It was only a National Scholarship from Harvard that allowed Howe to afford an Ivy League education. His storytelling father, a newspaperman, died when Howe was eight years old, widowing his mother and making money scarce. “I thought this was the most fascinating stuff imaginable.” Coming from Denver to Harvard was, in those days, still vaguely unusual: Denver was remote and provincial, far from the colorful melting pots of 19th century New Orleans, or ancient Rome. “I got interested in history when I was about six years old and my father sat me on his lap and told me about Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants to fight the Romans,” Howe said. The diverse internationalism of such a scene must have particularly piqued the interest of Howe, Harvard graduate and Professor Emeritus of both Oxford and UCLA, who once dreamed of ancient overseas battles as a young boy growing up in Denver. Orders were translated into Spanish, French, and Choctaw. The “Americans” hailed from Louisiana, Haiti, Kentucky, encompassing crack Irish-American units, freed slaves, and wary Native Americans. The opening scene of Daniel Walker Howe ’59’s Pulitzer Prize winning history, “What Hath God Wrought,” artistically depicts the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, which pitted British regulars against a heterogeneous American force.
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