Cheerful Saturday to you!
What did the music of the 1960s actually feel like? You might imagine Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Beach Boys. But consider the 1860s, a time when commercial records weren’t yet a thing. In this weekend’s American Artifacts, historian Dixie Dillon Lane investigates the origins of the “Rebel Yell,” a cry—or a shriek, or a scream—often emitted by Confederate soldiers as they pressed against their foes. Elsewhere in this newsletter, you’ll come across a reading suggestion and a book review by yours truly, recommendations from Dispatch managing editor Wendy Lane Cook, and a Work of the Week contributed by Dispatch member Reed Benet.
Today on the site, our contributing writer Alan Jacobs writes about A. J. Liebling, who served as a war correspondent for The New Yorker during World War II. “The emotional complexity of warfare—for both those in uniform and the people on the home front—studies with a level of precision and vibrancy that I think is unmatched,” Jacobs observes. “Yet he’s precise and vivid about everything.”
We also feature contributing writer Katherine Dee on GIRLS®, Freya India’s eagerly awaited nonfiction work from a British voice that appeals to Gen Z. “The central question GIRLS® leaves us with isn’t what India knows about the internet that any thoughtful smartphone user wouldn’t,” Dee contends. “Parents hoping for a clear explanation of why their daughters grapple with sadness won’t find much.”
Last but not least, for this week’s Where I’m From, we hear from Michelle Van Loon of Des Plaines, Illinois, who spent her childhood there and has just returned—half a century later. “When I strip away nostalgia’s ill-fitting lenses, I realize that Des Plaines offered me happy memories alongside a quiet sense of existential loneliness born of its cookie-cutter sameness,” Van Loon reflects.
With warmth,
Valerie
American Artifacts
By Dixie Dillon Lane
Aye-yai-yai-yai-yai-yai-yai!
That phrase is what I, an American historian, have long exclaimed to my students whenever the notorious Confederate battle cry known as the Rebel Yell is discussed. I utter this particular chant not only because it’s entertaining to perform an odd sound, but also because it jolts them awake to the real stakes of what they study. The Civil War can feel almost romantic to younger audiences, and they may be tempted to minimize the suffering it caused. They deserve something abrupt to snap them out of daydreams, to underscore the point that war is, in the words of my veteran godfather, “a deeply personal and profoundly awful memory.” The Rebel Yell is likewise intimate and dreadful.
Yet I shout it this way for another reason: the line “aye-yai-yai-yai-yai-yai-yai” is a direct quotation I once found in a Yankee’s journal, written phonetically as he recalled being overwhelmed by Confederate soldiers who cried out as they descended on him and his comrades while they brewed coffee at dawn. That same soldier later enclosed a lock of hair cut from the head of a fallen “Johnny Reb” in a letter home. Thus, war’s personal and terrible reality appears on multiple sides.
A few years back, though, a recording from a group of Confederate veterans singing the Rebel Yell in the 1930s altered my classroom approach. In the clip, a group chant gives way to each veteran stepping forward to perform the yell for a cheering audience. The setting is far removed from battle—an event shaped by memory and intention as the country worked to reshape how it recalls the war. There is laughter, applause, and who knows what else stirring beneath the surface. Most striking of all is the sound itself: a chorus of whoops, trills, and undulating cadences that bears no resemblance to the “aye-yai-yai.”
How should we interpret it? The truth is, no one today can claim to know exactly how the Rebel Yell sounded, even though it clearly existed in many variations during the war. So while “aye-yai-yai” might have represented one soldier’s fear, it might have meant something entirely different to someone else. (Walter Ong might have weighed in on this.)
Sound also shifts with place and era. Do crowds in a given time and locale tend to roar, yell, or perhaps hiss? How does applause differ across cultures, and how could you discern that without knowing the context? Does the wind outside my window tonight resemble what it would have sounded like two centuries ago? And if I attempt to replicate my late mother’s voice, will it bear any resemblance to her actual tone?
What did those veterans recall? Is that what was truly there?
Chances are the most we can say about the Rebel Yell’s sound is a blend of probability and memory. Surely the moment a man charges his foe is not easy to capture in writing or in later recreations. Yet sound shapes context, and context drives understanding, so students ought to hear, think about, and reflect on historical acoustic phenomena. We may think we know what sounds are, but we are often too closed-minded about what they can reveal.
When I teach about the Civil War now, I tell the tale of the “aye-yai-yai,” and I also show the accompanying video. What would you hear if you heard that sound while you were making coffee at dawn? I ask my students. And what would you imagine you might have heard? That question provides an excellent entry point for grasping both history and humanity.
An Outside Read
Living in New York City has its share of literary richness. Last weekend I had the chance to attend a launch party for “Steak Zine,” a steak-centric issue of Cake Zine, a publication rooted in food culture. The event, held in a Lower East Side steakhouse, offered a dimly lit program with readings from a range of authors, plus complimentary desserts (mousse-filled lemons) for the guests. (Afterward, my colleague and I went to grab burgers, which felt fitting.) The zine arrived as a compact volume with a marbled pattern reminiscent of wagyu and featured short fiction and essays, notably one by a former plant-based meat scientist who finds a taste for the real thing.
