You Can Save History

JOANNE: OK, so Ed, Nathan, before the break we heard about these people in the 1820s, these self-described antiquarians, who saved items from the past.

NATHAN: Over the past few weeks, we asked our listeners what items and artifacts they collect. Here are some of their responses.

JANINE HIGGINS: I’m Janine Higgins, a collector of bones. Bones are beautiful in their form and for their function. I have black bear and bird bones, bobcat, whitetail deer, beaver bones, and wolf and jaguar bones. I find these bones on my hikes. I study these bones for my work. I’m a wild animal artist.

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JEFF WAXMAN: I collect coins because a coin tells a story. And I like the short stories best, the coins of countries that no longer exist, monarchies or colonies that barely ever existed. I heard the Croat writer Dubravka Ugresic speak one night 10 years ago about a Balkan man she knew who had lived in six countries without ever moving house. Our boundaries and our fortifications and checkpoints and mines scar only the surface. But the metal that we pull from the earth and make into coins keeps telling stories long after a nation and all of its citizens have died.

STUART LUTZ: My name is Stewart Lutz, and I live in New Jersey. I love buying great pieces of Vietnam War history. I collect both sides, the Vietnamese and the American, the pro-war and the anti-war. I feel like a curator and a preserver of such an important event.

ZEV FELDMAN: My name is Zev Feldman. I’ve been called the Indiana Jones of Jazz or the jazz detective. I wake up every morning on a mission to find the most important jazz recordings that have never been released– a long lost Thelonious Monk studio album from 1959, or never-before-heard 1968 recordings by Bill Evans. It’s a never-ending journey. There’s a real sense of urgency for me to find and release these important recordings for the sake of generations to come, before they’re simply lost and not found.

NATHAN: That was Janine Higgins, Jeff Waxman, Stuart Lutz, and Zev Feldman. Thanks to all the listeners who reached out.

ED: Joanne and Nathan, I have a confession to make.

NATHAN: Oh!

ED: I spend my life thinking about all these dead people, and I don’t have anything that’s old or any desire to own anything. I don’t even like old stuff. What’s wrong with me?

[LAUGHTER]

JOANNE: Now, I’ve got to get specific here. Like, nothing? You don’t have a craving to own a book that belonged to someone that you’ve written about, or something like that?

ED: Not very much, to be honest.

[LAUGHTER]

JOANNE: Not so much?

ED: I’m willing to believe it’s something wrong with me. But when I talk to people who work in the Civil War field, a lot of people have a lot of stuff. And there’s a lot of people with private collections and things. And I always feel somewhat inadequate when I talk to them because they want me to be excited about this gun, or about this epaulet, or whatever. And I don’t really touch the past through these means.

But if we didn’t have people like that, the three of us wouldn’t have things to write about very much, if somebody hadn’t gone back and selected these things. I’m just wondering, what is it about the gene of someone who collects, and what is it about that those of us who interpret the record of the past? I mean, where do you fit?

JOANNE: Well, but I think the record of those who interpret the past isn’t even one-dimensional in that way. I wouldn’t say that I am a collector. But I do know a colleague whose entire house is furnished in early-American furnishings, very deliberately. I’m not that person, but I am the person who needs to own something that the person I’m writing about owned, just so that I can sort of have a piece of that person with me when I’m writing. So I want something that has meaning, meaning to me. And maybe that’s part of what we’re talking about today, things invested with meaning, rather than just things.

NATHAN: No, absolutely. I was reminded of the fact that during the Middle Ages people trafficked in these relics. This could be the finger of the Virgin Mary. This could be the cross, or a piece of the cross, that Jesus held. And, certainly, we never go back that far on BackStory. But the desire to keep something that has a certain kind of magic, really, from the past is not in any way, shape, or form a new thing.

I, in contrast to Ed, actually have a fake artifact that I really, really like. And I bring it with me everywhere. So I have, in my possession, a replica of a colored-only waiting room sign. And I use it in classes. I use it when I go on the road to give talks. And I use it because it really does trigger a response from the audience to see an object that may well be real. And I don’t try to pass it off as being real. If anybody asks, I’m happy to tell them it’s a replica.

But it’s that kind of locked gaze that the sign gets from the audiences when I pull it out that really does attest to the fact that, for many people, their engagement with the past is material. If they can see something that’s really real from that period, it makes everything that you say subsequently much more believable. You know?

There’s a problem that many historians have where we sometimes think that everything ought to be text-based, or that people’s relationship to the past is similar to how we write, or if we can present the documents and the footnotes then it’s all going to be fine. But there’s something much more visceral, I think, that those images speak to. But I, personally, am not going to decorate my entire home in mid-20th-century Jim-Crow-era stuff.

ED: So you made the point that I was thinking [INAUDIBLE] our faith, professional academic historians’ faith in the word. And wherever those words are is good enough for me, if they’re in a book or on a screen. I’ve gotten into passionate arguments with people who argue that, unless you’re actually breathing the dust off a document, you can’t really understand it. So tell me this– are you struck more by our similarities to these collectors or by our difference? Are we part of the same family, with just different fetishes?

JOANNE: I think the people who we’re talking about today have some kind of an emotional sense of the importance of what they’re doing that’s invested in that stuff. And I guess I would say, as a historian, I also have a sense of mission or importance, or something that drives me beyond just wanting to play with documents and write things. So I would say, when I first was writing my first book and I came across Plumer, what touched me about him was his gradual realization that history was fading and that someone had to do something or it was going to go away. And he had a sense that there was value here, and he needed to collect it and pass it on. And I don’t think that’s that far removed from what we do, is it?

ED: Well, here’s a question for you folks. William Plumer is there finding the documents of the founding of the United States on the floor of the lumber room. We can see how he might think there was something important. But today, after so many generations of people saving and archiving, the Library of Congress, is there any need for this sort of thing anymore?

NATHAN: Oh, it’s absolutely imperative. It’s one of the principal tasks facing us now, as we’re losing more and more people who were part of the early part of the 20th century, the mid-20th century. There are entire eras that need to be reclaimed and captured.

JOANNE: And voices. And kinds of voices.

NATHAN: And voices, absolutely. The William Plumers of the world, if you’re listening now, there are actually stores of documents that are very valuable that are just about to be lost to us, and it’s really important that our listeners appreciate that they need to get going and save [INAUDIBLE] some of this stuff.

Just to give you an example, so Zora Neale Hurston, who famously wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, who was a very important folklorist of both African-American and African diaspora culture– Hurston’s career spans from the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s through the mid 20th century. And Hurston, as was true of many African-American artists, spent much of her life living kind of hand-to-mouth and basically died in near-poverty and was left in the care of the state. Her personal papers are in the archive of the University of Florida, the special collections. And they have literal burn marks around the edges because they had to be fished out of the flames of the group home that she lived in in the final years of her life.

ED: Wow.

NATHAN: They were going to destroy letters, drafts of essays, tons of material, just as part of general housekeeping.

JOANNE: Nathan, you just became Plumer in the lumber room.

[LAUGHTER]

NATHAN: I’ll wear it proudly. I think I share dear Mr. Plumer’s sense of indignation and urgency, frankly, about– we need to save this very fragile relationship we have with the near past.

JOANNE: Yes

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