​To be sure, not every type of writing employs topic sentences as such. Fiction, some memoir, even certain types of narrative non-fiction, either avoid, or can get away with avoiding, the use of formal topic sentences. But for most of us toiling in the realms of history and much non-fiction, especially those of us who want our work to carry a strong analytical line, then topic sentences are almost certainly necessary. And if they are necessary, doing them well is crucial.
 
But why are they so important? There are at least two reasons.
 
The first is that the topic sentence introduces the topic of the paragraph. It is the first sentence of the paragraph, and that position gives it crucial work to perform: The first sentence of the paragraph tells you what the rest of the paragraph is going to be about. This seems obvious, but it bears reflection. If your writing seems to meander, if it seems unfocused or imprecise, there is a very good chance that the underlying cause is that your paragraphs address too many topics at once. A strong topic sentence, as a constraint on what the rest of the paragraph can be about, is the necessary fix.
 
Currently I’m reading Isabel Wilkerson’s marvelous The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. This is a book about the massive influx of African Americans from the south to the north that took place between the two world wars. Let’s consider a few of her topic sentences, plucked at random:
 
On page 236, she writes: “He [Robert Foster] was weighing every nuance and eventuality, and the stars seemed to have preordained Oakland.” We know immediately from the topic sentence what this paragraph is about: that Foster had chosen to move to Oakland. Sure enough, the rest of the paragraph details those reasons: Oakland had a large population to give Foster a clientele for his business, and he had a friend already living there. The rest of the paragraph, in other words, merely adumbrates what the topic sentence was already telling us. There are no other topics, beyond the reasons why Foster chose to move to Oakland (e.g., who he met there, how he got there, what he thought it was like, etc.), present in this paragraph.
 
Another example. On page 423, Wilkerson writes: “He [Foster again] would have guests from back east and up the coast and from all over the country.” You know, without reading the book, what this paragraph is about: a big party! And sure enough that is indeed the topic, a big party with “the best hams and the finest heavy bond paper for the invitations.” Again, the topic sentence announces the topic, and the paragraph fills in the details.  
 
The topic sentence is what keeps your paragraph thematically coherent, and therefore what keeps your narrative arc flowing properly. It tells what the paragraph is about, which also means, by definition, what the paragraph is NOT about. Tighten up your topic sentences, force them to constrain what then follows in the paragraph, and your paragraphs will become tighter, more coherent, and the narrative will be more readily followed by your reader.
 
The topic sentence, often, also carries another function, one related to the above. If it constrains the theme of the paragraph, announcing what the paragraph is NOT about, the topic sentence also carries the transition from one paragraph to the next. In the above example about Foster moving to Oakland, even without reading the book we know that in the previous paragraph, Foster was carefully considering various reasons and motivations for his move. In the second example, we know the previous paragraph was about his determination to have a party. There would be no reason to consider having guests if there were not. In this case, the transition is subtle, but subtle transitions are often the best.
 
Consider another example of the transition function, a topic sentence from page 186 of Mark Whitaker’s electric Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance. Whitaker writes “From the beginning, the operation was a Herculean struggle of man against nature.” We KNOW that this paragraph will be about some difficult (i.e., “Herculean”) struggle. In this case, that struggle is the  building of the Burma Road during World War II by African American troops under the command of General Joseph Stillwell. Can you spot the transitional part of the sentence? That’s right, it’s contained in the phrase “the operation.” That is, the previous paragraph introduced “the operation” (i.e., the building of the Burma Road), giving broad strategic and engineering details. The paragraph announced by this topic sentence, by contrast, begins the story of how that construction was undertaken and the brave men who toiled and sweated to make it happen.
 
Now consider the topic sentence for the next paragraph: “Bolden described the mission as ‘Green Hell.’” This is a chapter on the famed Pittsburgh Courier reporter Frank Bolden, who covered the story of African American troops building this road for the paper. The first paragraph in question introduced the topic of the road broadly, followed by the paragraph mentioned above detailing the heavy labors of the men who built it. That paragraph was then followed by this third paragraph, an account of Bolden’s journalistic descriptions of the project in the newspaper. You can see in this topic sentence both the topical function (“Bolden described . . . ‘Green Hell’”), as well as the transitional function (“the mission,” i.e., what we just described in the previous paragraph.) These are effective topic sentences because Whitaker is a subtle writer who writes with precision and economy, but also because the topic sentences are doing all the work he needs them to do: introduce and constrain the paragraph topic, and transition from the previous paragraph.
 
Topic sentences are load-bearing parts of your narrative, likely the most important load-bearing parts. Because they distinguish paragraph from paragraph, they distinguish theme to theme and subtheme to subtheme. They provide the order that you need to build interest and tension. If they are working, your piece is likely working. If the piece is not working, it’s almost certainly because there is a lapse in the topic sentences somewhere.
 
Let me emphasize part of what I just observed. Tension is a good thing to have in a piece of writing. By that I mean narrative tension, the careful parceling of information, the thing that pulls your reader along as he or she grows more eager to find out what happens next. That tension is built out of contrast: this thing is not like that thing, it’s different. The differences can be subtle or can be great, but the point is that without difference, we can’t distinguish one piece of writing from another. Narrative collapses, interest wanes, and the possibility of analysis evaporates. Topic sentences are the first breath of contrast that your reader encounters as they move from one paragraph to the next. Again I emphasize the point: Draw your topic sentences effectively, with both topic and transition, and your reader will be pulled along naturally from one contrasting point to the next.
 
Grab a favorite book off your shelf and flip through it randomly, noting the topic sentences. Can you identify the a)announcement of the paragraph theme and b) the transition from the previous paragraph? If you can identify both of those, you can certainly accomplish the same feat in your own writing. You might even try the exercise with this blog post (but don’t judge me too harshly!)
—David J. Snyder

​I have a son, but it is hard not to look at one’s books like a child in the world. They are often conceived in a flash of insight, gestated over a long period of hard work and high expectations, born into the world after a period of suffering, and then launched to readers in a career over which a parent has no control.
 
My first book, Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (Johns Hopkins, 2013) came out of a conference I organized in 2009. I was discussing the Vietnam War and associated student protest with a group of Honors students, and one of them asked if I knew that a student protest had taken place at the University of South Carolina, where I was teaching. I had not known this. (He was a brilliant student, I must say.) Most of the protests with which we are familiar were northern (or western) affairs: Columbia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Berkeley, Kent State, and elsewhere. But there were protests at southern institutions as well, some of which were quite passionate.
 
Inspired by that student, I put together a conference to bring together scholarship on southern student activism. Former student activist heavyweights such as Chuck McDew, Tom Hayden, Connie Curry, Cleveland Sellers, and Tom Gardner came to address us. Our keynote speaker, Robby Cohen, an acknowledged expert on student activism, approached me later about collecting the papers from that conference into a volume. Rebellion in Black and White is not the first book to address student activism in the deep south; there had been a few others. But our book gathered together the leading scholarship and charted a future direction for research, and that was new. Hard not to be especially proud of your firstborn.

​My second book was likewise a product of serendipity (or an accident, if you prefer I stick to the metaphor). I got an email out of the blue from a Norwegian scholar of whom I had never heard. He had got wind of some of my work on US public diplomacy and European-American relations in the 1940s and 50s, and asked if anyone was working on the 1970s. This was a difficult period in US global hegemony, less like “present at the creation,” and more like “the beginning of the end” (or perhaps the first beginning of the end, followed fifty years later by the actual end of the end). So I proposed we put together a conference on US public diplomacy in the 1970s, and how US officials, and interlocutors at the receiving end, made and received propaganda about America in a very fraught period.
 
He said he had a few connections that might help us. Little did I know this meant connections with the US embassy in Oslo and the famed Norwegian Nobel Institute. We raised some money, planned a conference at the Nobel Institute, and issued our call for papers. More than 70 respondents answered the call! It was a difficult job to select the most promising of these, but we did, and along with a third co-editor (my books always seem to have a surfeit of parentage), convened our conference in Oslo. A volume of those papers followed a couple years later, Reasserting American in the 1970s: U.S. Public Diplomacy and the Rebuilding of America’s Image Abroad (Manchester, 2015). I am proud of this book for several reasons, not least of which because it includes a paper from a student of mine. It is rare to have an undergraduate publish in a book of scholarship, but she made a signal contribution. (I have to be honest, though. Like more than a few middle children, I can never remember the full title of this book.)

​Having a bit of a track record, I was contacted in 2015 by a colleague at the University of Arkansas who was interested in exploring the legacy of Senator J. William Fulbright, a leading foreign policy thinker in the twentieth century, and a former president of the University of Arkansas. Again we formed a convening triumvirate and issued our call for papers. The resulting volume brought together original scholarship into the life and legacy of Fulbright himself, coupled with an equal number of chapters exploring the rich legacy of the prestigious exchange program that bears his name. The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Policy, Power, and Ideology (Kentucky, 2019) took a year or two longer to complete than I anticipated, but like any respectable third child, that one had a mind of its own. There has been scholarship on Fulbright himself, including the wonderful biography by the distinguished historian Randall B. Woods. And the Fulbright program has been treated in scholarly articles. But there is no standard book-length history of the Fulbright program, and while our book doesn’t quite accomplish that feat, it does point in that direction for an enterprising young scholar to take up.

