Ulysses Grant and Jefferson Davis never met, but their widows became good friends. They met at West Point in June 1893, when Varina Davis arrived to watch a cadet parade. Julia Grant presented herself and said, “I am Mrs. Grant.” “I am very glad to meet you,” Davis replied.

They ate dinner together on the piazza as curious guests looked on. “She is a very noble-looking lady,” Grant said afterward. “She looked a little older than I had expected. I have wanted to meet her for a very long time.”

They corresponded and met frequently after that. At Grant’s tomb Davis heard Julia say, “I will soon be laid beside my husband in this solemn place,” and she attended the memorial service in 1902 when these words were fulfilled, among men who had fought on both sides of the war.

In a tribute to her friend published in The World in April 1897, Davis had quoted Ulysses Grant’s motto “Let us have peace.” She added, “I believe every portion of our reunited country heartily joins in the aspiration.”

(From Ishbel Ross, First Lady of the South, 1958.)

Elizabeth Peabody hated rote learning. So the 19th-century American educator adopted the “Polish system,” a graphical means to help students recall reams of historical facts. Invented in the 1820s by Antoni Jażwiński and popularized by Józef Bem, the system relies on a series of 10×10 grids. The location of an event gives its date, the symbol that records it shows its type, and its color indicates the nations involved. A student who wanted to indicate that a revolution took place in America in 1776 would choose the grid for the 18th century, find the square for the 76th year (row 7, column 6), and paint a square using the color designating the British colonies in North America. The square indicates insubordination; a triangle would mean a revolt, an X a conspiracy.

The system is largely forgotten today, but it was immensely popular in Europe and North America in the early 18th century. In the 1830s it was approved for use throughout the French educational system, and Peabody toured the United States offering a book of her own, blank charts and a special set of paints. “Instructors who are themselves not well educated in history, may yet dare to undertake to teach chronology with the help of this manual,” she wrote, “and it must be obvious that highly-accomplished teachers can unfold and develop the subject to an indefinite extent.”

“The results of Peabody’s appropriation of the Polish System are both handsome and surprising,” write Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton in Cartographies of Time (2012). “Surviving copies of the charts in libraries look nothing like one another. Each bears the imprint of an individual student’s imagination.”