When Thurmond ran for President in 1948 as a so-called “Dixiecrat,” he did so because the views of the Democratic party had already begun to evolve sharply. The Truman administration, reacting to a wave of postwar racial violence (including the blinding of US Army veteran Isaac Woodard in Batesburg, South Carolina, in 1946) had begun to explore a firmer civil rights policy. This was the proximate cause for the “Dixiecrat” splinter and explains why Thurmond made segregation the fundamental plank of his campaign. Southern conservative Democrats remained deeply disconcerted about the evolution of their party on the issue of race in the 1950s and 60s, a concern made vivid in the launching by southern conservatives of the “massive resistance” campaign in 1956 shortly after the Brown decision. “Massive resistance” defined the determination of southern segregationists to defy the Court’s ruling and maintain segregation. It is why so many southern school systems did not integrate even decades after the Brown decision. This was a campaign for which Thurmond remained a stalwart, as evidenced by his role in drafting the Southern Manifesto and rendered with heroic aplomb in his historic anti-civil rights filibuster in 1957.

By 1964 the outlines of a major party realignment were already well in evidence. The bruising battle between liberal and conservative Republicans for the 1964 nomination, between the moderate Rockefeller and the conservative Goldwater, was one such harbinger. Thurmond’s historic party switch from Democratic to Republican in advance of the primary fight affirmed for many that the segregationism for which Thurmond had long stood would find a comfortable home under the banner of Goldwater’s “states rights.” Goldwater himself, though he had earlier supported civil rights, by 1964 had come around to opposing the civil rights bill then famously wending its way through Congress, further solidifying the linkage between segregation and states’ rights. Thurmond’s first political activity after becoming a member of the Republican party was to whip support for Goldwater. (Liberal Republicans, it might be noted, were instrumental in the passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights bill. That support would drive many of them out of the party or out of office in succeeding years.) As historian Kevin Kruse has recently noted “The Goldwater/Thurmond moment was transformative in how Americans understood the two parties on civil rights. Until 1964, it seemed clear that Democrats were the party of economic liberalism and the GOP economic conservatism, but civil rights had been left out of the picture. . . .[After 1964] [t]here was a stark change in popular perception about the two parties on civil rights.”

The South had been since before the Civil War dominated by the Democratic party—the “solid south” as it has been often referred. The Republican party in the region “scarcely deserves the name of party” as V. O. Key put it in 1949. The events of the early 1960s began to change this. The victory of John Tower in Texas in a special Senate election in 1961, making Tower the first Republican to win in Texas since Reconstruction, showed that it was possible for Republicans to win in the south if they campaigned appropriately and played to the region’s racial fears; Tower had publicly denounced the Kennedy administration’s nascent civil rights plans in a formulation that anticipated Goldwater’s strategy a few years later. Goldwater’s massive national defeat in 1964 continued the pattern, showing his defeated party that the way back to national prominence ran through the South; Goldwater’s success in the region refocused party energies, especially in the coming Nixon campaign. The civil rights movement had by now punctured the effectiveness of old-fashioned, crude appeals to racial prejudices. But the new generation of conservative that Goldwater and Nixon represented, needing desperately to expand its appeal to segregationist voters, was learning how to express the same racialized fears with a new political language. This is the essence of the “southern strategy” documented thoroughly in political discussions at the time and captured in published form in the book by Nixon-advisor Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969).  Thurmond played a leading political role in the establishment of the “southern strategy.”

Following Goldwater, from the mid-1960s a new conservative emphasis on “states’ rights” would take center-stage in Republican party rhetoric. “States’ rights” would be supported by other rhetorical formulations, notably appeals to “law and order,” as a supposed counter to the tumult in the streets witnessed in the era; bussing and local control of schools (and, indeed, the private school movement of the period) as a proxy for massive resistance; the continued red-baiting of the civil rights movement with ongoing accusations about communist infiltration of the movement; and stoking fears about a runaway welfare state making handouts to the undeserving poor. In every case, the subtext, of white fears that black Americans were overstepping, enjoying unearned access to (white) public goods, or unduly asserting their political and cultural voices, is clear enough. The “southern strategy,” in short and in plain language, was the rhetorical disaggregation of structural racism into its component parts, and the subsequent appeal to segregationists without giving formal voice to segregation. 

Because he enjoyed such prestige in the Republican party at this point, Thurmond played a pivotal role in the establishment of the “southern strategy” and the political reconsolidation of segregationist politics, as he helped to meld the racialized fears of his southern region to the western “freedom” rhetorics of Goldwater and Reagan. This legacy is clearly seen in the brokering work he did to win over Wallace voters to the GOP in 1968 and in stumping for Nixon in the general election that year. Historians are in agreement that Thurmond’s support for Nixon, in which he assured nervous southerners that Nixon would not employ federal power to enforce civil rights mandates in the region, was crucial to Nixon’s success in that narrowly contested election.

This “southern strategy” was widely discussed in Republican circles at the time, and well-understood to be a rhetorical strategy to appeal to the south’s racial fears. Ronald Reagan’s (in)famous launching of his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in close proximity to the most heinous event to occur in that place, the murder in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan of three young civil rights workers, is clearly indicative. Further evidence comes from the mouth of Lee Atwater himself who in a recorded interview laid bare the political logic at work:  Exclusive: Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy - YouTube. Many histories have been written about the “southern strategy” (see references, below).

By Nixon’s second term the small trickle of party defections from Democrat to Republican that Thurmond had pioneered in 1964 had become a flood, and dozens and dozens of formerly conservative Democrats had by the mid-1970s made the party switch, at both the national and state levels. Jesse Helms is another prominent example, as is Reagan himself. There are scores more. Some old-line party stalwarts, such as James Byrnes, did not make the switch formerly, but as early as the 1950s Byrnes had been fully supporting Republican candidacies at the local and national level, largely for racial reasons. The flood of conservative politicians into the Republican party continued throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Political identity is harder to change for voters than for opportunistic politicians, and voters did not follow these defections in a linear fashion. The victories of Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 showed that the traditional party label could in some instances overcome the racial liberalism of the candidate. But over time the “southern strategy” developed into a genuine watershed in American political life, hardening the increasing polarization between the two parties so well in evidence in our day. With a few exceptions, the South has become increasingly aligned behind the Republican party, still “solid” but with different party labels attached. (The particular and vehement animosity directed to both Carter and Clinton helps illustrate these transformations, as both were seen more as traitors to a cause than simple political rivals.)

