Stan talks about This Week in History (including King George III, AIDS, RFK, Mount Everest, & Charles Dickens), remembers a record-breaking baseball player, highlights new additions to the Off the Deaton Path bookshelf, and spotlights an incredible and historic collection of golden-age comic books about to hit the auction block–and the influence of comics in his own life.
Drew Swanson is Professor of History at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where he teaches classes in environmental history, food, 19th-century America, and public history. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Georgia in 2010. Born in rural Virginia, he worked as a farmer, zookeeper, and natural resource manager before turning to academia. Dr. Swanson’s research examines the intersections of nature and culture in the American South. He is the author of three books: Beyond the Mountains: Commodifying Appalachian Environments (University of Georgia Press, 2018); A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the Piedmont South (Yale University Press, 2014); and Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape (University of Georgia Press, 2012), which won the Georgia Historical Society’s Malcolm Bell, Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell Award for the best book in Georgia history in 2013. Dr. Swanson also won the inaugural John C. Inscoe Award in 2017 for the best article published in the Georgia Historical Quarterly the previous year. He currently serves on the GHQ Board of Editors.
What first got you interested in history?
Biology, strangely enough. I majored in biology in college and was working as a naturalist in western North Carolina, and in that job I discovered that the human history of the region fascinated me at least as much as its natural history. When people would point to a tree and ask me what species it was, I would find myself rambling on about how people used to use its bark to dye leather. That realization propelled me back to graduate school and the study of history. I ended up an environmental historian, which fused the two interests.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
I got in trouble in school in the second grade. Once I finished my work I started talking and disturbing others. My teacher began requiring my parents to send me to school with a book that I could read once I completed my assignments, and that got me hooked on the Hardy Boys. From there I turned to science fiction–Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, Ursula K. Le Guin–and then westerns. There’s still a set of the complete works of Zane Grey somewhere in our barn, I’m pretty sure.
And I was voracious, reading at every available moment. I know I looked like the typical sullen tween, with my head down all the time, but it was usually because there was a book hidden under the edge of the desk or table.
What book did you read in grad school that you never want to see again—and what book was most influential?
This is tough. I’ve got a couple of shelves in my office full of books I never intend to read again! Jacques Derrida is probably brilliant, I’m just not quite smart enough to be certain why.
There were plenty of books to love, though. Two that I regularly return to are Brian Donahue’s The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (Yale University Press, 2007),and Michael Wayne’s Death of an Overseer: Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South (Oxford University Press, 2001). Donahue is a brilliant example of how crucial it is to really get to know a place in order to better explain its past, and Wayne’s book reminds me of the value of curiosity and good story telling. The past is a mystery, and we shouldn’t downplay that.
What’s the last great book you read, fiction or non-fiction?
I read John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (LSU Press, 1980)again not too long ago. It always pulls me in, although it is hard to put a finger on exactly why. If I had to guess, I’d say it is the way his caricatures remind me of real people more than most of the “realistic” fiction out there. It’s hard to exaggerate just how quirky humanity is.
For nonfiction, I thoroughly enjoyed Stephen Heyman’s new biography of Louis Bromfield, The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution (Norton, 2020). Partying with Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway in France, hanging around Hollywood with Humphrey Bogart, experimenting with local food and agricultural improvement on his Ohio farm, and, oh yeah, writing some of the most popular novels of the early twentieth century: Bromfield’s life is almost too bizarre to believe, and Heyman tells it well.
When you’re not reading for your particular field of history, what else do you like to read? What genres do you avoid? And what’s your guilty reading pleasure?
I love how-to manuals. Masonry, carpentry, small engine repair, plans for building garden sheds, cookbooks, and the like. I think it’s a form of procrastination—I can read about doing these things rather than actually get up and accomplish something.
I avoid poetry. It has never made sense to me. (My dad’s a poet, so there may be something psychological involved here.) I deal with 19th-century sources in my work, and it was an age in love with poetry. Every time I strike a poem in a source I’m reading I groan a little inside.
As far as guilty reads go, I love a good detective procedural. The more atmospheric European serials tend to hook me, like the work of John Harvey, Henning Mankell, Tana French, and and Arnaldur Indridason.
What do you read—in print or online—to stay informed?
I’ve tried to cut down on my news consumption in recent months. The danger of being uninformed seems less than the hazard of being overwhelmed. It’s a trade off, to be sure, but I’m attempting to focus more on what’s going on in my local community. We still get a local newspaper, the quirky but excellent Yellow Springs News (independently owned since 1880!), which is chock full of village shenanigans, combative editorials, and actual locally relevant news stories. Not to mention an infamous weekly police blotter.
