I was watching Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch last night, talking about their great new book, The Lincoln Conspiracy, on which I provided some research help. Brad lamented our tendency to worship people like Lincoln, saying that this prevents us from seeing Lincoln as a person, one who made some mistakes as well as did some great things. We need to see the mistakes as well as the great things to identify with them as people.
Antislavery and Homelessness
Last night I heard Kathy Izard speak about her book, The Hundred Story Home, and her quest to end homelessness.
The book, in a sense, starts with another book, Same Kind of Different as Me, by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. That book describes how Ron Hall befriended Denver Moore, took him into his home, and thus helped him change from a homeless person to a normal person. Izard invited Hall and Moore to her hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, to speak at a fundraiser for their soup kitchen ministry. Izard gave Moore a tour of the soup kitchen, but he was not impressed, asking at the end of the tour “where are the beds?” When she started to explain that they were a soup kitchen, not a homeless shelter, he asked her whether it made sense to help people during the day and then lock them out at night. And he challenged her to dosomething about the problem.
Crimes of Heliogabalus
I read a lot of history books for my research: I have on the kitchen table right now a volume of the history of the Supreme Court, about 1500 pages, not light reading. So, when I go upstairs in the evening, and read for pleasure, I often read historical fiction.
Most often I read about the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, novels such as the Hornblower novels of Forester or the WWII novels of Alan Furst. But occasionally I venture farther afield, as in The Medicus Codex by Cy Stein, set in Rome in the third century AD.
On Biography
One of Salmon Chase’s best friends was Charles Sumner, the antislavery leader from Massachusetts. They first met in the 1840s, mainly through the mail, and they served together in the United States Senate in the 1850s, when they were among the most ardent opponents of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. During the Civil War, they were in almost daily touch, with Sumner in the Senate and Chase in the Treasury, and Sumner was one of those who pressed Lincoln hardest to make Chase the Chief Justice. Chase and Sumner continued to talk, in person and by letter, right up until Chase’s death in 1873.
Cancer Books
I realize, now that I have cancer, that I have been reading about cancer for many years. Most of what I know about cancer I know from reading. That is, I suppose true of most topics; we learn about Brazil, or the French Revolution, or John Jay, by reading. I could go on and on about books and their central role in my life, but let me get to the topic at hand, four specific books.
Prostate Cancer
A few weeks ago, on Friday April 13, I saw my usual doctor for my annual physical. The exam went well until that final phase, for men, the digital rectal examination. Instead of saying, as I expected, “that is fine too” Dr. C said something like “hmm, that is not quite right, you should see a urologist.” He suggested that I see a friend of his, Dr. B, and I was able to get an appointment sooner than I thought, on Monday April 16.
John Niven on Salmon Chase
As I start work on Salmon Chase, I am greatly indebted to John Niven. Starting in 1984, Niven led a team of scholars that gathered the papers of Salmon Chase. They published both a microfilm edition AND a five-volume printed version of Chase papers. In the midst of this massive project, Niven published in 1995 his own biography of Chase.
One would think that, having gathered and organized and published all this material on Chase, Niven would be accurate in his biography of Chase. Sadly, as I gather my own material, and read it against the Niven biography, I find some errors.
Non-Academic History
George Will has a strong review of Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses Grant in today’s Washington Post. Among other things, as I urge editors that Salmon Chase deserves at least 600 pages, it is nice to read a review that says Chernow’s 1000-page book is not too long.
The following paragraph from Will raises interesting issues:
WSJ and NYT Reviews
Harold Holzer reviewed the Stanton book for the Wall Street Journal yesterday. It is a long, detailed review, and I will not quote it all here, but send the readers of this blog to the review itself. Key quote, from my perspective: “This exhaustively researched, well-paced book should take its place as the new, standard biography of the ill-tempered man who helped to save the Union. It is fair, judicious, authoritative, and comprehensive.”
Another review of the Stanton book will appear in the New York Times Sunday Book Review next Sunday, August 13. It is also long and detailed and generally positive.
Augustus Long
I am getting ready to teach, next semester at Chapman, a course on the Civil War, and thinking about how I first got fascinated by that war. It goes back, I think, to Augustus Long.
It was about 1991 or 1992, when I started looking into my genealogy, that I learned that my great-great grandfather, Augustus Long, was a sergeant in the 128th Pennsylvania Volunteers.
Long was born in August 1840 so he was only twenty-two when he volunteered in August 1862. The regiment was organized in Pennsylvania, went to Washington, spent a week or so there, then hastened north in early September to defend Maryland and Pennsylvania. Stephen Sears, in his great book on Antietam, describes what happened to 128th at Antietam on the morning of September 19, 1862: