the eras they discuss, and what’s missing from ours.

The Tudor period lives on for us in the works of artists like Hans Holbein, a German immigrant from Augsburg who moved to England in his late 20s. Here I am thinking sumptuous again at the National Gallery in London (which holds four of his paintings), where I want to reach through the surface of The Ambassadors to stroke gently the fur lining of the gentleman’s coat. Or touch the springy curl of the subject’s hair in Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus.

That Holbein not only found work but also fame in England comes mostly from the Tudors’ desire to present the country (and thus themselves) in a certain light on the international stage. They wanted to attract the skilled craftspeople— painters, embroiderers, builders, metalworkers, goldsmiths—who gained such fame and fortune on the continent and have them work for England. It got to a point that English craftspeople rioted, arguing that the government should be investing in local talent, rather than importing goods and workers from abroad. But buying a glassmaker from another country’s supply is easier than building an entire industry from the ground up, in the hopes that remarkable talent will emerge.

Faraday makes clear in her history that the purchase and display of expensive handicrafts and decorative objects were about flaunting not only wealth but also power. You buy armor and goldwork from Germany because they are the best, and the same for French tableware, Flemish textiles and glass, Italian armor. That the Tudors could tempt the people who made those things to leave their homes and set up shop in England showed another level of power.

The Tudors were  successful in that the creations of their time still bring in visitors. I had to fight my way through a crowd to get close to the Holbeins, after negotiating another obstacle: America’s National Football League, in conjunction with a game being played eight miles away in Tottenham, was holding an event that day outside the museum’s doors in Trafalgar Square. But it was not successful in the sense that none of the painters of the time whose works survive were English in the nativist sense.

By contrast, in Germany, new developments in printing created a whole new kind of art market, one that Albrecht Dürer was eager to take advantage of. Frankfurt was at this point the center of the art and print market. Its annual fair drew craftspeople and eager buyers from across the continent. In 1507, Dürer was engaged to create an altarpiece to be showcased in Frankfurt—this, at the time, was how an artist created demand. The elites would flock to see the work, then compete to hire the hottest artist in Western Europe to paint portraits, religious works, and other pieces to show off to rich friends.

Dürer’s patron was Jacob Heller, a man who had so much money, Rublack writes, that his name lent itself to currency: “Around 1500, one gulden equaled two hundred Pfennig and four hundred Heller.” Heller had so much money that he hired men to go on pilgrimages for him, to wear his shoes and trace the holy routes of early Renaissance Italy, stopping at each site to pray for his family’s souls.

The arrangement between Dürer and Heller was standard for the time, but the relationship quickly grew contentious. Rublack presents correspondence that reveals Dürer’s arrogance and Heller’s pompous indignance that seem to epitomize the stereotypes of artist and rich patron. Heller was obsessed with making sure the altarpiece conveyed his financial status. “To everyone looking at the altar,” Rublack writes, the quality of the materials “would reveal the value of the commission and thus Heller’s place in society. Medieval contracts often set out in detail what qualities of gold leaf a painter was to use.” But Heller balked whenever Dürer asked for more money or explained what was taking so long. Heller seemed to view the money paid to the artist solely as a means of communicating his status, and he was frustrated that Dürer had his own intentions with the project other than announcing his patron’s piety and might.

The altarpiece was delivered to Frankfurt’s Dominican church in 1509, but the experience soured Dürer on similar projects for the future. He turned away from the altarpieces that still occupied his peers and turned his attention instead to the growing market for prints and engravings. These would be sold more cheaply but—and this seemed important—he would not be expected to please one specific gentleman. His audience would now be the public, and his eccentric and accomplished works are still instantly recognizable, from the detailed plate of a grumpy rhinoceros to the chubby baby of Melancholia.

Dürer had a taste for luxury, and his business decisions were at least in part influenced by his desire for market purchasing power. Rublack expands her focus to the establishment of art commerce in Dürer’s time. Her book is a fascinating look at both elite tastes and how regions met demands through the cultivation of artistic industries.

As for the completed altarpiece, it took a twisted road through the world, much like King Louis’s sumptuous carpets. Only a few years after its completion, Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria removed it from the church in Frankfurt to his private gallery. Rublack traces the routes of the other goods and materials that joined Maximilian’s collection, from tropical plants and animals to spices and silks. Gold works from the Aztecs were placed beside natural treasures such as Indonesian seashells and narwhale horns—rarity, exoticism, and the difficulty of procurement valued alongside craft.

There Dürer’s altarpiece remained, in the Duke’s collection, for more than a century until it was destroyed in a fire. All that remains is a copy made by Jobst Harrich, some preparatory drawings, and written descriptions by people who saw the original. It was Dürer’s “masterpiece,” but we have to take the word of those who saw it: Unlike the King’s carpet, its pieces won’t ever be put back together again.

The development of the printing industry may have enriched Dürer, but it started to nudge apart this divide between the fine and the decorative arts. Soon mass production would be everywhere, and it no longer took a 10-year-old orphan’s hands to create fine carpets or an expert gilder to make something look golden. It’s a theme that Walter Benjamin took up in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and it’s one that gains increasing relevance in the age of Temu and generative AI. As Rublack points out, without the difficulty in the creation and the exclusivity of the purchase to inspire awe in your peers and betters, having all this stuff is no longer quite such a flex.

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Eleanor Johnson is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Her books include Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968–1980) along with a number of scholarly monographs about the Middle Ages. 

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—Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”

In December 2016, when I lost my close friend the novelist Sydney Blair to a sudden and fatal attack of pancreatitis, my then-83-year-old father tried to console me. “December,” he said, “thins the herd.”

I don’t think my father meant his remark to come off as pat and callous as it sounded to me in my bereavement. The son, grandson, and great-grandson of farmers, he likely knew the phrase from the pragmatic agrarian practice of removing weaker animals from a flock in order to sustain a healthy population through months of relative cold and scarcity.

Despite the undeniable ruthlessness of my dad’s sentiment, it also had a ring of truth. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is in the months of December, January, and February when the greatest number of Americans die. The reasons for the statistics are no doubt myriad—colder temperatures bring winter diseases that can tax the body, particularly the respiratory system and the heart. Darker days mean fewer benefits from sunlight, and many people find the exigencies of the hibernal holidays stressful and even depressing. The elderly and folks with preexisting mental and physical conditions are especially susceptible to any of these factors, let alone a combination of them.

In December 2025, as I begin to write this essay, my father is a hale, hearty 92. He’ll turn 93, God willing, in the first month of the new year. But his advanced years, my own aging, the anniversary of my friend’s death, the ending year, and a host of other forces, personal and cultural, have me thinking more than I usually do about loss: about the people, things, skills, knowledge, emotions, and places from which, for one reason or another, whether by volition or force, we can and do become separated. “Sundered,” as Emily Dickinson puts it.

Things we can lose: count, patience, time, a train of thought, games, elections, one’s virginity, a bet, hair, teeth, hope, heart, control, one’s mind, face, keys, one’s moral compass, names, steam, power, friends, skills (how to use a slide rule, solve multiplication problems, sign a paper check, diagram a sentence, calculate the number of cups in a pint), loved ones, affection, weight, houses, cities, innocence, one’s temper, countries, passwords, muscle mass, faith …

In English, lose is an old word, coming from the Old English losian (“to perish, lose”) from los (“destruction”). It is akin to the Old English lēosan (“to lose”) and the Old Norse losa (“to loosen”). The word stems from the Proto-Germanic root *leus-, an extended form of the Proto-Indo-European *leu- (“to loosen, divide, cut apart”). Given the precarity and violence of life in fifth-century Britain, it is little wonder that loss joins other foundational Old English vocabulary essential to human life: fire, water, earth, sea, bread, father, mother, child, night, day, and love.

With four grandchildren ages five and under and a university teaching job that brings me into regular contact with students between the ages of 18 and 22, I am privileged to be able to observe how various kinds of gain and loss play out in two distinct populations.

The “grands” are new language users. As is the case with most children lucky enough to be healthy and cared for by responsible, loving adults, their lives are flush with more accrual than loss: sheer physical growth, expanding motor and linguistic and mental abilities, new experiences on a daily if not hourly basis. And though “lost” is not usually among their first words—that roster includes some forms of mama, dada, hi, bye, ball, uh-oh, no, up—children moving out of toddlerhood and into more advanced language do begin to sense that in the excitement of growing, they’ve also lost something. “Remember when I couldn’t drink from a cup?” “I used to fit in that car seat.” Caught up in the thrall of the propulsive moment and their expectation of what comes next, they may not yet have a nuanced sense of their lost younger selves. But what five-year-old hasn’t wanted sometimes to revert, to be held, cooed at, fed applesauce pouches, and rocked? “Pretend I’m a baby again!”

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning, though, that my grandchildren are native technology users. Even the youngest, at two and a half, is preternaturally adept at using a smartphone: She’ll record an iPhone video of herself singing a Dolly Parton song, place a FaceTime call, or search deftly and intuitively through photos and apps. Even though they may at times want to be dandled like a baby again and are perhaps missing out on some aspects of a more analog childhood, these preschoolers are often way ahead of their elders in embracing forward-facing technologies.