Throughout all this time I continued to work on my own book, American Power in the Netherlands. That birth, however, was a trauma all its own, and deserves its own post.
—David J. Snyder

​To be sure, I am a writer myself, and it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to avoid anticipatory feelings as someone else takes a close lens to my work. It is only natural to have those feelings. But I do want to suggest that those feelings are not the purpose and target of the edit, and that we should do our best to set them to the side.
 
I am describing here primarily the developmental and line-edit (see my blog post here for further discussion of the difference). For copyediting, frankly, there really should not be any anxiety at all. A copyedit is intended to align your manuscript with a publisher’s style guide. It is, for the most part, a mechanical exercise in which personal preferences, personality, and psychology should play little role.
 
But it is, I admit, different at the developmental and line-edit stage. Here a writer’s vision, his or her intentions, in some cases the deeply personal stories they may be sharing and their ideas about how best to share them, our understanding of ourselves and our world, our talent, are all at issue. It would be unusual not to be personally invested in an edit when all that and more is at stake.
 
But personal and psychological reactions will inevitably produce defensiveness, and this is not what we want at this crucial stage. It is important to remember that the object of an edit is not personal, and it is not to elicit a judgment about a writer’s worth, or talent, or value.
 
The process seems a lot like psychotherapy. Psychological analysis can be a very difficult process to get through. There is no text in which we are more deeply invested than the Self. A good therapist never hides from the truth, even when it is unpleasant to hear. Likewise, a good editor will stay focused on the text. While I want to have a good, personal relationship with all my authors—this is, after all, a deeply collaborative enterprise, and rewarding as such—at the end of the day, my focus is improving the text, just like the therapist’s goal is helping a client be the best version of him or herself they can be, however difficult any given session might be.
 
The focus is, and must remain, on the text. My job as an editor is to address the text, ascertain its strengths and weaknesses, and propose strategies for elevating the former and limiting the latter. It is a necessary function because a writer is often too close to the material, too invested in it, to see it as objectively as possible. Those feelings associated with judgment are one measure and expression of that proximity.
 
And perhaps that is why a good editor can seem so threatening. Writers always ask themselves “Ack, why didn’t I see this? How could I have let that omission slip?” But that is the point: It is very difficult for any of us to have that kind of insight. An editor is more likely to be able to see the matter clearly precisely because he or she is not so directly invested, on a personal level.
 
Moreover, as an editor, I see myself as a counter-puncher. I am only responding to what I see on the page, including any omissions or lacunae that persist. But I only have that insight BECAUSE OF WHAT IS ALREADY THERE. Even when I propose a new phrase or a new passage, I am not inventing so much as responding. As such, think of your editor as your prototypical reader: the response that the text provokes in me is likely similar to the response it provokes in others.
 
As a counter-puncher, I can also see that the solution to whatever ails a particular narrative is also usually, almost always, already present. The text will offer the solution, if we just step back and let it talk to us a little bit. This is what the editor does.
 
My developmental and line edits are not judgments. They are possibilities to consider. They are part of your text because they are a reaction, and nothing more than that, to your text. Those suggestions are, as it were, always there, embedded in the text that you have already produced. All that remains is to accept them or not. (And rejecting them is good, because it means the writer--you!--HAVE considered, and have chosen to retain the original prose. It is all the more considered in that way.) But either way, what remains is still very much your text, and nothing more than your text.
 
There is reason to fear the reaper, perhaps, and maybe even your therapist, but not your friendly neighborhood editor.
 
—David J. Snyder

Few social, cultural, technological, and commercial developments stand more central to modern American history than the automobile. The automobile not only revolutionized transportation, shrinking forbidding distance into minor inconvenience, it also revolutionized time, turning weeks into days and days into hours. Americans’ conceptions of what is possible, what is an obligation and what is a duty, what constitutes fun and what makes for drudgery, were transformed by the automobile.
 
But the car was also so much more than that.
 
The car transformed our ideas about recreation, about social etiquette, and how we should spend our leisure time. The car defined work time from leisure time. The car marked social class and social standing, and presented new pressures of social emulation and new possibilities for self-expression. It revolutionized our commercial lives—how we produce, how we market to each other, and how we buy and sell: think about the American factory system, and our credit system, to name just two examples, of the nearly-infinite knock-on transformations of the auto industry. We work, we play, we eat, we socialize, all differently in the twentieth century than we did in the nineteenth, and the automobile is as much responsible for that as anything.
 
