A few weeks ago I made a post on the various literatures, sub-fields, and specialties that informed my book, American Power in the Netherlands. I suspect many non-historians don’t fully understand the extent of other scholarship upon which historians rely to tell their stories, the cumulative and accretional building that goes into any work of legitimate history.

The context—what practitioners call “historiography”—for my Lampkin biography is no less extensive. Our lives touch so many other lives in so many ways, and this richness produces endless lines of investigation by scholars endeavoring to capture these connections. This is why we have regional and local histories, political histories, cultural histories, social and sociological histories, gender histories, diplomatic and military histories, intellectual and ideological histories, material and technological histories, and so much more.

It is incredibly stimulating to engage with all these stories in the context of the Lampkin project. I had done the obligatory reading on the civil rights movement, suffrage, Jim Crow, and other topics back in graduate school. But there is a wealth of new material out there that informs the project. Much of it is academic history, but it’s also been inspiring to discover the breadth and quality of popular, non-academic history relevant to Daisy’s story.

​Here is just a sampling of what I am currently reading, have recently read, or am shortly planning to read to give substance to the Lampkin narrative:

An interesting style question materialized the other day that, on its face, seems to carry only a little significance. It was an idiosyncratic matter that may apply to only select manuscripts, but which I thought was also more broadly instructive for those writing historical non-fiction. The question involves quotations, specifically as chapter epigraphs, but it also opens up a broader discussion about how and when to use quotations in general in history writing.
 
An author with whom I have been working wanted to use a particular quotation both as a chapter epigraph and also repeated as a quotation later in the chapter. I pushed back and suggested recycling quotes in this way was not a good idea. The author insisted, however, and after an appeal to the publisher, I relented. One should always choose one’s battles, and in this case, the stakes were not high enough and the infraction not severe enough to ruffle an author’s feathers. So I let the repetition stand. It is not the end of the world, or of this book’s credibility (it is a really good book), to have the same quotation exist in two places, as I readily acknowledge. But I still maintain I am right in this instance, and that the matter is worth an extra thought.
 
An epigraph, you will recall, is a quotation, usually in full, placed at the beginning of a chapter as something of a literary appetizer or thematic soupçon. It is designed to whet the reader’s appetite, offer a pithy or engaging way to prepare a reader’s mind for the chapter, and, perhaps most importantly, propose a metonymical or allegorical indication of what the chapter’s theme is about. Indeed, it is the chapter theme in brief.
 
So what’s wrong with recycling the chapter’s theme as an ordinary quotation later in the chapter?

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.

​The awards keep coming for Calvin Stovall. Last year Calvin’s Hidden Hospitality: Untold Stories of Black Hotel, Motel, and Resort Owners from the Pioneer Days to the Civil Rights Era (Brown Books) was nominated for a prestigious NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Literary Work category. Just last month we learned Hidden Hospitality was given the Literary Award for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation by the 2026 Black Caucus American Library Association. Calvin’s book is a trailblazing account of black hotel, restaurant, and resort owners who built businesses in the face of Jim Crow segregation, and in so doing built communities and legacies. Many readers may be familiar with the so-called Green Book publication which alerted black travelers to friendly establishments for rest and refreshment. Calvin’s book uncovered the stories of the people who ran those establishments as they fought racism, forged profitable enterprises, accrued political influence, and in many cases created centers for civil rights action and activism.

​As graduation from Illinois neared I applied to grad school, but here my naivete caught up with me once again. I applied to some of the best PhD programs in the country. But I didn’t have the background for it. My army experience was no advantage in such programs, which were tailored to high achievers and rewarded not practical experience but conventional, recognizable academic success. My army experience hurt me in another, unexpected way. I had satisfied nearly two years’ worth of credits in night school during my enlistment, an achievement of which at the time I was proud. But that meant I was at the university for only two years. I did good work in my history classes, but I was not around long enough to build relationships, stack extra-curricular accomplishments, and develop my reputation. The army experience did not translate, and so I am sure my record did not look nearly as strong to the gatekeepers at Princeton and Berkely as my younger competitors. That round of applications went unrewarded.

In previous posts I encouraged readers to avoid adverbs when possible, and to construct active rather than passive sentences. Today I’ll show you how and why to follow that advice.

A great, or even good, sentence may offer description. A truly great sentence almost always describes something, which means it may layer literary device upon literary device: metaphor, simile, synecdoche, or metonymy. It may offer allusion, poetry, and even lyrical beauty. But other than a sentence that is wholly about a state of being (“It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”—Toni Morrison, Sula), certainly for expository writing, most sentences will offer action. And action requires that we attend to our verbs.

I came close to not graduating high school. My sister, my two step-siblings, and I had been cordially invited to leave our house one night in September 1985, my overly-Evangelical father and stepmother declaring the end of their patience over our alleged “rebelliousness.” My sister has movingly told the tale here, so I’ll not recount it in this post. I was a month shy of my eighteenth birthday when I moved out, and about eight months short of graduation.

I lived at the YMCA my senior year, selling Honda motorcycles after school to pay my bills. Because I was now independent of my family, I was allowed to excuse myself from school, a privilege of which I took rather too much advantage. I failed physics and trigonometry, barely passed chemistry, and got through my other classes on a little charm and whatever brain power I could muster. I don’t believe I did any homework that year. Somehow I graduated, my grade point average barely registering a gentleman’s “C.” Most of my friends were off to college. I left the motorcycle shop, took a job as a cook, and registered for some classes at the community college. I failed one of those too.

After a year of such meanderings, I decided to get my act together. I enrolled for night classes at the University of Pittsburgh, trying to realize a years-long dream to return to my hometown. I lived with my Grandmother Katie, took one job at a sports memorabilia shop downtown and another at a local restaurant to pay my expenses, and charted the bus routes to the Cathedral of Learning. About six weeks of that experiment came to an end when the tuition bill came due. I hadn’t really factored tuition into my budget, and all attempts to secure financial aid failed. I had to drop the two classes in which I was enrolled.

With each new discovery, my Daisy Lampkin biography gives me some new cause to celebrate my hometown of Pittsburgh. Now, for the next few days, the whole nation can join in on the love: the National Football League is holding its annual draft this year in the Steel City. I’m not quite the (American) football fan I was growing up in the 1970s, when all the boys on the playground idolized Franco Harris and Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann. As Pittsburgh becomes the center of the professional football universe for a few days, there is, I have come to learn, a connection—thin, perhaps, but nevertheless there—between Daisy Lampkin and the Steelers and Pittsburgh and the NFL’s annual player draft.

The second Trump administration has been attempting to bring under tighter ideological control key cultural and intellectual institutions, including major universities, the Kennedy Center, and the Smithsonian Institution. One prominent target is the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), in the administration’s crosshairs for “improper ideology.” Director Kevin Young resigned a year ago under pressure from the administration. A distinguished poet, writer, and scholar, Young was a worthy successor to the NMAAHC’s founding director, Dr. Lonnie Bunch, now the director of the Smithsonian itself (and embattled by the Trump administration for the same political reasons.)
 
I have enjoyed the privilege of visiting NMAAHC four times. It does not portray anything ideologically suspect, though it may present a history with which some Americans are unfamiliar. Indeed, it may be the best museum in America. And one suspects that is why the Trump administration wants to throttle it.