​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:

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.