The Gen Z students I teach at my university are also excited, if a little terrified, by what lies ahead and about leaving childish things behind, continuing to grow, accumulating experiences of independence and freedom. But they’ve lived long enough to have a fairly developed sense of, if not necessarily a vocabulary for, the experience of loss. More than a few have lost important people—grandparents, parents, siblings, friends—to death, and some have lost cities and even countries through emigration and displacement. They’ve passed through the crucible of earlier adolescence, and several are living apart from family, often for the first time, while still being chiefly supported by others or loans. They can navigate the abstract realms of AI, social media, and virtual reality with the nimbleness of mountain goats, but many can’t write or read cursive, have trouble alphabetizing themselves in the lineup at the English Department graduation, and feel the absence of their devices, when forced to part from them, with a visceral anxiety. What have they lost and gained, these bright young people, in the world of AI and cryptocurrency? What faculties will atrophy? What abilities will they hone? Evolve? Devolve? How might the losses and consequences of the pandemic affect them? Or the fracturing of democracy? The slippage of the rule of law? What is behind them? Where are they going?

We lose a lot every day, often with little fanfare or awareness. Think of grievous ecological losses—coral reefs, for instance—brought about by our own mistakes and ignorance. Our personal biomes are continuously losing parts as well. According to one study, a typical adult loses between 600,000 and one million or more cells per hour. Although hair shedding is less profuse, humans normally lose 50 to 150 hairs per day as new hairs replace old ones. As we age, the body’s losses—skin tone, muscle mass, vision, hearing, flexibility, organ function—become more acute and more pronounced. Our bodies were made, it seems, to lose.

Something else we can lose: the content of our dreams. Such as the one I had in which I first conceived of this essay, ideas for my words burgeoning like sun-warmed apple blossoms, quoted poems flitting effortlessly among the sentences like winging starlings, profound insights glinting and winking from a towering, cloudless sky. From the depths of sleep, a voice, my own, intruded, telling me I should wake up, write this all down. Instead, I dipped back into my delicious oneiric fugue. And of course, when I woke, anything remotely approaching “brilliance” had vanished.

It is mid-January 2026 as I take up this little meditation on loss again. The winter holidays and first weeks of the new year have come and gone. Currently missing in the wake of countless all-family dinners and visits with the grandchildren are the following: a toy ice cream scoop, a little plastic tub of pretend corn cobs that usually lives in the dollhouse, one of the TV remotes, a small shepherd figurine from the tabletop crèche (interestingly, I found his tiny right arm holding a broken crook under the piano), and inexplicably, my wok’s removable handle. Not missed: the operatic head cold I had for two weeks at the close of December, now in the rearview.

I’ve informally polled several friends, colleagues, and family members about their first remembered losses. For most, it was when a milk tooth fell out, usually around the age of six. (Surely there are primal reasons many of us dream throughout our lifetimes about our teeth, as important as they are to speaking, eating.) More than 20 years ago, one of my talented undergraduates, Molly, wrote a poem about losing her first tooth while sledding in winter. Upon tonguing the little bloody socket that remained, she wrote, “I taste my death.” That line has haunted me over the decades. Again, our bodies: made for loss. Language: our ability to articulate what that might mean.

Others I polled remembered the first deaths they faced: pets, grandparents. One friend recalled how his family lost his younger sister, a toddler, in a museum. (Fortunately, she was quickly found, but everyone was understandably terrified.) But most of the people I spoke with had trouble recalling losses, or much of anything, really, before the age of three or even four. This is likely because of something psychologists call infantile amnesia. Although infants recognize their mothers’ faces and the significance of certain repeated activities, and most very young children can recall major autobiographical moments like the birth of a younger sibling or a traumatic event, most of our explicit early-childhood memories fade within a few years. As psychologist Vanessa LoBue writes,

Autobiographical memories often involve a sense of time passing, which isn’t something infants can think about until much later in life. Autobiographical memories also require a sense of self, or the ability to reflect on yourself and your own behavior as it relates to others.

This isn’t something that even begins to develop until about 18 months of age. In fact, before about 12 to 18 months, infants can’t even store information with language. Can you imagine trying to remember a story about yourself without the ability to use language? Finally, the part of our brains responsible for storing memories—what’s called the hippocampus—isn’t fully developed in the infancy period. Any one of these factors or combinations of them could account for why we have trouble creating or recalling autobiographical memories before the ages of 2 or 3.

Whatever the factor, it seems that language—the ability to understand and use it—is inextricably tied up with the human experience of loss.

I often wonder what was happening in my late mother’s mind as she sank, over a period of 10-plus years, into the tangled ambages of dementia. She lost the names of things and people. She lost any memory of who we were, those of us who cared for her, even her devoted husband, my father. She finally even forgot that she was not only an alcoholic with a fifth of Scotch hidden in the breadbox but also a chain smoker, though she’d occasionally hold a drinking straw to her lips and take a long, deep drag.

One of the last things she held onto was a lizard-brain vestige of her once-dazzling seamstress skills. Sitting in Buddha-like contentment, cross-legged on the couch, she’d snip up pieces of paper napkins and magazine pages with toenail scissors. Eventually, she forgot how to control her bladder, how to swallow. Yet as these faculties left her, she developed a seemingly impervious relationship to pain, blithely enduring a terrible case of shingles and failing to notice, let alone be bothered by, a fall that severely broke her wrist. A friend suggested that perhaps this was related to her loss of language. “Narrative,” he said, “seems necessary for suffering.” If lung cancer hadn’t finally taken her from us, I wonder how long she would have prevailed. The day before she died, she sat up in bed and spoke with me for an hour, delivering a word salad mash-up of references to her childhood in Detroit and her days as a special-education teacher. It was as though her brain was doing something akin to the “defragging” of prototypical PCs, shedding the data she no longer needed. As she spoke, in that burst of energy that often precedes a death, I told her that I loved her. Perhaps, in her own language, she was telling me this, too.

The first thing I remember losing was my way. Literally.

In 1960, kindergarten at my suburban New Jersey elementary school was a half-day affair that consisted of singing, snacks, play, story time, a nap, and pickup. On the first day of school, my mother had walked the several blocks with me and dropped me off at the entrance—a door beyond a strip of asphalt at one end of a long, low rectangular building—and promised to fetch me at noon. When dismissal time came, I must have taken a wrong turn because I exited the other end of the hallway, onto an empty strip of grass with a street of unfamiliar houses beyond. Where was my mother? Where was anyone? I burst into tears. It wasn’t long before a kind teacher noticed me through a window and walked me, shoulders shaking, to my mother, who I thought didn’t seem quite worried enough, and who in fact seemed a little amused by my dramatic, heaving sobs, which continued until we made it safely back to our house.

I’ve lost my way many times since then—in making decisions, in foreign cities, in my dreams. I’ve lost a few objects of treasured or sentimental value—a scrimshaw ring from a close friend, my grandmother’s irreparably shattered plum pudding bowl. But I’ve always feared the loss of beloveds more than the loss of things. When my firstborn was taking her first naps at home, I’d turn on the baby monitor and then lie down on the floor beside the bassinet, wide awake, afraid that someone or something might try to take her from me, she was so lovely and precious.

All of this is related, I recognize, to a fear of losing control—the control necessary to protect others. Control of my ability to know, to decide, to act. Control of my body, my faculties. Perhaps this is why, as I age, as my grown children themselves move into early middle age, and as my eldest grandchildren begin to lose teeth and ask the big questions—“Where will GoGo go when he dies?” they ask me about my father, their great-grandfather; and: “Where will you go, Nana?”—I find myself pondering loss and especially whether there might be a praxis, a poetics, to preparing for or accepting the experience. Perhaps there is something to Elizabeth Bishop’s admonishment, in “One Art,” to “lose something every day”—microdosing on loss, as it were, in honor of the flag of mortality under which we all live.

It is still January 2026. My father turned 93 a few days ago, but a spell of bad winter weather has kept us from celebrating in person. I celebrate him today by taking up this essay again as snow and sleet blur the window beside my desk, obscuring my familiar view, as though the bare branches revealing squirrels’ nests and the neighboring rooftops below never existed, like words erased from a page.

I am not wandering into new or original territory as I ponder the ways in which language—written language, specifically poetry—is always in negotiation with absence, with loss. Ancients such as Plato concerned themselves with the power of words to overexcite the imagination, fearing that poetry would lead to social disorder.

A poem is a mediation. It conjures up and stands in for what is not present: a woman much missed, a summer’s day, a Grecian urn, woods on a snowy evening. In his poem “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Robert Hass writes, “The word is elegy to what it signifies.” In Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Sharon Cameron writes that “language, then, is loss’s consequence. Loss gives birth to language in the strenuous aftermath of its own labor of grief at the price exacted by social existence. … [Loss is] also, independently, the first principle of the phenomenal world.” Cameron goes on to say that Adam, when in Eden—where everything was at his disposal and all his desires were known, no secrets hidden—may have “named the animals before the fall, but he had no real use for those names until after it,” when he is banished from the garden and forced into the mortal coil to till the soil, where his needs are no longer divinely anticipated and understood. The mortal coil, where embodied human life has consequence precisely because it ends, possesses meaning only if we can articulate our experience of it.

In “Of nearness to her sundered Things,” Dickinson wields words not just to conjure the real world but also to create a fantasy of the soul’s “special times,” in which people we have lost (“The Shapes we buried”) are permitted to return to us: “Untarnished by the Sepulchre, / The Mouldering Playmate comes – // In just the Jacket that he wore – / Long buttoned in the Mold.”

In this Dickinsonian fantasy, the living are not permitted to deny or overlook the time their now-returned lost ones have spent rotting in the grave. At least not at first. After the volta (“Divided – by a world”), the language in the penultimate stanza sheds its whiff of “mouldering” mortality and shifts into a decidedly lyric register:

The Grave yields back her Robberies –
The Years, our pilfered Things –
Bright Knots of Apparitions
Salute us, with their wings –

The poem itself “yields” here, imagistically, sonically, rhythmically; the mouldering, impersonal things and shapes are given multisyllabic, alliterative wings. The poem dilates to include time’s many pilferings, transforming them into volant, angelic, recompensatory apparitions, into words, an attendant flock of them so present and salutatory as to make the speaker feel, suddenly, as though it is the living who have been, through their bereavement, the lost ones, and the sundered things the ones still alive and waiting to be rejoined:

As we – it were – that perished –
Themself – had just remained till we rejoin them –
And ’twas they, and not ourself
That mourned –

In the special space that the language here makes possible, the speaker exists, for a moment, on both sides of the divided world, the realms of the living and the dead. The reader also feels this paradox, which is the paradox of poetry, in which experience is sacrificed in language that then makes absence present. Words, with their “bright Knots of Apparitions,” recreate worlds, real and imagined. “When Dimness – looks the Oddity – / Distinctness – easy – seems – .”

We lose. We’re sundered. We will die. December thins the herd. December becomes January. Years end. Years commence. (NB: also found in the past week, the missing toy ice cream scoop, in a shoebox, and the handle to my wok, in the downstairs bathroom soap dish.) And with each passing year that we’re privileged to live, we will, as Bishop says, lose farther (why do I read “father” here?), lose faster.

Poetry can’t change that, though its practitioners have asserted that it can outlive us—“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”—thus ensuring a kind of proxy immortality for the poet as well, in this case Shakespeare. But if one meaning of a “poetics” is a lens for understanding how poetry works and why, then I hope to continue my lifelong engagement with poetry to practice both losing and recouping at the same time.

In Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, when the precocious girl genius Thomasina mourns the lost library of Alexandria, her tutor, Septimus, replies,

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

As we live, we accrue, we gain, we shed, we lose, but we also continue to pick up what others have made and shed, and from these things we can, if we’re attentive, rediscover, reinvent, and renew, just as those who follow us will do the same. Loss is in poetry’s DNA as much as mine. I hope to keep learning from writing and reading it as long as I draw breath.

The post The Art of Letting Go appeared first on The American Scholar.

Out for a run one morning this past August, I stopped to ponder them again. Along with my usual fondness for the buildings and my notion that they could be awakened into a useful second life, I felt something new—that the buildings themselves, so long in place, so much a part of the landscape, were joining me in my question of who would save them and for what end. The early morning wind shook the weeds and the flaking paint flaked infinitesimally more, and the buildings on their foundations sank a fraction of a fraction, resigned to further waiting. It was summer, but soon the wind would be chillier, the snow would blow.

The complex was built by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs beginning in the late 1950s and expanded over the following years. The original yellow buildings served as dorms, kitchen, and dining facilities for the Navajo students from the nearby Alamo reservation who lodged there while attending the Magdalena public schools. Later additions included more dormitories, another kitchen, and living quarters for staff. The complex was called the Magdalena Dormitory, and it operated from the late 1950s into the 1980s, when a new school was built on the reservation and Navajo students could live at home.

In accounts of Indigenous boarding schools, I have read about the neglect, the abuse, the misappropriation of funds, the hardships, the deaths. Babies born to children. Small cadavers buried under a rosebush. Fear, despair, anger, shame. But these are just words, and reading them is not enough. We want pictures, images to confirm our worst fears, to haunt us.

But I saw no ghosts here. Perhaps any suffering was the common homesickness of children away from home, and perhaps the staff comforted unhappy children. Could I imagine such a scene if I saw the rooms? I would have looked in the windows, but they were boarded. The doors were locked. Eventually I came to one long building of garages and found that all six garage doors had been busted open by vandals. Across an open lane, the facing building of living quarters had had the doors knocked in. What a shame, I thought. But also, What an opportunity.

And so I ventured into one of these spaces, stepping gingerly across the threshold, pleased with the modest proportions of the rooms, how easily one could move between kitchen, living room, back hallway, bedroom, bathroom, and storage room. Built-in cabinets were more or less intact. In the short back hall, a light fixture hung from the ceiling, and inside the dangling bowl of the shade was a swallow’s nest.

I was wary of critters that might live there but saw no spiders or snakes. Even the nest appeared empty, now just a remnant from some previous time.

I went back outside, into the morning. What a huge job to rehabilitate this collection of buildings. Someone could do it, someone who knew whom to approach, where to find funding and collaborators, how to inspire interest in a big project. Meanwhile, what might I find out about these buildings?

It was 6:45 a.m. and the sun was rising over the mountains to the east. Golden light covered the decrepit yellow building at the south end of the area, the trees beside it, the long grasses growing up, the scrub beside the road, and the gravel, too, which shone almost white in that light. Glorious, I thought. I turned away to continue my run. Which is when I saw a small snake on the gravel, five feet in front of me. I stopped.

Long before I bent over to examine it, I realized it was dead. Poor snake, dead on this glorious late-August morning.

But it didn’t have to be dead in the middle of the lane. I used two skinny sticks to lift the snake from the dust and transport it the two feet to the edge of the road, where I curled it comfortably under a branch of a scrubby bush. On my way back from my run 50 minutes later, I slowed to a walk, searching for the small body. There it was, right where I had put it, under the sheltering twigs of the bush. It was not alone. Several ants were busy around it. I entertained the thought that maybe the ants, working over the snake, would inadvertently bring it to its senses, as the small Lilliputians had with Gulliver. But the snake did not stir.

At home I looked up this striking snake, about as big around as my pinkie, moss green on the back and bright orange with black specks on the underside turning red near the tail. It is the regal ring-necked snake, a small harmless snake with an important-sounding name. Now resting (as they say) across the street from a decrepit bunch of buildings with an important-sounding name: Bureau of Indian Affairs Magdalena Dormitory, full of asbestos and lead paint and slated for demolition by the village for future development of the land. It could not withstand many more winters. It does not need to.

The post Early Morning, Late August appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post “The Farmer’s Bride” by Charlotte Mew appeared first on The American Scholar.

The enigma of the war scare of 1983 is that in the end, nothing happened.

NATO completed Autumn Forge 83, a series of massive war games culminating in November with a command-post exercise called Able Archer 83, and then everyone packed up and went home. To the extent Ronald Reagan was worried about nuclear war, it was thanks to having screened the made-for-TV movie The Day After, which aired that month on ABC. Only later did Americans grow alarmed at how the exercise had appeared from Moscow’s perspective, thanks largely to Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer secretly working for British intelligence. Gordievsky later told the British that Able Archer 83—contrary to the sanguine attitude in Washington—had brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Leaders in Moscow and Washington sensed the danger in 1962, but in 1983 they had no such shared reality. This makes the war scare contentious and subject to endless litigation in book after book—Gordon Barrass’s The Great Cold War, Taylor Downing’s 1983, Marc Ambinder’s The Brink, Nate Jones’s documentary collection Able Archer 83, Simon Miles’s Engaging the Evil Empire—as well as journal articles, podcasts, and even a prestige television series called Deutschland 83.

Enter journalist Michael Dobbs, who covered the collapse of Communism from Moscow for The Washington Post. His 2008 book, One Minute to Midnight, gave the Cuban missile crisis its most readable hour-by-hour reconstruction. Now, with The Six Minute War, he applies the same craft to the events that culminated in the war scare of 1983: the Soviet shootdown of Korean civilian flight KAL 007, the false alarm indicating an American nuclear launch that Soviet air defense officer Stanislav Petrov did not believe, the deployment of U.S. nuclear-armed missiles in Europe, the collapse of nuclear negotiations in Geneva, and finally the Able Archer 83 exercise itself.

