The question came an hour into the interview and caught me completely off guard.
Brian Lamb, the founder of C-SPAN and intrepid interrogator of authors since 1988, wanted to know how much interest college-age students had in learning history. He prefaced the query by referring to his interviewee’s nearly four decades of teaching at Notre Dame.
It was a logical question — we’d been talking about a new book I’d written about Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower — but my response resembled more of a confession than an explanation.
It was impossible to gauge any level of interest, I haltingly began, because history for nearly all my time in the front of a classroom was terra incognita, a field of long-ago names and dates with little here-and-now appeal.
The job description, when I was hired back in 1980, outlined a position focusing on courses dealing with contemporary communications — “Reporting the News,” “News in American Life, “Television and American Culture” and the like.
Since I’d written a doctoral dissertation about Mark Twain, the department chair let me also offer “American Humor,” which sounds more academically frolicsome than the reality of class sessions. Learning to do stand-up wasn’t covered in my pedagogical training.
The great American essayist (and children’s author) E.B. White composed many unforgettable sentences but none more telling than: “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.” An instructor also seemed to die in the process, as I discovered before abandoning the course when political correctness took direct aim at “incorrect” types of laughter.
Before long, I added “Media and Politics” to my curricular bag of tricks, keeping courses on the straight-and-narrow of current affairs. A session on the televised debates between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 was the longest look back we took.
My ahistorical naivete came naturally. I’d primarily studied literature since enrolling at Notre Dame in the late 1960s. Any “history” arrived indirectly, almost by osmosis, when assessing a writer’s reaction to the times and culture of bygone eras.
The emphasis on communications came naturally, too. From time to time since high school, I contributed to newspapers and magazines, and I’d help inaugurate — while wrestling with Mark Twain — a program to teach college students how to interpret the media and their messages using approaches and techniques of literary analysis.
But the axis of my academic world shifted dramatically with one phone call in early 2006. An academic friend in Ireland, himself a historian, wondered if I’d be interested in working up a talk on how American newspapers covered the Easter Rising.
Though I knew next to nothing about the rising, I quickly learned that the ill-fated, six-day rebellion took place in 1916 and became a critical event on the long, bloody road to Irish independence from Great Britain. The lecture he was proposing would be part of a weekend “summer school” recognizing the 90th anniversary.
Little did I know how much I didn’t know about the practice of journalism, the political environment or the international tensions nine decades earlier. The research, mostly conducted grinding through microfilm in the basement of the Hesburgh Library, became a daily revelation: old news transformed into usable information for an immediate purpose.
There was a newfound, exhilarating sense of discovery in tracking down the people and their actions at this turbulent time. Intrigued by the connections that linked the rising to Irish America, the 1916 U.S. presidential campaign and what happened afterwards in Ireland, I embarked on what many colleagues and friends regarded as a foolhardy mission — a book of history.
As best I could, I wanted to try to explain America’s role in the rising through the eyes of key figures with a direct relationship to it, timing the appearance of the finished product to the centenary in the spring of 2016. Foolhardy is closer to an understatement than an accurate adjectival modifier.
For the next eight years, I turned into an archive hound, if not rat, pursuing documents, manuscripts, reports and letters in Dublin, New York, Washington, Boston and Cambridge, England. The digging, often in files untouched for decades, provided the spine for the work, which was published two years before I tossed all my teaching notes and files in a recycling bin to write full-time.
Working on the book taught me the previously unknown value of closely studying a different time — its people. its events, its forces, its follies — and seeing how it continues to cast a shadow today. Twain receives credit, though it might be fictitious, for saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Figuring out the rhyme scheme of history is worth pursuing —writing about and, yes, teaching, to stir students’ interest in the past and the lessons it offers for our own time.
Then, out of the blue again, a Washington journalist-friend mentioned a colorful story involving Winston Churchill at the White House, planting the germ of an idea. Churchill’s White House visit shortly after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor was well-known, but I wondered: How many other times did the British prime minister take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
Due diligence revealed well over a thousand volumes written about Churchill, yet none focused on his White House days. The book’s subtitle — “The Untold Story of a Prime Minister and Two Presidents” — captured the crux of the approach to the Englishman’s seven sojourns with Roosevelt and Eisenhower, three of which lasted more than two weeks.
When the book came out not long ago, some reviewers referred to me as a “historian,” but that classification is highly debatable in the eyes of this beholder. My uneasiness with the label is compounded from reading about a burgeoning concern in psychology referred to as the “imposter syndrome.” Identified in 1978, the complex comes from self-doubt or, stated more bluntly, a person’s sense of being a fraud.
It’s a sobering way to look in the mirror — the imposter quotient creating a colossal question mark — but it’s not an insurmountable anxiety. You can find, in the lingo of our cyber moment, a workaround.
In my case, a soul lacking formal training in history, I’ve relied on techniques of journalism — skills I tried to teach Notre Dame students lo those many years — to render the past:
Who was involved?
What actually happened?
When did the action occur?
Where did it take place?
Why did it happen?
How did it affect those involved, and, more broadly, the society and culture?
Like any credible nonfiction article or book, the finished product needs to have the most telling facts and the most arresting quotations. Finding these necessary elements takes as much, sometimes more, probing as an investigative reporter might do to get to the bottom of a complicated issue or story.
Even though I failed at answering whether Notre Dame students were interested in history, I see myself as both a convert and a late vocation. Self-doubt might shadow what I decide to write, but a sunny sense of satisfaction eclipses the insecurity.
And, by the way, another adventure at recapturing the past awaits.
Bob Schmuhl, the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Professor Emeritus in American Studies and Journalism at Notre Dame, is the author of Ireland’s Exiled Children (Oxford University Press) and Mr. Churchill in the White House (Liveright/W.W. Norton). Schmuhl will discuss his Churchill book Thursday, September 19 at 4:30 at the Hammes Bookstore.