William, the Conqueror of Information

Well, hello again, readers! The internet has arrived at our home, and so I am now able to post on a regular basis. As I am sure you are aware of, I started my new job on Monday, which is exhilarating. I'll talk more about that later. In this post, I want to share with you an interesting idea I've been mulling over recently.

Family History

I am currently reading Studs Terkel's oral history of World War II, titled The Good War. The book has been a great read, thus far - but I don't want to make this a book review post. It's really more about the importance of proactively learning about and recording your family history. I think this is something either done piecemeal by family members, or done after the passing of key familial figures.

Empire of Liberty

I just wrapped up the second of three Oxford History of the United States titles I am trying to finish by the end of the summer: Empire of Liberty. This book was great, and gave me a good base of knowledge about a period in American history about which I was less than familiar. It truly was a time of sweeping change in the United States, something Gordon Wood illuminates beautifully with his text. It was highly readable and accessible, but his scholarship was excellent - typical of the series. If you love American history, then you should give this book a shot! I'll conclude this brief review with a quote from p.2 of the book:

By 1815 Americans had experienced a transformation in the way they related to one another and in the way they perceived themselves and the world around them. And this transformation took place before industrialization, before urbanization, before railroads, and before any of the technological breakthroughs usually associated with modern social change. In the decades following the Revolution America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change but came to expect it and prize it.

Library of Congress Thoughts

Jen and I are back from ALA, and I have a lot to share. I am working on compiling my thoughts about the conference itself, but in the meantime, I want to share with you a thought/idea I had this morning while reading a bit.

As you might have guessed, Jen and I visited the Library of Congress, the national bibliographic institution of the United States, to use MARC appropriate language. It was so busy, filled with people wearing their ALA badges (mine is pictured above) that it was hard to really get any sense of the institution at all. However, it was great just to be there, and I got a cool mug.

Anyhow, the Library of Congress is (I think) almost entirely devoted to the collection, organization, and preservation of the labors of the mind, so to speak. As you read last week, I am reading Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood right now, and came across this passage on page 351 while reading this morning:

Although Jefferson was an aristocratic slaveholder, it was his political genius to sense that the world of the early Republic ought to belong to people who lived by manual labor and not by their wits. Cities, he believed, were dangerous and promoted dissipation precisely because they were places, he said, where men sought “to live by their heads rather than their hands.”

As you probably know, the Library of Congress was founded with the purchase of Jefferson’s entire library of 6487 books by the US Congress in 1815. It is an interesting contrast to me that the man who was so against those who sought to “live by their heads” ended up selling his collection to found an institution almost entirely dedicated to that purpose. I would like to think that his action was perhaps a tacit decision to acknowledge the importance of the labors of the mind, as well as the importance of working with your hands.

What do you think his founding of the Library of Congress says about Jefferson? Other thoughts?

Summer Reading

It’s Monday night, and that means Jen is volunteering at Cook’s Hospital. I look froward to her return and sharing an evening with her, but for now, I want to tell you about my summer reading plan, reader.

I think most people try and read very light fare in the summertime, on vacations and visits to the pool and such. I think that’s great, but for me Summer has long been the season for heavy reading. Summer is always a time (because of the climate where we live) that one spends a good deal of one’s time indoors. In addition, summer is the season of a bit lighter and less demanding work (for me) and thus lends itself to more mentally challenging diversions.

This practice of reading lengthier and more challenging works in the summer began several years ago, while I was still an undergraduate at Hardin-Simmons. I would visit my grandparents in Indiana for several weeks at a time, and this gave me the ability to read practically uninterrupted for each afternoon. I think my first couple of “long” works were Ron Chernow’s biographies of John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. These were great, but my most memorable (thus far) summer reading bacchanal were the three volumes in Caro’s biography of LBJ. If you’re curious, I wrote about that previously here:

Robert Caro and Lyndon Johnson

Well, as I wrote about in January, (here) I purchased the first three (chronologically) books in the Oxford History of the United States. I finished the first book The Glorious Cause earlier this year, but my goal this summer is to finish the next two, Empire of Liberty and What Hath God Wrought. So far, I am doing pretty well, and as a matter of fact, I am off to read for a bit now. What are you reading this summer? What is your perfect summertime book? Let me know in the comments!