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
Nodding off in the evening to one of those aforementioned detective novels.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
It would be a stretch to describe it as unknown, but I love Wendell Berry’s essay collection, Home Economics: Fourteen Essays (North Point, 1987). In his unification of home and work life, philosophy and practicality, Berry appeals to me. This collection tends to be overshadowed by The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Sierra Club, 1977) and The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (North Point, 1981), but in my mind it is one of his best. And damn, can he write. There’s a power and grace in Berry’s language that I’d love to emulate, but I can’t.
What book or collection of books might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
I have a lot of field guides left over from my previous work. If you want to identify a mushroom you found in the Pacific Northwest or skim through the Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas, I have you covered.
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
I have less patience for the sort of jargon I could stomach in graduate school. I’ll stop reading a book that I should probably finish if it is unnecessarily dense. The linguistic gymnastics that once impressed me as signs of insight now just make me wish for a well-told story. Historians lament that general readers so rarely find and read our work, but we’re not doing as much as we could to help them out.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (Viking, 1989). It seems obligatory, and I’ve been trying to read it for more than ten years. I start it and then always lose the thread.
What book would you recommend for America’s current moment?
It never hurts to read more Flannery O’Connor. She had a remarkable talent for tackling tough, divisive issues in an empathetic way. Race, religion, sex, disability—she wrote about it all in a way that still seems fresh and moving.
I’m also a huge fan of Tiya Miles’s Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). It’s a powerful dive into what titillates us about the southern past, and, as O’Connor observes, the truth isn’t always pretty.
And Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (Riverhead, 2015). He was a couple of years ahead of the curve on the trouble with cancel culture.
What do you plan to read next?
A lot of agricultural history! I am on a book prize committee for the Agricultural History Society, and a pile of new titles is stacked by my desk. In my reading so far I’ve been really impressed by the excellent recent work in the field. America’s small farmers may be struggling, but historians are doing a great job of explaining how they reached this point.
What is the next book you’re going to write?
A history of the consumer culture of American hunting since the Civil War. There is an irony at the heart of the project: We like to think we go to the woods to “get away from it all,” but we sure take a lot of stuff with us. I’ve found a pretty fascinating group of characters who helped create this trend, the sort of people we might today be tempted to call “influencers.” I won’t give away too much, but they include an alcoholic ex-librarian holed up in the Great Smoky Mountains, bow hunters chasing lions in Tanzania in Ford Model-T’s, and Ted Nugent. I’m having fun with the process.
When and how do you write?
I do all the things I tell my students not to do: I write in short bursts, I write in the bleachers at my kids’ swim practices, I write with the television on in the background, sometimes I write after I’ve had a beer. It’s a matter of necessity more than preference, but I’ve also discovered that my focus seems sharpest in short blocks of time. If I know that I have 45 minutes to write, I will really bear down. Give me a day set aside to do nothing but write, and I’ll end up staring out the window.
For me the most important thing seems to be to get words on paper, to make steady progress. That keeps me from feeling like I’m falling behind on a project. It also means I spend a lot of time revising and editing, and I’m okay with that.
With which three historic figures, dead or alive, would you like to have dinner?
Anthony Bourdain, Alice Waters, and Donald Link. I’m taking the “dinner” part of the question seriously.
Alexander X. Byrd is an Associate Professor of History at Rice University. In 2020 he was appointed Rice’s first Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Dr. Byrd’s area of expertise is Afro America, especially Black life in the Atlantic world and the Jim Crow South. He received his Ph.D. in History from Duke University in 2001. His study of free and forced transatlantic Black migration in the period of the American Revolution, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (LSU Press, 2010), received the 2009 Wesley-Logan Prize in African Diaspora History. Dr. Byrd teaches courses in African-American history at Rice, where he is a four-time recipient of the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching. He is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of African American History with Dr. Celia Naylor.
What first got you interested in history?
The first blame must go to good teachers who were also good story tellers. Well-stocked school and public libraries and the librarians who staffed were also at fault. Also, the stories on which I grew up that most sparked my imagination were historical in nature—between Alex Haley’s Roots and NBC’s Ba Ba Black Sheep—that had to have had some effect too.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
As I child in Colorado Springs, I read every book in the school library on World War II. Maybe I missed a few. Still, when I moved to Houston (at about eleven years old), there were no books on the subject at my school or in my branch of the public library that I hadn’t already read. I recall having to re-read The Battle of Britain. By the sixth grade, I was on to Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977) but by then I was also falling out of reading about war.
