Demented Christmas Cards & An Evergreen Question
Demented Christmas Cards & An Evergreen Question
I had planned on sending out a light newsletter with demented 20th-century Christmas cards, certain rosy-cheeked German youths smiling upon a dead bird in 1906 would put readers in a festive mood. There’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to these kinds of primary sources.
Christmas was, after all, the Devil’s Halloween. St. Nicholas’s right-hand man, disguised as Krampus, collected naughty children, not candy, to be returned at the end of the night or sent straight to hell.
Santa got in on the action, too.
You get the idea. Fun history. Light. Easy. Seasonally appropriate. Longtime fans may have even come to expect an annual Victorian greeting card post, and indeed, that kind of quirky history can be found in my holiday newsletters of yore, like “Squirrels troublesome little bones.” But this year, I’m not pegging newsletters to the holiday calendar. (That being said, if you’re looking for books to gift—in addition to my own!—there are some excellent options below.) Only one event looms large: my next book’s due date.
At this point in the process, I spend my days mining the hundreds of pages of research I’ve amassed since 2020. Figuring out what stays and what goes is like separating sprinkles in a confetti mix by color—slow, arduous, and maddening. In order to maintain my sanity, I often take a constitutional and consider the bigger questions, and lately, I’ve been fixated on the biggest one of all:
What makes good history?
You may have heard me answer this question before. Perhaps I waxed rhapsodic about the research process or the afterlife of an article, book, or documentary. I may have espoused theories about physical representations of history, from the size and structure of a book to the use of mixed media in exhibitions. But today, I want to briefly focus on three historians whose work has had a great effect on me, and one I aspire to have on others:
Nothing is ever the same.
Beverly Gage
Before I read Beverly Gage’s G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, I thought of J. Edgar Hoover, the founding FBI director who served eight presidents, as a kind of Cold War caricature. He maintained and abused power by waging an unrelenting war against Black Americans, communism, and “sex deviants.” If only JFK had lived long enough to fire him! He was, after all, the problem. But Gage, an excellent biographer, seeks to understand, and in doing so, the Yale historian makes it impossible to consider Hoover an outlier in America. He didn’t start a fraternity that pushed the Lost Cause; he joined it.
The author doesn’t sympathize with the legendary law-and-order conservative. Gage humanizes Hoover by focusing on the process of becoming. His evolution is unrushed and ongoing, and that approach—he was constantly amassing, and not just wielding, power—makes all the difference.
Gape, by the way, ran Yale’s Brady-Johnson program in Grand Strategy from 2017-2021. She resigned after plutocratic patrons made frequent attempts to diminish academic freedom.
Saidiya Hartman
“By shifting from the spectacular to the everyday, I aimed to illuminate the ongoing and structural dimensions of violence and slavery’s idioms of power,” Saidiya Hartman wrote in The New York Review of Books. In order to do so, she had to address a seemingly insurmountable impediment historians studying women and BIPOC face: Silence in the archive. Perhaps you read, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Hartman’s Scenes of Subjugation, one of the recent essays about her speculative approach. She focused on “the quotidian routines of slavery,” coined the term “the afterlife of slavery,” and dismantled the false dichotomy of “slavery” and “freedom.” Unfreedom can’t be changed by laws, or at least, not the ones we’ve tried. For real change, we must go back to the very beginning.
Annette Gordon-Reed
“When it comes to talking craft and process, history is a rare but esteemed guest of the American literary community,” I wrote in the introduction to my May 2021 SMK series, “On Popular History.” At the time, Ken Burns, Erik Larson, Robert Caro, and the late Hilary Mantel were the only history folks to be “found among 450 ‘interviews with writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters about how they do their work’” in a long-running series at The Paris Review.
We can now add another name to the list: Annette Gordon-Reed. John Jeremiah Sullivan interviewed the Harvard professor best known for successfully arguing that Thomas Jefferson had children with Sally Hemings, a woman he owned.
This was an open secret during his lifetime. “It is well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves,” began an essay in the Richmond Recorder in 1802, while another described Hemings as “a slut as common as the pavement.” In 1974, Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, the first modern biography to argue that Jefferson had fathered Hemings’ children, was criticized for its Freudian approach. In a review for the Washington Post, historian Michael Kammen deemed it "a historical gossip incapable of distinguishing between cause and effect,” but Gordon-Reed found value. Brodie “nailed his personality” and included “the first narratives of enslaved people I’d ever seen.” She wasn’t entirely convinced by Brodie’s argument, but she kept thinking about it.
The precision and focus that Gordon-Reed, who was trained as a lawyer, and the controversy that ensued demanded scientific confirmation, brought to her research made all the difference. A year later, it was finally confirmed by DNA tests. I’ve long known about that part, but TPR told me more about how she got there.
In The Gift of Fear, Gavin De Becker warns lies are often accompanied by “too many details.” Gordon-Reed saw that in a letter Ellen Coolidge, one of Jefferson’s granddaughters, wrote denying his paternity.
A man who sends hams is not soon forgotten.
ON A RELATED NOTE:
Want more? If you’re a subscriber who is starting a new project or struggling to finish an old one, do (re)read “On Popular History,” a series featuring notable writers, historians, podcasters, and editors.
If you want a bit more Jefferson: I talked to Kathryn Gehred about his granddaughters getting…grills.
I spoke to AGR and her bestie Onuf for my old Audible podcast, “Presidents Are People, Too!”