Editing as Interest-Based Bargaining

Thanks to Evidence Explained, I just came across this take on the editor-writer relationship from Carol Fisher Saller of the University of Chicago Press:

A good author-editor relationship involves working with the writer in ways that will tell you what he really wants so you can help him achieve it. A great deal of the time, you’ll find that what the writer wants, you want, too. And if you’re skilled, the writer will discover that he wants most of the same things you do.

That's from the introduction to her book, The Subversive Copy Editor (which I have not seen the rest of). But it rang a bell: the 1981 classic Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William L. Ury.

In any setting, creative negotiation need not be a zero-sum game or compromise that dissatisfies both sides. It involves listening, asking questions, and inventing alternatives that speak to both sides' interests (as opposed to stated opening positions). But I had never thought of editing this way.

Carol Fisher Saller, The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Roger Fisher and William L. Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, second edition (New York: Penguin, 1991).

Harold Henderson, "Editing as Interest-Based Barganing," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Ready-Made Democracy

Michael Zakim's 2003 book from the University of Chicago Press, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860, is not just (as the author writes) "a history of men's dress in America. It is also a social history of capitalism and of America's 'great transformation' into a democracy." {2}

Zakim combines a genealogically detailed account of the players in this great and ironic drama, a fantastically detailed acquaintance with the source materials (largely but not exclusively in New York) and the precise details of how the technology of clothing was revolutionized, and always an idea of the larger significance.

The Revolutionary-era ideal of Americans as plain homespun-clad folks survived into the 1850s and beyond, but the reality had changed enormously. The same words now meant something quite different. "That inversion is the subject of this book: how capitalist revolution came to America under the guise of traditional notions of industry, modesty, economy, and independence." {3}

This kind of history is not to everyone's taste, so no guarantees. But if you like it at all, you'll love it. There is a preview on Google Books if you want to test the waters.

Methodology Monday with the Karimjee Jivanjee Family

The University of Chicago Press is distributing for Amsterdam University Press The Karimjee Jivanjee Family: Merchant Princes of East Africa 1800-2000, by a Dutch historian Gijsbert Oonk. It is said to combine "family and political history with cultural anthropology" as well as being "a monument to cultural roots and family tenacity." Comparison with high-quality genealogical works of similar scope might be interesting.

Two new books from University of Chicago Press

The University of Chicago Press has gone a little gruesome this time around, at least in terms of books of potential interest to genealogists:

Michael Kammen's Digging up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials

Robert Elder's Last Words of the Executed (organized by era and method of execution).

Unlike Kammen, Elder's work is said to include "both the famous and the forgotten." I have not seen either of these books in person.

4 new books from Chicago

The University of Chicago Press, either as publisher or distributor, has four books out that look relevant to various parts of Midwestern family history. I haven't seen any of them -- yet!

The Frontier in Alaska and the Matanuska Colony, by historian Orlando Wilson, on a 1930s government-encouraged migration of farm families from the cutover regions of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to a new frontier. The book includes "several case studies of these original families, dispelling many frontier myths and describing the reality of pioneering in Alaska."

My Kind of Midwest: Omaha to Ohio, by John Jakle, longtime professor of geography and landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Includes "Some Family History of My Own." This is on my must-read list, based on my acquaintance with his Common Houses in America's Small Towns: the Atlantic Seaboard to the Mississippi Valley.

My Kind of County: Door County, Wisconsin, by geographer John Fraser Hart. Yes, these are two in a series from the Center for American Places, now a department of Columbia College Chicago. Hart is what every county needs: a knowledgeable outsider with an insider's feel for the place. Includes "A Historical Tale."

Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955, by University of Chicago historian Adam Green. How commerce helped create a common African-American culture around midcentury.

American Boundaries, the book

I admit I was a little taken aback that the new University of Chicago Press title American Boundaries: The Nation, The States, The Rectangular Survey was written by an architect (Bill Hubbard Jr. of MIT). But the more I poke around in it the more I think I'm going to enjoy sitting down and reading it through. And of course in theory it should be of interest to all of us who have research targets in public-land states. If I get it read (not a given under current circumstances) you'll hear more.

Forthcoming books

The fall 2008 publishers' catalogs are out, and I find two books (which pretty much by definition I have not seen) that may prove to be valuable as genealogical references:

Due out in November from the University of Illinois Press, Place Names of Illinois by Edward Callary of Northern Illinois University: "the origins of names of nearly three thousand Illinois communities and the circumstances surrounding their naming and renaming."

Due out in December from the University of Chicago Press, Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide edited by Ann Durkin Keating of North Central College, and coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Chicago: "comprehensive, cross-referenced entries on all seventy-seven community areas, along with many suburbs and neighborhoods both extant and long forgotten, from Albany Park to Zion." Contributors include Michael Ebner, Susan Hirsch, and Robert Bruegmann.

Chicago Nature Writing

Joel Greenberg, author of the definitive A Natural History of the Chicago Region (my lengthy review here) has edited Of Prairie, Woods, & Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing, brand-new, gorgeously designed and published by the University of Chicago Press.

I won't even pretend to have read all of his 100 selections, which range from the 1700s to 1960. I can say they include well-known naturalists and writers like Gene Stratton-Porter and Jens Jensen, and unheard-of ones like Colbee Benton. Like Greenberg's own history, this book defines the Chicago region with appropriate generosity, stretching north into Wisconsin, southeast into Indiana, and around the corner into southwest Michigan.

What does this have to do with genealogy, you may ask? Even assuming that you prefer parking lots to parks, two things:

(1) Many of these selections are written by people who were paying close attention to local conditions that have now changed dramatically. Just try duplicating William Johnson's trip from Fort Wayne to Chicago, taken 199 years ago! Or finding anything like the Chicago fish market of 95 years ago. If it were nothing else (and it's a lot more), this is a source of luminously detailed historical background that anyone with Midwestern forebears should treasure.

(2) Greenberg diligently searched for information on his authors, many of whom are a tad obscure. After one contribution on the Indiana Dunes, he writes expressing a feeling about its author that many genealogists can identify with: "Eli Stillman Bailey (1851-1926) is another author about whom there ought to be more information available. He received his bachelor's degree from Milton College (Wisconsin) in 1873..." and continues with information from a history of homeopathy and a volume of Who Was Who. I can't help but wonder what more a genealogist might be able to, er, dig up on some of these folks.

(Greenberg will be on WBEZ-FM 91.5 tonight at 9 pm Central. I'll link to the podcast if one becomes available later.)