Looking East to the Past

Randall Stephens

"Ostalgie." That's East German nostalgia for the quaint days of communism--drab, bunker-like, late-Stalinist architecture, watches that don't work, tiny little cars, and the romance of scarcity. I encountered a slice of that for the first time in the dark comedy film Good Bye Lenin! Since then I've been curious about this strange sort of public memory. A little like being nostalgic about

the Dust Bowl? (Watch the East German National Anthem scene from Top Secret, embedded here.)

A related travel piece that recently appeared in a UK paper got my attention: Stephen McClarence, "Trains and Trabants," Yorkshire Post, 6 March 2011 19:00

FEW cities are as haunted by their past and their politics as Berlin. Around almost every corner there’s a reminder of its turbulent 20th century history – and one of the most potent of those reminders is being celebrated, if that’s the word, this year.

August sees the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall and I’ve come to explore what remains of it and the divisions it created across the city. It’s not, however, a wholly sober trip. I’ve signed up for a tour in a Trabant, the notorious national car of East Germany, and there’s the prospect of mainland Europe’s biggest department store. . .

The nostalgia flourishes in a movement called Ostalgie – “nostalgia for the East” – which is celebrated at the absorbing DDR Museum. It explores East Berlin life before the Wall came down in 1989. Visitors poke around a recreated 1970s flat, with its floral wallpaper, net curtains, cassette player, copies of Sputnik magazine... and radiators, we’re alarmed to see, exactly like our own at home.

In the late 1990s Daphne Berdahl wrote an influential essay on the phenomenon: "'(N)Ostalgie' for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things," Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 64:2 (1999). After the fall of the Berlin Wall, objects and goods from the East became instant camp for West Germans. But the shoddy products of the East also took gave some weird, sentimental comfort. "In this business of Ostalgie," writes Berdahl, "East German products have taken on new meaning when used the second time around. Now stripped of their original context of an economy of scarcity or an oppressive regime, these products largely recall an East Germany that never existed. They thus illustrate not only the way in which memory is an interactive, malleable, and highly contested phenomenon, but also the processes through which things become informed with a remembering--and forgetting--capacity" (198).

Sounds like a fun way to get at "memory" vs "history"!

"They say in the novel . . .": What Students Think about History Books and the Authors Who Write Them

Randall Stephens

Every semester I encounter, to paraphrase Oliver Sacks, the student who mistook his history book for a novel. A novel is a work of fiction. How many times do history professors have to explain the difference?

What is a Novel?

Why would a student think that a history book, say Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction, qualifies as a "novel"? (Hint: It has nothing to do with postmodernism or new historicism.) Students don't mistake cricket for baseball or a minivan for a sports car. They are familiar with those, though. Maybe the average undergraduate thinks that if a book has a title and an author--and if it's not a phonebook, cookbook, or a dictionary--then it must be a novel. Perhaps he or she has read The Grapes of Wrath or Don Quixote or Island of the Blue Dolphins. The memory of reading those novels--with so many pages, and with an author's name on the cover--forms how the student thinks of a "book." A history book looks like a novel, smells like a novel, ergo it must be a novel.

What is an Author?

Another common misunderstanding: Students struggle with the idea of history being anything other than a natural force or a collection of unmediated facts. In my experience, quite a few students in history surveys have a very hard time thinking about how works of history--not textbooks--are produced by individuals who have a particular point of view and who develop an argument. I've often found that when students write a review of a book, they will not seem to grasp that there is an author and a thesis behind all that text on the pages they have read. So, summaries will make no reference to the author, as if the facts of history fell from the sky like meteors. Maybe this is why students have pronoun problems: "It says in the book . . ." "They say on page 25 . . ." Do students imagine that all books are like textbooks, written by anonymous committees? "They" sit around a table and figure out how to tell it as it actually happened. Or, "it" bubbles up from the deep and creates history. That might be reading too much into it.

As if Historians Wrote History Books in a Particular Context

Perhaps the average, or below average, student in a history class should be encouraged to think more about how historians or journalists write their books. It might seem like a kindergarten exercise, but . . . A history professor could describe how a historian like Nancy Cott came to write The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 in 1977. She could then explore with the students the social context of the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of the new social history, and then look at how the field of women's history and gender studies in later years added to what Cott wrote about. (Heather's post on historiography ably gets into these issues.)

I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with these matters. True, I might have to push this boulder up a hill, myth of sisyphus-style, for as long as I am in the classroom. But, if I can change how a few students conceive of the world, it might be worth it.

Where Should the Thesis Go in a College Essay?

Jonathan Rees

My 11th grade English teacher was named Joan Goodman, and she was very particular about how she wanted us to write our essays. The first sentence was where the thesis went. I’m sure she didn’t put it this way, but the second sentence was where you would repeat the thesis in different words in case the person grading it was too stupid to get it the first time you wrote it. The rest of the first paragraph was for elaborating on your thesis as you began to foreshadow what would appear in the body of the essay.
Ms. Goodman told us that her method was the same method they used to teach writing to the cadets at West Point. I’ve never checked into that, but I believe it because she was equally regimented in the way she drilled her model into our heads. Ours was not to ask why. Ours was just to do or . . . Well, maybe not die, but at least get a grade too low for us to get into the Ivy League schools to which we all aspired. I internalized her methods well and it served me well for a very long time, especially in history classes by substituting facts for quotes from the novel at hand.

As I don’t write college essays anymore, this structure no longer has a great impact on my own writing. It takes pages not sentences for me to get most of my arguments out, and thankfully the blog posts that I write, which are the length of some college essays, usually have no theses in them. (Otherwise, I doubt that I’d enjoy writing them so much.)

I do, however, subject my own students to the Joan Goodman/West Point writing model even if I pride myself in being a little less martial about it than she was. If you’re writing a paper that’s longer than eight pages, there’s no reason you can’t have one of those flowery introductions that most English teachers seem to love. You’ve got a lot of space to fill. The same thing goes for people who like to put their thesis at the end of the first paragraph. If it’s going to be a long paper, there’s no reason that you can’t elaborate on what the thesis means as well as the rest of the paper in paragraph number two.

However, when it comes to the four to six page papers that are the bread and butter of the upper-level undergraduate history course, I might as well be a drill sergeant. Even though I don’t remember Ms. Goodman ever explaining it this way, I have come to see the first sentence as the prime real estate in any college essay. It is not just the only sentence where a student can be assured of their professor’s undivided attention, it is the perfect place to set up for an explanation of what the student is thinking (which has always been my main criterion for grading).

A few weeks ago in my labor history class, I got the worst pushback I’ve ever experienced on this from one of my students. “I’ll give you your first sentence thesis, but next semester I’m going back to writing it the way I like it,” she told me. While I wish I had the quick thinking skills to compliment her on her newfound flexibility, my response was slightly different. “I don’t want you to write this way because I tell you so,” I explained. “I want you to write this way because you think it’s the best way to write.”

