Civil War Humor

Acknowledgments

[ xv ] Acknowledgments My name is on the title page of this book because I wrote all of the words in it, but anybody who has done it knows that the words could not have been written without the help of many people. This part of the book is where I try to acknowledge that. There are two stages to writing a book; the second is writing itself, and it is not much fun, and (maybe “because”) it has to be solitary. By far the most enjoyable stage is doing the research, gathering up what the words will be about, and for this book that meant finding and reading as many examples of humor published during and about the Civil War as I could. And that was enjoyable because research is not solitary but a community effort, which meant meeting and working with people who not only helped me with what I was doing but seemed to enjoy doing it. It all started the year I retired from James Madison University, where Shawn Miller, a student assistant in the department, copied, typed, and looked things up. He must have enjoyed it because he went to graduate school to get a doctorate in English. In the years that followed , the Department of English let me use its machines and paper, and the Interlibrary Loan Department of Carrier Library found things I needed. As someone whose high school graduation present was a Royal typewriter, I particularly appreciated the Center for Instructional Technology for patiently helping me make digitalized illustrations appear on the screen and, ultimately, in this book. Serious research (perhaps oxymoronic) began the summer after retirement as a McClean Contributing Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia, where I was required to immerse myself for a month into the extraordinary John A. McAllister Collection of Civil War Era Printed Ephemera, Graphics, and Manuscripts. The second day there, I had to ask: “So I get to come back tomorrow and every day after that for a month—and get paid?” “Yes.” Like all librarians and archivists I would ultimately work with, they knew their stuff there [ xvi ] ACkNoWledgmeNts and enthusiastically helped me do mine better. Surely the ultimate in research as “community” took place when I gave my research-in-progress report at an informal lunch meeting: those who attended were willing to sing, with gusto, even, “Maryland, My Maryland” and its parodies. (See my introduction.) Working at the American Antiquarian Society was like going home. I had started my research in American (New England) humor there over three decades earlier and made several pilgrimages over the following years. Like the Library Company of Philadelphia, it is one of the very top research libraries in Americana and has personable professionals to guide you through it all. They, and the people at every library or archive where I worked, helped me put it together at the end. I dearly and sincerely love libraries and the professionals who staff them, but I also have to say something about the wealth of primary resources available on the Internet. This is solitary work, true, but finding the Lester Levy Collection of sheet music at the Johns Hopkins University Web site; broadsides and sheet music at Duke and Wake Forest Universities; the American Memory database at the Library of Congress; and facsimile editions of so many books—all of these and more made me whoop with joy, alone at the keyboard. Virtually all of the primary sources I use here were found with a good “Google,” a verb that my spell-checker still flags. There are no people per se to thank for this bounty, but bless them and the institutions that support their work. The Internet did fail me when it came to comic valentines, but I did find the name of Nancy Rosen, the authority on valentines in general (president of the National Valentine Collectors Association says it all, but not really). And she put me in touch with “Dreadful” Marcia Richards , a collector of “penny dreadfuls” (as comic valentines were called), so devoted that she insists upon the “Dreadful” in her name. She sent me digital copies of her Civil War collection, and although I have used only three of them in this book, they deserve one of their own. ◊ ◊ ◊ Ultimately, despite the good times, I had to try to make some sense out of what I found, and that meant writing. And although solitary work (but not necessarily lonely), I did need to reach...