There is a persistent legend about Senator Thurmond, that late in his career he repudiated the segregationist views to which he had devoted the entirety of his career and embraced a colorblind position. This myth should be buried once and for all. No evidence that Thurmond ever made such a recantation has ever surfaced. He did make certain token appointments to office, and he remained shrewdly effective at constituent service. His supporters allege that such political outreaches constitute evidence of his newly softened views. But in a state whose voting constituency is approximately one-quarter black, these are only the operations of a shrewd political operator and do not constitute an apology for a career spent as a prime agent of systemic racism in America. Indeed, he never uttered a word in such apology. Moreover, Thurmond’s direct political descendants both extended and refined his earlier, cruder segregationist principles. These include Albert Watson, a protege, whose 1970 campaign for governor—strongly supported by the senator—made common cause with school segregationist dead-enders. The political operative Lee Atwater, leading practitioner of the “southern strategy,” was another protege. Thurmond never repudiated any of it.

It is in the context of the “southern strategy” that Thurmond’s most lasting contribution to the politics of segregation are best understood. Thurmond never abandoned the fundamental conviction that racial segregation was a fitting social and political practice. His remarkable consistency on this score helps to illustrate vividly that it was the American political system that had realigned itself in the middle decades of the twentieth century, not Thurmond’s views nor, indeed, the views of many within his constituency.

Thurmond’s political career is a remarkably consistent roadmap to twentieth century American politics. Like so many conservative Democrats in the 30s and 40s, Thurmond welcomed New Deal federal largesse into his state. But he grew alarmed at the potential reach of federal power into the region when the civil rights movement started to win victories in the courts and in the court of public opinion. He was one of the first to leave a liberalizing Democratic party as the Democrats increasingly (though imperfectly) embraced the cause of civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. While the old segregationist rhetoric no longer commanded public approval by that time, opponents to the civil rights movement found (and forged) a new language centered on anti-federal power and which stressed local rights, local prerogatives, the defunding of public goods, and the political illegitimacy of those advocating for the other side. Thurmond was a leading agent in this shift and indeed one of its prime architects. Like the segregation for which he always stood, his language moderated itself over time, but his fundamental commitments never wavered.
                 
Select References
Earl Black & Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Harvard, 2002)

Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (LSU Press, 2000)

Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (Hill & Wang, 2012)

Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
(Princeton, 2007) (Kruse also has a very accessible and popular series of threads on his Twitter account clearly and deeply explaining the party realignment outlined above: Kevin M. Kruse on Twitter: "The more people talk about my pinned thread of threads as a "mini-course" on modern American political history, the more it bugs me that it's not arranged in chronological order. So, here it is, with threads sorted together by era." / Twitter)

Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (Oxford, 2019).

Also, Maxwell and Shields on the “southern strategy”: The Long Southern Strategy | 2019 - YouTube

​Pat Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (UNC, 1996)

--David J. Snyder

The little research that has been published on Lampkin never fails to note that she staked a reputation as a leading suffrage activist in the 1910s and then became an important official within the NAACP in the 1930s. Most accounts also note that she was an executive with the Pittsburgh Courier, and some occasionally note that she was also a leading clubwoman.
 
Her activities in the 1920s, however, are often glossed, except to observe that she served as an at-large alternate delegate to the Republican nominating convention in Kansas City in 1928. She was the first African American woman from Pennsylvania so honored. But no account that I have yet seen explains how or why she was nominated to that position.
 
The answer, as I have recently discovered, is that she was a significant political operative in the 1920s, stumping and organizing endlessly for Republican candidates at both the local and the national level, as I’ll summarize in a moment. These are new discoveries, which add much more complexity and dimension to Lampkin's life. And therein lies the possibility of a new way to understand a key moment in twentieth century political history.
 
A bit of historiography: Many historians have written about the central political shift of the twentieth century, the gradual (and partial) embrace of a civil rights agenda by the Democratic party beginning in the 1930s and the subsequent abandonment, mostly complete by the 1970s and 80s, by the Republicans of that same agenda. Thus the “Party of Lincoln” has, over the course of my lifetime, become the party of neo-segregation.
 
Central to that political shift has been a no-less important revolution in African American voting loyalties. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries completely loyal to the Republican party, beginning in the 1930s black Americans began to defect to the Democratic party, first slowly and then in floods. By the end of the 1930s, black voting loyalties had transferred almost entirely to the Democrats, where they have more or less remained until today.
 
Back in grad school I read several accounts of this shift in black voting patterns. Those authors attributed much to the appeal of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Growing dissatisfied with the do-nothingism of the Hoover administration, some black leaders, such as the Pittsburgh Courier’s Robert Vann, famously advised that black voters abandon their long-held loyalties to the Republicans and embrace the Democratic New Deal. In a 1932 editorial Vann famously counseled that it was time to “turn the pictures of Abraham Lincoln to the wall.” For the first time in history, the 1932 Democratic candidate (FDR) enjoyed a surprising infusion of support from black voters, in a trend that became an avalanche in 1936.
 
But does the appeal of the New Deal suffice to explain this shift in black voter loyalties? Undoubtedly there is always a measure of fickleness in any American voter, and many of us are inclined to vote our pocketbooks first, party loyalty second. Maybe that’s what happened here. But Americans also tend to be loyal to their party. No doubt this is much more true today than in the past. But even in the 1920s and 30s, it’s no small thing to abandon one’s party. Moreover, in 1932, the New Deal was only a hypothetical. It hadn’t accomplished anything for anybody, black or white.
 
Enter Daisy Lampkin’s story. Her absence from the historiography, I think I can argue, has tended to downplay the depth and extent of black political commitments to the Republican party throughout the 1920s. My research into Lampkin’s life has revealed a mass ecosystem of black political operations that felt it had a bill to present to the victorious Hoover administration. When Hoover defaulted on that bill, the sense of betrayal was substantial.
 
As a suffrage activist in the 1910s Lampkin was a political force in potential. But once the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote throughout the nation, she became a political powerhouse and a powerbroker in her own right.
 
Not resting on the suffrage victory, Lampkin formed a new organization out of her suffrage work to galvanize and mobilize Pittsburgh-area women’s newly won political power, the Negro Women’s Republican League of Allegheny County. In this capacity she stumped tirelessly throughout Pittsburgh campaigning, organizing, and giving speeches on behalf of William Magee, Republican candidate for mayor. When Magee won, Lampkin had no qualms about demanding patronage recognition from the new administration by appointing an African American police matron. “We have been faithful and honest in our political dealings,” Lampkin insisted, “and are thus able to demand such tangible results.”
 
