{"id":199,"date":"2019-05-28T21:45:57","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T21:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=podcast&p=199"},"modified":"2021-01-20T21:37:27","modified_gmt":"2021-01-20T21:37:27","slug":"biographies-research-writing-and-reviews","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast\/biographies-research-writing-and-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Biographies: Research, Writing, and Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Speakers – Bill Brands (HISTORY) Bat Sparrow (GOVERNMENT) Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa (HARRY RANSOM CENTER)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bill Brands and Bat Sparrow will discuss the difference between writing history and biography, and between writing the life of a living person and that of someone dead, perhaps long ago dead, as well as the attitudes of biographers toward their subjects. And what of reviews that criticize a book seemingly other than the one the author thought he or she had written? Brands and Sparrow will also comment on their experiences of working with archival sources and the perils as well as benefits of interviews. Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa will comment on the dilemmas she has encountered writing professional biography. How does the historian determine where to draw the line between the personal and the professional?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speakers – Bill Brands (HISTORY) Bat Sparrow (GOVERNMENT) Ellen Cunningham-Kruppa (HARRY RANSOM CENTER) Bill Brands and Bat Sparrow will discuss the difference between writing history and biography, and between writing the life of a living person and that of someone dead, perhaps long ago dead, as well as the attitudes of biographers toward their subjects. […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/05\/Biographies-Research-Writing.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"82.13M","filesize_raw":"86120192","date_recorded":"15-03-2019","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[196,195,198,40,197,194,57,199,201,120,200],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-199","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-bat-sparrow","6":"tag-bill-brands","7":"tag-biographies","8":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","9":"tag-ellen-cunningham-kruppa","10":"tag-government","11":"tag-history","12":"tag-research","13":"tag-reviews","14":"tag-university-of-texas","15":"tag-writing","16":"series-bsls","17":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n

Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":833,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-23 19:52:05","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:52:05","post_content":"\n

Dr. H.W.Brands <\/a>was born in Portland, Oregon, where he lived until he went to California for college. He attended Stanford University and studied history and mathematics. After graduating he became a traveling salesman, with a territory that spanned the West from the Pacific to Colorado. His wanderlust diminished after several trips across the Great Basin, and he turned to sales of a different sort, namely teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For nine years he taught mathematics and history in high school and community college. Meanwhile he resumed his formal education, earning graduate degrees in mathematics and history, concluding with a doctorate in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He worked as an oral historian at the University of Texas Law School for a year, then became a visiting professor of history at Vanderbilt University. In 1987 he joined the history faculty at Texas A&M University, where he taught for seventeen years. In 2005 he returned to the University of Texas, where he holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He has written thirty books, coauthored or edited five others, and published dozens of articles and scores of reviews. His articles have appeared in the New York Times<\/em>, the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, the Washington Post<\/em>, the International Herald Tribune<\/em>, the Boston Globe<\/em>, the Atlantic Monthly<\/em>, the Smithsonian<\/em>, the National Interest<\/em>, the American Historical Review<\/em>, the Journal of American History<\/em>, the Political Science Quarterly<\/em>, American History<\/em>, and many other newspapers, magazines and journals. His writings have received critical and popular acclaim. The First American<\/em> and Traitor to His Class<\/em> were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize. <\/em>Several of his books have been bestsellers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brands is a member of various honorary societies, including the Society of American Historians and the Philosophical Society of Texas. He is a regular guest on national radio and television programs, and is frequently interviewed by the American and foreign press. His writings have been published in several countries and translated into German, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.<\/p>\n","post_title":"H. W. Brands","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"h-w-brands","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-23 19:52:05","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:52:05","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=833","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":"

Well, there is a sudden silence. I think people must be. Yes. So there it is again,<\/p>\n

the expectation. And here’s George<\/p>\n

Scott, Christian. And we have saved a seat for him right here.<\/p>\n

I said this is a session<\/p>\n

that everyone has been looking forward to taking the reading<\/p>\n

and the writing of biography and seen from different perspectives.<\/p>\n

This is a session that but Sparrow originated<\/p>\n

his idea and he represents government political science. Bill Brands, of<\/p>\n

course, in the history department and Ellen Cunningham Krupa represents<\/p>\n

the HRC. And so let’s be thinking<\/p>\n

about questions that we can ask our distinguished panelist. Because this is<\/p>\n

a. We’ve asked to speak only briefly so that we can get a good discussion going<\/p>\n

about different types of biography and for that matter, biographies that you’ve recently read<\/p>\n

that we’ll start with you.<\/p>\n

Well, I’m waiting for the lecture and we just say thank you for Roger and thank you for coming.<\/p>\n

Thanks.<\/p>\n

Ask you, as a political scientist who is interested in general concepts<\/p>\n

rather than audio graphic research. My decision to write a biography induced a degree<\/p>\n

of self-consciousness and introspection. Why was I writing biography rather than embarking<\/p>\n

on other kinds of scholarship once more consistent with social science scholarship? I had<\/p>\n

been engaged with previously and have been subsequently what were my unquestioned<\/p>\n

inclinations and intuitions that led me to write a biography? More generally,<\/p>\n

what can be said about biography as a method in genre? And I’m happy to have this occasion to explore<\/p>\n

this topic. I actually think Roger’s the credit and joined by Bill Brandes, who my counterpart<\/p>\n

has written two dozen books, including eight biographies and two joint biographies, and<\/p>\n

Dr. Alan Cunningham Krupa Ransom, the Ransom Center’s associate director for preservation and conservation.<\/p>\n

So looking forward to our conversation and your conversation. So what are the some of<\/p>\n

the attractions and limits of biography? Biography brings an immediacy and invaluable<\/p>\n

context and necessary meaning to enquiry’s of politics and government.<\/p>\n

Just as it does for investigations of science, religion, business, sports<\/p>\n

and other aspects of human life, it makes the subtleties of and shifts in interpersonal<\/p>\n

relations and the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events.<\/p>\n

Tangent, tangible and consequential, particularly the subject is well-known and an<\/p>\n

accomplished woman or man. If the great doors of history swing on tiny hinges, to paraphrase<\/p>\n

Max Vaper biography sheds shines light on those hinges.<\/p>\n

It does so in a compelling way. Moreover, at least a well-constructed biography of a person worth reading<\/p>\n

does. Given that in life, Murat narrative is such an obvious and direct way<\/p>\n

by which a layperson can understand someone else, biography illuminates and elaborates<\/p>\n

on the human condition. For those we care about war, for those who we are convinced to<\/p>\n

care about. The enduring appeal of the good biographies is,<\/p>\n

as I see it, wholly unsurprising. And this was its attraction to me. If I were to study how decisions<\/p>\n

were to be made by national security, by presidential administrations of the post-World War 2<\/p>\n

era, and to determine how U.S. foreign policy decision making evolved and are shifted<\/p>\n

during the Cold War and then after the Cold War and up to and after 9\/11, biography<\/p>\n

seemed a compelling means by which to do so. That<\/p>\n

being said, biographies constitute an odd sort of scholarship, as Virginia<\/p>\n

Woolf exclaimed in reference to writing about her friend Roger Fry. My God, how does one write<\/p>\n

a biography? Biography, as one student of political biography writes, I’m sure<\/p>\n

she can use that voice as a subjective and a highly interpretive method is without explicit<\/p>\n

theory. It does not offer testable hypotheses. It contains no limit on what can<\/p>\n

or cannot be used as evidence, and it has no established criteria by which to gage its quality.<\/p>\n

Consider the divided reactions to the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s two volume biography<\/p>\n

of Henry Kissinger. Instead, the biographer has to sort through numerous accounts of<\/p>\n

the subject’s career and settle on a final version that imposes order and structure.<\/p>\n

The biographer has organized her his evidence novel fashion so as to tell the tale<\/p>\n

he or she wants to tell the buyer for, then has a draft that version as if it was<\/p>\n

the story. In other words, life is packaged in biography. The loose ends<\/p>\n

snipped off. Consequently, it can never mirror the messiness of the subject’s life<\/p>\n

with the many ways open to assessing interpreting someone’s life. Then this phrase<\/p>\n

creative nonfiction is apposite. These features<\/p>\n

make biography vulnerable to writers who have political or ideological agendas, of course, and cause<\/p>\n

leet readers to have different assessments of biographies. I mentioned Caroline Ferguson.<\/p>\n

We can think of so we can think of the path to Power. Robert Caro’s biography of the<\/p>\n

early and early Lyndon Johnson water rising star David Jarrod’s biography on a Barack<\/p>\n

Obama. For these reasons, we speak of the best biography according to a number of criteria,<\/p>\n

the best in terms of the coverage of someone’s personal life. Her professional life, his political<\/p>\n

acumen, her interpersonal style and so forth. Given the latitude biography allows,<\/p>\n

its intrinsic openness to content, interpretation is unsurprising then that they get<\/p>\n

used for political, ideological or other objectives at its best, though. Biography shares<\/p>\n

with much of social science and I think it’s fair to say most scholarship a conscious effort to describe,<\/p>\n

explain and interpret phenomena here a person’s life based on quote, inevitably<\/p>\n

partial or imperfect information about the real world, unquote. This may not amount to<\/p>\n

encompassing theory. It does make such theory possible and it does so in a manner that makes the complex<\/p>\n

and consequential accessible. So what does a blog for need? How should he<\/p>\n

or she proceed? So what are some rules of thumb as I see it? One is that the biographer<\/p>\n

needs be honest about the subject. To be fair, in the collection, interpretation of evidence that the bar for<\/p>\n

be diligent is assumed. A large component of this honesty is having an open mind<\/p>\n

about the cumulative record of the subject and how what it amounts to a critical blog for<\/p>\n

may become more sympathetic over time according to where the record leads<\/p>\n

and how the facts lend themselves well in themselves to be interpreted.<\/p>\n

Jean Strauss had a preconceived notion of JP Morgan as a cynical tycoon, but after<\/p>\n

years of work, as her Miney Lee tells it. Strauss came to embrace a fuller and more complex<\/p>\n

understanding of the financier. The biographer should also approach the subject with sympathy<\/p>\n

charity. Even the biographer attempts to understand the subject on his or her own terms.<\/p>\n

It’s not to be expected that she or he understands or improves of all that the subject does. But<\/p>\n

it is to be expected that the biographer tried to do so even for a psychopath.<\/p>\n

The burden of the biographer is to communicate the kind of world in which the subjects and habits for his own actions<\/p>\n

to make sense. Nixon may not be a psychopath, but he is a good<\/p>\n

example. Having read several biographies and accounts of his life and of his presidency,<\/p>\n

he’s at once. It seems to me pathetic. His emotional deficits and psychological needs. And yet<\/p>\n

oddly admirable for his perseverance and willpower. Not unrelated. Lee Another quality<\/p>\n

is imagination. The biographies the biographer steadies a different period of history,<\/p>\n

foreign places, unfamiliar circumstances and unknown people like history, biography<\/p>\n

as to recapture the era of which the subject was part. And so many subtitles, a biography<\/p>\n

first to the subject’s life and times. This is not unlike good ethnography, compelling<\/p>\n

historical fiction, quality science fiction or the best travel writing. The biographer<\/p>\n

has to convincingly portray the subject’s world and what his or her life was like. And this takes a certain emotional<\/p>\n

and intellectual imagination. The very human tasks of ascertaining another’s personality and character,<\/p>\n

ambitions and passions and hopes and demons. Empathy is a word.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the bar for Nunnelee needs to be hardworking, as I have suggested. But as<\/p>\n

importantly, resourceful, especially for less well-known and less public figures. In the absence<\/p>\n

of clear criteria of what evidence to use, the buyer for is compelled or should be compelled to look<\/p>\n

at as many relevant sources as possible, whether transcripts, medical records, oral histories,<\/p>\n

records and testimonies of less obvious tangential features. And should interviews be called for<\/p>\n

or possible, the testimonies and answers of family, friends, colleagues, opponents and even antagonists<\/p>\n

interpretation. The biography has to as to be willing to articulate what he or she<\/p>\n

knows and to make her implied judgment. Facts don’t. You obviously don’t speak for themselves,<\/p>\n

and it falls on their biographer to organize, prioritize and single what his or her evaluation<\/p>\n

is of the subject. So a recent biography of George H.W. Bush wrote of Iran Contra and<\/p>\n

Bush’s complicity and stated that Bush’s behavior was beneath them. Some might think that<\/p>\n

Jon Meacham has it wrong, but the buyer for addressing the issue and took a position. Karl, airily,<\/p>\n

the biographer needs to be willing to say what she or he doesn’t know. Better that than dissemble or ignore an important<\/p>\n

point or event implicit with interpretation. Then comes organization<\/p>\n

and discernment that the bar for not cram in as much detail as possible, even if she has all the facts.<\/p>\n

Interpretation requires discipline and discrimination. In other words, less the biography approximate on<\/p>\n

Arnold Klein BS. History is one damn thing after another. And certainly I’ve<\/p>\n

read biographies that more or less do this proceeding chronologically, and I’m sure you have to<\/p>\n

style. This means writing and rewriting and rewriting stylistic quality. The<\/p>\n

seamlessness and effectiveness of the prose probably goes without saying, but good writing greatly<\/p>\n

adds to the reader’s attraction to the subject and trust in the biographer. It’s helpful,<\/p>\n

obviously here to have others eyes professionally, preferably those that are knowledgeable, critical and kindly.<\/p>\n

But just leave it said that. Good writing you think, would be automatic, but often it’s not. And it’s<\/p>\n

not a given. So how does this lists of traits Matt Mansharamani leaves propose<\/p>\n

rules of behavior. She gives 10 early on in her in her Oxford short short study of biography.<\/p>\n

Some of hers I would take for granted as being truthful, identifying sources, not censoring oneself,<\/p>\n

covering the entire life. She does not include sympathy, imagination, interpretation, resourcefulness<\/p>\n

or writing saw among her rules. But I think that resourcefulness and an effective writing<\/p>\n

style would be assumed for her. She adds detachment that<\/p>\n

is being objective and moves on the subject. And my answer is sort of yes and no. Yes<\/p>\n

about being honest and taking the evidence where it leads. As with Strauss writing on JP Morgan.<\/p>\n

But no, insofar as it would seem to be impossible at the end of the day, LEIGH herself writes about<\/p>\n

being intimidated by Virginia Woolf and can see that she cannot be objective a better subject for<\/p>\n

with any decision about how to write a biography. Comes commitment with Wolfe, for example.<\/p>\n

