Plus: Amina Claudine Myers; The Fed; The California Conquest
| Along the Yukon River, declining salmon populations threaten the future of the region’s sled dogs—and the communities that rely on them. The jazz pianist Amina Claudine Myers has spent her career weaving jazz, blues, gospel, and classical music into a distinctively personal idiom. Trump’s recent attacks on Jerome Powell’s Federal Reserve raise a deeper question: Are central banks really independent in the first place? For Trump, the great problem of the Jeffrey Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. Free from the ArchivesOne hundred and seventy-nine years ago today, several months into the Mexican-American War, Commodore Robert F. Stockton—namesake for the city of Stockton, California—issued a proclamation annexing the California territories for the United States. In the Review’s October 9, 2003, issue, Larry McMurtry wrote about John Charles Frémont, explorer, writer, captain in the US army during the Mexican-American war (where he led the massacre of at least fourteen American Indians), founder of the California Republican Party, first Republican candidate for president (losing to the Democrat James Buchanan), and, as McMurtry put it, “a superstar long before the word came into use; he may have been the first American celebrity to be destroyed by celebrity itself.” I think it’s safe to say that John Charles Frémont enjoyed fame—for a time he seemed to seek or enjoy not much else. The two Reports were published in one volume in 1845 and the book became a best seller. Frémont quickly cobbled together another crew and set off west again. His orders, from Colonel John Abert, head of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, instructed him merely to investigate rivers flowing east from the Rockies, but Frémont immediately delegated this paltry assignment and made like a streak for California. He got there readily enough, but it’s from this point on that historians and biographers have a harder and harder time keeping their hero heroic.
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