At the same time she remained heavily active in club work, becoming first the elected state organizer for the Pennsylvania State Federation of Negro Women’s Clubs, and then, while maintaining her local and state commitments, national organizer for the National Association of Colored Women. The intensifying club activity at the state and national level backstopped her elevating political profile.
 
In 1924 the Republican National Committee (RNC) asked Lampkin and Julia Bumry Jones, a notable Pittsburgh-area reporter in the black press, to serve on its Advisory Board. Lampkin campaigned heavily for the Coolidge/Dawes ticket in 1924, telling audiences “It is hard to understand how an American Negro could even consider voting any other than the Republican ticket, considering what that party has done for our race. The Republican party gave us the very amendments to the constitution that gave us our rights as human beings, that made it possible for the Negro to vote.” When Coolidge cruised to victory, the Courier reprinted rumors of a patronage offer to Lampkin in gratitude for her efforts, but nothing came of it.
 
She continued to deepen her club activities in the middle twenties, like her peers Nannie Burroughs, Hallie Brown, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, increasingly linking club work to political activism. The NACW would form political study groups, for example, to help mobilize black women behind Republican candidacies. In 1925 Lampkin would become chairman of the board of the National League of Republican Colored Women.
 
But she was just getting started. In 1925, the founder of the National Colored Republican Conference (NCRC), Dr. George E. Cannon, died suddenly. This was a new group, having formed only in 1922. But as its vice president, Lampkin was now thrust into yet another national leadership position. During Lampkin’s tenure the NCRC made a number of demands of the Coolidge administration, including proposals to limit Southern representation in Congress so long as black votes were suppressed in the region, and demands for fuller enforcement of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. (The same amendments under attack by the Trump administration in our day.)
 
Lampkin continued both her local advocacy and her national leadership through the latter half of the second Coolidge administration, which now also included the vice chairmanship of the Pennsylvania League of Colored Voters. In 1928, state party chairman W. L. Mellon named her an at-large alternate delegate to the 1928 nominating convention in Kansas City, the first African American women sent to a political convention by Pennsylvania. But the national party had uses for her as well: After the nomination, in 1928, the Republican National Committee appointed a “Colored Voters Division” (CVD) to lead the fight for Hoover among African American voters. John R. Hawkins, who had seconded Hoover’s nomination in Kansas City, was made chairman of this unit.
 
Lampkin became vice chairman of the CVD’s Eastern Bureau. As such, she also sat on the executive committee. Further, she chaired a special advisory body of some 200 prominent African American community and business leaders that advised the CVD on its black outreach strategy. It is relevant to note that Robert Vann was also closely connected to the CVD, chairing the publicity committee on which nearly every important black publisher and editor sat. Pittsburgh's prominent black Republicans were all in for Hoover in 1928, it seems.
 
Lampkin traveled extensively stumping for Hoover, combining her club organizing work with her political oratory. When Hoover won in 1928, there was again talk of patronage appointments for Lampkin, Vann, and others. However—and here is where I am obliged to get a little speculative pending further research—when patronage appointments were not in fact forthcoming, coupled with the administration’s perceived inaction during the depression, the high hopes and expectations which Lampkin and Vann and their colleagues had invested in the Hoover administration were dashed.
 
Then came the blow, in September 1932. In emotional cadences that not only charged the Hoover administration with economic mismanagement and financial malfeasance (along with political corruption), but embedded those charges within a much longer 80-year history of Republican lies and exploitation, Vann urged his readers to turn their pictures of Lincoln to the wall and vote for the Democrats. Vann’s editorial was not a measured political analysis, and it was certainly not a piece of standard political oratory that paid lip service to the writer’s objectivity. Vann wrote as a jilted lover or betrayed spouse. His editorial was a piece of political, and indeed historical, diatribe, though rhetorically powerful. A fuller analysis will have to wait my book, but for now I note that his focus was almost entirely Hoover’s misdeeds, and hardly a word of endorsement of the New Deal as a political program.
 
It is entirely possible that Vann’s attack—in which Lampkin must have concurred, as she was a vice president of the Courier at this time—was based on kitchen table issues and the hope that a Roosevelt administration could do better than Hoover. That is plausible, though again I note that at this time the New Deal was scarcely more than a vague campaign promise. To my mind, however, it is at least equally plausible that the speed and intensity with which Vann and Lampkin and many other African American voters reversed their loyalties to the Republican party in favor of taking a flyer on the Democratic party—whose southern wing, as they well knew, had made it abundantly clear that they did not care to address African American concerns—suggests something more personal and more emotional was at play.
 
To shift from exhaustive support in 1928 to utter contempt in 1932 is a striking political adjustment for any individual, and certainly for Lampkin who had carefully built a GOP-oriented political powerbase for more than a decade. I think it’s quite likely that the extent to which the Hoover administration took black voters for granted, ignored their economic concerns, disregarded their political appeals, and left unrewarded the efforts of a whole generation of activists, may have soured these black supporters much more than the New Deal attracted them, and very quickly. The Hoover administration, in other words, squandered some seventy years’ worth of black loyalties within presidential term.
 
This interpretation may be reading too much into the state of affairs, but it’s given further fuel by observing that Vann soured on Roosevelt less than a decade later, dissatisfied by the patronage he had been given and throwing his support back to the Republicans in 1940. Perhaps my understanding of the historiography is a bit dated; perhaps newer authors have proposed a more Hoover-centric explanation for the mass defection of black voters in the 1930s. But the suddenness of that shift for many black voters in 1932 is given much fuller context by the discovery of the depth and profound levels of energy to which Lampkin devoted herself to Republican party politics throughout the 1920s. In that sense, her support in the 1930s of the Democrats cost her a great deal politically. While she would go on to even greater prominence with the NAACP in that decade, she would lose the formal political influence that she had enjoyed with the national GOP in the 1920s.
 
—David J. Snyder

​Victor and I deliberated earlier this year on the best way to publish his account. I have no doubt that a traditional publisher would be very interested, but there are lots of other considerations: given the subject matter, would a traditional publisher demand changes or alterations with which Victor was not comfortable, or would they demand that he reveal national security secrets outside the scope of his story? There is the matter of delay: first finding an agent, then shopping the manuscript, then production. It would be at least eighteen months, and more like two or three years, before his account ever saw a shelf. Hybrid or self-publishing is an option that I thought held promise, but there are uncertainties with that avenue as well, not to mention the cost and unpredictable marketing outcomes.
 
Victor feels that his story is particularly timely. Given the current state of world affairs, to say nothing of the state of our national politics, he is convinced that his story has something important to contribute to democratic debate about where we are, how we got here, and how we might move forward. I couldn’t agree more.
 