It’s at that point when I started singing. I don’t sing well, so I don’t do it often, but I do think it illustrates my reasoning (not to mention Joan Goodman’s) here well. Imagine an opera singer doing scales. They begin low, gradually get higher and end with a note that catches your attention. The problem with that in a writing context is that every note in a first paragraph should catch your attention. That’s the only way that anyone can make a complex argument well. A good first paragraph, in other words, should be all high notes.

In my experience, students who put their thesis at the end of the first paragraph think their heavy lifting is then over. Without explanation and elaboration, the thesis falls to the wayside for the rest of the paper and I’m left reading mostly book summary. Using the end of the paragraph thesis model is too often an excuse to stop thinking. Putting the thesis at the beginning forces them to explain what they mean in some detail before they ever get to the details of the history at hand.

I teach writing not just because I have to, but because I get better papers that way. This, in turn, makes my job more fun. So thank you Joan Goodman (as well as a few other excellent English teachers from the Princeton, New Jersey public schools). You’re why I take my students’ complaints that I secretly wanted to be an English teacher as the highest form of compliment.

Historians and Their Memoirs

Randall Stephens

What can we learn about the craft of history by reading the autobiographies of historians? A great deal, I think. We get a picture of the context and era that shaped research and writing interests. We see how a historian grew into his or her work. We get an idea of how he or she was trained and mentored . . .

In my Critical Readings in History course I've paired selections from John Hope Franklin's memoir with selections from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s autobiography. Both went to Harvard in the 1930s. Students can see pretty clearly the basic differences in their backgrounds. One grew up in a well-to-do white family with ties to America's intellectual aristocracy. The other came of age in Oklahoma, struggling with poverty and race prejudice. It's not difficult to move from that reading to a discussion of how historians pick the topics they study and how historians are formed by their setting. From there students can reflect on their own interests and how history is, at least in some sense, autobiographical.

I recently dusted off and started rereading C. Vann Woodward's Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1987). Years before he became the tweedy, pipe-smoking Johns Hopkins and then Yale sage of southern history, Woodward was an aspiring historian, not quite sure what the next stage in his life would hold for him. Still, he was ahead of the game. He already had what would be a major book underway while he was still a grad student at UNC in the 1930s:

With a fresh if empty mind and an exciting book of my own underway, I reasoned that perhaps I would now see this unexplored field take on a new glamor and I would rise to the challenge. Much better minds had done so. After all, I was nearly four years older since my first brush with the subject and far riper in wisdom—or so I thought. The first thing to do, I was told, was to master the standard "sets"—the old American Nation series, the Yale Chronicles, and others guaranteed to bring one up to date. Noting with some puzzlement that most of the many volumes were already a generation old, I nevertheless plunged in. That first plunge was chilling. Plodding through volume after volume, I began to wonder if I had ever encountered prose so pedestrian, pages so dull, chapters so devoid of ideas, whole volumes so wrongheaded or so lacking in point. Was there anything memorable about what one was expected to remember? Was this the best my newly chosen profession could do? Was it what I would be expected to do? A career, a lifetime dedicated to inflicting such reading on innocent youth? Or accepting it as a model for myself? Fleeing the stacks repeatedly, I spent much of that first year pacing Franklin Street by night debating whether I might fare better as a fruit-peddler, panhandler, or hack writer. . . . (21-22)

No Southern youth of any sensitivity could help being excited by the explosion of creativity taking place during the early 1930s—in fiction, in poetry, in drama. Nor could I help seeing that the novelists, poets, and playwrights were in the main writing about the same South historians were writing about and making the whole world of letters at home and abroad read what they wrote and ring with their praise. With this awareness and the expectations it aroused, I arrived as a young apprentice at the doors of the history guild for training—and what a striking contrast, what a letdown, what a falling off! No renaissance here, no surge of innovation and creativity, no rebirth of energy, no compelling new vision. This was a craft devoted primarily at the time, or so it seemed to me, to summing up, confirming, illustrating, and consolidating the received wisdom, the regional consensus that prevailed uniquely in the South of the 1930s and—though I could not then have known it—was to continue through the 1940s. That consensus proclaimed the enduring and fundamentally unbroken unity, solidarity, and continuity of Southern history. (23)

The business about continuity sums up much of Woodward's work as a historian. Indeed, at the beginning of The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) he wrote "The people of the South should be the last Americans to expect continuity of their institutions and social arrangements" (3). The book—which Martin Luther King, Jr., called the historical bible of the civil rights movement— argued forcefully that the South's segregationist turn in the 1890s was something new. Woodward's memoir abounds with similar insights into his life and career.

There are many other memoirs by historians that I'd still like to explore. I include here a handful of those I've read and a great many more that I haven't.

Max Beloff, An Historian in the Twentieth Century: Chapters in Intellectual Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)

Thomas Dionysius Clark, My Century in History: Memoirs (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006)

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000)

Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003)

Forrest McDonald, Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004)

John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York: FSG, 2005)

Margaret Atwood Judson, Breaking the Barrier: A Professional Autobiography by a Woman Educator and Historian before the Women's Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1984)

George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950 (New York: Pantheon, 1983)

William Hardy McNeill, The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005)

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918)

Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, The New History: Confessions and Conversations (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002)

James M. Banner Jr. Jr. and John R. Gillis, eds., Becoming Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)

John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990)

John B. Boles, ed., Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001)

John B. Boles, ed., Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004)

Guy Stanton Ford, ed., (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910) Essays in American history, Dedicated to Frederick Jackson Turner. Read Carl Becker on Kansas!

Writing that Book After Work Hours: Why and How

Philip White

In a perfect world, each historian with a worthy book proposal would earn an advance large enough to enable him or her to focus solely on crafting a top notch manuscript. In reality, for those of us who write history in addition to working outside the academy, we work to convince university presses that our ideas are “academic” enough and trade presses that our book will be “marketable.” Once we get a deal it barely allows us to get enough Starbucks coffee to fuel late-night writing sessions after our “real” jobs are done for the day. After the tax collector has taken a cut and we’ve plumped down the cash for research trips, bought enough books to buckle already-burdened shelves, and purchased enough aspirin to kill a small horse, we’re typically left with a pittance. So why do we put ourselves through this?

It can’t just be because we’re suckers, or so I keep telling myself as my bloodshot eyes struggle to comprehend the horror of reading “2:00” again—and I’m not talking p.m.—on my bedside clock as I stumble into my bed, fearing the alarm that will blare in not even five hours.

Well, one reason is a cliché, but true nonetheless—love. Love of the subject matter, the new angle we’ve come up with, the historical characters we’re impatient for our potential readers to meet on the page. For me, it is all of these, plus the thrill of finding a detail that I’ve never seen before, something I’ve just discovered in a dusty archive file after a day of previously fruitless searching.

Another bonus is mastery, relative though that is, of our subject matter. Often, this involves the painful recognition that presuppositions we formed years ago are wildly inaccurate—a revelation that only comes from digesting a broad range of scholarly works to get as close to the “truth” as we can. We then do our own primary and secondary source work, which takes apart yet more generic or personal misconceptions, while supplying new facts to take their place. Supplement that with oral history, archival work and such and you can get dangerously close to (gulp!) writing a book with something new and important to say.

So now I’ve covered the “why,” at least in part, onto the “how.” Yes, the aforementioned caffeine, applied in careful doses that don’t cumulatively turn you into a jabbering, twitchy wreck that can’t sleep, is certainly needed. Beyond that there are the principles of organization and prioritization. The fact that you have might have a main job in which you must give your best effort, maybe a family and possibly, you slacker, some other, non-work interests, means you are dealing with very limited time. The first step in getting organized is working with your family to set up a realistic schedule that won’t push you over the edge or deny them the time they need. Then, you must find a suitable workspace in which distractions are minimal, a desk uncluttered and all the resources you need at your disposal. If this sounds elementary, forgive me, but it’s amazing how many wasted hours result from trying to eke out a first draft in a noisy, crowded, disorganized workspace. Next, you need to set yourself some deadlines, even if they’re “soft,” with your manuscript submission date in mind.

Once you’ve got these basics down, got all your research materials together and are ready to jump in, you need to prioritize. What are you going to tackle first, and why? List making may seem like a chore, but well ordered to-dos for each aspect of your project are useful: “Things to Ask My Advisor,” “Interviews to Conduct,” “Archives to Visit,” and so on. Then you must decide how much time to give to each list, and then each item on your list, in order to meet those established deadlines. It’s satisfying to get out the red pen and cross off items, one by one.

The third stage of getting a well-written book completed on time is execution. All the organization and prioritization in the world is useless if you’re not going to actually hunker down and get the thing written. This is tied to the umbrella over the three components—discipline. It takes discipline to clear your workspace, organize your folders so they’re easy to navigate, apportion your time adequately, and then to execute. Discipline is needed to say “no” when your buddies invite you out for a few cold ones or when you want to watch your favorite team lose again. It also takes discipline to listen to your body’s warning signals and take a night off when you need it.

If you can combine organization, prioritization, discipline, and execution you will be able to have fun with your research and writing processes, to eliminate wasted time and to create a finished product you can be proud of. And that, ultimately, makes the creeping carpal tunnel syndrome, the sleep deprivation, and the raging caffeine addiction more than worth it!

Seward Was an Upstate Lawyer

Dan Allosso

I was looking through the materials I photographed on my last trip to the American Antiquarian Society. This trip was mostly about acquiring background on the places where the people I’m researching lived. Although there are a LOT of old newspapers now available online, as Heather has recently pointed out, there are many that are not yet. The American Antiquarian Society has a huge collection of early papers, as well as broadsheets, political pamphlets, and books.

I photographed a lot of material, which is my strategy when I go to archives like this. Whenever digital photography is allowed, I focus on locating and recording as much in the archives as I possibly can in the time I have. There’s never enough time, but this strategy allows me to go home with more material than I’d ever be able to read, sitting at the desk in the archive. It amazes me that just a decade or so ago, people had to sit in these places for months and months—and then in many cases they still only managed to scratch the surface of what was available.

That’s not to say that past researchers haven’t done fabulously, getting to the meat of an issue and finding the relevant material. But I suspect it limited the time they had to look around the information they were seeking, to see, for example, what else might have been on people’s minds on the particular day a specific newspaper article they were looking for was printed. Not to mention, what might have been in the advertisements on the edge of the page.

For example, I was looking at a table of New York Bank Note discounts, in the Lyons NY Countryman for Tuesday, March 2nd 1830. The table was in the fifth column of page four. After I photographed it, I noticed there was a notice about the sale of a defaulted property in Lyons at the top of column six. So I shot a quick photo of it and moved on. It wasn’t until I reviewed my photos at home, that I read it through and found that, in addition to being an interesting example of a notice, complete with a detailed property description and a little more background information to add to my knowledge of people in Lyons, the final line answers an unresolved question from my earlier research.

As I was putting together all the legends that surround my subjects in upstate NY, I ran into a story that claimed they had spent a lot of time trying to build a ship canal around Niagara Falls. There were obviously good precedents to support the idea of an additional “internal improvement” in upstate New York. But it would take government money to build it, so they needed a patron. There was a brief mention of a long, late-1850s carriage-ride one of my subjects had with New York Senator and former Governor William Henry Seward, during which my guy bent Seward’s ear about the project and received the response that it would never happen until there was a change in administration. Which he took to be Seward’s way of saying “when I become President.”

I liked this story, and had always planned on using it. But the accidental newspaper discovery makes it much more plausible. The 1830 lawyer handling the default sale in Lyons, whose name appears at the bottom of the advertisement was none other than “Wm. H. Seward, Att’y.” A reminder that my guys, even though they were merely upstate businessmen, had a completely credible connection with the man who went on to become a key member of Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals.” Too often we forget that many of the “great men” who stride through the big histories, started somewhere as regular people. Unexpected material from the archives can not only provide background for a narrative, but from time to time, it can provide unexpected clues about meaning and context.

Exploring History through Space

Heather Cox Richardson

On Wednesday, March 9, the space shuttle Discovery touched down for the last time. The Endeavor will fly in April, and the Atlantis will launch in June. And then America’s shuttle program will shut down. This marks the end of the era that began with President Kennedy’s September 1962 speech at Rice University, when he announced the national commitment to the space race. In that speech, President Kennedy described the nation’s history, beginning with Pilgrim William Bradford in 1630, as one of people who deliberately moved forward. Men could not be deterred in their quest for knowledge and progress, President Kennedy said, and America must be in the forefront of the exploration of space.

The exploration of space would require new science education, new computers, and new universities. It would create new companies and tens of thousands of new jobs. “Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this state, and this region, will share greatly in this growth,” Kennedy promised. In the next five years, NASA expected to double its engineers and scientists, to expend $60 million a year, to invest $200 million in plants and laboratories, and to contract for more than $1 billion of goods and services.

This would be expensive, he acknowledged. The current space budget was “$5,400 million a year,” an astronomical sum although, as he noted, “somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year.” That cost would rise until the space race took more than 50 cents a week from every man, woman, and child in the United States, he said. And it would be worth it, for only such bold determination would guarantee that America would be the first to control space.

The U.S. threw itself behind President Kennedy’s vision. NASA’s budget soared into the billions, and Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon less than a decade after Kennedy’s speech at Rice.

Yet the meaning of the Space Race seems to me still in doubt. The 2010 collection of The Best American Science and Nature Writing (edited by Freeman Dyson this year, with Tim Folger’s usual steady hand) features an entire section on space, and offers some ideas about what exploring space means, and has meant, for Americans.

In an article in the collection reprinted from the New York Times, novelist Tom Wolfe portrayed America’s adventures in space as a cultural combat between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., abandoned as soon as the U.S. could declare victory by winning the race to the moon. Wolfe saw the mission of space exploration as a way to build that proverbial bridge to the stars, enabling humans to colonize the universe against the day that Earth becomes uninhabitable. NASA needs philosophers to proselytize, he says, convincing Americans to continue to send astronauts to space to explore.

Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg has a very different vision of the importance of space exploration. In an article reprinted in the collection from the New York Review of Books, he said he finds the vast sums of money poured into manned space programs galling. The real function of a space program is its ability to illuminate the laws of nature. Astronomy and cosmology are helping to reveal the secrets of particle physics, but politicians refuse to supply the relatively small sums necessary to continue this research because, they claim, voters want their money to go to the manned space flights that are far more exciting than, for example, the Super Collider. He thinks that’s bunk; astronomy and cosmology are even more exciting than astronauts.

What exactly did Americans throw their enthusiasm and funds behind in the 1960s? Was it the excitement of what Wolfe describes as a sort of David and Goliath combat against a dangerous foe? Or was it the realization that we were at the threshold of a new understanding of the universe, suddenly attainable thanks to the extraordinary expertise unleashed by WWII?

Or was it, perhaps, a serendipitous moment, when those eager to learn the larger lessons of astronomy and physics found a president able to harness a cultural impulse that would enable them to fulfill their vision?

Dr. Weinstein is indisputably correct about the extraordinary discoveries in astronomy and particle physics in the past several decades. (Indeed, he’s made some of them himself.) We now have excellent data about the history of the universe stretching back almost 13.7 billion years, to just after the Big Bang. (Watch this video of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Flythrough.) This data is orders of magnitude better than any data that archaeologists or paleontologists or geologists, to say nothing of historians, will ever have about the history of our own planet.

Yet Wolfe’s point is well taken, too. For historians, the Space Race has to be understood culturally as well as scientifically. If astronauts are seen as soldiers in the struggle

between the U.S and the U.S.S.R. rather than scientists, their actions help us develop a spectrum of military behavior. They can also be studied as popular heroes.

Still, I lean toward the idea that the central story of the Space Race is political. It was a moment when policy makers managed to direct huge popular enthusiasm toward an end with no immediate payoff. While some historians have studied the relationship between the space program and public policy, there is plenty more work to be done. In an era that demands long-term investments in science, education, infrastructure, and so on, we need to know as much as we can about how policy makers have successfully directed public enthusiasm (and funds) for long-term goals.

Jeremy Bangs's Experience with Sundown Towns

Randall Stephens

Americans born after the 1950s may not know that there ever were such things as sundown towns. James W. Loewen writes about them in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New Press, 2005). "'Don’t let the sun go down on you in this town.' We equate these words with the Jim Crow South," summarizes the book's website, "but, in a sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, award-winning and bestselling author James W. Loewen demonstrates that strict racial exclusion was the norm in American towns and villages from sea to shining sea for much of the twentieth century."

Jeremy Bangs emailed me the other day about his experience of growing up in Illinois and Kansas and being all-too aware of such villages and hamlets that dotted the midwest. Bangs is the founder of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum in Leiden and the author of Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners (General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2009). Jeremy's father, Carl Bangs, was a leading authority on the life and theology of Jacobus Arminius. (I read his biography of Arminius when I first launched into grad school. I was hooked on history.) With Jeremy's permission, I include below his reminiscence about sundown towns.

When my father moved ca. 1952-53 from Chicago to Bourbonnais, IL, to teach religion and philosophy at Olivet Nazarene College, he first heard about the existence of such towns, including some in the immediate area. Like others on the faculty who were ordained, he sometimes was invited to preach, and, as director of the college's brass choir (which he started), he sometimes was asked to take students to perform in Sunday morning services in Nazarene churches in Illinois as fundraisers for the college.

He refused to accept invitations in towns that were known as sundown towns. He always explained that he would be happy to accept the church's invitation once the village or town had reversed its policy. He was not alone in this vocal opposition to the racist custom, and I think that he and his colleagues made this an issue that was discussed (and officially opposed) by area councils of churches. Further, we did not drive through such towns, taking the long way around, whatever that might be, when going somewhere farther away. Since most roads there were laid out in square patterns, there was always a way to drive around. I think that at least one town officially changed their policy, after being shamed from the pulpits. As I recall, that must have been Manteno, IL, because I know that it was once a sundown town but in later years we did drive through Manteno. (We moved to Kansas City in 1961.)

In Kansas City, looking for a house to buy, my parents were shocked to find out that certain suburbs excluded blacks as well as Jews. This was possible with so-called covenants in the deeds, by which a buyer obliged himself to refuse to sell to blacks or Jews. The suburbs were among those developed and operated by the J. C. Nichols Company, who also built Kansas City's Plaza. My parents refused to buy in such restricted areas and refused to buy from that company. My father also instigated legal action on this point against the J. C. Nichols Company, which led to some retaliation, although I've forgotten what form that took. I think that eventually this action resulted in the company's being forced to drop the policy and restrictive covenants, even before legal changes made them explicitly illegal. As in Illinois, my father was one among numerous clergymen who tried to bring an end to these restrictions.

Key Performance Indicators and the Heightening Contradictions of Academia

Chris Beneke

Of what value is your scholarship? Historians in Britain are receiving unsettling precise answers to that question. In case you hadn’t heard the news, British academics are now locked into a quality control regime that forces them to measure up against “Key Performance Indicators” over a 6 to 7 year span. The measures are largely determined by government officials though the actual measuring is done by historians.

Better minds have already suggested that the quantification of humanities scholarship through such mechanisms will dampen creativity, discourage ambitious long-term projects, and lower scholarly quality, while sucking much of the joy out of professional historical work. Randall blogged about funding-driven assessment tools a couple of weeks ago, Anthony Grafton’s AHA President’s column mentioned it in January, and Simon Head recently wrote a more extended analysis for the New York Review of Books. (I did some hand wringing myself in November.) Nonetheless, one paragraph in Simon Head’s account of the system struck me as especially noteworthy:

In the humanities the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) bias also works in favor of the 180–200-page monograph, hyperspecialized, cautious and incremental in its findings, with few prospects for sale as a bound book but again with a good chance of being completed and peer-reviewed in time for the RAE deadline. A bookseller at Blackwell’s, the leading Oxford bookstore, told me that he dreaded the influx of such books as the RAE deadline approached.

In other words, the new British accountability systems seems perfectly designed to heighten the contradictions in the academic world, ensuring that the “research output” that scholars are dourly incentivized to produce is less accessible to the larger public and therefore less likely to contribute to the informed consideration of things that the public worries about—like, for instance, big social, political, and ethical problems. The argument can surely be made that rigorous research measures drive scholars toward more focused and more readily publishable research, which will ultimately makes a greater indirect contribution on the world. But I doubt that it would be convincing, especially when it comes to historical research.

Indeed, the RAE seems well designed to thwart scholars who believe that they should write engaging volumes that people who don’t care a whit about the distinction between social history and cultural history (the common term for them is “general readers”) might actually desire to read. Despite the precarious state of academic publishing, historians have enjoyed the indulgence of academic presses in recent years because of their faith that we will eventually write such books—if not the first time around, then the second, or third. It’s hard to imagine that system holding up if we’re flooding bookstore shelves with carefully calibrated units of research output, rather than, you know, books.