Any author ultimately must choose how to tell a story, and Dobbs tells this one in chronological order, as best he can piece it together. Some scholars are skeptical about how much the Soviets really feared that the United States was about to launch a nuclear attack in 1983, but Dobbs does not spend time quarreling with them, apart from a passing dismissal of those who say the crisis was a myth. Instead, like any good journalist, he attempts to reconstruct events as accurately as his sources allow, guided by his own judgment. He also—and this is no small thing, given how many times this story has been told—writes wonderfully. If you want a straight, engaging account of what many people believe happened in 1983, The Six Minute War is a fine choice.

The only caution is that no one experienced this story in order. If there was a war scare in 1983—and I suspect there was—it happened only on the Soviet side. At the time, the Americans dismissed Soviet expressions of concern as propaganda. Worries about nuclear war emerged only slowly as the intelligence community considered signals intercepts and other intelligence showing a wide array of unusual and alarming Soviet activity. The slow pace of declassification has further muddied things. Dobbs’s chronological narrative, written from an objective vantage point, imposes on events a degree of order and clarity unavailable to any of the participants.

He can hardly be faulted for trying to tell the story in a coherent way. The Rashomon-like character of the war scare, however, is precisely what should worry us about it. A U.S.–Soviet nuclear exchange would have been so devastating to both countries—to say nothing about the rest of the planet—that no sane leader would ever choose it except in the most dire circumstances. As Dobbs himself contends, the only plausible route to war is some sort of accidental escalation. But if everyone understood the stakes in Cuba in 1962, events in 1983 reflect a different, more unsettling route to Armageddon—a panic in which even sensible, cautious leaders struggle to think clearly. If the Soviet Union really placed a portion of its nuclear forces on alert, scrambled a mobile command train, and prepared for the worst without the United States noticing, the sequence of events hints at how crises might escalate in surprising ways. It is not clear which was more dangerous in 1983—Soviet paranoia or American obtuseness.

Such panics may be more common than we imagine. In the autumn of 2022, the Biden administration became convinced that Russia might be preparing to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Some administration officials reportedly placed those odds at 50–50. In the end, as in 1983, nothing happened, but no one can doubt that there was real fear in Washington in 2022. Some U.S. officials believed deterrence worked. Were the Russians really on the verge of using nuclear weapons? Or was it just a panic in D.C.? And if it was “just” a panic, does that make 2022 less frightening, or more?

Dobbs has written a fine book about 1983. It is also, like every other book about the war scare, as much about now as then. With the return of a sense of nuclear danger, Dobbs fears that we remain far more focused on a deliberate attack by Russia or China than on safeguarding against miscalculation, misperception, or simple bad luck. Underneath this worry is a sense that artificial intelligence systems will now make the situation harder to control, just as computerization in the 1970s led to a rash of false alarms, including the one in 1983. In the end, Dobbs gives the last word to Petrov, the Soviet officer who refused to believe the false alarm that might have turned the 1983 scare into a real war: “It’s absurd. We have learned nothing from the past.”

The post Unfriendly Exchange appeared first on The American Scholar.

What many people love about Colonial Williamsburg (CW) is also what critics have pilloried since its inception. Perhaps no public space in America is so clean (sanitized, according to detractors), no historic or replica buildings so pristine (again, sanitized), no home gardens so well manicured, and no visitors so restrained and civil. The Williamsburg aesthetic—perhaps even more than its equally celebrated historical programming—is a big part of the draw for the half million people who visit every year, for the 382,000 Colonial Williamsburg Facebook followers, and for the many YouTube historians who document their visits there.

Not far from CW’s main drag, Duke of Gloucester Street, stands a structure unknown to many visitors—unless they happen to be looking for ghosts. The George Wythe House, a small brick Georgian structure dating to around 1755, reposes virtually alone off the long Palace Green. If there were any building in CW where you might encounter the spirit of the Reverend Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin, this would be it.

Kelly Brennan, a historian in the research department of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF), has felt Goodwin’s presence here. She used to oversee the organization’s popular evening ghost tour program, which has a stop at the Wythe. In those days, Brennan was a doctoral student at the nearby College of William & Mary and would sometimes cram for exams in the Wythe’s downstairs parlor. “I could hear [Goodwin] walking around upstairs,” she wrote to me by email. “He must have come down the stairs, because I felt a presence in the doorway and the smell of pipe tobacco, as if he was checking in on my progress.” There have been instances, according to Brennan, when daytime visitors to the Wythe House encountered a “rude man” who was seen “staring out the window in a second-floor room. The visitors complained that the man wouldn’t turn around when they spoke to him.” The description of the figure was always consistent and “exactly matched photographs of Goodwin.”

That second-floor room was once Goodwin’s office. Staff and guests have also encountered his spectral presence behind the Wythe House, near a brick wall that abuts the Bruton Parish Church graveyard. This would make sense. Goodwin was twice rector of Bruton Parish. “The pipe tobacco,” Brennan wrote, “is Goodwin’s dead (pun intended) giveaway.” When Goodwin’s trusty briarwood pipe wasn’t clenched between his teeth, he used it to punctuate his thoughts, jabbing this sixth finger for rhetorical emphasis.

CW often refers to Goodwin as “The Father of the Restoration”—the project that involved the preservation or reconstruction of more than 300 buildings on 301 acres of Virginia’s former colonial capital. This appellation is no small honorific, considering that it was world-renowned philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. who footed a bill worth well over a billion of today’s dollars to create the world’s largest, perhaps most eminent living-history museum. But it was Goodwin—embodying P. T. Barnum’s knack for showmanship, John Adams’s pit-bull tenacity and razor-edged powers of persuasion, and a history major’s wide-eyed passion—who willed this place into being. He wasn’t a historian or an architect but an excitable, loquacious, know-it-all Episcopalian clergyman whose vision led to the creation of a place that revolutionized preservation, interpretation, and living history.

Beyond a small group of history professionals, however, Goodwin is virtually unknown, a footnote. Perhaps this, too, was inevitable.

William Archer Rutherfoord Goodwin landed in Williamsburg in 1903, when he was hired as rector of the Bruton Parish Church. Built in 1715, Bruton in its heyday attracted such luminous congregants as George Washington, George Wythe, John Marshall, Peyton Randolph, and Patrick Henry.

Soon after arriving at Bruton, Goodwin was thrust into his first preservation project. Parishioners wanted to restore the interior of the venerable church in advance of Jamestown’s forthcoming tercentenary in 1907—a celebration that would draw national and international attention. But there was another reason for undertaking the project. A formidable group of women parishioners (the future Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities) had already repaired the churchyard’s old gravestones, stabilized the foundation of the colonial capitol, and acquired the powder magazine (where the colony’s gunpowder and munitions stores were held) and the Publick Gaol—the first steps toward preserving Williamsburg’s historic structures. In Goodwin they found not only a willing collaborator but also a preservation acolyte who would ultimately manifest their deepest, most desperate wish: to restore the entire capital city to its 18th-century glory.

The problem was, many of these congregants had little if any money. So Goodwin solicited donations from northern benefactors, a controversial decision given the enmity many still harbored toward the North. The recalcitrant congregants were hardly pacified during a special farewell service Goodwin held in 1905 to mark the beginning of renovations. As Goodwin later recalled,

The old organ which had come down from Colonial days had undergone many local repairs. Parts of it had been tied together with wires and parts with shoelaces. … When the organist put her fingers upon the keyboard to play the opening hymn, the organ gave a long and horrible moan—and passed into eternal silence.

This was the beginning of horrors. A thunderstorm came up. A cat and dog took refuge under the Church, and began to dispute with each other the sole possession of this refuge from the storm. … Some of the conservatives hinted that it was all an omen of disaster and of divine disapproval.

Nevertheless, the work proceeded. Goodwin undertook the restoration with J. Stewart Barney, a respected New York City society architect who, apparently, took on the job pro bono. Certain mistakes were made, however: Goodwin and Barney chose to install mahogany pews in the sanctuary—an extravagant touch but a historical anachronism. In 1938, when Goodwin worked on a second, more complete restoration of the church, with the architectural firm of Perry, Shaw & Hepburn—which embraced painstaking research before undertaking any restoration work—he would wince at his rookie error.

Goodwin’s partnership with Barney primed him in many tangible and intangible ways for the mammoth undertaking that lay ahead. Perhaps nothing, however, aroused his passion more and brought him closer, literally, to the colonial Virginia past than what he discovered beneath the church floor: coffins, some of them bearing initials and dates. One example: “W.C. 1720.” (This method of interior burials was a common practice in Anglican and Episcopal churches until the mid-19th century.) Figuring out who was buried in the coffins became a puzzle that Goodwin only solved when he found a parish register dating to 1662. He and his colleagues “were able, by comparing the initials and dates, with the death record of the past, to identify these graves,” he later wrote.

Given the obsession Goodwin would develop with Williamsburg’s ghosts, these tangible, corporeal connections to the past must have been defining. Goodwin was living out the dreams of his 16-year-old self, who used money earned from working a cornfield to buy his first book, which he kept for the rest of his days: Buried Cities Recovered.