“Our cushy professional-development budgets and travel stipends went toward steakhouses and ‘bromakase,’ usually frequented by the higher echelons of corporate life,” the author notes. “Even vacations abroad were recounted in a self-aggrandizing way, detailing the texture of meats like kangaroo (mineral, like Chablis), pufferfish (as crisp as a pearl), and snake (thrillingly chewy). In the name of our noble mission, we quietly cultivated a justifiable, testosterone-fueled urge to eat as much Real Meat as possible.”
On Our Shelves
By Valerie Pavilonis
The Butter Book, by Amanda Stockwell. Published March 17, 2026.
Thus far in this newsletter, we haven’t recommended cookbooks, but inspired by former New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer’s incisive Dispatch essay from March about why cookbooks remain relevant, we’re trying something new today. Enter The Butter Book, from Amanda Stockwell, a writer and recipe developer based in New York.
Part of the appeal of The Butter Book is its appearance: a cover that evokes wax paper, as if the book were a stick of butter itself. But inside, you’ll also find explorations of butter’s history and uses, along with recipes in which butter is essential. For instance, the book traces the earliest butter discoverers to nomads around 8000 B.C., who, after transporting milk in animal skins, may have realized that the fat and buttermilk separated after prolonged agitation. (Given the current online trend of churning butter, the timing of this release seems prophetic.) We also learn about various members of the butter family: cultured butter, sweet cream butter, and Irish butter, as well as different types of compound butters flavored with garlic, raspberry and thyme, or miso-orange.
The book clearly distinguishes itself from heavier novels and histories we’ve recommended before, so if you’re looking for something lighter to pair with a shelf of classic tomes like The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, this may not be your first pick. Still, a touch of lightness can be welcome, and if you want to step out of your head and into your kitchen—and into butter’s everyday magic—Stockwell’s work might be the perfect nudge. Beyond taste, she communicates a simple wonder at the versatility of a staple we often take for granted:
Western cuisine as we know it would be unthinkable without butter. It acts as a foundational element, a catalytic force, and a flavor amplifier. In my French culinary studies, butter played a central role; I learned to monter au beurre, a phrase meaning to whisk cold butter into a warm sauce or purée to instantly enrich texture, shine, and richness. I discovered that the way butter is whisked or melted into a batter can generate completely different textures in cakes and cookies. And I learned that a croissant could never exist without its butter layers, whose steam lifts the dough as it bakes.
Stuff We Like
By Wendy Lane Cook, deputy managing editor
- Loop earplugs.
City living is convenient and exhilarating—and wonderfully loud. The trade-off of living near a Northern Virginia Metro line is… living near a Metro line. From my place, I hear trains rolling by as early as five in the morning, freight rattling at all hours, and Amtrak in the distance. All that rail activity plus a nearby fire station means I must block out the noise to sleep, yet those big foam plugs never stayed put through the night. The Loop Dream earplugs fit nicely—they’re silicone, designed to match the shape of the ear, and stay snug. After about four months, they’ve proven their worth.
- Blucher moccasins.
I first spotted these L.L. Bean shoes while visiting colleges in New England, and as a seventeen-year-old, they symbolized the effortless cool I associated with those campuses. No one at my Texas public high school wore these plain brown lace-ups with red-and-gold laces threaded through silver-tone eyelets, so I had to have a pair. They were my go-to casual footwear through high school, through college, and beyond—with laces tied loose rather than knotted, and always without socks. Introduced by L.L. Bean in 1926, Bluchers stayed a men’s staple in the catalogs for decades, but the women’s version vanished—until this spring. The 2026 Bluchers aren’t exact replicas of my youth’s shoes, but they’re close enough to spark a satisfying nostalgia.
- Nest cams.
Not the tiny security devices people install at doorways. These are cameras used by ornithologists at known nesting grounds to observe birds—often raptors—as they lay eggs, incubate, and rear their young. I’ve become hooked on several feeds this spring, following the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s clips. The nests feature barred owls, red-tailed hawks, ospreys, and kestrels from locales ranging from Austin, Texas, to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. The drama unfolds slowly, over months, as the females brood for about a month while the males hunt. In one case, a red-tailed hawk known as Big Red is tended by her mate Arthur who takes over incubation while she stocks up on prey. It’s remarkable to watch these formidable birds nurture their offspring in preparation for the first hatchings. Yet not all stories end well: nest-cam watchers recently saw a great horned owl struggle to feed her weeks-old owlets after her mate stopped visiting, and she abandoned the nest after one youngster died (the survivor is now in wildlife care). Still, the ongoing nest-cam sagas celebrate spring’s renewal, the teamwork of parenting, and the reward of nurturing the young.
Work of the Week
Work: Michelangelo, Grazie, by Ben Benet, 2025
Name: Reed Benet
Why I’m a Dispatch member: The Dispatch family makes me feel less solitary in this often wild world that seems full of oddities, and since joining, I’ve shifted from describing myself as a “recovering Republican” to, as noted on a podcast, a “moderately right-of-center Libertarian.”
Why I chose this work: Ben is an exceptionally gifted artist across many media and styles. His meditation on Michelangelo’s near-divine touch in the Sistine Chapel ceiling—rendered with used lottery scratchers—strikes me as transcendent and almost holy. I suspect the effect resonates with me—and likely with The Dispatch’s listeners—because it captures the fleeting, chance-filled, hopeful, and sometimes disappointed moments that define life… and art alike.
