A Historian At Work: A New Series Here At the Blog

"Oh, no," you groan. "Not ANOTHER series!" Yes, dear friends. Another series.

But this one is about what I do, about my work as a historian. As I mentioned a few weeks back, it's only gradually dawned on me (after a year of regular blogging) that I blog about this, that, the other thing, and everything in between. But I rarely discuss my work: that of a historian.

Yes, you've heard plenty about my view as a historian, but not about what it's like to do and write history. Frankly, I'm doing this for me: I don't often ruminate about what I do or how I do it, because, ya know, I'm too busy doing it.

But as I've noted about a zillion times here before, things are changing. I'm writing a new book, but by the time it's finished, well, the idea of the "book" may be some THING that I can't even imagine now.

So -- after about 25 years of working as a historian, and as I live through what I think is a pivotal era in our nation's and perhaps our planet's history, what the hell: I'm gonna document my work.

Thinking About Writing and Reading

As I've noted here before, I'm working on a new book, a history of meat in modern America (meaning roughly 1870 to the present). (*1) That project takes up most of my time -- the research, the writing, the banging my head on my desk, etc.

But this particular project is also weighted with more uncertainty than usual because it's clear that the nature of "reading" and "writing" and even the meaning of the word "book" are changing at an extraordinary rate. So part of my brain is plagued -- and distracted -- by questions I didn't ask or think about when I wrote my first three books: What will a "book" look like in, say, 2011, which is when I expect this new one of mine to land in bookstores. Will there still be "bookstores" in 2011? Will the book have a cover and pages? Or will it be "published" only in digital form? And who will publish it?

Nearly every publishing house in the U.S. is in a financial swamp, including the one that holds the contract to publish my next book (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

So although the book has been sold to a publisher, I have no idea which publishing houses will still be standing in two years. Or which one will own my contract. Or, well, anything. And even if the book is published, it's unclear to me what that will mean.

In any case, these questions are not new to me -- they've been at the front of my mind for months. I'd been planning to blog more about the new book and will start doing so over the next few days.

Meantime, for more all on this, check out David Nygren's thoughts at his blog, The Urban Elitist.

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*1: Although I plan to start blogging more about my work-in-progress, at the moment, there's not much here. Weirdly enough, my most coherent public statement about that project is a blog entry I wrote for Powells.com back in 2006.

Fall-Outta-My-Chair-Laughing Howler Of The Day

Those Google boys, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have once again, and inadvertently, demonstrated the virtues of a good liberal arts education, which they obviously missed out because they were busy learning to be computer engineering geniuses. (And I say that will all due respect.)

Backstory (brief version): I use and admire google. It's an incredibly useful tool. I also appreciate that Brin and Page want to scan the world’s books so that the information in them will be accessible to everyone. (This is a controversial project that prompted a lawsuit by the Authors Guild, which was recently settled, and, in my opinion, well-settled.)

Anyway, my complaint about the scanning project was the motivation behind it: The idea that scanning the world’s books would somehow capture the world's "information."

It won't. Archives, for example, contain millions of pages of unpublished manuscript material: letters and diaries, for example, are the mainstay of many historians’ work. So, too, old magazines and newspapers, whether published in 1790, 1890, or 1990.

Many of those are available on microfilm, and many are being digitized. But the number of digitized pages, whether of manuscripts or newspapers, is minute relative to the total.

Anyway, the point is that the world’s “knowledge” isn’t now and never will be confined to books.

But apparently the notion that “books” might be, ya know, useful, is still a novel (no pun intended) concept for our googleaders. Consider this quote from Sergey in a report in today’s New York Times.

There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site.

Damn! Ya think? Wow. I had no idea. Must ponder this insight from Sergey -- in between working on my next book, which, like the previous one, will take five years of my life because it will require me to conduct substantive primary research using material that can’t be found in books. And the finished product will itself be a book that will contain "fantastic information" that is "miles ahead" of something found on the internet.

O Beautiful For Spacious Skies

It's been running through my brain and voice all day. Wish I'd sung it last night when I was out in my yard yelling "Yes, we can." Sing with me now. (And then let's ask Congress to make this our national anthem.)

America The Beautiful

O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain!

America! America! God shed His grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet Whose stern impassion'd stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness.

America! America! God mend thine ev'ry flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law.

O beautiful for heroes prov'd In liberating strife,

Who more than self their country loved, And mercy more than life.

America! America! May God thy gold refine

Till all success be nobleness, And ev'ry gain divine.

O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years

Thine alabaster cities gleam Undimmed by human tears.

America! America! God shed His grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea.

Hurricane Ike, Key West, and My Brain

This from a report in today's New York Times:

Edward Koen, 87, sat in his wheelchair outside the center Sunday in the shade, staring up at the blue, sunny skies, waiting for the bus.

'Why should I be nervous, because of a hurricane?'' Koen said. He'd rather stay put. ''My gosh. I've been living here all my life.'

Ohhhhh .... that comment brings back an important memory:

I've written three books and the inspiration for each came from some deep place in my brain -- as in, my brain said to me "HERE. This is what you should write about."

That's what happened one day in the fall of 1998. I was living in Mobile, Alabama, where I taught at a university. A few weeks prior to this particular day, I had decided to leave academia to write history for a popular audience. This was a major life change and I was figuring out what this would entail and how to start this new career.

No surprise, a large part of my brain was occupied with the most important question: What should I write? What topic would I use to launch this new part of my life?

On that particular day, I was driving home from playing golf (which, full disclosure, I played badly and which I can't play anymore because of my shoulder). The radio was on. Hurricane Georges was on the prowl and a reporter for NPR was in a place called Key West.

At the time, I had no idea where or what Key West was, although I gathered it was somewhere near Florida. The reporter talked to a 92-year-old woman who told him that she wasn't worried about the hurricane. She'd lived in south Florida all her life and lived through a worse storm in Havana in 1928.

Although I wasn't sure where KW was, I knew something about the history of south Florida. Enough to know that if this woman had lived in Florida her entire life, she came nearly pioneer stock. (South Florida was settled relatively late; anyone who was there in the early 20th century was there early. ) And the idea of Havana in 1928? That sounded ... romantic.

That interview hit a nerve that I didn't know I had. "Wow," I thought. "That sounds ... fascinating. Maybe I should write a history of Key West."

So I did. And that's what hurricanes and Key West have to do with my life. So, to my pal George, who has a house in Key West, and to everyone else on the island: Be safe!

Good News for Beer Historians

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has finished processing a large collection of Pabst Brewing Company records and those are now available for use by researchers.

The university received the collection in 2000, just as I started working on my book, but the papers were not processed until 2006. Translation: I was not able to use them (which was, sigh, the story of my life when I was working on the book.)

The vast majority of the records are financial in nature (ledger books, stock records, receipts), but there's also a large scrapbook related to Captain Pabst and the company itself. There are also some "private ledgers," and as I learned from the few scattered ones I found at other libraries, those can yield a great deal of information! You can see the finding aid here.

I hope someone makes use of the collection. Grad students, heed my call!