Eight years ago, I spent time at Porches, a writing retreat in Norwood, Virginia, a hamlet clinging to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Early each misty morning, I’d walk along undulating roads sparsely populated with houses, in sight of the Union Hill plantation, where Philip Sheridan’s cavalry camped before expediting Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Norwood is one of those few remaining places where the hourglass has stopped, where it’s possible to experience that heady, dizzying dissonance of straddling the present and the distant past.

One day, near the old Christ Episcopal Church on Route 626, I came across a historical marker that read:

Boyhood Home of
Rev. Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin (1869–1939)
“Father of Colonial Williamsburg”

By that point, I had been to CW 15 or 16 times, yet this was the first I had heard about Goodwin. Touching the marker, I felt a palpable charge. This historical plaque was a conduit of sorts.

Back at Porches, I asked the homeowner and retreat director, Trudy Hale, whether she knew of any buildings tied to Goodwin. As it turned out, Porches (officially known as the Cabell/Ribble/Heath House) had been home to Goodwin’s aunt, uncle, and first cousins, the Ribbles. Goodwin’s childhood home? A few yards up the hill. Hale had a typed copy of a document called “Remembrances of Norwood,” written by the Reverend Dr. George “Wallace” Ribble Sr., Goodwin’s first cousin and playmate.

Wallace’s father was the local country doctor. His Uncle Frank—Frank Goodwin—lived nearby with his wife, Letitia, and their young children, including “Will” or “Willie,” after arriving from Richmond in 1869. Despite Letitia’s family wealth, which allowed the couple to buy a small farm, the Goodwins lived in poverty. For one thing, Frank was often sickly and didn’t seem to have an affinity for farming. Neither did Letitia, who once asked her husband “which of their cows gave buttermilk.” Ribble recalled how once, when he, his siblings, and his cousins were at the Goodwins’ home, they were playing a game and pilfered a plate of biscuits. When Letitia found the empty plate, she became unusually upset; the biscuits were to have been the entirety of the family’s dinner.

Despite those circumstances, the Goodwins lived in a comfortable and attractive house called Altavista, visible from the back yard of Porches and in a state of ruin when I saw it. Opposite Altavista, across the dirt road, stood another abandoned building, one that once housed the Matthews family’s shoe shop in one end and the local schoolhouse in the other. But because Ribble and his siblings and cousins were not from “F.F.V.’s [First Families of Virginia, the aristocratic plantation families that settled the colony in the early 17th century], and were not of otherwise gentle breeding,” they weren’t allowed to play with the Matthews boys. As Ribble observed, “Who your parents were, often cut more ice than what you were.”

The genteel part of Goodwin’s poverty did little to improve his situation when he attended Roanoke College, where he roomed with another cousin (also named Frank). Most students ate in the dining hall, but the cousins couldn’t afford that luxury and were kicked out of their dormitory for the infraction of cooking their meals on a small tin stove that they kept hidden beneath a bed. Homeless, they squatted in a vacated college office and tapped a fire hydrant late at night for water.

For a boy who loved language and came from hardscrabble origins, the ministry was a respectable pursuit. Though Goodwin came of age professionally during the Gilded Age, his early, nagging relationship with deprivation never pushed him to seek wealth above all else, setting him apart from the rags-to-riches robber barons of that time. That didn’t mean, however, that the priest lacked the relentless drive to pursue money—he just went after wealthy men to part with theirs. This was how he raised the funds needed to restore Bruton Parish, and he would continue along this path when he took the job of rector at the well-heeled St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Rochester, New York, moving his family there in 1909.

Goodwin flourished in Rochester, honing his fundraising chops amid a wealthy congregation. For the only time in his life, he took up a sport, joining congregants for rounds of golf at their exclusive country club. His force of persuasion and his passion were palpable; whether he was soliciting a donation or preaching a sermon, he seemed to grab you by the lapels and lean in, so as to deliver his pitch with maximum force. The congregation embraced him and paid him the kind of salary he couldn’t have dreamed of back in Tidewater Virginia. At last, he was financially buoyant. When his wife, Evelyn, died after a brief illness, a distraught Goodwin followed the tack of many people with the financial means and sent his three children to boarding school.

Three years after Evelyn’s death, he married Ethel Howard, a Virginian with an FFV pedigree, and they had three children. By 1922, Goodwin had become mentally exhausted. It’s probable that mental health struggles, homesickness, and a wife who wanted to raise her children back home contributed to his next move. To Goodwin’s relief, William & Mary President J. A. C. Chandler wooed him to join the school’s biblical studies and religion department—and, especially, to put his connections and fundraising savvy to use. Chandler had taken over the college at a time when it was finally growing after years of stagnation. He wanted to restore both the original 18th-century buildings and a late-17th-century showcase structure designed by Christopher Wren, as well as to expand the campus by purchasing nearby historic properties and converting them into dormitories and classrooms. For his efforts, Goodwin was promised a commission of five cents on every dollar raised. He also went back to Bruton Parish for a second stint as rector.

Goodwin returned to a Williamsburg that was unrecognizable to him. Less than 15 years earlier, ox carts and horses had churned the dirt road into deep mud, and 18th-century clapboard houses slowly languished and listed; residents had their James River oysters brought to them in large pails. Now, Goodwin wrote, that “dusty carriage road” had morphed into a “highway … lining a busy strip of concrete,” and “the city which had seemed to meditate for so long upon the accomplishments of another age was now engaged in a futile chase to catch up with a rushing world.” During World War I, military bases had sprung up in neighboring cities and DuPont had built a munitions plant nearby. The resulting population explosion meant a lot more housing with a fabricated, modern aesthetic. The length of Duke of Gloucester Street was now lined with gas stations and garages, constructed from corrugated iron and concrete. Then there were the Model T Fords clogging the road.

Goodwin wasn’t the only disenchanted observer. When William G. Perry—a Boston-based architect who would eventually become instrumental in CW’s restoration work—first visited in 1926, he found a country hamlet “straddling a concrete highway with a median strip punctuated by utility poles,” as reported in The Virginian-Pilot. Even though its central mercantile square had “become a midden of shacks and shanties, Williamsburg retained somehow a charming quality with many of its houses and buildings quietly reminding one of a notable past.”

Fueled by anguish, which was surely stoked by the local preservationist-activists, Goodwin began researching and creating a case for funding the restoration of extant historic buildings. He understood Williamsburg’s singularity. Other cities with well-known colonial ties, such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, had lost most of their original buildings. Yes, Williamsburg had undergone dramatic (even intolerable) changes. But they were largely cosmetic: Its historic core was still considerably intact.

In a fundraising proposal, he wrote that “the best way to look at history is through windows. There are windows here … which might be restored, through which unparalleled vistas open into the nation’s past.”

In February 1924, Goodwin filled in for Chandler and attended a dinner hosted by the Phi Beta Kappa Society in New York. His goal was to solicit funds to build a memorial hall at William & Mary (where the Society had been birthed in 1776). John D. Rockefeller Jr. was in attendance, and, aware of the philanthropist’s work, Goodwin cornered him, asking whether he would sponsor the ambitious restoration project. Not surprisingly, the soft-spoken, reserved Rockefeller demurred. But Goodwin had piqued his curiosity.

Goodwin also approached Henry Ford’s son, Edsel, likely having heard that the Fords had financed the restoration of a historic Massachusetts inn. Despite Goodwin’s uncommon blend of romanticism and incisive common sense, his pitch included this regrettable attempt at a rhetorically persuasive flourish: “Unfortunately you and your father are at present the chief contributors to the destruction of [Williamsburg].” He elaborated further, fingering the new “concrete roads” that had brought garages and gas stations, decrying the fact that “most of the cars which stop at the garages and gas tanks are Ford Cars.” Like John Adams, Goodwin was sometimes his own worst enemy when he became righteous, blowing past all judicious restraint.

In the sanctioned lore of CW’s origin story, there is no “smoking gun” moment, so to speak, when Goodwin’s mission transitioned from his commitment to William & Mary to setting his sights on a citywide restoration. But throughout 1924, 1925, and the early months of 1926, Goodwin continued soliciting potential donors and, most important, continued pitching Rockefeller, describing his dream of a large-scale restoration of the old city. Rockefeller appreciated the correspondence but remained noncommittal. If Goodwin despaired, he didn’t show it. “When things are hopeless,” he confided to Vernon Geddy, a local lawyer who would play important roles in the early stages of restoration, “is when I really begin to work.” One day, he walked into his office in the Wren Building and dictated a letter to his secretary, Elizabeth Hayes. Goodwin paced back and forth, puffing on his pipe with “the look of the pioneer in his eyes,” Hayes recalled.

Addressing Rockefeller, Goodwin argued that a restoration would give voice to the lives, struggles, courage, and ideals of the founding generation. A fully restored Williamsburg would become a “sacrament” to the nation, one that would refresh visitors’ understanding of America. “A living message should be given that will speak to the souls of pilgrims to this place,” he urged, veering into biblical territory.