What book did you read in grad school that you never want to see again—and what book was most influential?
There are ways in which I’m still wrestling with Melville J. Herskovit’s The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), Sidney Mintz and Richard Price’s The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Approach (1992), and Nathan Huggins’s Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery (1977). Mary Karasch’s Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850 (1987), Jan Vansina’s Paths in the Rainforest (1990),and George Brook’s Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630 (1993) were also quite influential. Wait, you said one book. There were so many great books!
What’s the last great book you read, fiction or non-fiction?
I am a fan of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016).
When you’re not reading for your particular field of history, what else do you like to read? What genres do you avoid? And what’s your guilty reading pleasure?
Uh oh. Everything I read is related to my work. But I stream with the captions on. So I count that as recreational reading, and lately I’ve leaned toward sci-fi, alternative history, and super heroes on screen: Black Lightning, Raised by Wolves, The Expanse, The Man in the High Castle, Luke Cage. I should stop answering this question.
What do you read—in print or online—to stay informed?
The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, the Houston Chronicle, and the New York Review of Books. But I still feel terribly under informed and uninformed. Maybe I don’t read the news as carefully as I used to. But I also have this feeling that there is news out there that I can’t find—that there is a universe of online writing that I haven’t and can’t tap into.
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
All day in a full house of Byrds with brief stops for espresso, some stretches, sweets, and maybe a pizza.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
I assume that I’m always a few years behind everyone else.
What book or collection of books might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
To save the other Byrds from embarrassment, I can’t say. I don’t think that people would suspect, though, that I had Robert Alter’s translations of the Hebrew Bible here and there.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
Writing is hard. I try to be patient with writers. So when I put a book down, it’s usually less out of disappointment and more out of my schedule getting out of hand. There’s a good book barely under my bed, and another on my night stand that I need to return to.
What book would you recommend for America’s current moment?
This is not a bad time to pick up Cathy Park Hong (Dance Dance Revolution, 2007, and Engine Empire, 2012) and Hanif Abdurraqib (The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, 2016, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, 2017, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes on a Tribe Called Quest, 2019, A Fortune For Your Disaster, 2019).
What do you plan to read next?
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020).
What is the next book you’re going to write?
A story of three Houston schools that speaks to the inequities and promise of public education now. I’ve been writing this book too long (and it’s too short to have taken this long). But I also think that parts of it are pretty good. It’s a book about schools, but to write it, I’ve done more research on parking garages than I ever thought I’d have occasion to do.
When and how do you write?
Not enough. But I’m learning to fit it in however and whenever I can. It’s taken me too long to learn this lesson.
With which three historic figures, dead or alive, would you like to have dinner?
I never have a good answer to this question. One of the great things about being a historian is that one is forever having dinner, or coffee, or breakfast with historic figures dead or alive.
Lisa Lindquist Dorr is a Professor of History at the University of Alabama and Associate Dean of Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2000. Dr. Dorr is the author of several books on Southern and Women’s history, including A Thousand Thirsty Beaches: Smuggling Alcohol from Cuba to the South During Prohibition (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), and White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960 (UNC Press, 2004).
What first got you interested in history?
When I was five, my parents took me to Colonial Williamsburg. I was already fascinated by what we called “the olden days” and literally thought that the re-enactors were people still around from 200 years ago. I remember being so excited that they were still here. So I think I always was drawn to history, and when I told my childhood friends I was headed to grad school in history, no one was surprised in the least.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
I read all the time as a kid, or as my mother expressed with much exasperation, I “always had my nose in a book.” There was even a time when we were spending several days cleaning for a big party that she actually hid my book so I wouldn’t disappear to read. I read books over and over when I was young; the Little House on the Prairie books, the One-of-a-Kind Family books, Madeleine L’Engle, E.L. Konigsberg, Lois Lenski. That said, my own children turn up their noses at pretty much anything I suggest. I just leave books around and let them find them on their own.
What book did you read in grad school that you never want to see again—and what book was most influential?
The book that nearly killed my cohort was Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 1982). Its cover design should have warned us; no one got paid to put any thought into that cover. Of course, after I had taught the second half of the US survey a bunch of times, I was a little more appreciative of his contribution. The most influential book is hard—it varies so much based on what I happen to be interested in at the moment. But Carol Karlsen’s The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (W.W. Norton, 1987) is a contender. It was a powerful moment when I realized how long it took historians to analyze why most people accused of witchcraft in the colonial period were women. Astounding.
