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Randall Stephens Michael Kammen It is with heavy hearts that historians, former students, and others are reporting on the death of the Pulitzer Prize -winning historian Michael Kammen.  He leaves an enormous legacy as an inspiring teacher, mentor, and scholar. H. Roger Segelken of the Cornell Chronicle writes that Kammen focused "his scholarship at first on the colonial period of American history."  He then "broadened his scope to include legal, cultural and social issues of American history in the 19th and 20th centuries." Kammen's Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991), says Segelken, "helped to create the field of memory studies."  (See a short biography of Kammen here .) Indeed, Kammen won high praise as a writer. In a New York Times review of Mystic Chords of Memory Thomas Fleming conceded that "not everyone will agree with all his conclusions, but they are presented with superlative style la...

Jonathan Rees Norge Refrigerator advertisement, 1953. So I have a new book out .  It’s on the history of the American ice and refrigeration industries and the research and writing only took me thirteen years. Why would anybody work on any subject that long?  Well, to be fair, I have published three other books over that same time.  Still, I developed a few serious problems along the way that really slowed the entire writing process down to a crawl. The first problem was picking the right level of focus for my work.  The very first documents I looked at were ice and refrigeration industry trade journals.  These are giant periodicals, available bound together in only the largest libraries, and written primarily for the refrigerating engineers who used to make what is now a mostly forgotten industry function.   Being something of a perfectionist, I was determined to understand everything they understood, from how ammonia compression refrigeration works to...

Randall Stephens When I teach writing I use a short piece by William Zinsser from the American Scholar : "Writing English as a Second Language" (Winter 2010). Yes, my students are native speakers.  Regardless, this essay is spot on for college students. (I've blogged about it before here .) A WPA poster from 1937. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Zinsser offers up a host of great tips: Cut horrible, long Latin-origin words: "communicated, conversion, reconciliation, enhancements, verification."  When these are used/overused they lead to stilted or stuffy prose. Use good, short, simple nouns: "infinitely old Anglo-Saxon nouns that express the fundamentals of everyday life: house, home, child, chair, bread, milk, sea, sky, earth, field, grass, road." "I have four principles of writing good English. They are Clarity, Simplicity, Brevity, and Humanity." "So remember: Simple is good. Writing is not something you have to embroider with fa...

Philip White Well, I’ve done it, and I’m pretty pleased with myself. I finally finished the remaining three chapters of my next book. Well, kinda. In fact, what I really did was send the rest of the first draft to the two generous souls who are reviewing my manuscript. Now for the fun part. And by fun, I mean death-to-the-ego-and-all-my-hopes-and-dreams. Unfortunately for me, some editors just want to watch the world burn . You see, soon enough my inbox will light up with e-mails, containing page after page of edit afflicted prose. And with each new comment, redline and question, I will die a little. Or at least my ego will. In a perfect, pain-free world, writers could just churn out a bunch of words, revise them ourselves and then fling them out to the unsuspecting public. Oh, wait, we can. I keep forgetting about self-publishing. But alas, those of us who go the traditional route of talking an academic or trade press into publishing our portable monuments to how smart we think we are...

Copies of classical Roman busts, the Scottish National Gallery.  Photo by Randall Stephens. Susan Ware, "The challenges and rewards of biographical essays," OUPblog, April 11, 2013 One of the first things I did after being appointed general editor of the American National Biography was to assign myself an entry to write. I wanted to put myself in the shoes of my contributors and experience first-hand the challenge of the short biographical form. >>> "Paul Johnson reviews 'C.S. Lewis: A Life', by Alister McGrath," Spectator , April 20, 2013 C.S. Lewis became a celebrity but remains a mysterious figure. Several biographies have been written, not to much avail, and now Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology, has compiled a painstaking, systematic and ungrudging examination of his life and works. Despite all the trouble he has taken, his book lacks charm and does not make one warm to his subject. >>> Jonathan Freedland, ...

Randall Stephens Over at the Religion in American History blog I have a short piece on publishing.  Here's an exce rpt and link to the full piece. Few could have accused Ernest Hemingway of being too subtle. “The first draft of anything is shit,” he once quipped.  True.  And still we plod on, hoping to spin that dross into gold. We spend hour upon hour crafting, redrafting, proofing, worrying, and rewriting. Several years back the historian Stephen Pyne wrote in a forum I put together for Historically Speaking that "History is a book culture. We read books, we write books, we promote and award tenure on the basis of books, and at national meetings we gather around book exhibits. We’re a book-based discipline." *   But figuring out how to land a publisher, what press to go with, and answering a range of other questions can be daunting.  And so, I was happy when my colleague Brian Ward at Northumbria University organized an afternoon session on publishing las...