Biographers can start at the source with Wolfe’s family history and see her in the context of ancestry,<\/p>\n

country and class. They can start with Bloomsbury fixing on her social and intellectual<\/p>\n

group and its reputation. They can start by thinking of her as a victim, as an incest survivor, and someone who’s later going<\/p>\n

to kill herself. They can start with a theory or a belief and steer oise in terms of that belief,<\/p>\n

since like Shakespeare, she is a writer who lends herself to infinitely various interpretations.<\/p>\n

My point is that with a perspective attends a particular relationship of the biographer<\/p>\n

to the subject. And if there is sympathy and imagination, the biographer spending years<\/p>\n

of work in many cases cannot possibly be detached, or at least not have detachment among<\/p>\n

the foremost descriptors. Let me just add<\/p>\n

some amusing incident, I might add luck or serendipity. I was using the National Security<\/p>\n

Archive of collated with George Washington University, and there was a large collection storage off site called a<\/p>\n

G H WB interviews. And I thought that sounded very promising since Bush 41<\/p>\n

was perhaps Brant Scowcroft best friend. I requested the reference records. They arrive the next day<\/p>\n

and lo and behold, they contain dozens of interviews on origins and evolution of nuclear competition with the<\/p>\n

U.S. and Soviet Union on end, particularly how to site nuclear missiles so<\/p>\n

they would be invulnerable to a Soviet first strike. The interviews had a wealth of detail on all the schemes<\/p>\n

to house the ICBM armor arsenal. Some of you may remember this in airplanes under water<\/p>\n

on a railroad loop in the Nevada desert. Other plans and so forth. And they. This material via<\/p>\n

valuably informed my chapter on the Scowcroft commission. That is the president’s commission on Strategic Forces.<\/p>\n

What is amusing is that I had transposed the letters of the collection, perhaps because of dyslexia<\/p>\n

or wishful thinking. They were the WGBH files, interviews for a 13 part PBS<\/p>\n

documentary on war and peace in the nuclear age. First broadcast in 1989.<\/p>\n

And were it not for that material and why would I look at the GBH? Why would I look at video<\/p>\n

media as a as a even tertiary source? There you are.<\/p>\n

So what about a couple of things I want to get? Two of them would turn over to to Bill Brands and Ellen<\/p>\n

Cunningham Group up clear. What about the difference in writing about a living or a<\/p>\n

or a deceased figure? And it seems to me there are clear tradeoffs. Living subjects bring<\/p>\n

freshness. Evidence is more readily available, if possibly more disorganized.<\/p>\n

And the subject has a currency. In the case of Scowcroft, this is because I could ask<\/p>\n

for his permissions. I had could look at his Army Air Corps, an Air Force officer, efficiency reports,<\/p>\n

his academic transcripts from West Point, Ogden High School and Columbia<\/p>\n

University. His group, Peachy Program, his military medical records. And I could<\/p>\n

have access to his friends and colleagues for interviews. There is also an advantage to being the first mover. There was<\/p>\n

no previous comprehensive biography of Scowcroft. So was open. So it is open terrain.<\/p>\n

Now, this could be a disadvantage. Have nothing to react to. Still, I think would be harder to write something new about a Washington,<\/p>\n

Franklin, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, or other famous political figure than to write about<\/p>\n

someone a little more obscure and not sort of top line.<\/p>\n

Probably the greatest advantage to writing about living or contemporary subject. As I’ve suggested is<\/p>\n

it allows for interviews. Interviews enable the biographer to flesh out the needed color in detail to follow<\/p>\n

up on documentary records in secondary sources that may be inconsistent and to fill in crucial<\/p>\n

gaps. The archives can always be trusted. Things get pulled or destroyed. Some<\/p>\n

policymakers lard the files put in memos that actually are just coincident with and not necessarily<\/p>\n

justify what decisions being made. And a lot of business I found was done verbally without paper<\/p>\n

or electronic documentation, and many materials may still be called classified and closed.<\/p>\n

And in that case, interviews supply needed background and they can reconcile differences.<\/p>\n

At the same time, writing on a living a recently deceased person has its drawbacks with recency.<\/p>\n

There comes reduced perspective. Consider biographies of Eisenhower versus those of Obama, for instance.<\/p>\n

There is also greater risks with interviews. The biographer might go native. That is, the more the<\/p>\n

buyer for talks to the subject, their friends and colleagues and family members, the greater the likelihood that she<\/p>\n

or he will unduly sympathize with the subject. Alternatively, or perhaps addictively,<\/p>\n

the buyer from IP played those being interviews might offered skewed interpretations of people events, withhold<\/p>\n

important evidence or outright mislead. Just as memoirs, oral histories, autobiographies<\/p>\n

and some biographies do. These factors could welly the biographer to make an accurate analysis and draw<\/p>\n

mistaken conclusions, thereby lending unwarranted support to particular positions or interpretations<\/p>\n

and be overly favorable to the subject’s image and reputation.<\/p>\n

With a living subject, too, there hasn’t been time enough for classified<\/p>\n

materials, which was Mayan’s a case and there are insufficient numbers of Emaar as mandatory<\/p>\n

views or FOI is Freedom of Information requests. And so one has less of<\/p>\n

a paper trail to work with. I also had to do without Scowcroft’s personal papers and financial<\/p>\n

records. A living or contemporary subject also means a distinct audience, the subject<\/p>\n

of her family, friends, family, family members, friends and<\/p>\n

close colleagues writing of a long to see subject and poses no such constraints were perhaps<\/p>\n

only minimal constraint. And I wanted to be fair to this additional audience. A related hazard<\/p>\n

then is BKB. Because of this audience of contemporary friends and family members, those who speak to the biographer make<\/p>\n

sense of themselves, where what they say might have may appear in print and affect their ongoing<\/p>\n

relationships with a subject and her associates. In my case, this meant being more Fedele,<\/p>\n

more subtle, more subtle. Leaving crumbs, leaving crumbs for the reader.<\/p>\n

At one point I wrote the Scowcroft’s career simultaneously involved giving strategic advice, serving<\/p>\n

on presidential commissions, being employed<\/p>\n

on corporate boards and working on behalf of some of the largest companies in the world with Consist<\/p>\n

Kissinger Associates and with the Scowcroft Group. I wrote that if anyone could pull<\/p>\n

off such juggling, it was Scowcroft with his extraordinary ability to come compartmentalize.<\/p>\n

One reviewer wrote that this showed that I was overly enamored of my subject. One was a different<\/p>\n

point, though, a signal that Scowcroft did have such conflicts of interest. And then it remained an open question<\/p>\n

as to how separated his considerations were. And I can elaborate on that,<\/p>\n

some other examples of that later on. Notwithstanding this list of pros and cons, I felt I had little choice but to write<\/p>\n

about Scowcroft when he was then in his 80s. Not only was he still in good shape, he wrote little about<\/p>\n

now security. Unlike Kennan, Kissinger, Brzezinski and he hadn’t written his memoirs. Unlike Cheney,<\/p>\n

Rice or Rumsfeld also figured that I would lose details about his childhood and early life.<\/p>\n

And given that his siblings, parents and neighbors were all deceased or incapacitated,<\/p>\n

revealingly, 15 of my interviewees have already passed away and Scowcroft himself has had a series of<\/p>\n

small strokes. So let me say a final word about reviews since I previously<\/p>\n

mentioned the subject. Having read Callis review book reviews, written a couple of dozen my own, a few things come to mind.<\/p>\n