And so in a throwback to twentieth-century magazine serialization, he’s done something extraordinary, which is to release his book to the public, free, on Substack: How America Lost Her Way After the Cold War, an essay | Victor Motier | Substack. Every month he’ll be releasing a chapter. I’ve had the privilege to read the manuscript in draft form, and it is a compelling story.
 
Victor’s story is remarkable in a lot of ways, and not only that he served on the front lines and in all of the hotspots of the GWOT. Victor is European by birth, but lived in the States for many years. After 9/11, like many young people, he was motivated to serve. His account details his training with the CIA and his initial postings in West Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Afghanistan, among other places. Notably, he spends a lot of time assessing the leadership of the CIA, at both agency and operational levels. We’re able to see how political demands coming from the White House met the political, cultural, and ideological realities on the ground, where Victor stood. The resulting outcomes were rarely happy.
 
No spoilers, but Victor’s account bristles with insight. The tragedy is the way in which Victor’s front-line perspective was constantly demeaned, diminished, and undermined by superiors. The refusal to acknowledge the extent of a highly motivated and deeply financed Saudi ideological operation in West Africa, for example, strikes me as one of the central failures of the GWOT. Much of the GWOT was political theater for a misinformed American audience, run by an administration more interested in favorable press coverage and narratives that could be spun on Fox News than favorable results on the ground. These trade-offs had, and have, real world consequences. Rather than hold governing officials accountable for misinformation, lies, and inefficiency, it seems, many Americans have come to prefer the political theater.
 
I think many of us know that secret agencies like the CIA are dysfunctional in all sorts of ways, but it is still shocking to read just how dysfunctional the Bush-era CIA was, political hacks executing operational portfolios for which they were completely unqualified.
 
While there are many sources for our current political state, one important cause of Trump-style ungovernability is the loss of faith in political leadership who for years sold Americans on lies and distortions in pursuit of foreign policy outcomes that were always problematic, unattainable, or counter-productive. That is what happens when ideological commitments substitute for effective, thoughtful and democratically accountable policy. We are living in the morass of failure bequeathed by the GWOT. One hopes that we find a way out of this trap soon.
 
Victor’s book makes a captivating twin for another book I worked on late last year, Ross Berkoff’s haunting account of his time in Afghanistan on the front lines, Beyond the Outpost. Check them both out for deep insight into how the war on terror has produced a deeply troubled America. They are both reads you can’t put down.
 
—David J. Snyder

I’m not sure why this tic prevails so often. I suspect many writers are convinced that their most sacred calling is to be informal, to “write like you speak,” to not offend with overly creative originality. And so we get a proliferation of stock phrases. But few prose habits will disengage your readers faster than the use of a stock phrase.
 
Modern corporate speak has been an incubator for this kind of intellectual laziness, cultivating metaphors into stock phrases that dominate communication. So we are forever moving needles, thinking outside of boxes, and touching bases.
 
But stock phrases should be avoided. They do not make your writing more approachable. They render it inert. No thought can occur inside of a stock phrase, and so no meaning can be conveyed by one. Indeed, the opposite is true: At best, for a brief moment, brains are shut off and autopilot takes over. No actual writing has occurred in that lapse, and so no real reading can occur either.
 
Stock phrasing signals laziness, and thus signals to the reader that at least some part of this piece need not be taken seriously. Readers recognize this, at least subconsciously. And at that point, the writer has lost his or her reader.
 
So remind yourself: Not every question has to be “burning.”
Not every first is “foremost.”
Not every “trial” is also a “tribulation.”
If you have a “little” of something, you don’t also automatically have to have “little to nothing” of that thing. You can just have a little of it.
Just because something is “lean,” does not require that it also be “mean.”
If something is “part” of something else, it doesn’t also have to be a “parcel” of that thing.
Not every “opportunity” is “golden.”
The “last” thing may or may not be the least of any list you are making.
And for god’s sake, and all that is holy in the world, when you build something, you build on, you don’t build “off of.” Nothing is built off of. One cannot build off of something else. (Poorly chosen prepositions are a tell-tale sign of lazy writing, but that’s a post for another day.)
Avoid cliches. Avoid idiomatic writing. Indeed, avoid any form of automated, algorithmic thinking.
—David J. Snyder

Lampkin grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, and she lived her entire adult life in Pittsburgh. Both of those southern Pennsylvania cities enjoyed substantial abolitionist legacies. Both were urban sentinels of freedom close by the Mason-Dixon Line, the geographical, political, and perhaps spiritual boundary between slavery and freedom. Both were sites of extensive Underground Railroad activities, as detailed by William Switala and Cooper H. Wingert. Both cities also supplied proud regiments to the Union, and many Pittsburghers and Philadelphians lost their lives in the cause of emancipation.
 
Philadelphia was also the home of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in America, a denomination grown from decidedly abolitionist roots. The AME Church was founded in Philadelphia at the tail end of the eighteenth century as a response to the racial segregation that prevailed within most of the region’s Methodist churches. From its early days the AME Church was heavily active in abolition, and many AME churches became safe houses and points of transit along the Underground Railroad. AME ministers strongly advocated for abolition and civil rights for African Americans. AME doctrine thus wove freedom and liberation into its theology to a greater extent than most predominantly white churches then (and now.)
 
Daisy learned this “practice what you preach” ethic from her step-uncle, the Reverend N. D. Temple, who was a prominent AME minister in eastern Pennsylvania. The brother of her stepfather, John Temple, N. D. was ordained in Reading but church officials soon assigned him to Philadelphia to plant new congregations in the region, a task in which he was particularly adept. Temple would travel back to Reading frequently to give guest sermons at Reading’s Bethel AME Church, which Daisy attended; Bethel AME had also been an important safehouse in the Underground Railroad. Temple also delighted weekday evening audiences (including, undoubtedly, a girlishly amused Daisy) with demonstrations of scientific curiosities such as making oxygen, burning magnesium ribbon, and firing a hydrogen gun. Early after the turn of the century Temple and his wife were sent to the Pittsburgh suburbs to plant more churches. Daisy followed them in 1909 when her mother passed away. This is how she came to Pittsburgh.

​Pittsburgh also enjoyed a powerful abolitionist legacy. Like Philadelphia and Harrisburg, Pittsburgh occupied a powerful symbolic role in the trek to freedom, as a first outpost on a perilous road that would eventually take runaways as far as Canada. Pittsburgh is also the source of the Ohio River, the western extension of the Mason-Dixon boundary between slavery and freedom. Readers will recall that it is the ice of the frozen Ohio River on which the slave Eliza and her infant son make their harrowing escape from vicious slave catchers in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s catalytic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most indelible scenes in all of American literature.
 
