Festschrifts

On one of my research trips to the lovely Shenandoah Valley this summer I brought along a really terrific festschrift volume for Sheldon Meyer, the legendary Oxford University Press editor.  I picked American Places up a few years back at a library sale -- never know what kind of books you'll find at a library sale, of course.  The idea of American Places was that authors he worked with (all of whom are American historians) reflected on places that are important to them.  There are some real gems in there -- distinguished historians reflecting on places like Gettysburg, Greensboro, the American cemetery at Normandy (see -- cemeteries are everywhere!), Nassau Hall at Princeton, Monticello, Graceland, Montgomery ....  For me, it was particularly meaningful to read (or really re-read in most cases) these essays while sitting on a mountainside.  I'm not quite sure which place I would have chosen had I been asked to prepare an essay.  Perhaps the Jefferson house at Independence Hall, which is where I first had the sense that historians were able to trace the intellectual origins of key ideas, like the Declaration of Independence all those many years ago.  In a lot of ways that was the beginning of my interest in intellectual history.  That's a little cliched, of course.

So would be the Virginia state capitol; my first job out of law school was in Richmond and I spent a lot of evenings and weekends sitting on the capitol grounds, a place of immense importance in American history.  That was where I first read Thomas Cobb's An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery and Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, two books that have loomed large for my thinking for a long time.  To avoid a cliche, maybe I'd pick the Brandywine Battlefield.  Those are all places that have been important to my thinking and development as a historian.  But if I were thinking of a place of importance to our nation's history (especially its legal history) I'd probably be thinking about Southampton, Virginia -- scene of Nat Turner's rebellion.  It's a beautiful, though obviously very haunted place.  Or Tulsa's Dreamland Theater, as a place where brave and thoughtful people helped to remake the world of Jim Crow.  Or maybe, given the research I've been working on lately, I'd focus on Lexington, Virginia -- a place where we see much of the conflict between slavery and anti-slavery.  (Hence the image of Washington College's colonnade.)  So many choices of places to write about....

One of the real advantages of the Meyer festschrift is that it required every author to write something new for the volume.  I think that's really great when people write something unique for a festschrift -- and it makes for a pretty coherent volume as well, an issue I discussed when I wrote about Morty Horwitz' festschrift a while back. At some point I want to talk about models of festschrifts -- how they variously balance reflections on the person being honored, extend lines of work, or set out on new lines.... 

Comments

[Calvin Massey]

Very interesting post, Al. The Meyer festschrift appears to have invited authors to identify American places of special personal as well as historical significance. It's fun to reflect, as you did, on places of your own. So here are a few of mine: the Pony Express station in Gothenburg, Nebraska (still standing, pretty much as it always was); the Little Big Horn (monument to Custer's arrogance and skillful tactics by Gall and Crazy Horse); the Antietam/Sharpsburg battlefield; Harpers's Ferry; the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado; the Columbia River Gorge; Pompey's Pillar, on the banks of the Yellowstone River, thirty miles or so downstream from Billings (with George Clark's name, date, and message carved into the sandstone). There are so many; it's a richly variegated land, always full of surprises and always changing.

[Alfred Brophy]

Those are all great ideas, Calvin; I've been to Harper's Ferry (once) -- had an awesome time. And ditto for Antietam. The rest of yours I still need to take in.

[Bill Turnier]

Of those on Calvin's list, I have seen Antietam, Mesa Verde and Harper's Ferry. They would all go on my list as well as Bunker Hill,the Old North Church, Gettysburg, Monticello, Shaker communities in KY and MA and Independence Hall and the 16th century Spanish fort in St. Augustine which predates all of our English settlements in the US. As Calvin said, this is a large and variegated land and I think that our lists are limited by our ability to get around it and see all the wonderful historic sights with which we are blessed.