The Literature of American Library History, 2001-2002

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Books collide—
Or books in a library do:
Marlowe by Charlotte Mew,
Sir Horace Walpole by Hugh;
The most unlikely writers stand shoulder to shoulder;
One studies incongruity as one grows older.

Barbara Howes, A Private Signal: Poems New and Selected

This is the fifth time I have composed this overview of current writings on American library history, which means that for the past ten years I have carefully monitored the amount and variety of scholarship that has appeared every two years from the little band of scholars who continually explore our corner of the historical canvas. As usual, our colleagues have been busy providing the rest of us with a wealth of writings and interpretations of our library past that will in turn foster yet more research and more thought about the role libraries, librarianship, and book culture have played in our nation's journey to the present. So with this brief introduction, let us now begin our journey through this most recent outpouring of scholarship on American library history.

Sources and Historiography

A. N. Wilson recently noted that all history "is selective, and by implication, if not overtly, it makes judgements."¹ The craft of historical scholarship, therefore, is highly individualistic, since each of us brings to our research and writing our own prejudices and proclivities. As usual, the items in this section represent recently published works that are geared toward helping us understand better our historiographical responsibilities and provide guidance for our work. I will begin with general discussions and conclude with contributions focused more deliberately on library history.

Beverly Southgate has updated her well-received survey entitled History: What and Why? It is a short book that is an excellent place to start any historiographical quest. Arthur Marwick has revised his classic The Nature of History (1970) with The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language, which, like Southgate's work, provides a highly useful introduction to our discipline. Gabriel Ricci balances Southgate and Marwick with his nicely constructed investigation of how philosophy and history intersect. Complementing these three new works is Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza's collection of essays on Western historical thought, which contains more than two dozen contributions that survey historical scholarship from the ancient world to the present.²

When we consider historiographical treatments of American history we are fortunate to have available recent books by two of our most prominent contemporary historians. John Lewis Gaddis, a leading interpreter of the Cold War, and Eric Foner, whose writings on the Civil War era have influenced a generation of historians, have each produced book-length essays on the nature of history.³ We can benefit greatly from the insights of these learned historians! Melvyn Stokes has edited an exceedingly helpful compilation of essays that take a broad look at various subtopics within our discipline such as gender and popular culture, among many others. Other valuable contributions include an informative history of American historical scholarship by Ellen Fitzpatrick and a sophisticated rendering of modern American historiography by that dean of American historians, David W. Noble.⁴

If we consider the library as a place where the reader meets the text, then David Glassberg's examination of the role of place in American history is especially appropriate for our labors.⁵ Shorter contributions include Thomas Bender's reflections on the role that narrative synthesis plays in the crafting of recent American historiography and Daniel Wickberg's explanation of how historians have treated intellectual and social topics in the past several years.⁶

As historians we use a variety of tools to assist us in excavating the records of our past. In addition to archival research (which is an essential component of most historical scholarship), we can also make use of other approaches, including oral history, an approach thoroughly covered in Barbara Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan's Oral...