Leno owns over 300 cars and motorcycles, plus related artifacts such as steam engines and vintage fighter plane engines. He was always interested in cars and began to collect early in his career. He parlayed his television success into a massive working garage/warehouse complex where the collection is stored, restored, reconditioned, maintained, and displayed. He has for years detailed the collection in a YouTube channel that offers twenty- to thirty-minute deep dives into select artifacts. “Jay Leno’s Garage” is the name of his video line, but it is also a place which employs artisans and craftsmen who repair, maintain, and most of all, preserve the artifacts. And what is being preserved is not just rich-guy toys, but a lineage of global engineering, design, manufacturing, and retailing history. Leno’s collection includes its fair share of exotic supercars, such as his 1955 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing. But he also appreciates the roles cars have played in our lives, and he is as likely to profile a station wagon as a Jaguar XKE.
 
Of course the collection includes its fair share of exotic Lamborghini, Porsche, MacLaren (perhaps his favorite badge) and Aston Martin supercars (he is not a big fan of Ferrari.) But he is just as likely to feature work-a-day cars from the 1950s and 60s for which he maintains a nostalgic soft-spot (like his Dad’s 1966 Ford Galaxie), esoteric experiments like his 1938 Tatra T87, or fun mid-century exuberations-in-chrome like his Packards and Cadillacs. He has a soft spot for engineering innovation, and for that reason frequently highlights his Duesenbergs or his extensive collection of British motorcycles. And there is no particular bias for luxury: some of his favorites are old steam-driven cars like his various Stanley Steamers or his several Whites and Dobles.
 
Indeed, one of the truly remarkable aspects of his video presentations is his familiarity with the engineering and technology. One of my favorite episodes is his careful step-by-step (and there are a LOT of steps!) explanations of how one operates a 1906 Stanley Steamer Vanderbilt Cup Racer. Watching Leno patiently and carefully explain how to fire and operate a boiler-powered car is a college course itself. He speaks with great knowledge about the evolution of carburetors, transmissions, and cylinder heads. Some of his favorite cars in the collection are engineering experiments or one-offs, such as his 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado or his 1963 Chrysler Turbine—a real life jet car. He has a keen sense for innovation and the men (usually men), operating out of a garage with little more than a wrench, turning dream into reality.
 
Leno is not a trained historian but he does have a sense of how important the automobile has been, and its endless relevance to American social, political, and cultural history, consumer and economic history, environmental history, geopolitics, and art and aesthetic design. The depth here may not appease experts in these respective fields, but as an entrée point to discussing deeper twentieth century history, there can’t be many better.
 
Th cars and the engineering are the star, but there is a subtext, which is the human element. Many of his YouTube episodes feature unique, interesting, and innovative cars lovingly restored by others. He is regular enthusiast and promoter of American car clubs and amateur associations and brings many of these fellows into his garage to showcase their passions. Whatever you think of Leno’s comedy, he is a good interviewer, honed by years of mining vapid celebrity interviews for television gold. Despite being arguably the most famous (and one of the wealthiest) car guys in the nation, Leno is fascinated by the stories of ordinary people who express their love and passion through their vehicles. His interviews are often as compelling as the vehicles themselves. He understands the love for, and identity with, cars that people maintain. Leno is also genuinely interested in the artisanship and expertise of his guests. He is concerned to hear about knowledge and skills, how those are passed on from mentor to apprentice, and how a lifetime spent in shops and garages adds up to passion, tradition, and generational connection points. What he shows is not merely engineering and technical development, but the story of people and the things that define them.
 
Leno has amassed a genuine knowledge of automotive and motorcycle engineering and design history. He understands how the dictates of the marketplace often clash with the preferences of the engineers, and he takes pains to highlight those conflicts. He has an encyclopedic recall of processes and technologies, and also of the designers, many obscure, who provided the vision and labor behind the artifacts he now maintains. In so doing he not only honors that work but preserves it for future generations.
 
Few industries have been as consequential to world—and certainly American—history as the automotive industry. Very few individuals possess either the resources or the expertise to be able to illuminate so many aspects of that industry as Jay Leno. As climate change increasingly mandates the extinction of the internal combustion engine, Leno is a good reminder that the passion, expertise, and energy that drives many people’s historic interest in automobiles will need to be rechanneled into other productive enterprises and hobbies.
 
Take or leave his comedy, but give the man props as one of our most essential public historians.

​--David J. Snyder

​There are essentially three editorial phases in which an editor engages a manuscript: the developmental phase, line editing, and copyediting.
 
Developmental Editing: This is the initial phase, the first time an editor such as myself encounters your manuscript. Well-seasoned and experienced writers may not need a developmental edit. But for most writers, wrestling with a manuscript with which they may have been deeply engaged for months or years, a developmental edit is at least helpful, and likely necessary.
               
At the developmental stage what I am focused on are big picture concerns: narrative arc and structure, organization, and proper emphasis of major and minor themes. We want to make sure that key turning points are mapped, key points included in their preferred place, and that key points and themes are properly weighted or emphasized.  
               
