Surfing the Internet

A package arrived in the mail recently from David Janott, who was one of my first students after I started teaching at IU Northwest in 1970. He was returning a book he borrowed almost 40 years ago, "Nixon Agonistes" by Gary Wills (the book got the author on the President's Enemies List), plus he threw in a book he thought I'd find interesting, "Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang" (I devored it and then passed it on to colleague Diana Chen-lin). What prompted Janott's gesture was that his wife typed his name on Google. Lo and behold, he was cited for being in my 1977 book about Gary, City of the Century. I had quoted from a student paper he did on the 1919 Steel Strike. He hadn't known he was in the book and ordered a copy. His package and note prompted me to send him "Gary's First Hundred Years" and a Steel Shavings magazine on the Calumet Region's Formative Years, 1900-1920 (volume 15) that, unbeknownst to him, contained his article.

That happy coincidence prompted me to Google my own name. The first entry, as expected, was the IU Northwest History Department's Home Page, where I am situated under "emeritus faculty." Next came a bunch of other James Lanes and some James Blanes, including info about a professional poker player and an escapee from Sing Sing. EBay had my and Ron Cohen's Gary Pictorial History on sale for a whopping $157.27. Amazon had a half-dozen Shavings issues on sale (including a rare out-of-print volume on United Steelworkers of America Local 1010 for 11 dollars) and five of my books, including my first, "The Enduring Ghetto," which I did with David Goldfield, and "Forging a Community," which I edited with Ed Escabar. A site called alibris had even more "James B. Lane" books, including a 1930s Shavings issue for $45 that originally sold for $2.50 and a book I edited with Steve McShane called "Skinning Cats: The Wartime Letters of Tom Kreuger."

The Oral History Review site claimed that for a 2000 issue I had reviewed Staughton Lynd's "We Are All Leaders." As much as I admire Lynd, I had never reviewed his book. Clicking onto the site, on the page in question was the last papagraph of my review of "Central Avenue Sounds," followed by the beginning of the Lynd review that someone else did (I think you have to pay to open up the whole thing). This is how I ended my review: "The impermanence of America is nowhere as apparent as in Los Angeles, and the rise and decline of this mostly black enclave is told with a bittersweet candor. The book reveals the institiutional racism and hypocrisy rampant during the mid-twentieth century in Los Angeles, but it also shows that for a time there was a beacon of tolerance in the Central Avenue jazz subculture."

Also under James B. Lane I found mention of an article I did on Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" in 1973 for the Negro American Literature Forum that showed up in the SSSL Bibliography. My 1974 essay on "Down These Mean Street" by Piri Thomas showed up on a site called Book Rags. The Encyclopedia Britannica reprinted a review that Andrew Hurley wrote for the Indiana Magazine of History of "Gary's First Hundred Years" (he called it breezy and engaging). The Journal of American History listed an article of mine they published on Industrial History Museums, and there's even a citation where I am mentioned in the book Nearby History.

Just when I was about to stop searching, I came across citation number 152 for my Steel Shavings website, which was set up as part of the larger Calumet Regional Archives site. Voila! Anyone who comes across that site can actually click on "James B. Lane Blog" and read this and other entries.