Readable History

"No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.” David McCullough

Historian Ray Boomhower has been sharing quotations from distinguished members of his profession, including David McCullough (above) who has written acclaimed biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams and, my favorite, “The Path Between the Seas,” about how the Panama Canal came about. Another statement I subscribe to that Boomhower referenced is by Samuel Eliot Morrison: “With honesty of purpose, balance, a respect for tradition, courage, and, above all, a philosophy of life, any young person who embraces the historical profession will find it rich in rewards and durable in satisfaction.”

Historians I most admire, such as Doris Kearns Goodwin and David Maraniss, write for a large audience rather than just specialists in a particular field.  When my Maryland PhD advisers Sam Merrill and Louis Harlan said that my dissertation, “Jacob A. Riis and the American City,” was very readable, I took that as a compliment. The only boring chapter, in my opinion, albeit necessary, was the one analyzing “How the Other Half Lives” (1890), the urban reformer’s famous study of New York City Tenement House Conditions and their immigrant dwellers.  My history of Gary, “City of the Century,” was based on weekly newspaper articles intended to reach a wide readership and elicit feedback. Nothing against journal articles (I’ve written my share of monographs), but I believe that serving Clio, the muse of history, includes striving to educate an informed citizenry.

 

One of the striking characteristics of the era of Coolidge Prosperity was the unparalleled rapidity and unanimity with which millions of men and women turned their attention, their talk, and their emotional interest upon a series of tremendous trifles -- a heavyweight boxing-match, a murder trial, a new automobile model, a transatlantic flight.” Frederick Lewis Allen, “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s”

F. L. Allen

The Gold Standard of contemporary popular history is Frederick Lewis Allen’s “Only Yesterday,” published soon after the “Roaring Twenties” ended.  The title is a perfect encapsulation of the belief that anything in the past – even seconds ago – is worthy of study by historians even if dissecting a larger perspective must wait.  “Only Yesterday” remains a pathbreaking example of the importance of social history, covering manners and morals, Prohibition and the rise of gangsterism, sports, advertising, automobility, and entertainment as big business, plus fads, dance crazes, and headline-making trials  such as Sacco-Vanzetti, Leopold-Loeb, the Scopes “Monkey” Trial and the most widely covered – Hall-Mills, about the murder of two lovers, a minister and his choir director.

Flappers

As a practitioner of contemporary history from the bottom up who is writing a blog, I ask myself how best to cover this plague year of pandemic, an unhinged president, economic disaster, and total disruption of one’s daily routine.  A believer that the personal is political, I try to describe the effect of this “new normal” on myself (a senior citizen to whom Covid-19 could be a death sentence), my family (including grandchildren still in school), my university, community, region, and, by extension, the country and world. Wish me luck.

Kaiden Horn (above), the former bowling teammate of grandson James made The Times by virtue of winning a state USBC scholarship.  The 2020 Wheeler graduate told Karen Callahan that he grew up in a bowling family and that was something he and his dad Kevin bonded over: “He’s coached me my whole life. We always talk about bowling and watch bowling. Without that, a major part of myself would be missing.”

 

Post-Tribune correspondent Carole Carlson wrote about the legacy of Richard Gordon Hatcher as a civil rights leader and urban mayor for 20 years beginning in 1968. She interviewed some of his most faithful supporters, including former adviser Carolyn McCrady and Dena Holland Neal, daughter of Deputy Mayor Jim Holland, who recalled passing out lollipops with Hatcher stickers in 1967 on her school bus at age 14.  Hatcher instilled Gary’s black citizens with a sense of pride but could not prevent the city’s economic decline despite obtaining millions of federal dollars for programs that benefitted the poor. By setting an example and encouraging others to seek public office at a time after Martin Luther King’s death when many Black intellectuals were despairing of the political system, Hatcher was responsible for inspiring many Black elected officials who emulated his example. I spent over a hundred hours interviewing Hatcher, my political hero and intellectual mentor.  I wanted the final product to be his autobiography, but, ever a humble man, he preferred it to be guideposts on how Blacks should proceed in the face of systemic racism, a phrase Hatcher never used.  A devout Christian, unlike me, he never gave up believing that all souls were redeemable.

 

I’ve been binge watching the Showtime series “Homeland.”  Discovering that it was about to embark on a ninth season, I started at the beginning.  When the original storyline didn’t end after 12 episodes, it seemed the denouement was imminent, but it seems further from the end as I approach the midway point of season three.  Nonetheless, I love the main characters, CIA agents Carrie (Claire Danes) and Saul (Mandy Patinkin), and the peripheral one as well. And each episode features unexpected twists and turns.

 

Former IUN colleague Don Coffin, whose field was economic history, believes that the current pandemic will be most devastating on middle-tier colleges. Elite institutions such as Harvard and Yale will have the prestige and endowment resources to ride the situation out, while affiliates of public universities and community colleges, in his words, “are about access and affordability; they’re the Honda Civics of higher ed. There’s always a market for that.”  Four-year schools in non-metro areas with regional reputations and high tuition, he predicts, may face widespread closures: they were fragile before the pandemic, often offering discount rates of 50 percent or more; the pandemic simply removed what little cushion they had left.”  To make matters worse Trump is threatening to cancel student visas and deny them access to online courses.  Coffin wrote:

These rules are unconscionable. Students should not be used as hostages to force colleges to be complicit in accelerating the spread of a pandemic, either to enhance somebody’s perceived shot at re-election or to satisfy a lust for racism. It’s wrong. Colleges have to protect their students -- all of their students -- as best they can. In a pandemic, that’s hard enough already. Now we have to add “political predators” to the list of dangers. But is in decent financial shape.

 

I responded: IUN has been developing quality on-line (distance education) courses for almost a decade (too much so I’ve argued).  On the other hand, wonderful middle-tier schools like Valparaiso University are suffering, and 45 (I won’t repeat his name) is making the situation worse by fucking around international students, the lifeblood of many universities since, in most cases, they pay full tuition.

 

As the temperature again exceeded 90 degrees, power went out in Dave’s Portage subdivision and his family spent the night.  That evening James won a close Space Base game, his second in a row.  Next morning, he was trying to adjust his fall VU schedule in the face of one cancellation and the other class now on-line.  I got my first haircut in four months at Quick Cut.  Longtime barber Anna gave 20-year-old James his first haircut.