Much of what I focus on at this stage is the ironic question of what to leave out. For many writers—certainly for me—the early drafting stages are expansive. I write a lot of words, sometimes saying the same thing two or three different ways, as I struggle and work to clarify what I intend and find better ways to say it. Developmental editing is therefore a process of elimination, deciding what is superfluous, what doesn’t support the narrative, what is a distraction. Including lots of supporting material is a high-value practice in the early drafting stages, but once we get to the developmental stage, we’re laser-focused on what needs to be removed, what needs to be downplayed, or what should be removed to the footnotes.
               
Not every writer will need a developmental editor, but every manuscript needs a developmental edit. If you are practiced and experienced, you can probably do the developmental edit yourself. If not, it’s crucial to find a pro that can help guide you. If you’ve ever DNF’d a book, or threw something against the wall in anger, it is almost certainly because it did not enjoy a quality developmental edit. Do not shortchange your manuscript at this stage.
 
Line Edit: A line edit is a close reading at the sentence level, focused on sentence structure, word choice, and flow. We’re on the lookout for grammatical structure, making sure our verbs and nouns agree, that we’re not overusing adverbs, and that the use of the passive voice is as limited as possible.
 
We’re making sure that all the sentences are not only structurally sound, but that they are all load-bearing, that is, they don’t do too much or too little. This is especially important for your transitions and topic sentences, to be solid and do their work.
 
I am also looking for appropriate sign-posting—the metaphor editors use to describe the phrasing that reminds your readers of what is at stake, and what the argument(s) of the book and theme(s) of the chapter are.
 
It is not possible to do a line edit before a manuscript has been developmentally edited. The latter usually means that sections, passages, and paragraphs have to be moved around. All of that reorganization requires the narrative sinew of topic sentence and proper transitioning. This means that every developmental edit requires, to a greater or lesser degree, prose rewrites and revisions. You can’t line edit something that is not there.
 
Copyedit: This is the final editing stage before production. Here we’re doing a proofread: a final check to make sure there are no typos of any kind. But this is also the stage to ensure that we are in conformity with the prevailing style guides. This means both the prevailing industry style guide (either the Chicago Manual, the AP, or APA7, for most publications) and also the in-house style guide of your publisher. (I wrote about styles and styles guides earlier.)
 
If you are traditionally publishing, the press will do the copyediting for you. But they do not do developmental or line editing. And of course the catch here is that a traditional publishing house will not publish a manuscript that needs developmental or line editing.
 
If you are self-publishing, you might skip developmental and line editing to save cost. Unless you are very certain in your own editing skills, the final product will likely very much reveal your choices, however.
 
Certain hybrid publishers, like the one I mentioned the other day, will do the developmental and line editing for you, but for a fee. Do be sure to confirm this in your contract.
 
In other words, unless you are already confident in your abilities and certain that you know what you’re doing, every manuscript needs a developmental edit, a line edit, and a copyedit. There may be places to economize, but if you want a first-class publication, editing is probably not one of them.

Developmental editing focuses on chapter and book level. Line editing focuses on sentences and paragraphs. Copyediting addresses typos and style conformity. You can't do one until you do its predecessor. That's what I do. That's what makes your manuscript the best it can be.

Writing has been a family affair. Start with the twins, David Levy and Charles Lee. Charles, who changed his last name early in his career to avoid the complications of antisemitism, was my maternal grandfather. Two minutes older than his brother, my great uncle David, and thus his mother’s favorite, Charles started out in the newspaper business, became a book review editor for Boston and Philadelphia papers, then took a PhD in American literature from the University of Pennsylvania. He eventually became an associate dean at Penn, a well-known radio and TV personality and charming man-about-town in Philadelphia. Along the way he produced a number of books including his published dissertation, The Hidden Public, which was an early investigation of the Book of the Month Club as an avatar of middle-class literary tastes. He produced several short story anthologies, at least one work of fiction (the novelization of the Ginger Rogers vehicle, Weekend at the Waldorf), and other miscellaneous pieces. It was as a poet and composer of light verse, however, which probably carries his greatest significance, at least for me. Every year at Christmas he produced much-coveted chapbooks for friends and family, most of which were later collected in published hardback form. “Come to Philadelphia,” went one of his lyrics, “and I will ring the bellferya.” Light stuff, but well rendered and offered with love.
 
I still recall my favorite of his in this vein, a tribute to the 1980 World Series winning Philadelphia Phillies:

​He left a legacy of hundreds like these: light verse, witty doggerel, a few sonnets. Some, like “The Wrestlers,” had real literary merit. I taught that one to my son during Covid-induced homeschooling. Grandpa also wrote a  piece in anguish over losing his daughter, my mother, to cancer in 1977. “The Hunters,” it was called. I did not teach that one.
 