One is that the reader deserves the the reviewers perspective. It is no service to the reader if the<\/p>\n

reviewer only summarizes the book, even as many reviewers do, just that which to be clear, should be the majority<\/p>\n

of the review. Is the book worth reading as a well researched is a well executed. The best<\/p>\n

reviews compare the book under review to other works on the same subject. Although I find this to be surprisingly<\/p>\n

uncommon, the more knowledgeable, the more informed the reviewer, the better the probability of a fair reading<\/p>\n

and evaluation. Book reviews are also surely going to be misleading and possibly<\/p>\n

wrong. They’re gonna irritate the author. And for two very good reasons. One is that the reviewer<\/p>\n

often us read reader lengthy book and come to an evaluation with a evaluation of that book within the space<\/p>\n

of a few weeks with a reviewer not infrequently postpones this task to the very last minute. Distortions<\/p>\n

are to be expected then because the reviewer write hardly and say something original. Unsurprisingly,<\/p>\n

in this condensation and and work, they often get parts of the book wrong and make unwarranted<\/p>\n

criticisms. And you see this in reviews and subsequent letters in the Tellez, the New York Review of Books<\/p>\n

and other venues, also reviews of my own work. The other reason<\/p>\n

is structural short reviews are necessarily unrepresentative. The whole reviewer has to condense a discussion<\/p>\n

of the whole book in several hundred or a few thousand words. He or she chooses to write about some things, ignore<\/p>\n

others. So is nothing necessarily going to be distortion and misrepresentation? Rarely will<\/p>\n

the reviewer viewer’s priorities accord with the authors, but the reviewer does nobody<\/p>\n

any favors by refusing to criticize in the pursuit of high standards. And I tend to be fairly critical<\/p>\n

my own reviews. It’s not that I’m criticizing a book for not being the one I would have written.<\/p>\n

It is rather that if I know something about the subject, then the book should not be inconsistent with or ignore that knowledge<\/p>\n

or if it isn’t consistent. For example, a recent book I reviewed about Puerto Rican citizenship<\/p>\n

and immigration to the U.S. mainland, then it should be able to persuade me of its new understanding.<\/p>\n

It is the reviewer’s responsibility to be forthright and fair and charitable, to be sure. Presuming<\/p>\n

the significance of what we study. Simply put, does the author accomplish<\/p>\n

what he or she has set out to do? There is always, almost always room for criticisms. Then, given the many<\/p>\n

perspectives on a person or topic, and consequently the many choices authors have to make.<\/p>\n

British reviewers in this respect tend to be more forthcoming than Americans political science and I cannot<\/p>\n

speak of history or literature. There’s all too often mutual back scratching interviews or mostly<\/p>\n

uncritical. There may there may be no place for nastiness, but there is surely plenty of room for<\/p>\n

engaging in dialog on the study of important people and topics. So what should a potential<\/p>\n

reviewer do then? I would even advocate that potential viewers accept only if he or she is somewhat knowledgeable<\/p>\n

on the subject. And as long as review view allows for a decent word count insufficient time to completion.<\/p>\n

The venue matters too, of course. Having said that, reviews are quite valuable. A loss leader in building<\/p>\n

business parlance, they take time to do well, but people read them. They established the reviewers credibility<\/p>\n

and they show that the reader reviewer is a smart, serious and well-informed scholar. Whatever the rank,<\/p>\n

they are relatively easy way to engage in discussions about the substance and process of scholarship<\/p>\n

discussions that we should all want to be a part of. Thank you.<\/p>\n

Goulburn’s OK, thank you. Bhatta said many things with<\/p>\n

which I agree. A few things with which I disagree and I’ll get to that in a moment.<\/p>\n

But first, I would like to say how I came upon biography. and I will admit that<\/p>\n

my motivation was principally mercenary.<\/p>\n

I in sometime in about the mid nineteen nineties, I had this idea<\/p>\n

that I wanted to write a multi-volume history of the United States. I had gotten tenure, so I’d<\/p>\n

done that stuff and I was thinking big. And I had been teaching surveys of American<\/p>\n

history from the time I started teaching high school in the mid 1970s. And<\/p>\n

so I I liked the idea of surveying abroad field<\/p>\n

and American history is a big story. So I remember attending a convention<\/p>\n

of the American Historical Association and going through the assembly hall there where the publishers<\/p>\n

have their the booths and striking conversations with a few publishers.<\/p>\n

And and I was talking to trade publishers at this point because again, I’d gotten tenure and I want to reach to a broader<\/p>\n

audience. And I proposed this idea of writing a history of the United States. And I had said about,<\/p>\n

oh, I know, five or six volumes. And the publisher just laughed<\/p>\n

and said, nobody does that. If, you know, nobody would publish it. And if anybody publish<\/p>\n

it, nobody would read it and said, who do you think you are anyway? Wilda,<\/p>\n

rant. I actually when I I tell this story<\/p>\n

before I say Will Duran’s. Usually I say now I will be able to<\/p>\n

guess the age of some the people in the audience, depending on your reactions. For the younger<\/p>\n

ones here, you’ll know that you might not know will doorand with Ariel Duran as the authors of The Story of<\/p>\n

Civilization, which is I can’t remember how many volumes, and I knew that the but<\/p>\n

many volumes. And I knew that the expected answer to the question, do you think you’re wilda rant<\/p>\n

was no. No, of course not. But my silent answer is yeah, that’s exactly go I want<\/p>\n

to be because I read all those volumes and I was entranced. I thought the idea<\/p>\n

of being carried across a broad sweep of history by an engaging guide,<\/p>\n

what could be more enjoyable than that? And that’s what I wanted to do. But I was relatively<\/p>\n

young in the profession, and I was sufficiently discouraged for the time being to set my project<\/p>\n

aside. But after thinking about it for a year or two, I realized, wait,<\/p>\n

there’s another way to do this. I’m going to write this history of the United States<\/p>\n

in six volumes. But I’m not going to tell anybody, including my publisher, that I’m doing it<\/p>\n

and I’m going to do it under a different form. I’m going to do it in the form of biographies.<\/p>\n

And so I took my first stab at a biography with the person that I thought<\/p>\n

was the most colorful, interesting figure in all of American history.<\/p>\n

And you will have your own thoughts on who this might be. But the one I came up with was Theodore Roosevelt.<\/p>\n

And Theodore Roosevelt is a wonderful subject for a historian because<\/p>\n

although he became president, the presidency was the least interesting part<\/p>\n

of his life. In fact, some of you perhaps will have read Edmund Morris, his three volume biography<\/p>\n

of Theodore Roosevelt. And the first volume is fantastic. It gets Roosevelt<\/p>\n

up to the presidency. The second volume on the presidency<\/p>\n

is pretty pedestrian. And actually, this betrays the fact that Morris. I<\/p>\n

mean, I’ve heard him admit that he finds politics boring. Well, if you’re gonna write a biography<\/p>\n

of a president, that’s a potential drawback. And then the third volume, when<\/p>\n

Roosevelt is no longer president, the post presumes year. That’s really good, too. But anyway, so I<\/p>\n

decided to write about Theodore Roosevelt and I had no particular<\/p>\n

preconceptions or expectations when I started writing a biography. I just figured, OK,<\/p>\n

we’ll start at the birth and wind up at the death and see what’s in between. I had no particular theory.<\/p>\n

I had no particular ax to grind. I didn’t<\/p>\n

consider myself to be a fan or a critic of Theodore Roosevelt. And here I will differ<\/p>\n

with that in that I think that detachment is important, or at least<\/p>\n

it’s been important to me. I try to keep an arm’s length distance from<\/p>\n

my subject. And this because in here I differ from perhaps bad and from many<\/p>\n

historians in that I get really uncomfortable being<\/p>\n

placed in a position of sitting in judgment on the past. And this applies whether I’m<\/p>\n

talking about an individual or an entire generation. I think that the judgments<\/p>\n

we make tell us very much less about history than they do about ourselves.<\/p>\n

And for example, when I wrote a biography of Ronald Reagan and<\/p>\n

people had strong views about my biography of Ronald Reagan. But at<\/p>\n

most of the strong views had relatively little to do with my book. They had everything to do with Ronald<\/p>\n

Reagan. And this, by the way, is one of the occupational hazards of writing biographies<\/p>\n

that you tend to get reviewed, especially if you’re writing about someone about<\/p>\n

whom people still care, that the reviews tend to be the reviews of the subject<\/p>\n

rather than with the book. And so I thought that my Reagan biography<\/p>\n

took it pretty much right down the middle. And I’ll admit that when Reagan was<\/p>\n

president, I was skeptical of his policies. I didn’t agree with his policies much. But and<\/p>\n

I won’t say that I agreed with his policies anymore after writing the book. But for me, that was<\/p>\n

not the point. The point was to make Reagan understandable to readers.<\/p>\n

And I made a point of leaving to my readers the task of judging<\/p>\n

Reagan’s policies and therefore to some extent judging Reagan himself. And I would like to think<\/p>\n

that readers who liked Reagan would find something in there<\/p>\n

to both support their views, but also to challenge their views. And likewise, for people who didn’t like<\/p>\n

Reagan anyway. So I know I will actually say this, too, that<\/p>\n

I think most readers of biographies, I’m suspect that most readers of history<\/p>\n

actually do want their authors to take sides.<\/p>\n

And I had high hopes for my Reagan biography commercially, but<\/p>\n

unfortunately, it fell between the two stools of, well, the the pro-Reagan camp and the anti-Reagan<\/p>\n

camp. But more on that. My first biography, the one on Theodore Roosevelt,<\/p>\n

did pretty well. And speaking of reviews, so<\/p>\n

the best review I got was by Paul Johnson, who reviewed the book in The Wall Street<\/p>\n

Journal. And he wrote and authors<\/p>\n

are looking for those one liners, those pull quotes that they can lift from the review<\/p>\n

and put on the cover of the paperback. And as soon as I read Johnson’s review,<\/p>\n

I thought, OK, this is this is going on the top of the cover, the paperback. And he said,<\/p>\n

every red blooded American must read this book.<\/p>\n

Yeah, can’t do any better than that. But the irony was<\/p>\n

that I could tell from reading the review that he hadn’t read the book. Because?<\/p>\n

Because the reviews. Well, exactly. OK. Maybe he was getting himself<\/p>\n

out because he’s a Brit. But but that unfortunately, I think that was lost on most of<\/p>\n

it, most of the people who saw their quote. But but this is the sort of thing that happens. It turned out that he<\/p>\n

was working on his own biography of Theodore Roosevelt. Or maybe it wasn’t biography, but something about Theodore Roosevelt.<\/p>\n

So he was very enamored of Roosevelt. And there was enough positive in there, I guess, to suit his tastes<\/p>\n

anyway. So I decided I was going to write this history of the United States in the form of biography<\/p>\n

and volume. It turned out not to be Vol. 1 in the series, but the first<\/p>\n

one that I wrote was about Theodore Roosevelt. And it went well enough that my publisher said, well, let’s do<\/p>\n

another one. So then I decided, who’s the second most interesting figure<\/p>\n

in American history? And I actually posed the question to a number of people. And the answer<\/p>\n

that popped up in several occasions was, what do you think?<\/p>\n

Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin. And by the time by the time I said hit on Franklin,<\/p>\n

I realized, OK, now I started to map out how this history project<\/p>\n

would take form. So Benjamin Franklin would be Vol. 1 in<\/p>\n

the series. And it’s a biography of Benjamin Franklin, but it’s also a history book. And here<\/p>\n

I will observe that every biography is a life and times<\/p>\n

and biographers tend to come to their subjects from one of two directions<\/p>\n

or three if we count political scientist. But they can’t. They tend to come from either<\/p>\n

the ranks of historians or from journalism. And<\/p>\n

if you read a biography and you’re thinking along these lines,<\/p>\n

it’s usually not hard to tell if this biography is by a historian<\/p>\n

or it’s by a journalist. And the analogy that I draw is<\/p>\n

in cinematography. So if you’re shooting a film, the journalist biographies,<\/p>\n

they tend to keep their subjects in pretty tight focus. So you see your subject and not much<\/p>\n

around your subject. Whereas this historians, they tend to back out a little bit. So you say much more<\/p>\n

of the context. So with the historian, I’m the historian writing biographies here, these<\/p>\n

biographies are as much the times as. They are the lives.<\/p>\n

And this because I had this sort of hidden<\/p>\n

agenda, which was to write these books that add up to a history of the United States.<\/p>\n

So and in thinking about my subjects,<\/p>\n

I didn’t I deliberately tried not to impose particular themes<\/p>\n

on the subjects, but the choice of my subjects and the careers<\/p>\n

and lives of my subjects lent themselves to particular themes. So the book that I wrote about Benjamin Franklin<\/p>\n

came my way. It went up with the title The First American and I employ the title<\/p>\n

of First American, in part because primarily because Benjamin Franklin was<\/p>\n

born an Englishman and died an American. And this is the thing that has to<\/p>\n

be explained in American history in the 18th century. How did these colonies become an independent<\/p>\n

country? I also use the title in the second sense that that Benjamin Franklin was the<\/p>\n

most celebrated American of his generation. So he was first in that regard. So<\/p>\n

this is the story that I try to tell with Benjamin Franklin. And it gets me from his birth in<\/p>\n

my biographies are going to have to form this more last seemless<\/p>\n

history I’m on the lookout for. So who is going to be in Volume 2?<\/p>\n

Who is going to be my next subject? Now I need someone who is<\/p>\n

an adult or stepping onto the adult stage at the time. My<\/p>\n

previous subject steps off that as dies. So who is an adult<\/p>\n

in 17 90 and and who can carry the story<\/p>\n

of American history? And for me, this is crucial. Now, when I started out,<\/p>\n

I had no idea and no intention of writing mostly about presidents<\/p>\n

of the United States. It turned out that five of my six biographies were about presidents,<\/p>\n

and partly this reflected that mercenary motive in that<\/p>\n

presidential biography as an understood knish. And if you want books<\/p>\n

to sell. First of all, you have to sell the idea to a publisher. So the publisher will get behind<\/p>\n

putting it out there. And when I began this, I did not consider myself<\/p>\n

a presidential biographer, in part because I was fully aware that in the field of academic history,<\/p>\n

there is no such thing. I mean, in academic history is hardly just a biographer. But<\/p>\n

let alone a presidential biographer. But for the public at large presidential biographies,<\/p>\n

that makes a lot of sense. So my second volume was about<\/p>\n

Andrew Jackson and this because Andrew Jackson was twenty three years old when<\/p>\n