March 2011 Issue of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

The new issue of the Journal of the Historical Society has been arriving in mailboxes this past week. Articles from it can be downloaded at the Wiley Online Library. The March 2011 issue features:

"Blind Men of Industan"
F. S. Naiden

"Three Weeks in Mississippi: James Meredith, Aubrey Norvell, and the Politics of Bird Shot"
Aram Goudsouzian

"Neither a Secular nor Confessional Age: The Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875"
Thomas Albert Howard

"Tar and Feathers"
Barry Levy

"The Age of Reagan? Three Questions for Future Research"
John Ehrman

Here is a little from Howard's "Neither a Secular nor Confessional Age: The Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875":

Europe's "revolutionary century," the nineteenth, has experienced its own historiographical revolution in recent decades. Not too long ago its direction reflected the academy's penchant to think in terms of "secularization"; the title of Owen Chadwick's The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (1975) might serve as an illustration of an earlier status quo. Encouraged by the advent of the so-called "new cultural history" in the 1990s and building momentum ever since, religious topics have emerged as a significant focus of scholarship. One German scholar, Olaf Blaschke, has influentially proposed that, far from a "secular age," we might do better to think of the nineteenth century as a "second confessional era," in light of the persistence of Catholic and Protestant "milieus" throughout Western Europe and lingering confessional animosities and prejudices. Blaschke's words have received much deserved attention. read more >>>

Getting Students to Read . . .

Randall Stephens

Over at Times Higher Education Tara Brabazon wonders how to get underaduates to care about reading ("Bringing Them to Books," March 9, 2011). I enjoy Brabazon's snarky reports from across the Atlantic. This one is particularly witty and relevant.

"One short sentence chills the expectations of teachers," Brabazon begins. "A student, in reply to a tutorial question or query about an assignment, shrilly replies: 'I don’t like reading.' This is an ice pick through scholarly culture. It is naive. It is short-sighted. It is foolish. It is ignorant. Without reading, a student is trapped within the limitations of their own life, confusing personal experience with researched expertise. Reading builds a productive network of authors, approaches, theories and evidence." For Brabazon, "Reading is not meant to be liked or disliked: it is a way to understand the views of others." How should professors "support the act of reading," she asks. Brabazon describes her use of GoodReads, a social media site where readers across the world post reviews and comments about their books. "GoodReads enables students to comment on books, meet authors who are registered on the site and commence a dialogue with an array of interested groups." Sounds like a great idea.

In my classes I use other, rudimentary strategies. I usually give a very basic quiz on the day that a book is due in class. (Sounds awful, I admit, but it works.) The quiz is elementary, asking the most simple questions to ensure that students are at least reading the book that we will be discussing in class. In my experience students need to know that reading is not optional and the quiz tends to help.

Still, how can a professor "make" a student care about reading? I occasional begin my classes by describing a recent book--by a historian, sociologist, religious studies scholar--and then using that as a hook for the lecture of that day. I also start off classes by pointing out a history book or a newspaper article that connects the topic we are covering in the class with a current event or a larger historical theme. Maybe, just maybe, that will make students think about how reading and being informed makes their lives richer and more interesting.

We know that reading widely helps individuals develop as writers. So, I tell my students that if they want to fine tune their writing and become better writers, they should read opinion journals, newspapers, serious nonfiction, and the like. William Zinsser puts it well: "writing is learned by imitation." He suggests that students find a writer whose style they like. "Study their articles clinically. Try to figure out how they put their words and sentences together. That’s how I learned to write, not from a writing course."

I'd be curious to know what carrots others use to attract students to the practice of reading.

The Historical Society's 2012 Conference

Popularizing Historical Knowledge: Practice, Prospects, and Perils

Columbia, SC, Thursday, May 31st - Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

Professional historians in the United States are increasingly being called upon to produce more “popular,” more accessible history. How do and how should academic historians reach popular audiences? How and to what extent is “popular” history written around the world? Does the meaning of and audience for “popular history” vary from place to place? Along with professional historians, states, elites, and a variety of interest groups have long had an interest in sponsoring, supporting, and generating historical knowledge for popular and other audiences. We seek paper and panel proposals that will consider “popular” history in its various guises and locales. How and to what extent is the interest in “popular” history genuinely new or does it have a deeper genealogy? How do and how should historians interact with television and movie production or write op-ed pieces or blogs or serve as expert witnesses? Is there such a thing as a truly “popular” history? Do we need a distinctive “popular history” and are historians
properly equipped to write it?

We especially encourage panel proposals, though individual paper proposals are welcome as well. And our interpretation of “panel” is broad: 2 or more presenters constitute a panel—chairs and commentators are optional. As at past conferences, we hope for bold yet informal presentations that will provoke lots of questions and discussion from the audience, not presenters reading papers word-for-word from a podium followed by a commentator doing the same.

Please submit proposals (brief abstract and brief CV) by December 1, 2011 to Mark Smith and Dean Kinzley, 2012 Program Chairs, at jslucas@bu.edu.

What on Earth was a “Bourbon Democrat?”

Heather Cox Richardson

Recently, I went over the importance of the Paris Commune in American politics in the 1870s with a group of teachers. As we examined James S. Pike’s 1874 The Prostrate State, written by a man consumed with concern over the Commune, one of them noticed Pike’s reference to “the Southern Bourbon.” With France firmly in mind, he asked if Pike had been referring to the French aristocracy when he used that term.

I’ve studied nineteenth-century American politics for almost thirty years, and have written extensively on the importance of the Paris Commune to American political thought, but this had never occurred to me. To the degree I even thought about it, I honestly thought the Bourbon Democrats were dubbed that because they drank bourbon.

So as soon as I got home, I set out to track down where, exactly, the name “Bourbon Democrat” came from. That search yielded an answer—of sorts—and it also revealed just how much work historians can now do on the internet.

Most general histories on-line and scholarly articles (available on JSTOR), where I started, examined the Bourbon Democrats themselves rather than their name, and dated their importance from 1875 or 1876 to the turn of the century. They noted that the Bourbons were straight-out, old-fashioned Southern Democrats who stood against black rights.

But Pike used the term in his book in 1874. Where did he get it?

To find out, I started where I almost always start a nineteenth-century search: with the New York Times (available at the Historical New York Times). That turned up surprising little from this continent. There were a large number of stories from the very beginning of the newspaper’s publication in 1851, though, referring to the Bourbons of France and Spain. Obviously, “Bourbon” was a term with which Americans would have been very comfortable, and which they would have associated with the European aristocrats. (There were also a few advertisements for bourbon whiskey).

The first time I found a reference to “Bourbon Democrats” in the New York Times was in 1872. It was in an article that looked to the upcoming presidential election and attacked the Democrats by arguing that the “Bourbon Democrats” were the same men who had in 1864 been strong advocates of peace with the South and a return to pre-war conditions. They were essentially unchanged, still firm Confederates. (New York Times, May 8. 1872, p. 4.)

From the New York Times I went to the Chicago Tribune, where I found the term “bourbons” used in an editorial in May 1872. There, though, the term was used for extremists on both sides. The editorial complained about how “bourbons” in both parties were hurting the nation. (Chicago Tribune, May 31, 1872, p. 4).