His younger-twin-by-a-minute, David, earned much the greater national reputation, though not quite as a writer. David started his career during the New Deal in the US Treasury. He moved from there to the advertising firm Young & Rubicam, working on accounts in the fledgling television industry. Part of his portfolio was to vet performers on behalf of advertisers lest unsavory political (i.e., communist) ties mar the production’s reputation. David sidled easily into television proper from Y&R, becoming head of programming for NBC in the late 1950s. He was responsible for bringing Bonanza to the air. Let go under mysterious circumstances in the early 1960s, David formed his own production company. His most enduring legacy was the conception that a popular one-panel cartoon that regularly featured in The New Yorker could be fashioned into a popular sitcom. Thus The Addams Family was born. Later in his career he published a few potboiling novels about the television industry; I have vague recollections of his paperbacks prominently displayed in my childhood home.
 
David’s son, Lance, my cousin, has certainly eclipsed his father in his writing career. Lance is an exceptional poet, playwright, and novelist (check him out here: Lance Lee Author.) He’s also written several highly regarded books on screen- and stage-writing craft. My favorite of Lance’s works is his memoir, Family Matters (LWL Books; 2022), an account of his relationship with his father and the latter’s mercurial career. David, the much-despised younger twin, could never quite shake a latent animosity that he carried with him his whole life, exacerbated by a mother (my great-grandmother, Lilly Levy) whose epic acidity and turgid self-consideration is a wonder to behold on the page. True story: Lilly accompanied David on his honeymoon, and tried to break up the marriage in favor of another shipmate whom Lilly favored over her brand new daughter-in-law. Lance needs to turn her into a screen character.
 
The family tradition remains unbroken. Rivaling Lance for reach, mastery of genre, and mounting literary reputation is my kid sister, Rachel Louise Snyder (check her out at www.globalgrit.com.) Rachel cut her journalistic teeth in the harried world of free-lancing, collecting bylines in the Chicago Tribune, Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and other ladies’ periodicals. She reported major stories for American Heritage and The New Republic before her big break, a publishing contract with Norton for her first book, Fugitive Denim. A deeply reported account of the global textile industry, Rachel’s book is ostensibly a biography of your blue jeans, taking readers from the cotton fields of Azerbaijan, to the factories of Cambodia, to the design boutiques in Milan, to the retail shelves in San Francisco.
 
For most writers that would be accomplishment enough. Rachel’s next book was a novel, What We’ve Lost is Nothing, in which she mines our suburban upbringing, and the dark prejudices and paranoia that often lay undisturbed therein, for a truly innovative and gripping narrative tale. Still, though, only prelude.
 
Rachel returned to the world of non-fiction for her third book, the celebrated and highly acclaimed No Visible Bruises, an expose into the troubling world of domestic violence. Stoically focused, Rachel probes the phenomenon from multiple perspectives: Why do violent men commit violence? Why do women stay in violent situations? And what sorts of policing and intervention efforts might stem the national epidemic? One of the key insights in the book is to show in detail why so many women find it so difficult to remove themselves from dangerous environments. The book found a spot in numerous top ten lists and was a finalist for prestigious Kirkus and National Book Critics Circle awards. No Visible Bruises has rightly fomented a national conversation around the topic.
 
But there’s more. Rachel’s most recent publication is a memoir, Women We’ve Buried, Women We’ve Burned. This is a deeply personal, and highly affective account of our shared upbringing, and her more turbulent teenage years. She recounts the loss of our mother, the subsequent ideological loss of our father to charismatic religion, and her ensuing search for meaning and acceptance in a tumultuous world. She also notes the inspiration that “Papa Chuck” had on her decision to become a writer. I’ve read this book twice, partly because it reminded me of many shared experiences I had forgotten, partly because I had to learn that a boy’s experience and a girl’s experience of putatively shared circumstances are seldom the same.
 
The skill that Lance and Rachel show in poetry, fiction, drama, how-to, non-fiction, and memoir is staggering. I know of no other writer of any reputation with such a breadth of mastery over so many genres.
 
It doesn’t stop there. My ex-wife, Dr. Saskia Coenen Snyder, is professor of modern Jewish history at the University of South Carolina. I was along for the ride for her first two books, Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe, which examined patterns of assimilation and segregation in European Jewish communities through the lens of synagogue architecture, and A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting, which traces the involvement of Jewish communities in London, South Africa, Amsterdam, and New York as each comprised a circuit in the global diamond industry.
 
