In the meantime, I am thrilled to announce the publication of the latest issue of Rethinking History, with a forum built around Aaron Sachs‘s essay “Letters to a tenured historian: imagining history as creative nonfiction – or maybe even poetry.”

My Writing of History course had the privilege of reading Sachs’s letters in an advance copy–quite advanced, given that the cover note suggests that the letters are recovered in 2049, “after the most recent round of earthquakes, mudslides, and fires, when Southern California was finally abandoned.” The curators of the future wonder, “Who would write such fake epistles, and footnote them, to boot?” Readers of the present will be richly rewarded if they find out.

Rethinking History has gathered more letters in response: a note of introduction from James Goodman, and reactions and reflections from Jenny Price, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Martha Hodes, Robert Rosenstone, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Kate Brown, and Gregory Downs. My print copy is in the mail (one might find a great deal right now for AHA members, if you would like one) and I don’t have complete access online, but the abstracts suggest this is a roundtable on the state of writing history creatively (and writing about history creatively) not to be missed.

co-hosted with the Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders
12:30 p.m., Lamar Center, 53 Wall Street (Whitney Humanities Center basement)
lunch to be provided–please RSVP to Edith Rotkopf (edith.rotkopfATyaleDOTedu)
All are welcome

A draft chapter of Faragher’s project is posted on the Writing History website (or email christine.deluciaATyaleDOTedu for a copy). We’ll be discussing this excerpt and Deverell’s project, which raise questions about the modern American West and narratives we tell about it. Is the West fundamentally violent and dark? Are there moments and sites of redemption and healing? How can these historical findings (or convictions) be expressed in prose?

Bill Deverell is Professor of History at University of Southern California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, working on “convalescent landscapes” of the post-Civil War American West. He is the 2009-2010 Frederick W. Beinecke Senior Fellow in Western Americana at Yale. His recent publications include Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (2004); and Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (2005), which he co-edited with Greg Hise.

John Mack Faragher is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale, working on “Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, 1846-76″; and the possibility of writing “history noir.” His books include Women and Men on the Overland Trail(1979); Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (1986); Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (1992); Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (2000), with Robert V. Hine; and A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland (2005).

Hope you’ll join us.
Christine DeLucia & Paul Shin
Writing History coordinators

Elisa New
Professor of English, Harvard University
“Jacob’s Cane: A Jewish Family’s Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore; a Memoir in Five Generations”
Monday 22 March 2010, 4 p.m., room TBA
All are welcome

Praised as “an imaginative recreation of two vanished worlds,” and “a moving and powerful memoir, weaving together past and present, public and private,” Jacob’s Cane (2009) is Elisa New’s exploration of a Jewish history spanning continents and generations.  It considers the challenges of uncovering a family past often at odds with conventional narratives of the immigrant experience; the intersection of private lives and larger historical currents; and choices of voice and poetics used to convey these stories.  A striking change from New’s previous research and writings on American literature, it will be the subject of a wide-ranging conversation about the past and its tellings.

Elisa New is Professor of English at Harvard University, where she teaches American literature with special interest in American poetry; American literature to 1900; and religion and literature.  Her work includes The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (1999); and The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry (1993).

The diversification of media is good for the discipline, giving historians choices about how to present both historical arguments and primary sources. As Daniel Cohen notes in this month’s  Perspectives,

it is clear that the fundamental activities of the historian—researching, publishing, teaching—have been forever altered by the transition to digital media and technology.

This flourishing of forms simply makes more visible the kinds of strategies already available in a print-only era: aim for a specialist journal devoted to time, place or thematic interests, or a generalist journal? As with breaking news, the proliferation of venues and increasing ease of self-publication (like this blog) means that editorial boards no longer control access to dissemination, so you can take your message directly to your audience.

Having more choices naturally complicates the decision-making process, though. Which available medium reaches your intended audience (including members of a tenure committee)? What puts you in the most direct dialog with other scholars, or with members of a wider public? What makes your work most accessible? What form best preserves your work and provides some assurance of long-term availability? Where is your work most likely to be seen and reliably cited? Thinking through answers to these questions points again to a continued mix of print and digital forms to tell new stories about the past and represent its artifacts.

I’ve already made a case for the continued relevance of print forms. Here I want to reflect on the opportunities and challenges of going digital. One of the many seductions of creating historical interpretations for web-based media is the possibility of direct and nearly immediate interaction with interested readers. Another seduction is the expanded possibility of “getting it right,” quickly correcting mistakes or responding to suggestions without having to wait for a publisher to issue a second edition.