So far I had discovered that, in the same month, the New York Times had used the term as if its meaning were established and the Chicago Tribune had used it as if its meaning were still malleable. Clearly, it had emerged shortly before May 1872.

My next stop was the New York Daily Tribune. Its editor, Horace Greeley, was a political animal and could even have invented the term, I figured. The New York Daily Tribune is on that incredible Library of Congress website, Chronicling America. On March 5, 1872, Greeley published the first salvo in James Pike’s attack on Republican Reconstruction policies in the South. In this article, titled “A State in Ruins,” Pike referred to South Carolina’s antebellum leaders as an “aristocracy,” before going on to argue that those leaders were now being trodden underfoot by black upstarts. This was the same part of his argument that used the term “Southern Bourbons” in his book—the one the teacher identified. This put aristocracy and “Bourbons” together.

Was there an earlier reference to “Bourbons” that might clarify why Pike used the term?

Perhaps. In May 1871, an editorial in the New York Daily Tribune identified as Bourbon Democrats a faction of the Democratic Party in Bourbon County, Kentucky. According to the editorial, the faction was made up of ex-Rebels who had not fought in the war, and who still spouted extremism. They refused to recognize the 14th or the 15th Amendments to the Constitution, and abhorred black voting. Gaye Keller Bland, in The Kentucky Encyclopedia—where I went next—had a slightly different take on this group, saying they took their name not from Bourbon County (although they were centered there) but from the House of Bourbon that “held to royal tradition after the French Revolution.” Bourbon County, though, according to the article above Bland’s in the encyclopedia, was named for the French royal family.

So was it a county political faction or the French Bourbons who prompted the name Bourbon Democrat? A final newspaper article might provide the answer. On September 20, 1871, the Louisiana Democrat (also at Chronicling America) stood firm against the Democrats who wanted to accept the Reconstruction amendments and move forward. It made the term a symbol of the entire Old South when it said “. . . we believe that when the old Bourbon banner, torn, tattered and fragrant with the blood of a hundred thousand heroes, kisses the sunlight again, victory will nestle in its folds.” (Louisiana Democrat, September 20, 1871, p. 3)

So my best guess is that the term began by identifying a Democratic faction in Kentucky, but quickly got picked up as a reference to the French royal family that stood against the French Revolution. In 1871, Southern Democrats described themselves as the bastions of old tradition and culture, standing in the storm of socialism unleashed by the dregs of society. It only made sense to pick up the limited Kentucky name and use it more widely to describe those who held to the Old South as Bourbons. This was precisely the sentiment of Pike’s The Prostrate State.

So, in answer to that teacher’s question: while Pike’s work in general referenced the Paris Commune, in The Prostrate State he used the term “Bourbons” to invoke those who stood against the French Revolution. (Of course, the two French events tended to run together in Americans’ minds.) Two things are even more certain: that many of the Bourbon Democrats drank bourbon was clearly incidental, and that you can do more research now from home than you could do even a few years ago in most libraries.

An Interview with Robert Darnton on the Digital Public Library of America

Randall Stephens

"Google demonstrated the possibility of transforming the intellectual riches of our libraries, books lying inert and underused on shelves, into an electronic database that could be tapped by anyone anywhere at any time," wrote Robert Darton several months back in the New York Review of Books. "Why not adapt its formula for success to the public good," he asked, "a digital library composed of virtually all the books in our greatest research libraries available free of charge to the entire citizenry, in fact, to everyone in the world?"

Creating a Digital Public Library of America would be no easy task. Certainly there are major obstacles

to overcome. The legal matters of copyright and what to do about so-called orphan books would be daunting. Cost, as well, would pose a problem. Yet, says Darnton:

If [other] countries can create national digital libraries, why can’t the United States? Because of the cost, some would argue. Far more works exist in English than in Dutch or Japanese, and the Library of Congress alone contains 30 million volumes. Estimates of the cost of digitizing one page vary enormously, from ten cents (the figure cited by Brewster Kahle, who has digitized over a million books for the Internet Archive) to ten dollars, depending on the technology and the required quality. But it should be possible to digitize everything in the Library of Congress for less than Sarkozy’s €750 million—and the cost could be spread out over a decade.

A little over a week ago I sat down with Darnton—award-winning historian, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard, and director of the Harvard University Library—to discuss

plans underway for a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Sitting in Darnton's office right next to Harvard Square we discussed the nettlesome issues surrounding the DPLA, what the massive on-line collection might offer, and how such a virtual repository could serve the public. In the two videos embedded here Darnton also considers what this proposed library would mean for scholars in the humanities and history in particular.

The project has deep intellectual roots in American soil. In another essay that Darnton wrote for the New York Review, he reflected on the long history of the idea. "The ambition behind this project goes back to the founding of this country," he remarks. "Thomas Jefferson formulated it succinctly: 'Knowledge is the common property of mankind.' He was right—in principle. But in practice, most of humanity has been cut off from the accumulated wisdom of the ages. In Jefferson’s day, only a tiny elite had access to the world of learning. Today, thanks to the Internet, we can open up that world to all of our fellow citizens. We have the technical means to make Jefferson’s dream come true, but do we have the will?" In the video interview Darnton ponders what is possible now that has never been possible before. The dreams of the Founders, spun out of Enlightenment optimism, could, at least in some ways, be realized today.

Few early Americans spelled out a plan for a "publick" Library as did Benjamin Franklin. His ideals of thrift, self-improvement, volunteerism, access, and the public good are apparent in passages like the following from his Autobiography:

At the time I establish'd myself in Pennsylvania, there was not a good bookseller's shop in any of the colonies to the southward of Boston. In New York and Philad'a the printers were indeed stationers; they sold only paper, etc., almanacs, ballads, and a few common school-books. Those who lov'd reading were oblig'd to send for their books from England; the members of the Junto had each a few. We had left the alehouse, where we first met, and hired a room to hold our club in. I propos'd that we should all of us bring our books to that room, where they would not only be ready to consult in our conferences, but become a common benefit, each of us being at liberty to borrow such as he wish'd to read at home. This was accordingly done, and for some time contented us.

Finding the advantage of this little collection, I propos'd to render the benefit from books more common, by commencing a public subscription library. I drew a sketch of the plan and rules that would be necessary, and got a skilful conveyancer, Mr Charles Brockden, to put the whole in form of articles of agreement to be subscribed, by which each subscriber engag'd to pay a certain sum down for the first purchase of books, and an annual contribution for increasing them. So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able, with great industry, to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each, and ten shillings per annum. On this little fund we began. The books were imported; the library was opened one day in the week for lending to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned. The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns, and in other provinces. The libraries were augmented by donations; reading became fashionable; and our people, having no publick amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books, and in a few years were observ'd by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.

There were critics in Franklin's day and there are critics of the DPLA now. But, it's encouraging that conversations/debates and planning have begun in earnest!

