It has been several months since I last saw a tweet or blog posting by someone describing their “history grandparents,” but it is something that I have been pondering for a while. What is my historiographical genealogy and how has it affected my work as an historian? This will be the first of three reflections on the subject.
I first learned to be an historian at St. John’s University in Jamaica, New York where I earned both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Most of my professors earned their PhDs at Columbia University in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their biggest influence was Allan Nevins (1890-1971), a journalist who taught history at Columbia University from 1928 to 1958 and was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History, despite the fact that he had not earned an advanced degree in the subject. If anyone remembers him these days it is likely because of his magnum opus, the six-volume account of the American Civil War entitled the Ordeal of the Union where he argued that extremists on both sides – fire-eaters in the south and abolitionists in the north – created the toxic environment that prevented compromise and led to war. Granted it is completely heinous to lump both slave holders, who wanted to expand bondage, and abolitionists, who wanted to liberate the oppressed, as moral equivalents, but Nevins wrote these works in the shadow of two world wars and in the early years of the Cold War when confrontations and extreme saber rattling over places like Berlin, Korea, obscure islands off the coast of China, Cuba, etc., threatened nuclear war and annihilation.
Nevins was famously prolific. One of my professors described how Nevins mixed up the drafts of his multiple projects and sent mishmashes of manuscripts to confused publishers. Nevins also could neglect his guests during cocktail and dinner parties so that he could spend more time writing. This might have annoyed some guests, but it impressed the young graduate students who later became my professors.
In addition to Ordeal of the Union, Nevins authored biographies of Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, Henry Ford, John C. Fremont, Abram Hewitt, John Rockefeller, and I might be missing one or two others. It is this interest, indeed emphasis, on biography that my professors at St. John’s instilled in me. They understood biography as fundamentally a part of history, not a separate genre. They frequently referred to biographies, as much as histories, in class, discussion, and papers. When a name was mentioned in a paper, they wanted a biographical reference in a footnote. Their syllabi, too, contained biographies and autobiographies. A biographical angle or approach featured prominently in our term papers. My master’s Civil War paper, for example, was about Union general Philip Kearny (1815-1862). In addition to reading the few biographies that existed of him at the time, I travelled to the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark to study Kearny’s papers.
Biography was also an acceptable topic for a master’s thesis. I really struggled with a topic for mine. The only thing I felt certain about is that I wanted to research and study the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. When I went to Dr. Richard Harmond, my faculty advisor, for advice, he mentioned three people, Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon (1836-1926), nature writer Thornton Burgess (1874-1965), and conservationist and zoologist William T. Hornaday (1854-1937). Being pre-internet, my first stop was the Dictionary of American Biography. Then to the National Union Catalog of Manuscripts. If all else had been equal, I probably would have selected Cannon because of my interest in political history. But, Hornaday’s papers were in the Bronx Zoo, a short drive from my home, and that was the deciding factor. Thus began a twenty-year odyssey with Hornaday that culminated in the publication of The Most Defiant Devil by University of Virginia Press in 2013.
Some historians dismiss biography as only following the “big man” version of events and ignoring larger cultural and social forces at work. There is some truth to this, of course, but human beings do make choices and do shape history just the same. To me, as an historian and biographer myself, they are complimentary, not adversarial, approaches to the study and understanding of the past. I will forever be interested in good historical biographies. I will always want to know who were the actors of the past through accounts of their lives. I am eternally grateful to my professors at St. John’s for showing me this approach to our craft.
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