M. Diderot and Me

While at the Amon Carter Museum Library yesterday, I was asked to begin the process of cataloging one of the most amazing works in our collection: Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Here is an image of the title page, from Wikipedia:


This is the first of seventeen text volumes, which were published concurrently with eleven volumes of plates. The key distinction of the Encyclopédie is that it shows you how to do things, as well as dissecting complex items. Here is one of those wonderful illustrations:


Just how big is it? Well according to Wikipedia,
▪ 17 volumes of articles, issued from 1751 to 1765
▪ 11 volumes of illustrations, issued from 1762 to 1772
▪ 18,000 pages of text
▪ 75,000 entries
▪ 44,000 main articles
▪ 28,000 secondary articles
▪ 2,500 illustration indices
▪ 20,000,000 words in total
Print run: 4,250 copies (note: even single-volume works in the 18th Century seldom had a print run of more than 1,500 copies)

Ok, so it’s big and it’s old, but why is it so significant? Once again, from Wikipedia:

The Encyclopédie played an important role in the intellectual ferment leading to the French Revolution. "No encyclopaedia perhaps has been of such political importance, or has occupied so conspicuous a place in the civil and literary history of its century. It sought not only to give information, but to guide opinion," wrote the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. In The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution, a work published in conjunction with a 1989 exhibition of the Encyclopédie at the University of California, Los Angeles, Clorinda Donato writes the following:
“The encyclopedians successfully argued and marketed their belief in the potential of reason and unified knowledge to empower human will and thus helped to shape the social issues that the French Revolution would address. Although it is doubtful whether the many artisans, technicians, or laborers whose work and presence and interspersed throughout the Encyclopédie actually read it, the recognition of their work as equal to that of intellectuals, clerics, and rulers prepared the terrain for demands for increased representation. Thus the Encyclopédie served to recognize and galvanize a new power base, ultimately contributing to the destruction of old values and the creation of new ones.”
While many contributors to the Encyclopédie had no interest in radically reforming French society, the Encyclopédie as a whole pointed that way. The Encyclopédie denied that the teachings of the Catholic Church could be treated as authoritative in matters of science. The editors also refused to treat the decisions of political powers as definitive in intellectual or artistic questions. Given that Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe at the time and that many European leaders used French as their administrative language, these ideas had the capacity to spread.

First, please feel free to come by and check it out - it’s wonderful to see. Second, this is a great example of why I became a librarian - so that I could help people and get to see and use cool stuff, like the Encyclopédie!

The Alamo

Readers, I am not sure how many of you have traveled to San Antonio and seen the Alamo. If you have, like Jen and I, you were more than likely very disappointed. Only two structures from the original mission compound remain - the famous chapel, and the convento, where the final parts of the battle played out. The rest of the Alamo is gone. Given up to hotels, Madame Tussaud’s, and really bad souvenir shops.

Did 183 (ish) men die in this place so we could view wax figures? I say they did not. Their legacy deserves a better memorial. I believe that the Alamo grounds should be reconstructed, so that visitors gain a greater sense of the battle, as well as the scale of Mexican San Antonio. This would be a much more fitting honor for those men, and would fit (or exceed) the expectations of visitors. Hopefully, we will soon see a change in governors here in Texas, and the new Governor will proceed with making this dream a reality - a state park for the Alamo. Not a national site, though - I think the Alamo should belong solely to our great state. If you’d like more information check out this article from the November 2008 issue of Texas Monthly.

You Aren’t Here, by Gary Cartwright

- Jason Dean

About Texas

While I was in Syracuse, when people asked me where I was from, I replied, “Texas.” Many people wanted to know more about Texas, and I tried to give them a fair description - but I really did not do a good job. This has bothered me since returning to my native state, and I have been searching for a decent description of the state. I discovered this passage about Texas in a book I just finished, titled The Big Rich by Bryan Burrough.

It’s hard to tell people about Texas. It is. It’s hard to explain what it means to be a Texan. To anyone who grew up in the North, it probably means nothing. The idea of a state “identity,” or that a state’s citizens might adopt it as a part of their own self-image, seems a quaint, almost antebellum notion. Folks in Iowa don’t strut around introducing themselves as Iowans, at least none I know.