Earthquakes through Time

Randall Stephens

When I was on a fellowship in San Diego last summer, I became very familiar with the USGS’s “Recent Earthquakes” page. The aftershocks from the Easter Mexicali earthquake continued to rumble through southern California. Having never been in an earthquake before, even minor ones like we were having, the whole experience was bizarre and a little frightening. The US Geological Survey has another helpful page that lists “Earthquakes with 50,000 or More Deaths:
Most Destructive Known Earthquakes on Record in the World.” I include a selection from that below. Note the words “on Record.” It has been 1,200 years since Japan suffered an earthquake as destructive as the one that shook the island nation on Friday afternoon.

Year: Place, death toll, magnitude

856: Iran, Damghan, 200,000, unknown

1667: Caucasia, Shemakha, 80,000, unknown

1693: Italy, Sicily, 60,000, 7.5

1727: Iran, Tabriz, 77,000, unknown

1755: Portugal, Lisbon 70,000, 8.7

1923: Kanto (Kwanto), Japan, 142,800, 7.9

1970, Chimbote, Peru, 70,000, 7.9

1976: Tangshan, China, 255,000, 7.5

2005: Pakistan, 86,000, 7.6

2010: Haiti region, 222,570, 7.0

Men and woman have always tried to understand why earthquakes happen when and where they do. After the 1755 Lisbon quake, felt in Africa and across Europe, Europeans were eager for on-the-ground intelligence and desperately sought to make sense of the whole thing.

Social critic Walter Benjamin, oddly, delivered a 1931 radio address to children on the effects of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. He ably demonstrated its scope and terror . . . for kids, nonetheless! He also spoke about how it changed the ways Europeans thought about their world:

There is a further, special reason that helps to explain why this event affected people's minds so powerfully--why countless pamphlets passed from hand to hand, and indeed why new descriptions continued to make their appearance almost a century later. The reason is that the earthquake was the most powerful on record. Its impact was felt throughout Europe and as far away as Africa. It has been calculated that, together with its most distant tremors, it affected two and a quarter million square kilometers--a huge area. Its most powerful shocks extended from the Moroccan coast to the shores of Andalusia and France. (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: vol 2, part 2, 1931-1934, eds. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings [Harvard University Press, 2005], 537.)

Benjamin goes on to site some original accounts of the quake, including one by the Englishman Rev. Charles Davy:

It was on the morning of this fatal day, between the hours of nine and ten, that I was set down in my apartment, just finishing a letter, when the papers and table I was writing on began to tremble with a gentle motion, which rather surprised me, as I could not perceive a breath of wind stirring. Whilst I was reflecting with myself what this could be owing to, but without having the least apprehension of the real cause, the whole house began to shake from the very foundation, which at first I imputed to the rattling of several coaches in the main street, which usually passed that way, at this time, from Belem to the palace; but on hearkening more attentively, I was soon undeceived, as I found it was owing to a strange frightful kind of noise under ground, resembling the hollow distant rumbling of thunder. All this passed in less than a minute, and I must confess I now began to be alarmed, as it naturally occurred to me that this noise might possibly be the forerunner of an earthquake, as one I remembered, which had happened about six or seven years ago, in the island of Madeira, commenced in the same manner, though it did little or no damage. . . .

Perhaps you may think the present doleful subject here concluded; but alas! the horrors of the 1st of November are sufficient to fill a volume. As soon as it grew dark, another scene presented itself little less shocking than those already described: the whole city appeared in a blaze, which was so bright that I could easily see to read by it. It may be said without exaggeration, it was on fire at least in a hundred different places at once, and thus continued burning for six days together, without intermission, or the least attempt being made to stop its progress.

It went on consuming everything the earthquake had spared, and the people were so dejected and terrified that few or none had courage enough to venture down to save any part of their substance; every one had his eyes turned towards the flames, and stood looking on with silent grief, which was only interrupted by the cries and shrieks of women and children calling on the saints and angels for succor, whenever the earth began to tremble, which was so often this night, and indeed I may say ever since, that the tremors, more or less, did not cease for a quarter of an hour together. I could never learn that this terrible fire was owing to any subterranean eruption, as some reported, but to three causes, which all concurring at the same time, will naturally account for the prodigious havoc it made. (Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham Univ.)

As of now, there is no telling what the long-term implications of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami will be. What sort of additional reports will be relayed from those who survived it? How will we understand it differently in days and years to come, after considerable reflection and after the damage is assessed? How will victims make sense of it? What will be it's global impact?

In Praise of Oral History: A Dispatch from Fulton, Missouri

Philip White

In a 1940s-style coffee stand in the middle of a drug store, six grey-haired gentlemen sit around a long, light-wood table sipping coffee and swapping stories. They’re here at 10am six days a week (Sunday is a church day, and the drug store, as with many businesses in the town, is closed then), and the proprietor holds the same table for his most consistent patrons, who have gathered in this manner for over 25 years.

Today’s topic of conversation is the day Winston Churchill came to tiny Fulton, MO, 65 years ago to the day. Fulton mayoral candidate Bob Craghead recalls his father charging out-of-towners a whopping 25 cents a pop to park at his farm just outside the city limits. O.T. Harris, whose family is a part owner of the Callaway County Bank across Court Street, is laughing as he recollects the bank’s CFO Tom Van Sant (a frequent visitor at Truman’s White House, and the man who encouraged Westminster College president Franc McCluer in his unlikely bid to bring Churchill to town) reputation as what Jerry Seinfeld called a “close talker.”

My pen is working overtime to scribble down these priceless recollections, in case the batteries in the voice recorder on the table betray me. In the weeks before my Fulton visit, I’ve had similar conversations, albeit by phone, with half a dozen Fultonians. One gentleman was so eager to share his memories that the aforementioned recorder ran to more than 90 minutes. Then he called back the next day with another half hour’s worth of vivid descriptions of the Missouri town as it was in the mid-1940s. I relished each word.

Certainly, oral histories can be distorted by forgetfulness, romanticism and exaggeration, but they remain an indispensable way for a historian (or any writer, for that matter) to add color and personality to his or her work. It is simple (and, sadly, the modus operandi for writers of history that’s as dry as a pile of October leaves) to read a couple of written sources and apply their second-hand generalizations to a time and place. But to talk to people who were in the moment is to see what they saw, hear what they heard, touch what they touched. Such accounts also serve the purpose of putting events that fall into so-called “Great Man” history (in this case, Truman and Churchill parading through town and the latter then delivering his “Iron Curtain” speech) in the context of “regular” folks’ lives. It’s also all too easy to reflect on the impact of such an occurrence through other world leaders’ perspectives or with the benefit of hindsight, but to obtain the real reactions of people who were there adds a new dimension.

Perhaps one reason certain writers avoid oral history is because it requires a different sort of effort. It can take weeks to track down people who were present at a particular event. Some writers surely think “who can effectively describe a bygone era.” You can have 10 conversations before you get one piece of usable information. In addition to prepping for the interview, jotting notes and/or recording, and transcribing, you need to cross-reference certain facts to verify authenticity, and to compare testimonies to establish sources.

And yet, even if it takes 10 hours of panning for every gold nugget minute, such treasures are hidden in the memories of people everywhere. Beyond the benefits of oral history for your project, there is the immeasurable value of creating connections and, if you’re fortunate, new friendships with your interviewees.

