history in the writing
Dec. 11th, 2008 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacWe need one of those useful German words, like Schadenfreude or Weltschmerz, to describe the sensation of finding that someone else has finally adequately done the work you'd made a fumbling attempt at long earlier. I have two library books here which, had they existed when I was in school, would have rendered totally unnecessary major term papers of mine. The books are much better than my papers. It's only slightly eerier that both authors share my first name.
At UC Berkeley, frosh intending to be history majors take (or took, in my day) a seminar course from a tenured professor and write a freshman thesis. Mine was from the late Lawrence Levine and was on the then-current subject of Richard Nixon. My paper was titled "The Old Nixon and the New Nixon: A Survey" and traced, as best I could, the history of the idea that Nixon had either reinvented himself or discovered his true more statesman-like self. This metamorphosis had been rediscovered by journalists regularly for decades. Of course, as the tapes eventually revealed, the Old Nixon, "Tricky Dick," was the real Nixon all along, as a reader of Art Buchwald's columns (which I cited in the paper), where the New Nixon, the President, lets the Old Nixon out of the closet for an occasional chat, could have realized long before.
But there's no need for such a paper now: Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image by David Greenberg (2003) covers all that on a much broader level than one phrase. Some of Greenberg's research for the book is buried in the archives of his excellent writings for Slate. Each of his chapters discusses Nixon as seen by a different group of people, from the left radicals to the diehard loyalists (who, as the weirdest, are by far the most interesting). Greenberg never forgets to show how and to what extent each image is grounded in reality, so you even get to understand where the late image of Nixon as foreign policy sage comes from.
A bit more esoteric, but equally interesting to me: Founding the Far West by David Alan Johnson (1992), which I came across in Google Books when looking for something it touches on. This is a constitutional/social/macro-political history of the early history of the first three far-western US states - California, Oregon, and Nevada - focused on the lives of the attendees of their first constitutional conventions. Sounds boring, I know, but it's very lucid, brings out important issues of the time (like, how did prohibiting paper money interact with prohibiting slavery?), and uses biography and statistics to make key points. Like, all the Anglos who went to Monterey in Gold Rush days remarked on how purely Mexican it was, but it had actually been completely transformed by early Anglo immigrants over the previous 15 years. (But what did they know; in California, if you'd been there for more than 6 months you were an old-timer.)
The centerpiece of the book is the conventions. Monterey, which had no hotels or restaurants until the delegates arrived, hosted the 1849 California constitutional convention. And what did I write one of my high-school history honors papers on but the 1849 California constitutional convention? I read through the whole proceedings and didn't realize half the points made here. And, I couldn't find any good secondary sources less than 25 years old (they're a lot older than that now), and they were mostly peripheral to the topic. Now there's this, which is dead on target and covers it all.
I'm glad to be reading these. Here's to a good book.
At UC Berkeley, frosh intending to be history majors take (or took, in my day) a seminar course from a tenured professor and write a freshman thesis. Mine was from the late Lawrence Levine and was on the then-current subject of Richard Nixon. My paper was titled "The Old Nixon and the New Nixon: A Survey" and traced, as best I could, the history of the idea that Nixon had either reinvented himself or discovered his true more statesman-like self. This metamorphosis had been rediscovered by journalists regularly for decades. Of course, as the tapes eventually revealed, the Old Nixon, "Tricky Dick," was the real Nixon all along, as a reader of Art Buchwald's columns (which I cited in the paper), where the New Nixon, the President, lets the Old Nixon out of the closet for an occasional chat, could have realized long before.
But there's no need for such a paper now: Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image by David Greenberg (2003) covers all that on a much broader level than one phrase. Some of Greenberg's research for the book is buried in the archives of his excellent writings for Slate. Each of his chapters discusses Nixon as seen by a different group of people, from the left radicals to the diehard loyalists (who, as the weirdest, are by far the most interesting). Greenberg never forgets to show how and to what extent each image is grounded in reality, so you even get to understand where the late image of Nixon as foreign policy sage comes from.
A bit more esoteric, but equally interesting to me: Founding the Far West by David Alan Johnson (1992), which I came across in Google Books when looking for something it touches on. This is a constitutional/social/macro-political history of the early history of the first three far-western US states - California, Oregon, and Nevada - focused on the lives of the attendees of their first constitutional conventions. Sounds boring, I know, but it's very lucid, brings out important issues of the time (like, how did prohibiting paper money interact with prohibiting slavery?), and uses biography and statistics to make key points. Like, all the Anglos who went to Monterey in Gold Rush days remarked on how purely Mexican it was, but it had actually been completely transformed by early Anglo immigrants over the previous 15 years. (But what did they know; in California, if you'd been there for more than 6 months you were an old-timer.)
The centerpiece of the book is the conventions. Monterey, which had no hotels or restaurants until the delegates arrived, hosted the 1849 California constitutional convention. And what did I write one of my high-school history honors papers on but the 1849 California constitutional convention? I read through the whole proceedings and didn't realize half the points made here. And, I couldn't find any good secondary sources less than 25 years old (they're a lot older than that now), and they were mostly peripheral to the topic. Now there's this, which is dead on target and covers it all.
I'm glad to be reading these. Here's to a good book.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
re: history in the writing
Date: 2008-12-12 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-13 05:06 pm (UTC)On Nixon... Back in 1974, two composers I studied with at UC Santa Cruz organized an evening called "Hot Theater", where every work (mostly created for the occasion) was intended to be uncomfortable for the audience in some way, physically or emotionally. Something I worked on for the occasion without it coming together, was a musical dramatization of the life of an appealing college student, who played piano at parties. At the end, the final pose joyful of the performers would be echoed with a projection of a shot of Nixon receiving the nomination in 1972. The uncomfortable impact I hoped to make, by using real incidents from Nixon's biography, was that somebody you could identify with at your stage of life could turn into a monster like Nixon.