During his second stint as rector at Bruton Parish, Goodwin often visited the aging members of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. Like Ichabod Crane, he sat before their winter hearths and listened to tales of local haunts. In a letter to his son-in-law, Barclay Farr, he wrote that the

older people of Williamsburg, many of whom lived in the Colonial houses, were largely responsible for the dream of the city restored. … They were constantly peopling the houses with fascinating ghosts.

… The ghosts of the past haunted the houses and walked the streets at night. … They grew as they were told on moonlit verandahs or on winter nights by those gathered around a blazing fire whose flickering light illuminated the faces of ancestral portraits which still graced the Colonial walls. …

Letters were found which had lain long hidden in secret drawers or in hide-covered trunks.

… The Palace ballroom was again peopled by the “lovely and the beautiful. …” The music of the minuet and the fragrance of the mint again filled the “Hall of Apollo” in the Raleigh Tavern …

CWF chroniclers point out that Goodwin was speaking metaphorically, referring to the spirit of these spirits. When someone spouts his deeper beliefs enough times, however, no matter how much he downplays their fangs or funhouse tone, the gap between the figurative and the literal narrows. Goodwin grew to believe that these ghosts were “benign nation-builders” whose ectoplasmic remnants had important lessons to teach 20th-century Americans, as he once wrote to a 10-year-old Norfolk girl named Joan Scott. This was why, he told her, you could “shut your eyes and see the gladsome ghosts who once made these places their home. You can learn to call them back.” Indeed, he wrote, “You can train yourself to hear what they have to say.”

The belief that these spirits existed, that they were conduits to an era that held so many answers, so much inspiration, fueled Goodwin through his own dark days of uncertainty.

In March 1926, Rockefeller—along with his wife, Abby, and four of their children—stopped by Williamsburg for a tour of the old city. Goodwin was charmed by Rockefeller’s youngest son, David, who was 11, and later, Goodwin often sent his regards to the boy, a thoughtful (if not savvy) gesture that helped strengthen the bond between fundraiser and potential donor. Rockefeller even began signing confidential telegrams to Goodwin with the name “David’s Father.”

That November, Rockefeller attended the dedication of the Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall at William & Mary. During the visit, Goodwin took Rockefeller on another tour of the old city, this time ending at Bassett Hall, a small 18th-century estate that had been owned by, among others, Burwell Bassett, a nephew of Martha Washington. Stopping at an ancient white oak behind the house, Rockefeller said that he needed some time alone to consider Goodwin’s proposal and reputedly sat in silence, letting the “past speak” to him. As Goodwin recalled, Rockefeller concluded that “some means might be found for saving the Colonial buildings which remained and restoring those that had vanished.”

This wasn’t a commitment to purchase any buildings, however. He agreed to fund, more immediately, a preliminary report that would provide an inventory of the city’s existing historic structures. He also requested schematic drawings and a plan for how Duke of Gloucester Street would look with its modern buildings relocated to a commercial area. He was already envisioning a Williamsburg with a commercial base intact. All in all, it was a toe-dipping offer, not a full plunge into the deep end.

Before they left, Rockefeller turned to Goodwin and asked, “If I come back some day, can we bring our lunch and eat it under the oak tree?” It was a tender, defining moment, one that would become a part of local and CWF lore. The story is still fondly thought of as the beginning of the two men’s great partnership and, more urgently, the start of Colonial Williamsburg’s origin story.

Goodwin hired William G. Perry—a partner at the Boston-based architectural firm of Perry, Shaw & Hepburn—to help with parts of the report, including the schematic drawings. But Goodwin didn’t want to attract unwanted attention and questions. Neither did he wish to reveal who was bankrolling the project or raise the ire of homeowners who wouldn’t appreciate unsolicited measurements of their houses. To ensure the needed secrecy, Goodwin and Perry snuck out late at night to measure houses while the residents inside slept.

Goodwin tasked Elizabeth Hayes with preparing the report eventually titled “Historical Notes and Tentative Suggestions Relative to the Restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, Capital of Colonial Virginia.” Later known simply as the Hayes Notebook, it is a rare glimpse into a Williamsburg that was commercial, decaying, and in the throes of rapid change. Rockefeller found Hayes’s work invaluable, of “utmost helpfulness and importance in the consideration of the problems which are under review.” In December 1926, Goodwin notified Rockefeller that a local 18th-century property, a “brick colonial residence” called the Ludwell-Paradise House, was going up for sale at the “exceedingly low” price of $8,000. Despite Rockefeller’s initial hesitation, the first building that would become part of Colonial Williamsburg was acquired.

The purchase was made with Rockefeller’s money but in Goodwin’s name. Rockefeller insisted that if he was going to undertake even a small-scale restoration, he would have to remain anonymous. If word got out that he was involved, real estate values would become artificially inflated. Rockefeller was also exceptionally guarded and thoughtful about his image at a time when most Gilded Age barons bulldozed their way through business dealings and had fixers swoop in to do damage control. His father had been one of the most notorious and cold-hearted of these magnates. John Jr. was different. He invested in the growing national parks system, established the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm, and funded affordable housing in Harlem as well as historically Black colleges such as Hampton. He would remain a silent partner in the acquisition of CW properties until 1928.

Amid all of this secrecy, the Rockefeller Foundation tapped a young attorney named Francis T. Christy to go down to Williamsburg in late 1926 or early 1927 and report on what was being purchased, for how much, and who held the titles. In keeping with the theme, not even Rockefeller’s staff knew about this. The only intel Christy received, as revealed in correspondence that appeared for the first time in 2021, was that Rockefeller had been “sending money to a minister in Williamsburg, Virginia, for the purpose of buying some houses. Four houses had already been bought, and Mr. Rockefeller was about to buy two more.” Christy was even instructed to stay at a hotel in Richmond, take a daily train to Williamsburg, and eat lunch in Goodwin’s office so that no locals would become suspicious of the interloper’s presence.

When Goodwin and Rockefeller met again, in late November 1927 at the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York, Goodwin made his formal presentation. His case for a comprehensive, citywide restoration was bolstered by a trusted Rockefeller adviser, Colonel Arthur Woods, who told his boss that a piecemeal restoration was a waste of time and money and urged an all-or-nothing approach. Soon after, Goodwin received a letter from Rockefeller:

Thank you for your beautiful letter written just before you left New York last Tuesday night. I too am happy to be associated with you in this profoundly interesting and significant project. In the months which have intervened since we first met, we have come to know each other and how each other’s minds work to an unusual degree, in spite of the fact that we have seen each other so seldom.

I have every confidence in your wisdom, your tact and your discretion. The loyal way in which you have observed your silent partner’s wish that he should be in very truth a silent and unknown partner has also increased my confidence in you. I am happy in the thought of being able to help you in realizing the dream which you have been dreaming for so many years.

As he wrote in a memo to an assistant, Rockefeller now had every intention to “carry out this enterprise completely and entirely.”

If it wasn’t odd enough that Goodwin, a financially middling priest, was suddenly buying up 18th-century houses, now a savvy New York lawyer, Christy, was taking over negotiations to acquire the original green spaces leading to the Governor’s Palace and behind the courthouse. Yet local leaders went along with these developments, perhaps sensing that this was their one chance to save the city and return it to its exalted glory. They didn’t even balk when Goodwin and three other local men posed as the unlikely founding agents of the newly created Colonial Williamsburg Holding Company and Colonial Williamsburg, Inc.

On June 12, 1928, more than 200 citizens (some estimates put the number as high as 400), as well as newspaper reporters from around the East Coast, flocked to Williamsburg’s Matthew Whaley High School auditorium for a city council meeting. Everyone knew that Goodwin would be revealing both the historic-area restoration plan and the identity of the mystery financier behind the project, and after these details were announced, the plan was passed almost unanimously, to applause, save five nays.

City leaders may have been happy, but not everyone was. Some local residents feared becoming “a butterfly pinned to a card in a glass cabinet”—a trapped relic for visitors to gawk at, according to the Encyclopedia Virginia. Other residents, both white and Black, were devastated when they were eventually forced to relocate to what they deemed to be inferior housing. This displacement resulted in increased segregation in the city. The Newport News Daily Press published a clever, if not epic, poem from one Jack Hundley, which lamented and lampooned the proposed changes and included this line conveying the sense of droll resignation: “My gawd, they’ve sold the town.”

The large-scale restoration commenced with the rebuilding of landmark structures on their original foundations, such as the Wren Building, the Capitol, the Raleigh Tavern (which would be the first reconstructed building in Colonial Williamsburg), and the Governor’s Palace. Perry also brought along an A-team of researchers to probe extant 18th-century foundations, period maps, manuscripts, and 19th- and early-20th-century photographs. The researchers traveled throughout the Mid-Atlantic, measuring, sketching, and documenting cornices, stair balusters, chimneys, door handles, and locks on 18th-century buildings, wanting to get every detail in their reproductions accurate.