But if you grew up in Texas, as I did, it becomes a part of you, as if you’re a member of a club. It’s a product of the state’s enduring, and to my mind, endearing, parochialism, a genetic tie to the days when Texas was a standalone nation borne of its own fight for independence, which produced its own set of national myths. Ohio doesn’t have an Alamo. I’m not sure Ohioans, as wonderful as they are, have a distinct culture. As a child I was always vaguely ashamed I wasn’t born in Texas. I’ll never forget the day a boy in my fifth-grade class actually called me a carpetbagger. How on earth would he even know what that was?

I thought that was somewhat insightful into the identities of many Texans. Although, to be fair, I am a native Texan, though I am not one who has a bumper sticker to prove it.

- Jason Dean

Why Read Biographies?

For those of you all that I have spoken to personally, you know that some of my favorite books are biographies. I love reading good biographies, but I was really never good at giving a good description as to why. However, I just finished reading this blog post that does a great job, and I wanted to share it with you:
http://ricklibrarian.blogspot.com/2009/06/reasons-to-read-biography.html

- Jason Dean

Robert Caro and Lyndon Johnson

I want to tell you about a series of books, and overall, an author that have made a tremendous impact on my life. At Hardin-Simmons, I majored in History, with an emphasis on modern US history. I love learning more, and reading about topics in US history.

It was, I think, three summers ago when I finally picked up a book recommended to me by one of my professors. It was The Path to Power, by Robert Caro. I knew that if I enjoyed the first volume, I would be undertaking a mighty reading task – the series will eventually include four volumes, and well over 2,000 pages. So, with this knowledge in mind, I went to Indiana to visit my grandparents and plow through the first novel to see if it was worth a major commitment of my reading time.

The first volume was engrossing and powerful – more so than any other biography I have ever read. The book drew me in with its descriptions of the extremely difficult life that Texans in the rural Hill Country faced. (As a matter of fact, it led me to have a series of wonderful conversations with my 90-year-old grandmother about growing up on a farm much like the Johnson farm.) Not only is the book, and the series as a whole, about the life of Lyndon Johnson, it is also a study of political power in the United States. Caro shows that Johnson is a master at finding, and using, this power.

This series, and the life of Lyndon Johnson, is a major inspiration to me. Let me qualify this, though – Johnson was ruthless, and was willing to go to any means to gain the power he desired, even if it meant stealing the senate race of 1948 from one of the finest Texans I know of, Coke Stevenson. Johnson also regularly engaged in extramarital affairs, and treated people who worked with him with disdain. However, he was willing to do anything he could to improve life for Americans, specifically for those who were less than fortunate. That is the Johnson I admire – improving American society as a whole. Before I read these books, I knew he was a very “dirty” politician, but after reading these books, I could see these actions through some sort of understanding – I believe Johnson wanted to improve the lives of Americans, and was willing to go to any lengths to make sure he could do this.

As I feel sure you have inferred from what I said above, the next two books in the series, Means of Ascent, and Master of the Senate were also wonderful. Master of the Senate is one of the finest non-fiction books I have ever read, but you cannot really appreciate it unless you have read the two preceding books in the series. Allow me to give this series my hearty recommendation, with some qualifications. First, be prepared to invest a good deal of time reading these books – it took me three summers to finish them. Second, know that you will be exposed to both the great aspects, and the very dirty secrets of political power in Texas, as well as in the United States. Third, you might actually end up with a great deal of respect for both the subject of these books, as well as the author.

Before I close, allow me to say a few words about the author, Robert Caro. Mr. Caro writes from an office in New York City, aided only by his wife, Ina. (If you get a chance and have a bit, view the video below, and listen to the way he talks about his wife. Wonderful!) Ina is his only research assistant, and has moved with him when Caro was researching these books. They moved first to the hill country, to research Johnson’s family, and talk to people who knew the Johnsons. Then, they moved to Austin, to research Johnson’s time there. Afterwards, they moved to Washington, DC, to better learn about Johnson’s time in the senate. For the fourth and final volume of the Johnson series, the Caro’s are planning to move to Vietnam to better research the impact of the Vietnamese War on the people of Vietnam. And, finally, Caro’s work was initially met with criticism from Johnson’s friends, but it is now widely accepted as the defining biography of the life of Lyndon Johnson, by scholars, critics, and Johnson’s friends alike.

Once again, I would highly recommend these books to you. If you are so inclined, I have attached an illuminating interview with the author below:

- Jason Dean

PS – I sent off my copies of his books to be signed last week – he was very kind and I am excited to get them back!

PPS - Jen and I are off to London next week, so there will be no new posts all next week.