GIFT BOOKS 1985 : History

Lee Iacocca has made 1985 the year of immigration and of the Statue of Liberty. His perfervid restoration efforts have produced varied side-effects, including a Public Broadcasting program of which the book Statue of Liberty: The First Hundred Years (American Heritage/Houghton Mifflin: $29.95; 192 pp.) by Bernard Weisberger is a spinoff. Beautifully illustrated, the volume is based on text and picture research by Blanchet and Bertrand Dard, who wrote the original version in French. They interviewed more than 1,000 persons, visited hundreds of museums, and discovered many unpublished documents and illustrations. Contains 154 color and 24 black-and-white illustrations.

In Voyages of the Steamboat Yellowstone (Ticknor & Fields, $16.95; 182 pp.) an accomplished editor of Western chronicles, Donald Jackson, provides us with a view of the American frontier from the deck of a steamboat of the 1830s. In this book, the Yellowstone, operated by John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Co., takes on a life of its own. The small but plucky side-wheeler hauled smallpox vaccine, contraband weapons and important personages up the Missouri. Its passengers ranged from artists Karl Bodmer and George Catlin to the Indian chief Black Hawk. The boat also ferried Sam Houston’s troops across the Brazos in Texas and carried the body of Stephen Austin to its last resting place. Built before the golden age of the river boat, the Yellowstone was the little chugging engine that could do almost anything.

American railroads helped to create the tourist industry. How they engaged in image-making that was designed to coax prospective residents to the West is the subject of Dream Tracts: The Railroad and the American Indian (Abrams: $37.50; 208 pp.) by Teri McLuhan. Both author and filmmaker, she has found and restored rare film footage of the Hopi Snake Dance, an unfailing attraction heavily promoted by the Santa Fe Railroad. The book also reproduces more than 100 hand-colored photos of the type popular a century ago.

“The Civil War was the great American Iliad, the ordeal of the Union, the great crimson gash in American history.” So writes Herman Hattaway in one of the essays within Touched by Fire: A Photographic Portrait of the Civil War, edited by William C. Davis with William A. Frassanito, photographic consultant (Little, Brown: $49.95; 313 pp.). This coffee-table ornament contains more than 1,000 photographs, many never before published. It is the first volume of a two-part project, produced with the backing of the National Historical Society. The last chapter, “Comrades . . .,” showing what happened to veterans of both the blue and the gray as they entered the December of their lives, contains some especially poignant photographs.

For history buffs and readers with children in their households, Colin McEvedy has compiled The Macmillan World History Factfinder (Macmillan: $29.95; 208 pp.). The author is described as “a specialist in psychological medicine” who has compiled several such information atlases. Both the serious seeker after facts and the casual dabbler will be helped by his series of “date-charts,” which highlight past politics, religion, discoveries and the arts.

A bit more specialized is The Greek World: Classical Byzantine, and Modern (Thames & Hudson: $60; 328 pp.), edited by Robert Browning. In addition to a felicitous text, he has compiled 367 illustrations, 70 of which are in color. Greek nationhood is presented as the unifying element of the Hellenic identity, despite the diaspora of communities as far afield as Australia and the United States. Twelve specialists describe Greece’s special mystique from Minoan times to the present.

Jacques Brosse’s Great Voyages of Discovery: Circumnavigators and Scientists, 1764-1843 (Facts On File: $35; 232 pp.) is an impressive fusion of typography and navigational scholarship. Reproductions of maps and color pictures made on the spot by early artists bring to life a 75-year period of epochal discovery. This era of Cook and Darwin was one in which navigators roamed the globe seeking out new geographical, botanical and zoological wonders. They reshaped Europe’s conception of unmapped portions of the world, particularly of the Pacific Basin. An accompanying biographical dictionary of scientists and navigators includes sketches of La Perouse (who disappeared after sailing out of Botany Bay), Bougainville, and even the maligned Capt. Bligh, master of the mutinous crew aboard the ship Bounty. The book includes a geographical dictionary and a short foreword by the distinguished French historian Fernand Braudel.

During 1978, Victor Sarianidi and a team of Afghan-Soviet archeologists excavated a hill called Tillya-tepe near the modern town of Shibargan. They uncovered six burial sites containing 20,000 gold objects. These are described in Sarianidi’s The Golden Hoard of Bactria (Abrams: $49.50; 259 pp.). The book, sponsored by The Institute of Archeology of the U. S. S. R. in Moscow and the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, contains 420 spectacular illustrations, including 166 color plates. Among the artifacts depicted are golden shoe soles, hairpins, buckles, crowns and medallions. How were these objects used? An engaging text tells the story of a once opulent “lost” civilization now unearthed.

In short compass, it is almost impossible to describe the overwhelming efforts of the international panel that compiled The World Atlas of Archeology (G. K. Hall: $65; 408 pp.), edited by Michael Wood. This huge volume (10 3/4 by 14 1/2 inches) covers archeological discoveries from the earliest known cultures to the 19th Century. Its 1,000 illustrations, maps and charts provide overviews of the entire world, region by region. Such modern techniques as data banks, aerial surveys, optical filtering and undersea exploration have vastly expanded the tools of archeologists.