One historian and researcher, Mary F. Goodwin (W. A. R. Goodwin’s sister), was picking through Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries in 1929 when she came across a copper plate with familiar etchings on it. The Bodleian Plate, as it became known, dates to c. 1740 and depicts the Governor’s Palace, the Capitol, and the Wren Building, as well as some native flora and fauna and images of two Native Americans. This became a Rosetta Stone for the reconstruction of three of the capital’s most defining, yet at the time absent, structures.

Meanwhile, Arthur Shurcliff, a Frederick Law Olmsted protégé who helped found America’s first undergraduate program in landscape architecture, at Harvard, was tapped to design Williamsburg’s many gardens, streetscapes, and traffic patterns. The plan called for a radical overhaul: Sidewalks and streets would be rebuilt, new water and sewer systems would be constructed, and utility lines would be buried. Shurcliff leaned into the symmetry, clean lines, and beauty of the colonial revival style.

Arthur Woods was selected as CW’s first president, but he stayed in New York, performing his duties from afar. In his place, Goodwin was tasked with managing the restoration, purchasing more properties, working closely with architects, builders, lawyers, and landscapers. This new position invigorated him, perhaps even more so than his job in the clergy. Decades later, his children would recall how perpetually occupied their father had been with this work. A photograph taken in 1928 depicts Goodwin and Rockefeller standing next to each other near the Wythe House, looking into the distance as if they are divining CW’s future. At that time, Rockefeller was 54 and Goodwin 59. Goodwin looks 15 or 20 years older than his boss.

The massive restoration and reconstruction of Colonial Williamsburg required, in the words of historian Charles B. Hosmer, “new professions, new organizational procedures, and a whole new philosophy of restoration.” That was only part of it. Hosmer added, “When one takes Boston architects, New York contractors, and Northern money into a Virginia town, it requires great organizational skill and tact to achieve success.” This was still the era of Jim Crow and lynchings, when influential southern preachers railed against northern progressivism and industrialization. More immediately, the project was facing a far bigger, more existential threat: Things had become so chaotic, the managers so divorced from one another’s work, that the whole project was imploding. Goodwin was in way over his head.

Vernon Geddy, the local lawyer who aided Goodwin, had become a valued consultant, as well as a bridge builder between residents and the Rockefeller syndicate. He contacted the New York office and pleaded for help. As a result, Kenneth Chorley was sent south to become CW’s fixer extraordinaire.

Tough, unrelenting, and volatile, Chorley moved to Williamsburg after being named vice president of the organization on November 20, 1929. (He became president of CW in 1935 and remained in that position until 1958.) His standards were so high, his demeanor so overbearing and harsh, that many of his underling supervisors developed stress-related gastrointestinal disorders, according to a local physician at the time. He reportedly required his managers to keep typed letters of resignation on hand in case they fell short of his expectations. So intense was his devotion to the cause that in 1930, when a fire erupted at Bassett Hall, Rockefeller’s Williamsburg residence, Chorley (and other CW employees) helped local firemen save the house and its vast collection of early American folk art. He even ran into the engulfed structure and returned with period balusters from the stairwell.

What most impressed his peers, however, was his incisive vision. On noticing that Raleigh Tavern hostesses wore costumes, he saw the value of period attire for the tradesmen, shopkeepers, and others working in spaces that attracted visitors. He turned the crafts program, populated with independent contractors who quietly went about their jobs in everyday work clothes, into artisan shops where costumed tradesmen were well versed in the history of their trade. And among other things, he was instrumental in developing the beloved holiday-season pyrotechnic display, the Grand Illumination. Ultimately, it was Chorley’s vision that transformed CW from a stagnant architectural museum into a vibrant, interactive experience, one that brought Goodwin and Rockefeller’s vision to life.

Few, if any, surviving documents from this era shed light on an important question: What did all of this mean for Goodwin? From the time of Chorley’s arrival in 1929 until Goodwin’s death in 1939, little has been written about Goodwin’s role at CW.

Goodwin had been Rockefeller’s trusted and cherished henchman, carrying out Rockefeller’s wishes as an unauthorized midnight surveyor and unlikely real estate investor and, in the process, risking his rectoral reputation. It’s safe to say that he relished his role as manager of CW operations—displaying an even more consuming, indefatigable passion than he did with the Bruton restoration. Breck Longstreth, daughter of Goodwin’s son Howard, told me that her father’s memories of her grandfather were of a man constantly working—on the restoration.

When Chorley took over, Goodwin acknowledged his new boss’s “quick and keen insight,” as The Virginian-Pilot reported. But Goodwin was also frustrated, firing off this broadside to the home office: “I want you people in New York to get it out of your heads that I am a bedraggled and overburdened man.”

Although possessing a clear sense of Edwardian social graces and propriety, especially when it came to his social superiors, Goodwin would surely have felt betrayed, on some level, by Rockefeller, after all he had done in making their shared dream a reality. His rants must have continued—to the home office and, eventually, to Chorley. Goodwin’s biographer, Dennis Montgomery, told me that Chorley “asked Goodwin’s son Rutherfoord (who worked for CW) to burn Goodwin’s correspondence with the president’s office to avoid embarrassing himself and the institution.”

After Chorley took over, Goodwin’s role was dramatically diminished. According to Montgomery, he remained a CW trustee but was eventually not invited to staff and even trustee meetings. Apparently, Chorley grew so furious with Goodwin, he refused to let Goodwin use the foundation’s stationery—which Goodwin had helped design.

Sadly, this was always going to be Goodwin’s fate. For all of his passion, his commitment to Rockefeller and to his beloved Williamsburg, he was out of his league when handed the role he coveted. When he believed, moreover, that he was right or when his thin skin had been pierced, he unleashed a fusillade of articulate arguments that inflicted considerable damage on his intended targets. The only relationship he seemingly managed (or cared) to salvage most, throughout this period, was with Rockefeller.

Goodwin died on September 7, 1939, at the age of 70. The only published evidence of his illness comes from a 1941 article in The New York Times. It mentions that he developed a heart condition in 1931 after organizing a 150th anniversary celebration of the victory at Yorktown: “Physicians who took X-rays told him his heart muscles were those of a man 90.” Throughout the period of Goodwin’s illness, Rockefeller sent money to his family to help defray medical costs.

Howard Goodwin recalled a conversation that took place just before his father died. “He once told me,” Howard said, “that in all his travels the most beautiful places he had ever seen were in his dreams. He indicated that he felt he would visit these dream places at the end of his life.”

Surely one of those “beautiful places” was the gloaming woods near Bassett Hall. I like to think that, in his final days, as he lay in bed, he returned to the moment beneath the white oak when Rockefeller tentatively agreed to fund Goodwin’s biggest, most consequential dream. I like to think that Goodwin’s spirit does double duty and haunts these woods, too, no longer the “rude man” but the grinning pioneer, grabbing us by our lapels and shaking us awake to his greatest sacrament.

The post The Spirit Seeker appeared first on The American Scholar.

But one day something changed, and I am now able to recall the structure and even extended sections of a few dozen works of literature, meaning that I find myself the surprised owner of a small internal library. I can compare the anatomy of various books without looking at the texts. Best of all, if I end up riding a city bus empty-handed, I’m not bored. To the contrary, I have the grand company of strong characters, and I am able to summon up the atmosphere of the pages they inhabit. Miss Havisham and Estella. Emma Bovary and Rodolphe. King Lear and Gloucester. All are companions who quicken the mind because to see them is to see them in action, casting their own particular light on the world.

Most of the books in my internal library are classics that I discussed in my writers’ group. For nearly two decades, we met two or three times a year, but I recall little about the books we discussed in those rambling sessions. Once the Covid lockdown hit, however, we began meeting on Zoom every week for an hour. We focused on 70 pages at a time—in this way, we could spend up to five weeks discussing a novel. And each of us would select a passage to read aloud, explain why we’d chosen it, and then hear what others discerned. This close oral analysis apparently allowed our reading to migrate to a different, more adhesive part of my brain.

We started with Howards End, feeling the need, during those stressful days, of E. M. Forster’s charm and scope, as well as his grand message to connect. I’d read the novel before, but only now was I struck by the seeming nonchalance of the opening: “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.” The reader can almost see the tweedy, droll, self-effacing author at his desk pondering how to begin, wearily surveying his options, as if the entire story has already taken place and as if he isn’t himself about to scribble Helen’s delightful, highly emotional, expressive letters.

When I think of the novel, that first line summons the rest, as certain great openings do. The lovely, wry, mediating authorial presence, one that is characteristic of Forster’s work, goes on to provide fine company throughout the book.

The edition I used was a Bantam paperback I’d found on my shelves—it was roughly the size of my hand, with stiffish serif type and saffron-edged pages that were as soft as a cat’s ears. The very heft of the book was consoling. I read slowly, underlining, drawing stars, jotting notes in the margins. Doing so allowed me to notice how Forster set up his plot points like closely positioned dominoes. Now I could also see the strategic importance of the dramatic crescendo leading to what some novelists call a fireworks scene, which in Forster’s hands swivels everything about, and which occurs about 70 percent of the way through the novel, marking the end of the long second act. Once I saw this turning point, it came to mind whenever I thought of the novel. The book now had a shape, which became a sort of visual mnemonic, and the fireworks scene drew to mind the scenes leading up to and away from it.

I’ve learned that noting a few turning points in a story can help you later recall the structure of an entire book. My friend Alice said that she always finds the exact center of every novel: She sees how many pages the book has and divides that number in half. It’s surprising how often one discovers here the very midpoint of the action, the story’s inner hinge. It might seem arbitrary, but the practice has helped me with my memory. In my copy of Howards End, the exact numerical midpoint falls when Helen is imploring Margaret not to marry Wilcox:

“Don’t, don’t do such a thing! I tell you not to—don’t! I know—don’t!”

“What do you know?”

“Panic and emptiness,” sobbed Helen. “Don’t!”

So there, at the center, is a dramatic restatement of the novel’s first epiphany, as well as a warning about what will follow when our heroine makes her decision and ignores her sister’s experience.

To more fully recall Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I pull to mind the midpoint, when the protagonist, visiting a friend whose mother has died, remembers the behavior of her own almost comically awful mother—revealing at long last the reason our protagonist is living the bizarre, troubled way she does. At the numerical midpoint of Forster’s A Passage to India, we discover for the first time the nature of the accusation Miss Quested has lodged against Aziz, and we get Fielding’s reaction, one that cuts him off forever from the Anglo-Indian community. For me, recalling the midpoint often summons much else. It’s a kind of Proustian madeleine that, contemplated, allows landscapes and eras to cascade in.

The same goes for hearing startling insights from members of one’s group. Such remarks stick in the memory. While discussing William Trevor’s Reading Turgenev, set mostly in the 1950s, one friend commented on the scene in which the young bride and her much older new husband, Elmer, are at a seaside pub on the eve of their honeymoon. A stranger pulls close beside Mary Louise and says some almost suggestive things. It had never occurred to me that he does this because he’s excited by the idea of what the newlyweds will be doing later. The surprise of hearing my friend’s sexually frank observation has lingered. And as a consequence, not only has the passage stayed with me, I’m also able to recall, with clarity, many of the passages that surround it.

I’m convinced that a neurological change happens when one analyzes a passage aloud. Doing so must activate a different, more pertinacious function of the brain. Therefore, to build one’s internal library, it helps to have a group or at least a friend with whom to discuss what you read. In the absence of such a group, careful rereading on one’s own does much good. It also helps to copy passages out. And to consider a book’s shape. When you’ve put your book down for the day, spend time recalling the most haunting scenes. Certain images enter us saturated with meaning, like emblems on a tarot deck: Josef K.’s neighbors across the street peering into his bedroom as he demands to be told why he is under arrest, Emma Bovary taking out of hiding the green silk cigar case her husband found (after their thrilling night as guests of an aristocrat) and gazing at the emblem at its center—a coat of arms like a carriage door. Every time you think of a scene like this, you reinforce your hold on it and its hold on you.

Moreover, the more you notice the architecture of one book, the better you are able to see another’s. At a certain point, a kind of chain reaction takes place. Beginnings cluster themselves with other beginnings. You start grouping midpoints, and you can compare how different books rise and tilt.

The energy I expend in fixing a book in my mind is, for me, a wise investment, both because I want to be a person who understands life better and because I’m a fiction writer myself. I recently finished writing a novel that began with a plethora of material, a stultifying, bewildering, enervating amount. My first drafts were far too detailed and repetitive, lacking in pattern and decision. I needed to crystallize the book’s meaning and to allow a character who was not me to have experiences that were not mine. The process of revision was greatly aided because I now had so many novels living inside me.

But even if I hadn’t been writing a novel, the effort of creating an internal library would have been life changing. I have read all my life, and I see now why such an important activity, one to which I had devoted so much, had previously left so few traces. Reading wasn’t enough to let me possess the narratives that I hungrily, incessantly devoured. I needed to dwell with the books I’d finished and loved, to regard them with discerning eyes. Only then would they become a part of my interior life; only then could I remember lines and summon up passages. In high school, I learned how to study. Then I learned how to think. But only now, decades later, have I learned how to become the reader I always wished I’d been, able to hold onto books even after I set them away on the shelf, able to keep some of their electrical force field with me, and to benefit, over time, from my acquaintance with them.

The post It’s All in Your Head appeared first on The American Scholar.

Fritz is a retired marine biology teacher, a fabulous cook, a painter, an art collector, and a businessman with a bed-and-breakfast on Highway 60, just outside town, an established art gallery in town, also on Highway 60, and now Main Street Gallery, on Main, between the Good Samaritan store and the sheriff’s office.

The back third of the building is a small rental apartment, with a garden behind. The gallery sits at the front. I looked around. First impression: a deep, narrow room stretching before me, a pressed-tin ceiling high above, and artwork and rugs hanging from a picture rail on the white walls. The hardwood floor was painted, and a few pieces of furniture were placed to create the semblance of separate areas, as you might have in a house. You still had to fill in the rest.

The small roll-top desk toward the back of the room drew my attention. At my dad and stepmom’s house in Colorado, my father’s enormous roll-top still sits in its spot, just inside the door to his study, filling almost the entire length of the wall, with books all around and rising to the ceiling above the desk and on the other walls. On the little remaining wall space, some family portraits and an old pendulum clock keep the desk company.

My dad’s desk is a place of crannies and cubbyholes, slots and shelves, drawers big and small. At least half a century has drifted by while the roll-top has kept its place. Other people have large, beautiful roll-top desks, but those pieces often seem like mastiffs impossibly coifed and combed. My dad’s is a lion in repose. The desk always brings him to mind: I can just about see him, sitting there, looking up from his papers at my entrance.

To have my own perfectly proportioned roll-top—that is a hazy dream that swells at times, fed by a desire to establish myself as a desk-deserving person, someone with accounts to keep or letters to write. Then the desire ebbs because a roll-top for me would be something new, not something in perpetuity, like my dad’s. Not the swaying seaweed, anchored in the ocean floor, enduring the rising and falling waters, but a boat, tossed on the waves.

“Is the desk for sale?” I asked, moving languidly toward it. It sat three-quarters of the way down the long room, between a bulky cabinet and a grand, upright steamer trunk—a compact dignitary accompanied by a couple of swells. To the left of the trunk was the fabricated passage to the work area behind the desk and, farther back, the door to the private apartment.

“Everything’s for sale.”

I saw no price tag, and I moved on, circling back toward Fritz, who had taken the chair beside the loveseat. He was explaining the difference between museums of the past, where picture after picture hung on the wall to be viewed as visitors paraded by, and the modern conception of art in living spaces—a “curated lifestyle.” I sat on the loveseat, propped the woven-wool pillow behind my back, and listened to Fritz talk about how he and his partner, John, had come to live in Magdalena. Driving through on their way west, they had looked around at the dismal surroundings and wondered who would choose to live in this place. It was a “shithole of a town,” Fritz said.

“How long ago was that?” I asked.

“About eight years ago,” he answered.

On the edge of town they had seen a for-sale sign on a building and stopped to peer in the windows. “John,” Fritz had said, “this is an adobe, it has vigas, it’s got everything. It’s for real.”

They turned around, drove back to town, found the real estate agent, and within two hours had bought the house. Soon they built the rooms to turn their new place into a bed-and-breakfast. Then came the first gallery. Then this second gallery. So Magdalena is not a shithole after all. Fritz and John have made a good life here, though Fritz’s stories suggest that for him the village is not even close to ideal.

“Everything’s for sale, everything has a story.” He settled back to tell us a few more. Besides his own story, he recounted what he knew of the origins of the steamer trunk, a Navajo rug, and a portrait of a lady hanging on the wall. He told us about the painter and how he’d tried to get one of the artists he knew to take an interest in him. No one wanted to help. Fritz said he couldn’t understand it.

I already knew that Fritz liked doing good turns. He had found a buyer for a friend of my mother’s and mine who had decided to move. Our friend became Fritz’s friend, too.

I asked, “What about the desk? Has that got a story?”

It was a gift, Fritz said. From the friend who had moved. I was surprised. “I don’t remember the desk at his place. Where was it?”

In the front room, Fritz said. My mother chimed in that our friend had buried the desk under a cloth and a lot of odds and ends, so I had likely never seen it. Had I noticed the desk, relegated to an obscure corner, I might have wanted to rescue it. Our friend was already talking about leaving years ago. You can’t leave, I thought. You belong here. He was an institution in my summer visits. But he did leave. And what did he leave behind? An empty space for the briefest time, and a roll-top desk.

All that remains of my desk desire is a twitch in my fingers, like the one I felt when I saw a desk sitting at the back of Fritz’s new gallery. The desk that I might have seen, might have coveted, but never did.

That close, but not my story. Not my desk.

The post My Own Roll-Top appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

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