This week I had the opportunity to present my research to a Civil War Roundtable, one of the dozens of such groups around the country that regularly gather non-academics to learn more about Civil War sites and battlefields and share their enthusiasm for the Civil War era.
I was invited in part because I study St. Louis—a place where, as I put it, the Civil War was over in one day, with a “battle” where no shots were fired until after the surrender. As part of the often-neglected western theater of the war, events from Missouri to California, New Mexico to Montana offer a completely different chronology for Civil War events, and a different sense of when and how the Union was able to win the war. In the much-trod ground of Civil War history, the view from St. Louis offers something new.
Yet, even as I spoke about somewhat neglected places and topics, I still found that what livened the eyes of the audience were mentions of the familiar: William Tecumseh Sherman, then a civilian railroad executive, shielding his son when gunfire broke out in the crowd in May 1861; Ulysses S. Grant, then working at his father-in-law’s leather-goods store, riding the streetcars and entering into a heated discussion of the prospects of war. William Greenleaf Eliot, the founder of Washington University, gains special notice not only because of his humanitarian efforts with the Western Sanitary Commission, but also because his grandson was T. S. Eliot, who likened himself the British poet who happened to be born in St. Louis.
It’s natural, of course, for folks to connect new bits of knowledge to things they already know. While high-powered academic audiences would like to know what is new about your research, approach, or argument, I find nonspecialist readers often crave what is familiar—how you retell the lives of already-loved figures, how your stories add or shade what they already believe.
This instinct probably explains why yet another book on Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or, indeed, the Civil War or World War II can sell so well. And paying your mind to the familiar as well as the new may be what can cause a busy person to choose your work of history over the chance to catch up on current events or enter a completely fictional world.
Innovative scholars can even make the unknown ring with the feel of familiar. For example, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (interviewed on the podcast here), could take the diary of an unknown woman in colonial Maine and spin a story of faith and domestic economy that has gained a wide readership. She succeeds in part because the individual human actions that sustained a family more than two hundred years ago have an echo in everyday life, even in the age of iPods and space travel.
So, when do you choose the new, and when the familiar?
Writers: When you write a story of the strange, the forgotten, or the revolutionary, do you still highlight the familiar, the new light on old topics? Readers will ask for it.
Readers: When you read, do you seek out the familiar, even in the new? And can you tell when you begin, or only when you have finished?
