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From: jomalley at caruspub.com <jomalley>
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 09:04:53 -0600
More from Marc-
Violet asks an excellent question that gets to the heart of what interests me in nonfiction. The reason why I asked Steven Jaffe to write Who Were the Founding Fathers? some years ago was b/c of the discussion of Melzter's Jefferson bio at a BBYA session chaired, I believe, by Debbie Taylor. The Hemmings question came up then, and I thought it would be very intersting to do a book that would show kids how the issues that define who a President is or was keep changing (like the current vote counts). That is, in the case of SH, it is not just that historians have new evidence from DNA but that the attach new degrees of importance to TJ's private life, and to the issues of race that he expressed in his silence. The very heart of history is historiography, that is, how historians' views change in response to their own times.
I hasten to add that this does not mean all views are relative or there is no truth. Rather, that as we move forward in time we constantly have a new angle of vision on the past, we see it from a new place. We always have the obligation to take seriously what people have said before, and to use the utmost rigor in treating evidence, it is only that we are sure to see new things.
I think this is great for young people, b/c it tells them, for sure, that their generation will have new things to say about the past. The past is not dead, it is brought to life as each new set of historians re-views it.
And, quickly, I wrote about Ralegh precisely b/c he was complex, charismatic and yet given to plotting, idealistic (in our terms) and yet he participated in a massacre, a courtier and a poetic critic of the fawning court. I think three dimensional figures such as that are especially interesting to write about, and, for teenagers who are discovering their own complexity, their own drivers and urges that do not always match who they want to be, or believe themselves to be, offer much more than two-dimensional heroes or villains.
But I'm just not interested in Nixon. Richard III maybe. Marc Aronson
Received on Thu 09 Nov 2000 09:04:53 AM CST
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 09:04:53 -0600
More from Marc-
Violet asks an excellent question that gets to the heart of what interests me in nonfiction. The reason why I asked Steven Jaffe to write Who Were the Founding Fathers? some years ago was b/c of the discussion of Melzter's Jefferson bio at a BBYA session chaired, I believe, by Debbie Taylor. The Hemmings question came up then, and I thought it would be very intersting to do a book that would show kids how the issues that define who a President is or was keep changing (like the current vote counts). That is, in the case of SH, it is not just that historians have new evidence from DNA but that the attach new degrees of importance to TJ's private life, and to the issues of race that he expressed in his silence. The very heart of history is historiography, that is, how historians' views change in response to their own times.
I hasten to add that this does not mean all views are relative or there is no truth. Rather, that as we move forward in time we constantly have a new angle of vision on the past, we see it from a new place. We always have the obligation to take seriously what people have said before, and to use the utmost rigor in treating evidence, it is only that we are sure to see new things.
I think this is great for young people, b/c it tells them, for sure, that their generation will have new things to say about the past. The past is not dead, it is brought to life as each new set of historians re-views it.
And, quickly, I wrote about Ralegh precisely b/c he was complex, charismatic and yet given to plotting, idealistic (in our terms) and yet he participated in a massacre, a courtier and a poetic critic of the fawning court. I think three dimensional figures such as that are especially interesting to write about, and, for teenagers who are discovering their own complexity, their own drivers and urges that do not always match who they want to be, or believe themselves to be, offer much more than two-dimensional heroes or villains.
But I'm just not interested in Nixon. Richard III maybe. Marc Aronson
Received on Thu 09 Nov 2000 09:04:53 AM CST