Several comments in response to Karl Jacoby’s praise of the mutability of digital formats suggest the allure of correction is strong, compounded by the sense that you’re not bound to stick with positions you no longer defend. True. But neither are you bound by published positions in print, even if the article exists to remind you of old errors. Subsequent publications can modify or critique your own previous work. This isn’t likely, though, since few of us want to tread and re-tread in exactly the same intellectual terrain. Given the exigencies of peer-reviewed publications and the competition for spots in major journals, it’s usually not worth the time to develop an article that clarifies or adjusts what you’ve already published. So it’s attractive to be able to simply alter what’s already out there.

The mutability of digital forms creates a thorny problem, though: how to create a sustained chain of citations if the evidence or arguments in the cited work may change? Columbia University Press made the decision to make the Gutenberg-e series of books immutable, once published. Granted, the series was hatched in the long-ago days of Web 1.0, before the premium on interactivity. This decision also speaks to an attachment to existing notions about “the book” as an entity, in which changes might be desirable, but require a defined second edition.

For historians, the ground slips right out from under our disciplinary training if either argument or sources are open to changes at will. We have citation problems with evidence or arguments entirely rooted in a mutable website—another reason to want some fixed form of published scholarship, whether print or digital. Roy Rosenzweig’s illumination of this problem, published half a decade ago in the AHR, retains its salience.  A post a month ago on Inside Higher Ed reiterates the issue’s currency.

Historians are not likely to abandon our attachment to defined, reproducible citations, but as Rosenzweig’s article shows, we can find ways to make the changing evidence part of the stories we tell. But that’s only if the changes leave a trail. Without something like the explicit change history on Wikipedia, or the skills of a forensic computer analyst borrowed from CSI, historians laboring in digital trenches must take care to keep their own copies of sources they discover on the web, and work assiduously to assure that resources they create remain stable (or at least traceable).

How we might accomplish this is still open to discovery, but that shouldn’t put us off the task. We should instead be excited about the prospect that some of the forms of the future haven’t been invented yet, even as we grapple with the challenges that come with figuring out what to do with the technology already at our disposal.

“Taking Liberties: Histories, Fictions, and Blind Spots”
A conversation with historians
Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore
Wednesday 21 January, 3 p.m.
Yale University
HGS 211, 320 York Street
All are welcome

Profs. Kamensky and Lepore will present their new book, Blindspot: A Novel (Spiegel and Grau, 2008), a collaboratively written work of historical fiction set in Boston on the eve of the American Revolution. Reviewers have called it a novel “as sexy as it is political, as accurate as it is outrageous,” combining “a tender love story, a murder mystery, and a brilliant sociological and political portrait of a turbulent time.”

With that off my chest, I do hope that you’ll take a moment to tune in to Patty’s reading of her essay “Dancing with Professors,” where she muses about the reasons behind the obtuse prose of most historical writing. Even if you don’t wholly agree with her assertion about wallflower historians, you will be inspired by her clear voice and her passion for accessible writing.

One reviewer said of Patty’s essays:

“If William Blake could see a world in a grain of sand, Limerick has the gift to find history in the small experiences of everyday life. She uses stories, anecdotes, and parables to introduce challenging ideas. She has great skill at finding ways to entice readers into her subject…[Her] skill is to take a solid historical fact or an everyday experience and twirl it around so that it catches light in new ways.

Patty is the author of Something in the Soil and The Legacy of Conquest. She is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, where she is also a Professor of History.

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Practically anything written by Professor Spence can offer up questions about the nature of historical writing, weighing evidence, and spinning imaginative tales, so I have chosen selections from books old and new, as well as a few other sources that might provide different angles. They are:

• Chapters 6 and 8 of his newest book, Return to Dragon Mountain

• the final 25 pages of The Death of Woman Wang

• comments on Margaret Atwood from John Demos and Jonathan Spence in the American Historical Review, with reaction to letters

• For those with a bit more time, I’d highly recommend reading Woman Wang, Return to Dragon Mountain, The Question of Hu, or another Spence book cover to cover. I’d also suggest Professor Spence’s 2005 AHA presidential address, which discussed the same material and some of the themes of Return to Dragon Mountain, to open yet another angle on how free to be, and to what audiences.

This provocative Q&A with Ulrich includes her thoughts about the renaissance of women’s history, touches on the tensions she experiences as both a feminist and a Mormon, and gives some details about her new research projects.

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Links to some of Jeff’s favorite reads:

• Jonathan Spence, The Question of Hu
• Amitav Ghosh, In An Antique Land
• Mike Davis, City of Quartz
• Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
• The travel writing of Pico Iyer
• Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Wasserstrom’s latest book, China’s Brave New World, was featured on a list of Pankaj Mishra’s favorite books of 2007. Mishra writes, “In this book Jeffrey Wasserstrom shows why he is one of the most sensible writers on a subject that most Western writers spoil with either paranoia or excessive awe.” Jeff is also a member of The China Beat blog team.

Stay tuned for next week’s episode of MHP with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, AHA president-elect and author of Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.