During Daisy’s adult life, Pittsburgh would attract many black migrants fleeing the terrors and restrictions of the Jim Crow south during what is known as the Great Migration. Her earliest civil rights work was with black women’s clubs and the Urban League, organizations that sought to increase educational, health, hygiene, and labor conditions for the migrants pouring into Pittsburgh and other northern cities, extending a history of abolition into a broader struggle for progressive reform.
 
There is a related story to tell about Daisy’s encounter with northern and southern racism which I shall post about later.
 
Daisy’s life is thus heir to a great national epic begun by abolitionists, democracy activists, and other reformers, paid in sweat and blood, and symbolized by Juneteenth. This legacy shaped her even before she became politically active. The story of her life is how she carried that legacy forward, contributing her own dynamic energy and talent, contributing vigorously and lastingly to the expansion of democratic and civil rights in the United States.

That is a story in which all Americans can take pride.
 
—David J. Snyder
 
*The Juneteenth proclamation derived its authority from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which had only applied to the states, like Texas, then currently under Confederate control. Hence enslaved persons in certain of the Union-controlled border states such as Kentucky and Delaware remained in bondage until freed by the 13th Amendment ratified at the end of the year.

Prior to the Second World War the US was a formidable state power, but in no sense a global superpower. Its economic output had surpassed its nearest rival, the United Kingdom, though the economy of the entire British empire would still dwarf the United States. Economic prowess aside, the US was generally not considered a near geopolitical rival by the leading European states, its activities largely confined to the Western Hemisphere. While the American navy was an increasingly global force, its army was paltry by European and Asian standards, and not until World War II would its land forces be considered noteworthy by the European powers.
 
Acquisitions during the War of 1898 with Spain and the US pursuit of influence within China (the so-called “Open Door” policy) made the Americans latecomers to European-style “great game” colonialism. American geopolitical arrears began to reverse themselves during World War I as the European powers consumed themselves in the maelstrom. The United States emerged from that war greatly enhanced in geopolitical terms. The relative power of the Americans would not be fully expressed until World War II, however, after which the United States would emerge as the premier power in the world in nearly all phases: economic, technological, certainly militarily, and even cultural. The atomic bomb is in this sense emblematic of American preeminence in nearly every field.
 
Word War II was a turning point. No state had ever achieved the absolute power the Americans held and maintained for decades thereafter, no state has ever had the global reach of the Americans, and few powers have even achieved the relative regional supremacy the US routinely exercised in most corners of the globe over the last 80 or so years.
 
This bestriding global power emerged in part due to the wartime expansion of American industrial might. While the war laid waste to vast swaths of competitors’ physical plant, industrial capacity, and human capital in the rest of the world, American industry boomed to fill the demand. But American power was not merely the accidental result of wartime contingency. It also resulted from careful investment, deep political commitment, and a widely-shared will to cultivate the organizations, institutions, and practices that projected power around the globe. Some of those institutions were built during the war and developed later. Many were the result of decades of investment during the Cold War.
 
US Economic Multilateralism. During the war American factories roared to life after years of relative depression-era idleness, becoming what FDR called “the arsenal of democracy.” American plants poured out the tanks, planes, ships, trucks, munitions, and supplies that brought victory over the Axis powers abroad. After the war the United States became the workshop of the world, but this was never a matter purely of technological advances. American industrial supremacy also rested on worker solidarity and buy-in in an era of burgeoning trade union strength. Industrial might both required and led to deep changes within American society that would unfold over the coming decades as minorities and women sought, and won, places on the assembly line. Those victories were and are partial, of course, but they were also real. American industrial preeminence could not have emerged without them.
 
The Americans’ vastly expanded physical plant and vastly improved competitive position meant that the United States emerged as both a preferred supplier of substantial amounts of industrial and consumer goods and services elsewhere and a preferred market for export output from other producers. American officials used this leverage to push for free trade policies and integrated markets around the world, a posture that was, in the main, quite successful. It was an approach that was inherently multilateral; trade cannot work otherwise. The United States sought, and won, economic concessions because it comprised a market—both an export market and an import market—to which foreign produces wanted and needed access. Trump administration tariffs are increasingly rendering this signal fact of postwar economic life obsolete.
 
American economic power was on display early, in the series of multilateral agreements established at Bretton Woods in 1944. Here dozens of world powers agreed on a basic framework for postwar international economic activity that centered on free trade, and which would seek in the coming years the lowering of trade barriers. The Americans also won the acceptance of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, guaranteeing a privileged position for the US currency which carried tangible benefits to American investors and consumers for decades. Establishing a basic framework, Bretton Woods also established a vocabulary and a set of norms around which global economic relations have pivoted ever since. Those norms have been largely undone in recent years.
 
American economic dominance gave American officials, in turn, substantial diplomatic weapons. Economic dominance meant that the United States could extract concessions in some areas in exchange for favored economic treatment from rivals and allies in other areas. That is, American economic dominance could be transformed into beneficial or punitive economic diplomacy: aid or sanctions. The effectiveness of both rested on the US using its massive economic leverage to produce a world of prosperity that nations would want to join. That is, without free trade, neither the stick of sanctions nor the carrot of aid would matter much. Aid was never as extensive as many Americans think, it was never a free gift, and, when it was successful, was always accompanied by very strong administrative oversight, as with the Marshall Plan and later USAID programs (as I will explain in a subsequent post).
 
Science. WWII saw vast leaps forward in military technologies such as radar and sonar. Inarguably the greatest consolidation of research prowess during the war was the Manhattan Project, the nationwide race to engineer the splitting of the atom into a workable bomb. The Manhattan Project undertook to produce two variants of fissile material from two different isotopes, fashion the necessary detonation systems, and construct workable bombs. The Manhattan Project was part of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) headed by Vannevar Bush. After the war Bush advocated for an expansion of federally-backed science with the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. The NSF joined its sister organization, the National Institutes of Health, and together created a new model for basic research in which government funding would be met by commitments from universities which provided laboratory space, manpower, and expertise. In this way, private/public partnerships were formed, the wisdom of such arrangements proven by the enormous output of American science in the decades that followed. American scientists have produced wonders from the space race to disease eradication to agricultural productivity and so much more. Many of the technological developments we take for granted, and which we mistakenly assign to the private sphere, emerged from this government-backed  science, including GPS, mobile phone technology, the internet itself, and so much more.
 