My own efforts pale in comparison to these illustrious writers in my family. But they are a source of constant inspiration. Looking back, I am sure this is one reason I went into a literary academic field. It was a guarantee of being surrounded by excellent writers and effective storytellers. All my friends are writers, and they’ve all produced books of which I am enormously impressed . . . and sometimes even a little jealous.  
 
So let’s see what I can do with Daisy Lampkin now . . .
 
—David J. Snyder

​Late last week I had the opportunity to tour a notable hybrid publisher in Texas. This is a highly reputable company in business for over thirty years. They have an extensive back catalog and their books sell well both online and in bookstores. But it is pricey to get in their catalog. At this particular firm, a contract to publish will likely run an author upwards of $20,000 or more, depending on additional services required. Seems like a lot, doesn’t it?
 
Let’s reflect on what you get for your money. First, not all manuscripts are accepted for publication. This is a boutique outfit publishing around two dozen titles per year. Every submission is screened and a report generated for the author.
 
For those that are accepted, an extensive editorial process commences. Because many of the authors served by this firm are novice or first-time authors, two full rounds of developmental editing commence the process. Then a full round of line edits, followed by a final copy-edit. Suffice it to say that the editorial process itself is more stringent—likely much more stringent—than in most university presses, certainly more extensive than for my book.
 
Then you will enjoy the services of a dedicated, in-house design team to design not only the book’s cover, but the interior layout and typographical design. Remember you will have to learn how to do this yourself or pay a free-lancer if you self-publish, but here it is included in the contract price. For picture-heavy books, competence at this stage is essential.
 
For anyone who may have struggled with self-publishing, the editorial and design services alone may be worth the price of admission. But for my money, even more value comes later. First, a contract with this firm gets you access to its extensive distribution system. The warehouse in Minnesota is connected to distribution agents who operate throughout the country, ensuring that books get placed in Barnes & Nobel, Books-a-Million, and other bookstores.
 
The access to distribution may be worth the price of the contract, but there’s more. This firm, somewhat uniquely, also offers in-house publicity services. That means they can help an author set up a website, book a speaking tour, learn how to access podcasts and TV interviews, offer presentation coaching, and more. This is treatment that only the most prestigious authors at the big 5 normally enjoy.
 
And here’s the kicker: because you are paying to publish, the contracts stipulate that authors will recoup 80–90% on the back end as royalties. That’s right: where the traditional publishers pay a miniscule 5–7% royalty, after advances are covered, hybrid authors at this firm receive nearly all the ensuing sales of their book. Unlike the traditional presses which retain the rights, authors also keep all rights to their work under this model.
 
I asked one official of this company what percentage of authors make money on a $25,000 contract and was informed that about one-third of authors do not recoup their full investment, but one-third do, and another one-third actually see a profit on their books. This is an eye-popping ROI in this industry.
 
It’s all the more remarkable when one considers who constitutes the likely market for this kind of service. If you are working on a memoir, or a novel, or a standard piece of narrative non-fiction, this model may not be for you. But if you are a business leader, have aspirations of becoming a thought leader or an influencer, then an investment in having a book to your name may be immeasurable. A book as a marketing tool may seem objectionable to the purists, but even in the academic world a book is often seen as a box to tick on the way to tenure. For many authors in this market, the thinking is similar: write a book to position yourself in your industry, to attract new customers, or to announce yourself in some broader arena. And $25,000 to make that investment the highest quality it can be, and to give it access to all the markets that traditionally published books enjoy, backed by a team of coaches to help you design a bespoke marketing campaign, and even a book that does not return its full investment in sales may still be exceptionally profitable to the author.
 
Think of it this way: Every author pays to publish his or her book. Traditional authors pay on the back end when the publisher recoups the lion’s share of the royalties. Hybrid authors pay on the front end. So the questions then becomes: Do you have the tolerance for risk? Or, put another way, are you willing to bet on yourself?
 
There are, of course, scammers out there, so prospective authors are encouraged to research hybrid companies before signing on the dotted line. Many companies do not offer the full range of these services.  As always, caveat emptor. But if you find yourself in the position that authoring a book is important for your career prospects, or you have an idea and don’t want to endure the interminable delays and inevitable rejections associated with traditional publishing, then the hybrid approach may just be a fit for you.
 
—David J. Snyder

​Ideologically combative it may not have been, but US propaganda efforts in the Netherlands were extensive. I did not uncover evidence of a sustained CIA campaign in Holland, but there undoubtedly was agency interest in Dutch unions and other priority target groups. The US agencies that did pursue an extensive propaganda campaign included the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA, i.e., the Marshall Plan administration), the State Department, and later the United Staes Information Agency (USIA).
 
ECA propaganda commenced first and may have comprised the largest propaganda campaign ever undertaken in peacetime. The agency churned out an endless stream of pamphlets, books, films, posters, news items, radio programs and more. Most of this information was prosaic and factual, aiming to inform about what American economic aid was accomplishing or sought to accomplish. Much of it, however, was advocative, explicit with the lesson “You too can be like us.” Here the ECA claimed that the factors that made the American economy the envy of the world could be replicated in Europe: mass production and high worker productivity, low trade barriers, and cooperative labor relations.
 
One of the most popular items in this vein was a simple pamphlet aimed at workers, with illustrations by the famed Dutch cartoonist, Jo Speier. With stark and simple drawings, De Marshallhulp en U (The Marshall Plan and You) advanced the argument that without ECA funds, the factories would shut, the bread would go unbuttered, and the whole European economic system would collapse.

​Later in the Marshall Plan-era, after 1950 with the pressures on NATO rearmament greatly increased, the Americans would push a much more ideologically-inflected propaganda message centered on what became known as “Technical Assistance.” Arguing that only with greatly increased productivity (i.e., output per work unit) could Europe hope to afford massive new defense efforts while maintaining minimally acceptable standards of living, the Americans would insist that the Europeans would have to adopt American-style work habits, behaviors, and technology. As I show in my book, the Dutch were happy to accept technical advice where and when they felt it suitable, but otherwise rejected the larger message that only by becoming like the Americans could they find their way out of the economic trap.
 
State Department information and cultural programs came in waves, the first commencing with the passage of the Smith-Mundt Act in 1948. These efforts joined the independent Fulbright exchange program, in operation since 1946. Much of the State Department effort centered on acquainting European audiences with Americans, and included American libraries in host cities, films and publications, and the beginnings of what would become known as the “Foreign Leader” program of exchanges of prominent individuals from the worlds of politics, journalism, and labor unions.
 
A more intense period of State Department propaganda came in 1950, as the Korean War exacerbated wider fears of a general conflict with the Soviet Union. Known as the “Campaign of Truth,” this approach preached a “full and fair picture” of the USA, but in reality hawked a militant, aggressive anti-communism and anti-Sovietism. The aim was to promote a much more aggressive rearmament among the Europeans, and in pursuit of that a more strident, fear-based propaganda ensued. More intensive depictions of the dangers represented by communism in general, and the military dangers of the Soviet Union in particular, prevailed.
 
The death of Stalin and a new Republican administration in the United States began to release some of this pressure, and after 1953 a softening in US propaganda came into focus. After 1953, most State Department programming was folded into a new agency, the United States Information Agency. The USIA represented several new developments: First, it saw, somewhat ironically, an intensified effort by the Eisenhower administration to center information and cultural programming. Eisenhower, as Kenneth Osgood points out, understood the costs of war and reckoned that if propaganda could undermine the USSR more cheaply than bombs and bullets, more effort should be placed there. The Eisenhower team also sought to protect US information and cultural programming by removing it from the State Department, where it was under constant attack from conservatives, into the new agency where it could more readily be sheltered from Congressional undermining.
 
USIA programming tended to emphasize cultural affairs. It was something of a golden age for officials who prioritized deeper cultural relations, including in the rarified worlds of music and high art, as opposed to the harsh propaganda themes of the Campaign of Truth. Exhibitions and arts exchanges in painting, music, and dance occurred. Heavy emphasis was laid on American fine arts, and American painters, jazz masters, dancers, and singers were celebrated by their government, often for the first time in American history. Dutch audiences made enthusiastic patrons for these events.
 
Before the end of the decade, however, the steam had run out of the USIA effort. The American National Exhibition held in Moscow over the summer of 1959 seemed to herald a new era in US-USSR relations, hinting even at normalization. Vice President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khruschev would engage their famous “Kitchen Debate” at this exhibition, suggesting that geopolitical rivalry might further vent itself into the arena of friendly consumer competition. Future dangers awaited when the Berlin Crisis would once again make Europe a flashpoint of superpower rivalry, but for now peace and friendly competition, not nuclear showdown, was in the air. For many conservatives, the USIA’s high-mindedness—which they did not appreciate under any circumstances—seemed increasingly a lavish waste.

In the Netherlands, the last great propaganda spectacle would be the exhibit Het Atoom, at Schiphol, in 1957, part of Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative that occupied so much of the softer USIA approach. USIA budgets in Holland were slashed in 1958, and then all but shuttered in 1959 as budgets cratered. The most serious concern that year was that the now-trailered Het Atoom exhibit posed a danger to unsuspecting bicyclists rounding a corner unawares.

​As I conclude the chapter on this topic in my book:

Further reading:
Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.)
 
Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.)
 
Michael L. Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.)

Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

Kenneth A. Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006.)
 
—David J. Snyder