Reintroductions

Regular readers will notice a wide range of topics covered in this blog and may be wondering what it’s all about. My historical interests are varied and I cover a wide area, from diplomatic history to civil rights, from pop culture to public goods, from the history of empire to the craft of writing. The throughline to all this is that I believe stories matter. I think the stories that we tell ourselves, about ourselves, ground us—they help form our identities and offer levers to change ourselves and our world. I am a fundamentalist when it comes to stories and how we make stories. They are our anchors in an increasingly rudderless world.

Some of these stories I am determined to tell formally, such as my book on Dutch-American relations and the blog posts that introduce that book. My interest here is American power, how it is deployed overseas, and how it has been received, negotiated, resisted, and employed by those on the receiving end. From that set of basic questions I’ve developed a broader geographic and chronological interest in the development of American power, and readers can see that interest develop as I consider American empire in not only its political and economic dimensions, but in its cultural aspects as well. It is a strange time to be studying American power overseas. When I began my formal academic training my assumption was that American power was one of the permanent bedrocks of the world order. Now Americans are willingly and eagerly—without cause—giving up that power. As I speculated in a previous blog post, I’m not certain whether that development makes my scholarship much more, or much less, relevant.
 
Recently, my fascination with American empire was preempted by another story, however. About six or eight months ago I stumbled (that is indeed the word) onto the story of Daisy Lampkin, a pioneering suffrage and civil rights leader about whom I had never heard before. I did some preliminary digging, and the more I learned about Lampkin, the more fascinating she became. She was possessed of a boundless energy, a fierce commitment to righting wrongs, a keen set of organizational and leadership instincts, and, perhaps above all, what appears to be an endless joy: she and her husband, William, seemed to have known how to live, even given the seriousness of purpose of her career. She has, I have to admit, rather taken over my waking consciousness, and I am determined to write her biography, a story of joy, purpose, and commitment.
 
I am very interested in the theory and philosophy of public goods, about what that means and what the consequences for American life are of our attitudes to the public and private worlds. I have come to believe that there is a serious deficiency in the way we understand—tell the story of—public goods in American life, with tragic consequences for the quality of our governance and our democracy. We don’t have good stories for what public goods mean for the quality of our lives, how they help to define our rights, and how in some cases they have been abused. This is a big story I want to continue to tell, if not in book form, then in a series of what I hope are provocative blog posts.
 
Finally, I hope that my blog, as it drives a small community of interested readers and writers to consider and reconsider the stories that we tell each other, will also help promote ever better ways of telling those stories. These is the ambition of my own writing, and what I coach in others. My greatest pleasure is helping a writer find a more effective voice, a clearer mode of expression, a more compelling story structure. The craft of narrative is what unites the various threads of this blog, and drives all of my work.
 
—David J. Snyder