Americans joined scientific prowess to multilateral institutions such as the World Health Organization and agencies of the UN, along with private NGOs, and while these efforts have never been complete and always subject to political interference, they have produced tangible, and at times, miraculous results. Polio, once a great scourge, has been eradicated from the US and most parts of the globe. The Peace Corps has delivered life-saving medicines, technologies, and hygiene practices to communities all over the world. Until it was largely shuttered by the Trump administration last year, PEPFAR, one of President George W. Bush’s signal policies, saved millions of lives throughout Africa. These efforts have always been undervalued and underfunded, but they also produced real, lasting, and tangible benefits for millions of people around the world and contributed to goodwill among otherwise hostile nations.
 
Education. The United States has always possessed top-rank private institutions, such as the Ivy League universities; the American system expanded mightily with nineteenth century land-grant colleges and universities. But over the course of the twentieth century American public institutions of higher education became the greatest knowledge generating and dispersal machine in the world. Not only American citizens but students from around the world flocked to American institutions, sharing expertise, knowledge, systems, and patents across national borders. The Fulbright program is representative of these relationships, contributing American prestige and American leadership to a global educational system that allows participants to share knowledge and best practices in every field of human endeavor. It is the epitome of American-led global multilateralism.
 
As a byproduct of American global hegemony, the United States holds interests in every part of the world, in every area of human life, from agriculture to industrial development to the environment to human rights. These interests have produced a rich tapestry of think tanks and foundations, as well as a vast proliferation of area studies programs, new majors, language training, and much more in US universities. But the Trump administration has unaccountably cut funding for many of these. Now that the United States is embroiled in a war with Iran, for example, it no longer has the expertise of the Wilson Center on which to draw in formulating approaches to a country and a region of enormous complexity.
 
American culture. Beginning during the war, but vastly expanded after was a network of American information and cultural institutions that beamed American culture around the world. The Office of War Information and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs were joined after the war by the Voice of America, the State Department, Radio Free Europe, the United States Information Agency, and more. Never propaganda agencies in the Orwellian sense, these institutions brought American music, film, painting, and literature to a global audience, creating markets for American artists but also implicitly carrying a message about American prosperity and American democracy: You too can be like us. This so-called “soft power” has opened up new relational terrain in geopolitical affairs, increased international understanding and goodwill, and consequently lowered the need for or threat of armed conflict. These institutions, too, have been largely shuttered.  
 
Alliances. The postwar world was a great era of multilateral alliance building. Most of these alliances were established against the backdrop of the Cold War, such as NATO and the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), which joined older alliance systems including the US-backed Organization of American States. These alliances are often structured via the occupation of physical bases and outposts within member states in arrangements that allow for the geographical projection of American military power. Though the exact number is classified, some estimates have put the number of US bases around the world at more than 800.
 
Yet now these organizations and relationships are in tatters. Where not formally disbanded, the Trump administration has so poisoned relations that many member states no longer feel the assurances of mutual aid, the lifeblood of these agreements. As Tom Tugendhat has recently written of the British, but which applies with equal and more force to the Americans, the fracturing of our alliances “has revealed our dependencies, not our partnerships, the risks we’ve hidden, not the resilience we’ve built, and, perhaps most gravely of all, our casual confidence of a return to normal when the disrupted alliances and energy flows will do anything but.”
 
Military Prowess. Since World War II the Americans have maintained a massive navy, a globally competent air force, an unmatched nuclear arsenal, a limited but formidable army, and a vast global basing and alliance system. American military power is unrivaled, easily eclipsing any other competitor or, indeed, alliance of competitors. But as vast as it was (and is), American military power is also unusable in very many geopolitical challenges. It can be brittle, easily broken and not easily restored, and enormously costly to use even when it is effective. It is not, as this administration seems to think, a tool for all seasons. US military power is in fact unusable in most instances, and often not very usable even in seemingly advantageous circumstances. Military power is very often the least effective vector of American global preeminence.
 
The latter half of the twentieth century, with military setbacks, outright defeats, and unstable victories in places from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, should have taught us the lesson that the sword is very often most effective when sheathed. The two great military calamities of the past thirty years, the War in Iraq and the current War in Iran, should be proof enough of this reality. We will be reaping the consequences of these disasters for decades.
 
It is never military power alone that advances a nation’s interests. American history proves this reality time and again, that overweening military advantage does not necessarily produce laudable outcomes in the nation’s interests.
 
My book examines in some detail how and why the institutions of American global multilateralism were built and how they operated in one representative context. To be sure, American-led multilateralism has not always produced favorable results for the US nor for international partners. There is plenty to criticize in the long and often tragic history of US foreign relations since World War II. But to blindly dismantle the edifices of global multilateralism is to surrender, without debate and without complaint, American leadership in the world. That is a future fraught with privation, suffering, and terror.
 
—David J. Snyder

​The first book I encountered is one of those popular histories, Mark Whitaker’s Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance. I continue to recommend this book enthusiastically on its own terms, but it’s also a model for what I hope my Lampkin biography achieves. It’s vibrant, exceptionally well-written, and presents a picture of a community. Whitaker gives short-shrift to Lampkin, but as I’ll discuss later on the blog, this gives me an opportunity to correct the record. Such corrections, amplifications, and new points of emphases are why history writing—“historiography”—is cumulative and accretional.

Regional histories are important, and one of the great joys is to be able to learn about Pittsburgh generally, and histories of black Pittsburgh in particular. On this latter score the work of Joe Trotter, Laurence Glasco, Rob Ruck, and Adam Lee Cilli, among others, has been particularly important. Sports fans will love Ruck’s book on the Negro Leagues (which had important connections to Daisy’s Hill district) Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh; any book with Satchell Paige as a central character has to be a lively book. The esteemed historian Joe Trotter has written a host of books on black Pittsburgh and the wider region; his Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II (with Jared Day) is a detailed sociological account. Laurence Glasco has written books on black Pittsburgh and the New Deal. He has a new biography out, August Wilson’s American Century: Life as Art, about the great Pittsburgh writer who came from, and has written about, the Hill community in which he grew up and in which Daisy was so active. Wilson and Lampkin never crossed paths, but Wilson’s work, some of the most important American writing in the last century, carries the legacy of the community that Lampkin did so much to build.

Just the other day I ordered Adam Lee Cilli’s Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915–1945. I don’t know how Cilli will tell his story yet, but I suspect it will offer the most detailed accounts of Lampkin’s work in the community to yet appear in the scholarship. So I am really looking forward to this one. I may offer a full review of Canaan, Dim and Far in the near future.

It wasn’t only Pittsburgh that shaped (and was shaped by) Daisy’s life. Philadelphia and Washington, DC, both played important roles in Lampkin’s early upbringing, and Philadelphia helped to shape her early political work. So I’ll also be reading up on those two cities. Philadelphia and Washington were not only important because Lampkin grew up in those regions, but because both were, for similar reasons, vital centers of black cultural and political life. Both cities had longstanding and well-developed communities of free African Americans prior to the Civil War, and remained centers of intellectual and political life long after.

Philadelphia, in particular, was shaped by abolitionist politics. In part because of abolitionism, Philadelphia became the center of the AME Church in America, and AME history is a big part of Lampkin’s early life. There are important books on AME history that I will be consulting shortly.

Philadelphia (and to a lesser extent Pittsburgh) also became vital centers of black social life because both cities had been important nodes on the Underground Railroad. Daisy and William Lampkin were both born long after the Underground Railroad ceased to exist. But as a part of the community legacy in both of those cities I’ve also been reading local histories of the Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania. I don’t expect any of those stories to directly inform Lampkin’s life, but there may be a few sites here and there in the 1910s and 1920s that had played important roles a century earlier and that continued to be part of the community well into Daisy’s life. These may add color and texture to my narrative.   

Lampkin’s first entree into formal political organization was in the effort to secure American women the right to vote. There is a vast and growing literature on the suffrage movement, especially investigating the often-fraught relationship between black and white suffrage leaders and organizations. At the local level, Eliza Smith Brown’s recent She Devils at the Door, which examines suffrage leadership in Pittsburgh via two of Brown’s relatives, offers fine-grained local texture to a story often told from a national level. I’ll also be consulting an older book by Elinor Rice Hays, Lucy Stone: One of America’s First and Greatest Feminists, for the backstory on the woman who gave her name to the organization of Lampkin’s first leadership role. There is a broader wealth of scholarship on the suffrage movement that is germane to my story.  

Much of Lampkin’s early political work was also a response to profound changes in American society during her life, notably the vast movement of African Americans from the south to the north, what we call the “Great Migration.” Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration has rightly commanded much recent attention, and I am finishing that now. There are also important scholarly books (Joe Trotter has contributed a number of these), including a favorite of mine that I read several years ago, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America by James N. Gregory. Also on the reading list are related histories of the Urban League, which emerged to help ease the entree of Southern migrants into northern urban areas,  and in which Lampkin was heavily involved.               

The other great endeavor of Lampkins life, of course, was the NAACP. There is a wealth of recent books on the NAACP and its leading figures, some scholarly and some popular, though disappointingly very little mention of Lampkin’s essential role in the association gets mentioned. I’ve revisited Pat Sullivan’s Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement. Rawn James Jr.’s Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation, details the historic work of Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall, but does not mention Daisy. Yvonne Ryan’s biography Roy Wilkins: The Quiet Revolutionary and the NAACP, and Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement each offer compelling portraits of important NAACP leaders, though again neither mentions Lampkin.

There are not as many books on the Pittsburgh Courier as I expected, but there are some titles that examine the black press more generally. Andrew Buni’s biography, Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism, is several decades old, but remains excellent and highly relevant as the only biography of Vann to thus far appear—some enterprising young scholar should correct that oversight. There are several Master’s theses on Pittsburgh and the Courier into which I will be digging shortly.

Speaking of biographies, a great source of inspiration, and thinking about how to structure and organize a biography, comes from reading other biographies. I finished Jonathan Eig’s masterful work on MLK, King: A Life several months ago. In addition to the NAACP biographies I mention above, I’ll also be getting into—finally, after sitting on my shelf for years—David Levering Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning W. E. B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. DuBois was the leading black scholar of the century, a pivotal figure in the NAACP, and a close colleague of Lampkin. There are new books on black female activist heroes including Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and others to provide key points of connection and emulative models.

I continue to read James Baldwin, one of the most extraordinary writers of the twentieth century. Baldwin disapproved of the NAACP’s bourgeois orientation, so it is necessary to keep his critical voice in my ear as I continue to develop Lampkin’s story.

This is just a start. There is a whole literature on the late suffrage movement that requires attention. I haven’t even mentioned the black women’s club movement, on which there are many good books, and which was a crucial part of Lampkin’s life. She was also very active in Pennsylvania Republic politics in the 1920s, so I will have to bone up on my state-level political history quite a bit. There are, of course, endless rosters of relevant civil rights-related titles to consult.

We’re just scratching the surface here. And all of this is in addition to the archival work the project requires; that will comprise a later post.

The historiography is certainly extensive. There is no element of American history that is untouched by the concerns of race, class, and gender, and Daisy Lampkin positioned herself at the heart of all of these. There are thus few limits to the relevant historiography. Onward into the breach . . .

​—David J. Snyder

​PS: What's not on this list that absolutely should be? What am I missing? Let me know in the comments!

​The short answer is that any such repetition risks boring the reader. We are asking a reader to encounter the same stretch of prose twice in the same chapter. That is, one must acknowledge, just a little bit boring. Our goal is to offer prose that sparkles, amazes, delights, or intrigues (or stimulates, arouses, or even mesmerizes, if you want). No writer can achieve those ends all the time, but the repetition of prose (without further clarification or elaboration) clearly works in the other direction. In the interest of lively prose, we should recognize that repetition is probably a trifle boring.
 
But I think there is a more substantial foundation for my objection, and for that we need a brief digression into the use of quotations in general.
 
Why do we offer quotations in historical narratives? (I will address the how of quoting material in a later post.) There are several reasons for the practice. Certainly, many of the authors with whom I work want to signal their trustworthiness. The reader can trust this account, they are saying, because of the fulsome reliance on quotations, quotations that come directly from the primary sources themselves. Writers signal that they’ve done their research, and that the narrative they are conveying comes, as it were, straight from the horse’s mouth. This is an altogether worthy instinct, and the use of quotations to establish veracity is suitable, helpful, and worthy. It is, indeed, necessary.
 
Quoting in the service of veracity is both standard and good practice, but it must be attended with a note of caution. Overuse of quotations can be problematic. Writers ought to remember—some seem to forget—that the story they are telling is their story. They should be jealous of that prerogative, which means that they should surrender the valuable real estate of their own prose only with great hesitancy.
 
Many historical actors lie or misremember, and hence their own account is not always truthful. Of course there may be good reasons to preserve and present such lies in a narrative, so dishonesty is not an automatic disqualification. But what probably is an automatic disqualification is that, besides being liars, mis-rememberers, or obfuscators, many human beings are also boring! Why surrender the valuable real estate of your narrative to some other writer? Why let someone else elbow aside your lively, intriguing, and dynamic prose for their quotidian ramblings? Don’t do it!  
 
