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.

​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.

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.

​I’ve been discussing the wide variety of modules I offer on FractalPast. The other day I posted about some of the courses I had taken, as the foundation of my historical knowledge. I’ll be making another post next week about the many courses I taught in my more than twenty-year teaching career. But my research also provides another entrée point for expertise in a wide variety of historical fields and subfields. Though seemingly a narrow topic—US-Netherlands relations in the fifteen or so years after World War II—my book actually required that I familiarize myself with a host of distinct historical fields. Many of these overlap, of course, in some cases barely comprising a subfield. But every one of the following subject areas enjoys a robust literature, and the scrupulous researcher is obligated to engage with all of them:

I’m pleased to announce the launch of a new venture: FractalPast online history courses. Editing services will continue, but it seems to me there is a need and a thirst for something new. We live in an age of AI slop, of aggressive propaganda, and stultifying algorithms that constrain the spirit and assault the mind. I think people are hungering for something real, something grounded, something that can help anchor us in unsettled times. And there is no better way to face the present and the future than to understand the past.

When I entered my PhD program, I was primarily interested in the history of the far left in American political life, notably the history of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), including the reactionary attempt to squash far left politics through vehicles such as the Smith Act, loyalty oaths, or McCarthyism. I had written my Master’s thesis on John Howard Lawson, a playwright who became a leading screenwriter in the 1930s and 40s, the doyen of the Stalinist left in Hollywood, and the ringleader of the group of screenwriters and producers who would in 1947 become infamous as the “Hollywood Ten.” Through Lawson I broadened my interests into Hollywood and American cinema history. At one point I even thought I might write a dissertation on the history of American drive-ins. But all that changed in a cemetery in the small town of Amersfoort, The Netherlands. In an instant one cold December afternoon I became a diplomatic historian.

I feel myself growing more and more passionate about books, about publishing books, about writing books myself, and about helping others craft powerful and moving narratives. No doubt it’s a function of age, trying to cram more significance into fewer days. But I’ve come to realize that I’ve always been surrounded by writers and their books, and surely that’s left an imprint. Adolescent summers with my grandmother on Boston’s North Shore put me in a bedroom walled by books. This remains an indelible memory. Upon arrival my habit was always, year after year, to peruse the shelves, finger the spines, study the titles, see which piqued my interest compared to the previous summer. Perhaps I was indexing my intellectual growth in some way. The order of the books never changed on the shelf, however, unless I did it myself, a private time capsule for next year. The centerpiece of that collection, a complete run of Harvard’s fabled set of classics, “The Five Foot Shelf of Books,” now sits on my shelf. Even now I often lose myself in daydreams staring at my own bookshelves. Entering the home of a new acquaintance, I always make a direct run to the bookshelves, if there are any.

I get asked from time to time why I call my business and my website “FractalPast”? A fractal is a mathematical concept, a geometry that comprises “a never-ending pattern.” According to the Fractal Foundation, “Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales.” At every level of magnification, in other words, a fractal repeats itself in the same pattern. YouTube videos of fractal patterns can either relax or drive you mad—either way Pink Floyd on the turntable may be necessary.

Facebook "Memories" function reminded me today that we lost Dad about six years ago. I posted the following thoughts a couple weeks after he passed. Some of this still moves me, so I share it with readers today. Regular writing, history, and book posting will resume tomorrow: