Another look at old reference books

Last week I got to spend some time in a college town (Charleston, Illinois), and I picked up a nice hefty reference book in a used-book store: The Reader's Companion to American History, edited by Eric Foner and John A. Garraty (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991). It's just the kind of thing to have on hand to check up whether you need an upgrade on who exactly Elizabeth Blackwell was, or a quick look at agriculture (and especially when Wikipedia is having a bad day).

I didn't pay much attention to the publication date -- those who work with dead people rarely need historical context for the last 27 years -- but when I reviewed the titles of the entries I realized that the book itself is a historical artifact and a creature of its time. The Cold War was just barely over; Bush I was president; many individuals with entries (Benjamin Spock) were still alive.

There are no entries for computers, technology, terrorism, or trolls. I found myself wondering what the large group of historians involved would have added and subtracted if they were tasked with producing a similar book of similar length (1226 pages) today. What would they cut to make way for more recent events and conditions?

None of this made me regret my purchase; quite the opposite. It is in fact a member of an interesting group of books: the last of the enormous compendia, like Hoosier Faiths or Ancestry's Red Book. It's a relic of a time, not really that long ago, when information was relatively scarce. It's not just a well-grounded source for earlier history, it is itself a part of history too. (And a still-changing part: I see a Kindle edition is available.)

"The New American History"

I've been reading a 22-year-old anthology in which a baker's dozen of historians summarized some of the ways in which historical knowledge has evolved since many of us got our childhood dose. Here are six items that stuck out for me. (I do wish some of the chapters had been more thoroughly footnoted, but the bibliographies of books and articles to follow up are great.)

Eric Foner, ed. The New American History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. (There is a "revised and expanded" 1997 edition which is available in limited preview on GoogleBooks. In addition, individual chapters are for sale cheap in pamphlet form in the AHA bookstore.)

"In early Virginia, New England, and New Netherlands, the intruders -- not the Indians -- introduced the tactic of the deliberate and systematic massacre of a whole community." (John M. Murrin, "Beneficiaries of Catastrophe," 10; 12 in 1997 edition)

"Rural northeasterners who could not make a go of [farming in the early 1800s] tried to avoid entering the urban wage-labor market . . . . [They] headed west instead, most of them hoping to reconstruct the independent yeoman communities that had crumbled back home." (Sean Wilentz, "Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution," 55; 65 in 1997 edition)

By the end of the Civil War, "some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union army -- over one-fifth of the black male population of the United States between the ages of eighteen and forty-five." (Eric Foner, "Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction," 80; 93 in 1997 edition)

Progressives in the early 1900s "typically began by organizing a voluntary association, investigating a problem, gathering relevant facts, and analyzing them according to the precepts of one of the newer social sciences. From such an analysis a proposed solution would emerge . . . [nevertheless] men and women were commonly surprised by the results of the reforms they so fervently sought." (Richard L. McCormick, "Public Life in Industrial America," 107, 114; 122, 129 in 1997 edition)

"As Kenneth Jackson demonstrated, the Klan [in the 1920s] had its greatest support in northern and midwestern cities." (Alan Brinkley, "Prosperity, Depression, and War," 125; 139 in 1997 edition)

"By 1910 the nickel theaters showing silent motion pictures . . . could be labeled 'the academy of the workingman' . . . . Initially catering to working-class audiences with a tolerant indulgence of drinking and casual family comings and goings, the movie theaters began to take on more lavish, disciplined, middle-class standards only in the 1920s." (Leon Fink, "American Labor History," 243; 343 in 1997 edition)

Lincoln and context and reading history forward

Very interesting review in the San Francisco Chronicle of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner, distinguished historian of the Reconstruction. In the reviewer's words, Foner's main point is that "We should not understand Lincoln from the myth-glazed outcome reading backward, but from the beginning, through one transformative event after another, looking forward. This is a historian's book, a lesson in context, but one hopes it will be widely read." It's not that Lincoln was consistent, or politically correct by our standards, but that he never stopped learning and growing. Hat tip to Legal History Blog.