Benjamin Franklin died. You might well ask. So why did they have to be adults? And the answer<\/p>\n

is, I don’t do childhoods very well at all. And here I<\/p>\n

will take issue with the comment that the bad cited, that you got to do<\/p>\n

justice to all parts of the life. No, you don’t. You just have to write about the stuff that’s interesting<\/p>\n

and important. And here I tell my students, my writing students in particular, of<\/p>\n

a story that is ascribed to Elmore Leonard, the mystery writer who died a<\/p>\n

few years ago. And the story goes that Leonard would write a draft of whatever<\/p>\n

his novel was and he would hand it off to his first reader, who was his wife,<\/p>\n

and his wife would read it and hand it back with the same one line comment<\/p>\n

every time. And that one line comment was, take out the boring stuff. So<\/p>\n

I concluded that just because something happened doesn’t mean you have to write about it.<\/p>\n

And and also because, as I say, childhoods<\/p>\n

don’t tell me in most cases they don’t tell me. Maybe they tell other people. Maybe they tell more insightful biographies<\/p>\n

than me. They don’t tell me much about the adult. Sometimes<\/p>\n

you get it, but very often you don’t. In the case of Theodore Roosevelt, yes, he spent much of his life trying<\/p>\n

to sort of live down his his week as he saw it. unmannerly childhood. And that explained<\/p>\n

a lot about the man he became. But in the case of Franklin Roosevelt. OK. He had a shelter. So I<\/p>\n

ended up writing about Franklin Roosevelt. So he had a sheltered childhood and he has some cute<\/p>\n

letters that he wrote home from camp. But once you quote one of those, you know, that’s about all<\/p>\n

I as the author are. I think readers need anyway. So I wrote about Andrew Jackson. And in the case<\/p>\n

of Andrew Jackson, the I began thinking of my biographies as having<\/p>\n

to describe a task of American history because I’m a teacher of American history. And what<\/p>\n

happens during the life of this interview? What happens in the life of the generation that the individual represents?<\/p>\n

Well, in the case of Andrew Jackson, it’s the emergence of American democracy. So this. Is the story.<\/p>\n

Andrew Jackson is the first ordinary man to become president of the United States. And he establishes<\/p>\n

a model for American politics that we’re still living with today.<\/p>\n

I wrote about Ulysses Grant as a third volume, although he was almost that he was a second<\/p>\n

to the last one. But I actually wrote and in that case. So Andrew<\/p>\n

Jackson dies in 1845. So I’ve got to get somebody who can pick up the story in 1845.<\/p>\n

And I had already written about Theodore Roosevelt. So Theodore Roosevelt was going to be volume<\/p>\n

four in the series. And Theodore Roosevelt graduates from college in 1880.<\/p>\n

So I’ve got a gap. Basically, the coverage I need is eighteen forty five to 1880. And<\/p>\n

what’s the story that has to be told there? Well, it’s the story of the<\/p>\n

civil war or the sectional crisis, the civil war and reconstruction. And this<\/p>\n

is credit. This was critical for me because as a teacher of American history, I<\/p>\n

I am bothered. Every year I teach both halves of an introductory course in U.S. history. The<\/p>\n

first half goes from the pre-colonial times to the end of the civil war and then from the end of the civil<\/p>\n

war to the present. And I have been trying to persuade my colleagues in the history department here that we<\/p>\n

need to change that division, in part because of the division was made about 80 years<\/p>\n

ago when there was a whole lot less of the second half of the course. But also it does violence<\/p>\n

to any understanding of what the civil war was about and how it turned out, because<\/p>\n

it certainly tends to convey the opinion that as of 1865,<\/p>\n

all those problems were finished. Well, they weren’t at all. And I wanted an individual that would span<\/p>\n

the gap, that would carry the story. And the one who leaped immediately to mind was<\/p>\n

Ulysses Grant. And in this case. So I will say that my<\/p>\n

the title of my biography of Andrew Jackson was not very<\/p>\n

imaginative. It was just Andrew Jackson life. And the<\/p>\n

life was insisted upon by the marketing people. And I posed.<\/p>\n

Andrew Jackson, you think what it’s what is it not going to be besides a life? It turns out, though,<\/p>\n

that there was more to this than I understood, because by the time I got around to write about Ron Reagan, who was the last<\/p>\n

one, volume six and the last one I wrote then the marketing people didn’t say Reagan a life. It was<\/p>\n

Reagan the life. This is the one you want anyway. So with with Grant,<\/p>\n

it’s the title is The Man Who Saved the Union. And there again, I think I’m<\/p>\n

able to convey the theme of the story in the title. I wrote about Theodore<\/p>\n

Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt. Title is a traitor to his class. And then with<\/p>\n

Reagan is just Reagan the lie. So these are my six volumes. I’m going to say it’s sort of a couple of things<\/p>\n

about what I tried to accomplish with this. Well, I’d say that I wanted to cover that the<\/p>\n

story of American history. But I also have I have developed my own. I’m<\/p>\n

not going to call it a theory of history, but it’s an observation about history. It’s one that I share<\/p>\n

with my students. And that is I draw a distinction between what I call big history and little history.<\/p>\n

And big history is the stuff you typically read about in the history books, in the history of wars and presidential<\/p>\n

elections and industrial revolutions and the fall of old regimes and all this sort of big<\/p>\n

stuff. And little history is the history of daily life. But the history of individual<\/p>\n

lives and it’s the history, as I tell my students history view and you and you and you and you.<\/p>\n

And one of the interesting things to me about biography, one of the compelling things about biography. It’s where<\/p>\n

big history and little history intersect, because I certainly do not believe,<\/p>\n

as Thomas Carlyle and various other people have said, that history is just a biography of great man.<\/p>\n

No, no, it’s much more than that. But it certainly is the case that there are individuals<\/p>\n

to whom just the most unusual thing happens, just great accidents<\/p>\n

happen. And if they didn’t happen that way, then history would’ve turned out quite differently.<\/p>\n

And I’ll give one example. I wrote about Franklin Roosevelt. If Franklin Roosevelt<\/p>\n

had not contracted polio in the early 1920s, then very<\/p>\n

likely the history of the United States and conceivably the world during the next twenty five years would have<\/p>\n

been quite different. I’ll just give you this quick scenario. Franklin Roosevelt was the most attractive<\/p>\n

Democratic politician in the United States as of 1920. He was on the ticket with James<\/p>\n

Cox that lost badly to the Republicans. But Roosevelt came out of there as<\/p>\n

the odds on favorite to get the Democratic nomination the next time around. And if<\/p>\n

he had gotten the Democratic nomination in 1924, he would have gone down to defeat. The 1920s<\/p>\n

were a Republican era. And by that time in American politics, if you lose<\/p>\n

as the headliner on the ticket, if you lose as the vise presidential candidate, no problem.<\/p>\n

But if he loses a headliner, you’re probably not going to get. chance. so quite likely. Franklin<\/p>\n

Roosevelt never would have become president of the United States. At a more personal level, Franklin’s<\/p>\n

for Roosevelt’s exposure to and his struggle with polio<\/p>\n

made him much more. Able to understand the<\/p>\n

essence of America’s struggle during the Great Depression and<\/p>\n

the essential part of what the Depression meant for millions of Americans was that bad<\/p>\n

things can happen to good people through no fault of their own. And people saw<\/p>\n

their their bank accounts disappear, their nest eggs go up. They were thrown out of work, they were made homeless<\/p>\n

and they had not done anything wrong. And Franklin Roosevelt,<\/p>\n

as some, was someone who contracted polio and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair through<\/p>\n

no fault of his own. Before this, Roosevelt gave every indication of<\/p>\n

being someone who sort of thought the world had been handed to him on a silver platter. Things came<\/p>\n

very easily to him after that. Things came to him very hard. That’s just just<\/p>\n

one thing. One last thing that I will say, and that is that one of the<\/p>\n

enduring appeals of biography is precisely that it’s not history.<\/p>\n

And this because this might might be lost on this audience, because I get most of your interest<\/p>\n

in history, but most people are not interested in history. Most people remember their<\/p>\n

history, their high school history class, and they do not have a fond memory of it. And some of you might<\/p>\n

have heard me say this before, but many people it’s especially true in Texas. But I hear<\/p>\n

this in other states as well. They can’t remember the last name of their high school history<\/p>\n

teacher, but they pretty sure that the first name was coach.<\/p>\n

And this is this is why I mean, when I talk to people, if<\/p>\n

I say that I’m writing a history of so-and-so, it doesn’t take long before the eyes to glaze over, for<\/p>\n

the eyes to start glazing over. But if you say you’re writing the life of somebody, well, nobody has bad memories<\/p>\n

of a high school biography class because they never had such a thing. But the other thing is that the biography is<\/p>\n

the genre of nonfiction. I think that is probably closest to the novel. One<\/p>\n

of I use this thought experiment if if the tornado should sort of blow through a town<\/p>\n

and tear the roof off the library or a bookstore and you wander through the next morning, all the books are scattered<\/p>\n

and they’re just lying open on the floor and you’re walking along and you just look down from sort of head level<\/p>\n

down and you see the books there lying open. How can you tell the novels from<\/p>\n

the works of nonfiction without actually reading either the titles or reading<\/p>\n

just some the appearance of the pages? How can you tell? No. Well, I’m happy. No pictures.<\/p>\n

There’s that. But there’s something else. Just about the way<\/p>\n

pages. What do you have in novels that you typically don’t have a nonfiction dialog?<\/p>\n

Okay. And the dialog is the back and forth. He said, she said. And in American and<\/p>\n

British publishing, you know, one new speaker gets a new paragraph and you could just tell this.<\/p>\n

Well, with biographies, you can get almost the equivalent of dialog because your subjects<\/p>\n

speak. You can get inside their head. They leave diaries. They write letters. And so you get a kind<\/p>\n

of conversation going in a biography that you don’t very often see in a standard work<\/p>\n

of history. And so it’s one of the things that makes it more appealing going circling back to my original mercenary<\/p>\n

motive. I was paying attention to what books were on the bestseller lists, and almost<\/p>\n

never were they just a straight work of history. But biographies, you would find those there.<\/p>\n

And that’s where I wanted to be. I stopped it thinking.<\/p>\n

Yeah,<\/p>\n

well, I’m going to be a little brief. Don’t think we have that much time left in our in our afternoon<\/p>\n

out. But I want to leave plenty of time for you guys to ask questions of these really<\/p>\n

well seasoned, esteemed writers. In my case, in writing biography, it was<\/p>\n

the professional career of a person that I’ve been writing about. This is my first book.<\/p>\n

Maybe my only book. But it’s been a real labor of love and<\/p>\n

an intellectual thought for quite a number of years now. I didn’t<\/p>\n

start thinking that I would write biography. What I started with were<\/p>\n

a couple of questions that were driving me. What I<\/p>\n

write about is the field of library and archives conservation,<\/p>\n

which is a field I’ve been in for for thirty five years now, and I had some really<\/p>\n

central questions that kept nagging at me that had to do with<\/p>\n

why was it that library and archives conservation took so long<\/p>\n

to become to achieve professional status relative to the field of art conservation?<\/p>\n

Art conservation entered the academy around 1960. It took library and archives conservation.<\/p>\n

There were three programs in art conservation in the country and it took till 1981<\/p>\n

until the issues of preserving library and archives materials got to the<\/p>\n

point where there was a thought that there should be professionalization of the field to care<\/p>\n

for these materials. Nineteen eighty one program opened at Columbia University.<\/p>\n

Concomitantly, it’s been really hard for this particular field to stay<\/p>\n

in the academy, and I’ve had some ideas about why that was so I’d been<\/p>\n

teaching in this particular field for 10 years at the point. These questions became just nagging<\/p>\n

to me and I was directing the only program in the United States that was<\/p>\n

teaching preservation administrators and library archives conservers. And so<\/p>\n

I finally got to a point my life and I said, I can’t answer these questions. I have<\/p>\n

head coach history from high school and IT manager in in college to take<\/p>\n

two community college courses in history to get out of taking history. And<\/p>\n

because I thought it was so boring and as I got older, I realized how how intrigued<\/p>\n

I was by history and decided to get a p._h._d later in life<\/p>\n

in American studies here at the University of Texas, at which personally opened up a<\/p>\n

whole new world for me, and more critically gave me the historical grounding I needed to<\/p>\n

understand what was going on in the country at the<\/p>\n

time in terms of, you know, the Cold War, postwar, postwar,<\/p>\n

professionalization ideas of what what is progressive in<\/p>\n

terms of information, the information age versus the old analog age<\/p>\n

within libraries, schools. And in some of the impetuses that were were preventing<\/p>\n

the ACT Academy from accepting this, what had been a craft, say, bookbinding<\/p>\n

field for so many years, a craft or trade bookbinding field that came to us through, you know,<\/p>\n

from Germany and in the UK and France. So but<\/p>\n

here, here, here’s what I realized after a while, was that the heart I couldn’t get<\/p>\n

at these answers without looking closely at the life of a man named Paul Banks,<\/p>\n

who had been the primary champion of educating library and archives<\/p>\n

conservators in the academy. Between the years of 1960 and 1980<\/p>\n

took him 20 years of beating against the wall. And I<\/p>\n

I knew that if I looked at his writings, his life, all of his records spoke<\/p>\n

with I spoke with about 30 or so different people who knew him and were involved in the scene<\/p>\n

at that time that I would because he had been so central to<\/p>\n

the activity that I would begin to ferret out what was going on, because he was corresponding<\/p>\n

with everybody who could help him if these different junctures when he was trying to<\/p>\n

get funding for this to be in the academy. So I ended up writing<\/p>\n

a switch with kind of a professional biography. But more more critically,<\/p>\n

I use him as a lens. He’s like a primary lens. And so<\/p>\n

it just sort of this world of ideas to people, to connections<\/p>\n

to a larger history. And so someone told me when I started writing this,<\/p>\n

if you’re going to write biography, the guy’s name needs to be on every single page in your book. Well, he’s not on every single<\/p>\n

page in my book. And, you know, I would say that is definitely not something that you have to do. But<\/p>\n

be interesting that you guys have to say, but he’s not there. Every page, I think would be deadly<\/p>\n

to have Paul on every page. So so.<\/p>\n

But like Bill and Bette now, you know, I’ve had to wrestle with the fact that there are necessary<\/p>\n

