The Autobiography of a Historian, Part 1

I knew I wanted to write a history book from about as young as I can accurately remember.

This was a realization I made on the floor of my grandfather’s study while thumbing over the dog ears of one of his books on the French and Indian War and settling on a paragraph of particular brutality. (Few wars are as good for brutalities as the French and Indian and few are as eager to receive them as a little boy.) Now before that moment, I was no stranger to books. Bedtime had rarely been the dreaded death knell of fun for me as it for most children because it almost always meant another chapter of Narnia read by my father whose voices were terrible but whose enthusiasms were impossible not to catch. Thus primed to see books as objects of adventure and mystery, I had cracked open my grandfather’s with some similar expectation but instead stepped through an entirely different wardrobe. Here was a world of pounding drums and piercing war cries and what widened my eyes most of all was that these were not just made-up stories. These things had happened. And not somewhere else. Many just right around the corner. 

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Detecting my curiosity, my grandfather joined me on the floor with even more of his books. Each of these he pulled from another shelf in his library, nothing more than a handful of chest-high bookcases but to my widened eyes they might as well have been a cross between the Bodleian and an unopened chest of pirate’s treasure. And not only did my grandfather marvel along with me at each depicted scene — midnight raids, narrow escapes, massacred villages, scalped Redcoats — he read aloud whole passages punctuated by teeth-clenched gasps. “Now how ‘bout that for a paragraph,” I can still hear him saying. Even as a child I knew that this was a reverence for both the history itself and the hands that had written it down. Apparently a reverence I interpreted as a gauntlet. 

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What followed this early discovery was a vague assurance that somehow the past was in my future. The symptom of such an assurance was an equally vague sensitivity to anything historic. By 8, I knew the start and stop dates of the Civil War, the First World War, and World War II. At Disney I forced a family detour to Cinderella’s Castle just to track down a rumor of medieval swords at the gift-shop. (I still have my allowance-money purchase in my office.) 

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Surprisingly none of my early preferences for historical make-believe promoted me to most popular kid on the playground. This, plus a house in the country, plus a personality well-suited for isolation meant that I mostly kept to myself. This in turn eventually meant a pair of worried parents and a due-diligence trip to a doctor. 

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Him: Do you know the difference between a paperback book and a hardcover book? 

Me: Yes.

Him: Why is a paperback book better?

Me: It isn’t.

Him: Why not?

Me: Because a hardcover book will last longer.

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Whatever else was asked in that interview I no longer remember but I do remember the most important thing: that is, he pronounced that I was not special just especially curious. This was a diagnosis no doubt a relief to my parents who from then on apparently adopted a philosophy toward me of can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em: Unscrutinized check-outs at the library. Routine trips to the only toy store in town that sold those metal miniature Britains knights. If there was a point of no return it was left behind the day my own mother introduced me to the movie Spartacus. 

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Easily the most consequential person in determining my destiny was my grandfather. In 6^th grade he got my parent’s permission to take me and me alone on a trip to the Gettysburg Battlefield. The trip was to start immediately after my last cross-country meet which also coincided with the beginning of Fall Break. For his part, I suspect he thought I would enjoy the company of someone with shared interests. For mine, few adventures have been as eagerly anticipated — for the history, yes; for a friend, even more so. 

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The Autobiography of a Historian, Part 2 (Coming soon)

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