AMERICAN DREAMER

He's not the only "impoverished Caribbean orphan who immigrated to the United States," as the flack for the New York Historical Society describes him in a press release. But I'd bet he's the only one ever to be given an exhibition by the society. The reason, of course, is that this particular impoverished Caribbean orphan immigrant was Alexander Hamilton.

"Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America" explores his life and times, and offers what is described as "an unprecedented array of more than 150 original documents, letters, paintings and artifacts -- many of which have not previously been publicly displayed." The exhibition is to include:

+ The pistols used in the duel with Vice President Aaron Burr, who killed him.
+ A rare version of the Declaration of Independence printed in Boston in July 1776.
+ Benjamin Franklin's signed, personal copy of the Constitution of the United States.
+ The Federalist Papers.
+ More than 30 portraits of leading figures from the founding era, including iconic portraits of Jefferson and Washington by Rembrandt Peale.
+ Minutes from the New York Manumission Society, which remain unpublished to this day.
+ Hamilton's handwritten drafts for Washington's Farewell Address, which he ghostwrote.

Some of them would make me go "Ooooh!" So if you'd like to see them and learn more about 1) "the force behind the ratification of the Constitution"; 2) the "financial genius" who founded the Bank of the United States"; 3) "an ardent opponent of slavery and a founding member of the New York Manumission Society"; and 4) the "hard-hitting journalist who founded the New York Post" a couple of centuries before Rupert Murdoch tucked it like a toy whistle into his pocket, get thee to 170 Central Park West (between 76th and 77th Streets). The exhibition opens Friday and runs through Feb. 28, 2005.

Don't have the time? Don't live in New York and can't get here for it? You'll have to settle for a virtual tour of the exhibition, or you could settle in at home with either Ron Chernow's recent biography or Robert Brookhiser's earlier biography. Fair warning: Chernow's the liberal, Brookhiser's the conservative.

September 8, 2004 3:10 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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