​I am privileged to work on dozens of fascinating manuscripts every year (check out my editing portfolio here!), but last year something particularly noteworthy and unusual came across my desk. A retired CIA agent and overseas operative named Victor Motier asked for help with a memoir. Victor is not a writer by trade, though that is one of the few professions that he has not undertaken in his more than twenty-year career inside the agency. He has served all over the world, including on the front lines of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). What he produced is absorbing, exciting, and harrowing in ways I did not expect.

Most writers are aware to avoid cliches, which in nonfiction writing often appear in the form of metaphor: blind eyes, cold shoulders, hearts of stone, and the like. We know not to make all of life into a journey, and not all love must occur on a battlefield. We refuse to read between lines, we play our cards wrong, and we do judge books by their covers. We know that cliched metaphors in your writing will turn off your readers faster than water off a duck's—You get the idea.
 
But cliche still creeps in. Many writers still can’t resist to punctuate their writing with casual colloquialisms in the form of stock phrases. A stock phrase is employed to punctuate a passage or to add emphasis. And so every thing that is “first” is also “foremost.” Everything that is “last” is also assured to not be “the least.” And all “opportunities” are “golden.”

​Very much belatedly, in 2021, the federal government finally recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday, a day in which all Americans should take pride. On June 19, 1865, at Galveston, Texas, some of the last enslaved persons still held in bondage were informed of their freedom.* Juneteenth thus symbolizes the final eradication of chattel slavery in this country, an outcome for which not only hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers and their commander in chief died, but a day for which many thousands of Americans, including many themselves enslaved and those in the abolitionist movement, had worked and struggled, at considerable personal cost.

​Daisy Lampkin was born in 1883 or 1884, nearly twenty years after the 13th Amendment (mostly) outlawed slavery in the US. But her life intersected with the history of the anti-slavery movement in a number of ways, making her an heir to Juneteenth and an important point of connection between nineteenth century abolitionism and twentieth century suffrage and civil rights activism.

The dismantling by the Trump administration of venerable foreign policy agencies such as the USAID, and the hobbling of venerable multilateral institution such as NATO, the World Health Organization, the UN, and many others, seems unquestionably to have brought to a sudden, and shocking, end the exercise of American power on the global stage. I write at some length about many of these institutions, and the vigorous support of them by Americans and global partners, in my book. I give primary attention to what American multilateralism meant for post-WWII Dutch reconstruction and renewal. But the work of these institutions and practices carried similar consequences for nations and communities around the world, for decades after the end of World War II. 

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: