Iagnemma: If Lewis was murdered, then obviously this is the aspect that would change. If he wasn’t … it’s tempting to say that his suicide could be changed, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense. It would have been nice if Clark hadn’t been treated so poorly by the federal government. Aside from that it’s difficult to imagine what I’d change about one of the most successful expeditions in American history.

Sorrentino: What would be different, but alas won’t be, would be if the issues the current and all future national campaigns will address aren’t left for the candidates and their consultants to delimit. They fall into the deep sleep of their comfort zones and nobody in the press can bear to pull the comforter off them. Looking at all the wreckage George Bush has left in just seven years, I can’t believe that he and Al Gore spent the entire 2000 presidential campaign grappling over social security.


––What aspect of the event do you consider either overblown or under-appreciated?

Casey: Charcot and his Tuesday lessons are very much appreciated and discussed and criticized. They have been dissected, deconstructed, and otherwise fed through many an academic shredder. I first read a book about Charcot, specifically the photographs that were taken of the “hysterical” women he studied, in a class in college. The take home message was that Charcot was pure patriarchal monster, another too-tight sweater.

The truth is I don’t think I’d like Charcot much. I’d be rooting for the woman dancing faster and faster on the table. It would be hard to watch, this Tuesday Lesson on February 7, 1888, but I’m interested in the glimpse of relief the woman might have felt in being watched, in having her mysterious pain anointed with a name. Diagnoses are, after all, stories, and in its screwy way, the Tuesday lesson was a story about her. Maybe not her story but a story in which she had a leading role, which is sometimes better than no story at all.

Goldberg: Nikola Tesla was a celebrity in his day, but his name has been largely forgotten. He not only invented alternating current––which despite Edison’s national smear campaign became the international standard––but vied with Marconi for inventing the radio and was a pioneer in the development of radar technology. The fact that Edison’s name is so much huger than Tesla’s today makes sense, given that Tesla had no business sense and was eccentric enough to fall in love with a pigeon, but in a better world schoolchildren would be singing his praises and Tesla’s later vision of a system of free, wireless electricity for all would have made Thomas Edison’s name the quaint, historical footnote.

Iagnemma: The expedition has been written about so exhaustively that it’s tempting to say that it’s all a bit overblown. But what seems somewhat unappreciated (or at least less overblown?) is the scientific nature of the journey. Mostly this was Lewis’ work, collecting botanical and mineral specimens, and it completes the picture of Lewis as a writer/adventurer/scientist, the sort of man that seems to have only existed in the 19th century.

Sorrentino: September 11 is certainly overblown, or at least distorted. It’s become National First Responders Day. Whatever’s underappreciated will get its due, when we’re paying for it.

Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel WE’RE SO FAMOUS, editor of DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON THE FILMS OF JOHN HUGHES, and co-founder of POST ROAD, a national literary magazine based out of New York and Boston.