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189 Isuspect that very few historians stop to reflect on their personal pasts before calibrating the direction of their scholarship. And yet, as a former graduate student once observed, historians often seem to write their autobiographies with the subjects they address in their books and articles. Perhaps the process is inevitable. As the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker observed, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” The process is most frequently unselfconscious, the product of imagination and improvisation as much as what we have read and taught. We follow our inclinations, our curiosities, the “hot” historiographical trends of our era, and it is only in retrospect that we are able to see how our work has followed certain patterns. Some historians, including my coeditor David Gerber, have at times written about personal influences upon their professional choices.1 Others of us have not pondered the connections. Certainly, when as a young boy I trailed after my late father in walks around lower Manhattan, it never occurred to me or to him that I might be headed for a career as an academic historian. History was fun, but my blue-collar roots made thoughts of becoming a college professor somewhat implausible. I knew the answer my father wanted to hear on those Saturday mornings when I accompanied him to the factory loft on John Street in lower Manhattan for a half-day’s work. He wanted me to say George Washington, not Macy’s. The answer was a response to the question, “Where would you like to go after lunch?” George Washington sent us walking a few blocks to Wall Street after we dined on some sandwiches at a local luncheonette. When we reached Federal Hall, I would stand, mesmerized, in front of the statue of George Washington, his hand perpetually extended toward an invisible Bible upon which he was taking the oath of office as the first president of the United States. For the Coda ALAN M. KRAUT 190 ALAN M. KRAUT umpteenth time I would ask, “Was he really that tall?” Six- and seven-year-old boys tend to be very concerned about height. Who Washington was and what he did, I already knew. My father had been buying me age-appropriate history books, including ones on George Washington. We read them together at night. Harry Kraut, a high school dropout during the Great Depression, was my first history teacher. After Federal Hall, we would walk to Fraunces Tavern at  Pearl Street, where Washington said farewell to his officers at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. Because my dad was a poorly paid factory worker, a plater and polisher of metals at the Regal Emblem Company, we could never afford to eat in Fraunces Tavern. But on an upper floor of this, Manhattan’s oldest surviving structure, there was a modest exhibit dealing with Washington’s speech and his military career. Making eye contact with a sympathetic waiter and nodding toward me, my father got us past the dining room without purchasing a meal. Then it was up the staircase leading to the little museum. “How much better is this than Macy’s toy department!” my father would say. At Macy’s, we could look, but only look, at the pricey toy soldiers in their colorful uniforms, many of them collectors’ items. There, too, history could come alive, as we discussed the wars in which such soldiers had fought, and I would ponder how I might arrange those soldiers in various formations on the linoleum floor of the apartment if we could afford to buy them. But Federal Hall and Fraunces Tavern were better. That’s where history actually happened, and no purchase was required. After visiting with George Washington and touring the Trinity Churchyard , where Alexander Hamilton is buried, father and son would hop the subway home to the South Bronx. Neither George Washington nor my father ever disappointed. We always got off the subway at the Prospect Avenue station on the IRT White Plains Road line, an elevated stop in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. From there, it was a three-block walk to our South Bronx tenement owned by a very short Italian immigrant landlady, Virginia, and her very tall Swedish immigrant husband, Charley, who had been rendered deaf by World War I artillery. He drank considerably and shouted a lot, but my mother reassured me that he was not mad at anybody. The building was immaculately...

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