Historic times
It goes without saying that every era is “historic,” but it’s also true that some eras are more fraught with import than others. Only time will tell whether historians view the present era as one such period, but it certainly feels that way now, doesn’t it?
Everywhere I turn these days, I seem to bump up against primary source documents and their importance in history. Just this past weekend on Book-TV (granted, most weekends it’s nothing BUT historians talking about documents!), I happened to see a conversation of presidential biographers. Robert Caro talked about the document from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin that unlocked the key to Lyndon Johnson’s transformation from lowly junior senator to power broker; it was a handwritten chart in which LBJ tallied the favors he was doing (or not doing) for fellow senators who had sought his help with reelection races. In the same program Ted Sorensen talked about the libraries and documents that allowed him to write his new memoir, which focuses on his time serving John F. Kennedy. On another Book-TV program this weekend, the Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame talked about the infamous Bixby letter, which he argues is clearly not the work of Lincoln himself but of Lincoln’s aide John Hay.
It’s all quite fascinating to anyone interested in history or goverment, of course, but it’s especially validating for those of us at Schlager Group, as we focus our energies on creating content that helps students and researchers utilize primary sources to better understand history. We feel fortunate to be working on stuff that matters. Just today we sent the first volume of our upcoming Milestone Documents of American Leaders to the typesetter. From Abigail Adams to Louis Brandeis to Bill Clinton to Frederick Douglass, Volume 1 is full of interesting figures and the documents that they produced, as of course are the other 3 volumes in the book, which we’ll likewise be sending to the typesetter in the near future. In the coming weeks, I’m hoping to write some blog posts that focus on some of these figures.
January promises awards announcements for our first title, Milestone Documents in American History, as well as news about some special content we’ll be creating about Barack Obama’s inaugural address and about the other noteworthy speeces he’s already given in his brief career. Work has also begun on our third title, Milestone Documents in World History, and I look forward to sharing tidbits from that editorial process as well.