Look where your hands are now.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
The trade which of all manual trades has been most honoured: be for once a carpenter.
—John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
My father was a carpenter. On washday, a week’s worth of his work uniform, carpenter’s overalls, hung side by side on my family’s clotheslines. As was typical of the time, laundry was sorted and hung according to its use or purpose—bed linen, towels, blouses, shirts, pants, skirts, dishcloths, and so forth, all in their place. There was a beauty to this arrangement, intentionally so. In those days, clotheslines also telegraphed a sense of order and a household’s wealth or poverty to the community at large—in my family’s case, the proud occupation of a working man and a veteran who had served three years in Europe during World War II and used the GI Bill to further his education.
In the pockets of my father’s overalls were some of his most valued tools—a hammer; a carpenter’s folding ruler, with a sliding carpenter’s scale on one side; pencils; and a nail puller—each in its place like the laundry on the clothesline. I carry an image of my father jotting down numbers and measurements calculated in his head on pieces of lumber that had to be cut, joists that had to be just right, walls that had to be timbered or sheet rocked. There were no calculators or computers, but pencils and rulers brought houses, office buildings, and bookcases into being.
I inherited little of my dad’s mathematical brilliance, but from his example I gained an idea of what genius looked like, and what mind linked to hand could produce. The pencils and ruler that protruded from the pockets of his overalls left a deep impression, and I came to see them as among the most valuable of the legacies he left me. I give pencils to friends and colleagues. I find joy in writing with a pencil (and similarly with a fountain pen when sending a card or letter to a dear friend). My children gift me pencils and writing pads on special occasions, and pencils remain important items in my writing toolbox.
The pencils and ruler that protruded from the pockets of my father’s overalls left a deep impression.
I still begin most new articles, essays, or book projects writing my thoughts out in pencil. It could be a few pages or as little as a paragraph. Yet in the face of the prominent place my laptop has in every aspect of my work, penciling is now more a ritual than anything else. At the same time, it is a valuable one and something more than ceremonial. It is also terribly demanding, and properly so. There is something about writing out a word, sentence, or paragraph on paper, erasing it, and starting over again that the delete, copy, and paste functions of the computer cannot replicate. Something that seems to force the brain to work a bit harder but in a way that is pleasurable. Typewriting captures some of this—the inserting of paper and physical movement required to move the page forward or make a correction, for example. When I’m writing with pencil on paper, my thoughts are not interrupted by the intrusions of spelling suggestions or predictions of what word I will or should use next. There is also the tactile pleasure that comes from writing by hand but is about more than touch. Most importantly, I can better see my mind working. I can better capture a word and sense when it’s not the right one, even when I don’t readily know what is the right one. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, I can see where my hands are.
My father’s carpenter’s ruler helps me see where my hands are. I keep it close by on my desk at home. It is a constant reminder of the importance of precision. It reminds me, too, that like my father, I measure things, just different things, where the stakes are different but arguably no less important. His measurements had to be precise lest a building lean where it should stand straight, a roof fail to connect with the wallboards that rise up to meet it, or a wall collapse due to poor measurement of the timbers that frame it and lives be hurt or lost.
Historians measure not wood but words. Because of the demands of the trade and our reading audiences, we literally count them. But it’s another form of measurement that we deem more important. It matters to us that a word means what we say it means, that it measures up to the job we give it, even as we acknowledge that all of us sometimes slip, sometimes dangerously. I am certainly never fully successful at avoiding the slippage. I use words that do not convey the meaning I attribute to them, but my father’s carpenter’s folding ruler is a constant reminder that precision matters in writing history.
The joy I find in writing with a pencil is of a piece with the satisfaction I find in archival research. There is something about touching a document written by hand a hundred or more years ago—which I know for colleagues who study ancient, or even medieval, times is very recent history—in all its legibility and illegibility that never ceases to excite my imagination. I have other antiquated writing crutches, or writing companions as I prefer to call them, like my decades-old two-volume copy of the abbreviated Oxford English Dictionary and hard copies of dictionaries and thesauruses. It is undeniably easier to use the computer to search the meaning of a word or its etymology, and I take this route on most occasions now, I dare say. But I still find it a great deal more pleasurable to turn to hard copies. It’s a bit like using old cabinet card catalogs versus online ones or going to the stacks to get a particular book only to be reminded of the riches to be found in the adjacent and nearby volumes, as historian Charles McKinney reminded us in a recent Facebook post.
There is something about writing out a word, sentence, or paragraph on paper, erasing it, and starting over again that the delete, copy, and paste functions of the computer cannot replicate.
As historians, we each have our own way of researching and writing. I have the deepest admiration for my colleagues who write the most splendid, brilliant prose from the start on their computers and even mobile phones. But we are also each in our own way, like my father the carpenter, skilled craftsmen, artificers in words rather than wood. Whether with computers or pencils, the frameworks of words that we craft into narratives are essential to understanding the past and present. We are members of a guild that has evolved over time and become more specialized; in many respects, historians are better than ever at what we do. The results are truly astounding. My figurative carpenter’s bib overflows with new knowledge from the many books, articles, essays, podcasts, documentaries, history labs, databases, and other forms in which historical scholarship appears. This work has never been more important. Nostalgia has its place, but in the end, what excites me more is my membership in a craft that for all its imperfections continues to produce valuable and exciting new knowledge.
This is my last column as president of the American Historical Association and a bittersweet moment. I write amid the ongoing, centuries-old, terribly difficult work of making and keeping democracies at home and abroad and amid the ongoing efforts of the AHA to be responsible to the needs of its members. My year as president has involved a steep but necessary learning curve. It has not been without its challenges but has also been a good year and a productive one. I have learned so much more about the work of historians across the country, and indeed the globe, and about the immense challenges that make our work harder. I have been honored to work with wonderful AHA staff, whose contributions are often invisible to the membership but whose talents, brilliance, kindness, and warmth keep the AHA going. Thank you, AHA team. I could not have done it without you. You have been my joists. I also thank the readers of my Perspectives columns over the past year who have sent me the most gracious notes and their own wonderful stories. The ones about mail-order catalogs were especially dear. You helped make it an honor to serve as president of the AHA
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