It's back again, and six years of experience has taught me that it’s going to make some readers angry. Others will tell us it’s their favorite feature. Save for a now-distant cover story about Jane Fonda, nothing we’ve published has elicited such vehement responses as “Overrated & Underrated.” This is not because it is controversial, in the usual sense of the word, although it may touch on subjects close to people. For instance, in the category of Regional Food, Danny Meyer —who owns a clutch of the best restaurants in Manhattan—boldly addresses the subject of barbecue (on which even people raised in the Yankee fastness of inland Maine have strong opinions) and then disses ramps, which, not so long ago, were featured on the menu of one of his celebrated chefs, Kerry Heffernan, in his splendid establishment, Eleven Madison Park. This is certainly food for discussion, but not the kind of thing that ordinarily draws cancel-my-subscription letters.

Here, though, it will. The reason is that many take offense not at any particular category, but at the exercise itself. As season after season of letters testify, the disaffected find it a frivolous and even a meretricious way of looking at history. I also suspect that they feel we are diminishing the most important aspects of our past by allotting them equal time with the more mundane. In this issue, for instance, Candy Bar and Civil War General occupy roughly the same amount of room. But does this really trivialize the general and inflate the candy bar? After all, the grand and the small live side by side together in our fears and our affections throughout our lives. When, in Stephen Vincent Benét’s wonderful fable “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” the senator argues against Satan before a jury of the damned for the soul of his neighbor Jabez Stone, he doesn’t sway the jurors solely with his famous oratorical thunder. Instead, ”. . . to one, his voice was like the forest and its secrecy, and to another, like the sea and the storms of the sea; and one heard the cry of his lost nation in it, and another saw a little harmless scene he hadn’t remembered for years.” The candy bar, as well as the general, saves Jabez Stone.

But, besides putting the homely down on our palette with the momentous, the feature makes, in a concise and engaging way, a most important historical point: History isn’t history. That is, although the past is all we have to guide us as we negotiate the seemingly solid ground of the present, that ground is always in motion, and we look back from changing vantage points. A generation ago, Thomas Jefferson was by far the most revered of the founders, and Alexander Hamilton was someone on the ten—the twenty?—dollar bill. Now, in a beleaguered time when federalism is beginning to seem increasingly significant to a good many people, Hamilton’s star is in the ascendant.

This will change, and neither