limitations on what we can actually know about any given human being, whether they’re still<\/p>\n

living or they’re deceased. And that making sense of the written record, a person’s writings,<\/p>\n

correspondence, notes, never creates a totally clear picture on any<\/p>\n

level. It’s just like being married, right? I mean, how<\/p>\n

well do you really. I mean, I’ve been married 30 years, but there’s so many things I continue to learn<\/p>\n

about the person I’m married to. We’ll try writing about a dead person. You know, I mean, it’s it’s<\/p>\n

it’s really difficult. So I found it really difficult<\/p>\n

to read these nuances of human communication. And<\/p>\n

while oral interviews with the people who knew banks were incredibly helpful, you run<\/p>\n

into these issues of people’s memories being vague or more nostalgic<\/p>\n

than reflective. And that’s something that perhaps if I were a better oral<\/p>\n

interviewer, I could have gotten more out of people. But I. But I’ll explain<\/p>\n

that in a minute. Few people want to be quoted if they’re going to<\/p>\n

say something negative. So that was also, you know,<\/p>\n

a little problematic. You have to figure out how to work with that. There’s no crystal ball then that reveals<\/p>\n

the full range of nuances that enter into this picture where we’re trying to figure out human<\/p>\n

action in the world. So in the end, what we we all end up doing is biographer’s<\/p>\n

is interpreting and balancing. Right. It’s a lot of interpretation<\/p>\n

and balancing the resources we have at our disposal, shoring them up with multiple perspectives and secondary resources.<\/p>\n

And sometimes you just go out on a limb. You know, you get to know your person well enough<\/p>\n

in your when you’re writing hucker features kind of living this person’s life for a very<\/p>\n

long time. They’re like in your head all the time. So I try to distill<\/p>\n

quickly the factors that made my work both at times easier and at times more difficulty.<\/p>\n

And one for me was that my person was deceased. Yet I knew him because he<\/p>\n

was my teacher in grad school and later he was a colleague. Hence<\/p>\n

I brought to my work all of these memories of a very generous person, but also some very boring classes.<\/p>\n

And knowing that he was a very tedious person to work with in the workplace.<\/p>\n

Yeah. So but knowing him a bit intrigued me to know more<\/p>\n

about his life and his influence on the field of conservation.<\/p>\n

But I found myself constantly weighing. Was I being fair? Was<\/p>\n

I being fair? And that that nagged me still nags me. And I’m<\/p>\n

doing final edits to this book with my poet publisher and it’s still nagging me. Am I being fair?<\/p>\n

So and having colleagues who knew banks read select chapters did help me to sort of balance,<\/p>\n

you know, make sure I asked them to critically look. Am I being fair here and like. Yeah. You know,<\/p>\n

thankfully the feedback is, yeah, you’ve been fair. I’m writing about a field that I’ve been part of thirty<\/p>\n

years. So this allows me to have perspective and insight and opinions. So<\/p>\n

while I I trust that my work is going to be received as a contribution to our fields<\/p>\n

history, it’s undoubtedly going to raise a few eyebrows here and there. And I’ll be eager to see the<\/p>\n

reviews. I don’t expect to sell more than 200 books, Bill, but I’d be eager to see what<\/p>\n

reviews come in. But again,<\/p>\n

speaking of types of biography, this is what is called a critical biography. So<\/p>\n

I’m absolutely scrupulous to the consternation of my editor<\/p>\n

and publisher that I have notes just.<\/p>\n

They’re scrupulously throughout my notes so that I have multiple sources I’m using.<\/p>\n

And then if I’m kind of going on a limb somewhere, I’ll note that in the note. Here’s what I’m trying to balance.<\/p>\n

So I do at one point in my book actually say, you know, this is all such nuanced<\/p>\n

stuff. I’m I’m trying hard to read this. So bear with me.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, being part of the field gives me some blind spots, of course, that I’ve had to work<\/p>\n

through. The things that I was really fighting against were were things that we’ve normalized in<\/p>\n

our field and that I I you know, actually this is what kind of led me down this path where these<\/p>\n

sort of normalized things that I was teaching in the classroom and just started questioning over and over again,<\/p>\n

like, why do we think about it this way? Why do we call it that? What got us here to this<\/p>\n

moment? We do it this way.<\/p>\n

So. Finally, one of the<\/p>\n

other things I had to struggle with initially in my project was where to draw the line between Paul<\/p>\n

Banks as an individual who acts in the personal realm of his life from the person<\/p>\n

who’s wearing his hat as a professional in the public sphere. So certainly any<\/p>\n

biographical account has to understand what personally motivates someone to think<\/p>\n

and act in the ways that they do. I mean, the same person that acts out in the world,<\/p>\n

who plays tennis, who does whatever I do, I catch your attention. Tom Staley<\/p>\n

is the same person that walks into the workplace every day. We may<\/p>\n

put on a different persona when we walk into these different areas of our life, but essentially there’s<\/p>\n

a central core and personalities that’s there that drives what we do.<\/p>\n

So I’m gonna give you a couple examples of where I had these difficulties. Paul Banks<\/p>\n

was gay and he was out in 1956. So,<\/p>\n

yeah, very, very interesting. And he I mean be<\/p>\n

out in fifty six. Yeah. Not it not an easy time. So I<\/p>\n

couldn’t figure out at first why he decided at a very, very young age. After not finishing his undergraduate<\/p>\n

degree in printing management to move to New York City and this<\/p>\n

is where you know this is where you have to know history. Right. He moved to the east<\/p>\n

at a lower east side, which is now called the East Village. But at that point in time was not called the East Village.<\/p>\n

And it was a very creative, open world there. And<\/p>\n

I think he thought that he was young. He was twenty one or two one years old, I think. And<\/p>\n

he was looking for acceptance. He had had a rough childhood. I didn’t get much into his childhood<\/p>\n

because that doesn’t yield anything for the story I’m writing, except that<\/p>\n

he had a childhood he never spoke about ever. And there were a few<\/p>\n

inklings that there were some real issues there with his father. He never really engaged<\/p>\n

with his father after he left Southern California. So<\/p>\n

he went to New York City. The story is he goes to New York City to be a printer<\/p>\n

and, you know, to to learn this new field of bookbinding come<\/p>\n

conservation. But there’s a lot of other reasons that take him there and position him<\/p>\n

in a certain place to be nurtured into grow intellectually. So I do,<\/p>\n

you know, bring that out. There is another instance where he repeatedly turned<\/p>\n

down an offer to head up a new can be premier conservation operation at the Library<\/p>\n

of Congress. And this was around 1970 at a time when, of course, it was still<\/p>\n

illegal to be gay and work in the federal government. So the story is<\/p>\n

that Banks says that he didn’t want to get involved in highly<\/p>\n

bureaucratic organization, but I suspect that he also might have felt<\/p>\n

some concern placing himself in that particular organization. So<\/p>\n

one last thing, and then I’m going to say, no, that’s it. I’m going to stop. Stop right there.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/199\/biographies-research-writing-and-reviews.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/199\/biographies-research-writing-and-reviews.mp3","audio_player":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/199\/biographies-research-writing-and-reviews.mp3<\/a><\/audio>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/feed\/podcast\/bsls","embedCode":"

Biographies: Research, Writing, and Reviews<\/a><\/blockquote>