What’s the last great book you read, fiction or non-fiction?
Anxious People: A Novel by Frederik Backman (Atria, 2020) I laughed, I cried, I was left gasping and gutted at one revelation late in the novel. The book has so much warmth and heart, humor and kindness that it was the perfect book for this moment.
When you’re not reading for your particular field of history, what else do you like to read? What genres do you avoid? And what’s your guilty reading pleasure?
I am always reading and listening to fiction—I find I can weed my garden for hours or actually clean the kitchen if I listen to a novel. I have been keeping a list of books to read since 2013 (it’s now seven pages long, with two columns per page), and have found that I don’t like epic multi-generational sagas or fiction about women in World War II. I am also wary of fiction related to my area of expertise—too many irritating historical errors. My guilty pleasure is a regular helping of thrillers. I consider them the fast food of literature.
What do you read—in print or online—to stay informed?
I am a diligent reader of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker online as well as Tuscaloosa’s local paper, the Tuscaloosa News. I am mystified by the idea of getting my news through social media, which I think makes me old.
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
I like nothing better than to curl up on my couch with a good book, with views of my birdfeeders in the back yard. And nothing is more indulgent to me than reading a novel for three or four hours in the afternoon; I don’t let myself do it much.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
Rickie Solinger’s book, The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law (Free Press, 1995). It will blow your mind about how common and accepted abortion was well before Roe v. Wade.
What book or collection of books might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
I have several shelves of Young Adult historical fiction. One of the most satisfying classes I ever taught was for secondary social studies education students on teaching history using historical fiction. There are so many terrific books out there, and fiction can hook K-12 students in ways textbooks most surely can’t.
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
Since graduate school, I make a distinction between reading for work and reading. Since I became a dean, I read less for work, which bothers me. With fiction, when I was younger, I tried to read only “good” books, meaning critically acclaimed novels. At this point in my life, I rarely want to work hard reading fiction. I steer away from books described as lyrical or surreal or dreamlike. I need a plot line I can follow.
When I was in my twenties, I was enthralled by stories of great and overwhelming love, which the protagonist dropped everything to pursue. Two examples: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (Doubleday, 1971) and Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith (Putnam, 1988). When I read those books years later, I found I could no longer relate to dropping everything for love. There were other loves that competed and outweighed romantic love, especially love for one’s children. I realized how much where one is in one’s life shapes how we understand the characters in novels.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
Again, I have to go to fiction here. I am much more diligent about reading all that I am supposed to when I read history. I either mine it for what I need or read it all to consider it as an entire work. Which novel have I tried to read twice and can’t despite a torrent of accolades? The Overstory: A Novel, by Richard Power (W.W. Norton, 2018). Everyone says it is truly a great book, but I find its stories so sad I can’t make myself finish it.
What book would you recommend for America’s current moment?
Something about the importance of thinking about the common good. But other than that, I would refer you back to Anxious People.
What do you plan to read next?
Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic, by Richard A. McKay (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
What is the next book you’re going to write?
A book on abortion in the South from 1920 to Roe v. Wade. The history of abortion is a good example of how the past is not like people think it was. And my hope is that understanding the past better will help people think a little differently about the present.
When and how do you write?
Juggling scholarship and “deaning” is a challenge. I have become completely tethered to my email calendar. There are always small bits of time when I can think productively about research, so I make sure that there are small research tasks I can do when I have 30 or 45 minutes free. My writing mantra is that you should always do several hours of your own work first, before you get distracted by students or meetings or life. So when I am writing, I write best in the first couple of hours of the day, which I religiously block off on my calendar. When I feel like I have run out of things to say (or have a meeting approaching), I always leave a few notes about what should come next to make it easier to pick up and get back into the writing flow when I return.
With which three historic figures, dead or alive, would you like to have dinner?
Ella Baker, because I would want to talk with her about organizing and strategy for movements. And the Obamas, because I am really, really sure that if we met, we would all be best friends.
This week Stan interviews Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Atkinson about the first volume of his new Revolution trilogy, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Volume 1: Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777. Rick discusses researching at Windsor Castle, George III’s handwriting, walking the battlefields, Washington’s leadership, and plays “Overated/Underated.” All this plus another edition of the ever-popular This Week in History.