Then there is the time capsule bonus of recording first-person impressions for posterity. Recently, Frank W. Buckles, the last surviving American World War I veteran, passed away, marking the end for new oral histories of the Great War. The same will be true in just a few years for World War II, the Great Depression, and all sorts of other 20th-century subjects.

I feel fortunate to be speaking with these fine, 80-something individuals from Fulton while time remains.

Jack Miller Center Essay Prize Competition for the best essays published in Historically Speaking

.
Announcing . . .

The Jack Miller Center Essay Prize Competition for the best essays published in Historically Speaking during 2011 in the following areas:

Intellectual History or the History of Political Thought

Military or Diplomatic History

The prizes are $1000 each and will be awarded in January 2012. Essay submission guidelines for Historically Speaking can be found at www.bu.edu/historic/hs/ guide.html. Direct all submissions and questions about the prize competition to: Donald Yerxa at historic@bu.edu.

The Jack Miller Center is a nonprofit, nonsectarian, nonpartisan, educational organization dedicated to strengthening the teaching of America’s founding principles and history.

University Press Imprints

Randall Stephens

I just got word from Harvard University Press that my forthcoming book, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, co-authored with Karl Giberson, will be part of the press's Belknap Press imprint. We're elated!

I've always noticed that certain books with HUP list "The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press." Oxford University Press has its Clarendon Press imprint. Though other than the fact that good books come under the banner of various imprints, I didn't know much else about how all this works. Max Hall explains the role of Belknap in his Harvard University Press: A History (Harvard University Press, 1986):

"What is the Belknap Press?" People ask this, sometimes mistakenly voicing the silent "k." The answer: it is an imprint, identifying the books whose costs are paid out of Belknap funds and whose sales receipts are plowed back into Belknap working capital after the parent body has deducted a share for its operating expenses-so percent until 1976, when it was raised to 60. The Belknap Press has no separate staff, only separate accounts. Waldron Belknap himself supplied the name, specifying that the income from his bequest was to
be used for "publishing activities, under the name of the Belknap Press, of the Harvard University Press." . . .

In the will Belknap said that it was his intention "that the relationship of the Belknap Press to the Harvard University Press shall be as closely analogous as may be to the present relationship of the publishing activities of the Clarendon Press to the Oxford University Press." The Clarendon Press imprint was known for books of long-lasting importance, superior in scholarship and physical production, chosen whether or not they might be profitable. Those principles were adopted for the Belknap Press. At first, when the funds were just a trickle, the subject matter was confined to Belknap's own main interests, American history and civilization, but the benefactor imposed no restrictions and in 1961 the scope was expanded to all fields. (140-41)

There are a variety of imprints and series at University Presses. When shopping your MS around it's always a good idea to know what a particular press specializes in. What series will be the best fit for your book? A smaller press like Mercer University Press has wonderful series on religion in the South, Kierkegaard studies, and biblical studies. Whether you are working on Native American history, Medieval devotionalism, or 20th-century military history it's always a good idea to do some real investigating in order to find the press that would best suit your work.

Historians and Their Theories/Methodologies

Randall Stephens

Theories/methodologies come and go. Take a look at the history profession over the last half century to see how that works out. Where are the pyschohistorians? The social historians armed with computer punch cards and prosopographic reports? The consensus historians clutching well-worn copies of Adorno's Authoritarian Personality? The world systems historians of international affairs? And the Marxist historians? (I'm not pointing this out in some neanderthal effort to convince historians to ditch theory. Far from it. If anything, thinking about how things fade and move on might make us a little more humble.)

In this vein Terry Eagleton reviews Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 in the March 2011 LRB. Eagleton is, for me, always a pleasure to read. He begins:

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Had someone stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke?

We are speaking, note, about 1986, a few years before the Soviet bloc crumbled. As Eric Hobsbawm points out in this collection of essays, that wasn’t what caused so many erstwhile believers to bin their Guevara posters. Marxism was already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution, the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system – or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial proletariat had dwindled, but Marx himself did not think that the working class was confined to this group.>>>

Labor Battles and Exploring the Past Online

Randall Stephens

Nelson Lichtenstein writes about "The Long History of Labor Bashing" in the March 6 Chronicle. What are the antecedents of the current struggles over benefits and bargaining? What light does history shine on all this? asks Lichtenstein.

This right-wing critique of trade unionism has often been contradictory and inconsistent. At the turn of the 20th century, many establishment figures in the news media and politics saw the unionism of their era as but a manifestation of immigrant radicalism, often violent and subversive. After World War I, the business offensive against the unions went by the name of "The American Plan," with the American Legion and other patriotic groups often serving as the antilabor militants who broke picket lines and physically manhandled union activists.

At the very same moment, a quite contradictory discourse, which portrayed the unions as retrograde rather than radical, was emergent. Progressives, as well as conservatives, often denounced unions as self-serving job trusts, corrupt and parasitic enterprises linked to ethnic politicians and underworld figures.>>>

After reading that I went over to the Library of Congress's Chronicling America website, an excellent, free historical newspapers resource. My search for the exact words "labor," "anarchists," and "immigrant" brought back 8 results for 1890-1900. Here's a fairly typical article from the Chicago Eagle, June 15, 1895. Notice that the author acknowledges that the Haymarket Riot at least drew the public and the experts to acknowledge the labor troubles of the day.

A little over nine years ago Chicago's Haymarket tragedy occurred. On the night of May 4, 1880, a bomb was thrown into the ranks of the police, who had gone to disperse an anarchist meeting. One policeman was killed outright, six were mortally wounded, and sixty more or loss injured. The number of the crowd killed or hurt was never known. Chicago never witnessed excitement so intense, and she at once achieved the reputation of being the center of anarchism for the whole world. No one event ever brought labor troubles and agitation to the notice of so many people, and probably no other influence has done so much to cause a widespread study of social economy. Four men wore hanged for the Haymarket crime, and one killed himself in jail by blowing his head to pieces with a dynamite cartridge exploded in his mouth. It was never discovered who threw the bomb. When it exploded it blew Chicago anarchy to pieces and answered the directly opposite purpose its thrower evidently intended.

A similar search on Google Books (from 1890-1900) for "anarchy," "labor," "unions," "immigrants," and "radical" returned 21 results. Of course, word searches like this cannot pick up on the subtleties of meaning and the distances between the words on the page. But they still represent a huge leap in the way we do or can do our research. Journalists, too, must be taking advantage of these relatively new ways to access the past. (One could spend hours and hours searching and browsing through countless other databases to harvest similar sources.)

(In the coming days I'll be posting here a video interview I did with Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard and director of the Harvard University Library. I ask Darnton about what is being called the Digital Public Library of America, the range of digital resources on the web, and the ways historians are using these new materials.)

Thirty years ago a historian who knew little about labor history, but wanted to learn more about how the present compared to the past, might have had to spend hours in the library, browsing indexes, thumbing through moldy card catalogs, or roaming the stacks. Not any more. Though, I still love to browse the stacks!