Many writers use quotation after quotation to signal veracity and truth-telling. But in truth, passage after passage of ordinary prose, even if it authentic, truthful, and real, can get in the way of a good story. It can be fatiguing for readers to remember who is doing the telling in a given passage. And it can also be boring: Just because a historical actor said something, doesn’t mean that that saying is the most intriguing way to present the material. In the military history I often edit, many writers feel obligated to present one quotation after another, which can make the narrative seem like a report on reports, which is no way to tell a rip-roaring good story.
 
Establish veracity with quotations, to be sure, but don’t let veracity encumber your story.
 
There is at least one other reason to use quotations, and that is to establish verisimilitude: a good quote can give specificity to a moment or an action. A quotation may offer color, may offer sight and sound, or a dose of period realism in a moment that a writer cannot. A particular turn of a historical actor’s phrase may be more elegant than how a writer would phrase the moment. To my mind (and eyes) this is a better reason to offer a quotation than one made in the name of veracity. Let an actor speak for him or herself when the saying cannot be improved upon. Quotations offered in this way will thus be made with elegance and parsimony, more vivacity and color, less taxing and more delightful for the reader.
 
In either case—veracity or verisimilitude—the quotation is offered at a specific point in the narrative, to make, or to emphasize, what we call a “narrative beat.” Just like in music, one’s prose can offer thematic rhythms, the delights of melody, even the “hook” that prevails in pop songs. A good, juicy, well-selected quotation can help make the music of a chapter, especially as it emphasizes or draws attention to particular narrative moments. These are the “beats” that comprise a well-told story, one that whisks a reader along while memorializing key moments.
 
In other words, a quotation in a piece of prose is offered only at a particular moment, to heighten or draw attention to specific narrative points that the writer wants to emphasize in some way. It is their specificity-in-the-moment, more than anything else, that gives them their effectiveness.
 
Which brings us back to epigraphs. The point of the epigraph is to offer a point of thematic contemplation. The epigraph illustrates the theme of the chapter—the whole chapter. The epigraph loses its function, and becomes in fact a point of confusion, if it is intended to apply only to a portion of a chapter, even more so a moment in a chapter.
 
An epigraph, in other words, is generic in a way that a quotation is not. A quotation, by definition, is meant to be specific, and in fact, the more specific (i.e., to the particular point in the narrative at which it appears), the better.
 
By recycling the passage as both epigraph and quotation, we are asking readers to accept a saying as both general (applicable to the whole chapter) and specific (applicable to only one particular point in the narrative.) This is bound either to produce confusion in the reader, or he or she will reject one usage of the passage in favor of the other. In either case, we would undermining any purpose we maintain for the quotation.
 
The confusion is probably slight, and may (as I trust it is in the case I am citing) be readily resolvable. But the best prose doesn’t ask readers to resolve internal or logical or narrative inconsistencies. Recycling the epigraph later in the chapter doesn’t emphasize the quotation, it confuses the narrative, however slightly, working against a reasonable writer’s purpose. For that reason the practice is probably best avoided.
 
—David J. Snyder

Wyoming had given me something else as well that I took with me to Carbondale: the American Studies program enjoyed close relationships with exchange programs in the Netherlands. Dutch students loved to come to Laramie, exchanging the most densely populated country on the planet for what was one of the least. And that is how I met my future Dutch wife.

She would soon enroll at SIU with me to pursue her own studies. In time she would transfer to the University of Michigan and the denser Holocaust studies offerings there. But I was also developing a keener interest in contemporary Dutch history, a topic virtually non-existent in American higher education. You can read about how my scholarly agenda shifted here, but suffice it to say that I was now becoming highly sensitized to the role of contingency--luck, fortune, and happenstance--in the flow of events.

I would take my first teaching job at Grand Valley State in 2001, a Fulbright to the Netherlands in 2003–04, and another teaching job at Central Michigan University a few years after that. By 2008 we were on our way to the University of South Carolina, where I taught for thirteen years, interspersed with a year teaching at the University of Utrecht.

I taught—a LOT: dozens of courses in many different subjects: surveys and upper-level offerings, hoary topics well-traveled, and brand new courses I developed myself. I published quite a bit as well: eight peer-reviewed scholarly articles, three co-edited anthologies, and dozens of lesser pieces. I worked on my book intermittently, which finally appeared earlier this year, though that is a topic that will get a post of its own. I delivered dozens of conference papers at home and abroad. And I gained extensive administrative and management experience as Faculty Principal of an internationally-themed living-learning community. I’ve served on every type of committee the university has to offer, from thesis committees to curricular committees to diversity committees to countless ad hoc committees. There isn’t a better way to get something done, with democratic accountability, than through a committee. There isn’t a better way to bury a politically unpopular initiative either.

It has not been a linear path, and certainly not conventional. My career has been marked more by stubborn determination than brilliance. But I have maintained my love for the study of History. I am certain more than ever that we cannot know ourselves if we do not know our history: personal, family, regional, national, and global, all those histories are interconnected and they have produced each one of us. We all are—you, me, everyone—the sum total of all that has come before, whether we know it or not. Many Americans seem content to remain oblivious to the past which has produced us, even, I think, wholly committed to the maintenance of historical ignorance. Others seem satisfied to distort self-knowledge with the comforting warmth of myth. I think there’s a better way, a more honest path to awareness, understanding, and truth, even if that path requires confronting and acknowledging uncomfortable realities from time to time.

--David J. Snyder

It's a strange world we live in, where things often don't seem real unless they've been represented or replicated in the virtual world. Mom died well before the internet became a fact of our lives. You can Google "Gail Margery Lee," and you get no hits. Her virtual invisibility bothers me, because to me she's so very present. If anything good in me persists, it's because of her fierce commitment to the project of raising her children, in the very little time she had.

This picture was taken in about 1970 or 1972, just a year or two before her diagnosis. You can see the anchor motif on her blouse, a cheesy 70s-era polyester, but also a nod to the Boston area in which she grew up and loved so much. Her badge reads "Patient Advocate," to reflect the volunteer work she did at the hospital that would soon treat her own deadly disease. I look at her hands in this photograph, and I can still remember the texture of her fingers and her well-manicured polish.

She died in 1977, at 35 years of age, far younger than I am now -- which remains a fact I will never be able to process. She never met her grandchildren, Jazz Snyder-Burton or Dashiell Snyder, but she would have loved them and been so proud.