One Historian's Educations

Abstract

I T would be accurate to say that I stumbled into the study of history. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan I wound up majoring in English because I loved literature and was all thumbs in the chemistry laboratory, where originally I had expected to spend my life. I took enough credits in education to qualify for a teacher's certificate but only one history course-the obligatory year's survey of English history. course, thorough and fact-crammed, touched no interest of mine. When I could not obtain a high school teaching job in I939, my university mentor recommended me for a teaching assistantship at Penn State, where a graduate program was being developed in English composition. At that time there, the study of English was divided between two departmentscomposition and literature. I taught five sections of freshman composition for each of two years at seventy-five dollars per month and free tuition. I studied ancient and medieval rhetoric, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, English prose style, and even the American short story. Research took me to such entertaining volumes as Studies in Philology. My master's essay was called The Prose Style of Laurence Sterne, surreptitiously subtitled Oft Was I Weary When I Toiled at Thee. I think that I was the only one, however, who found something to laugh about in a library carrel. Sterne's sly wit saved my sanity. I taught composition and literature for two years while beginning a family and, after a two-year stint in the infantry, returned to teaching freshman composition to the best students I have ever had, World War II veterans. Before plunging in, I sought out a professor of English at the University of Chicago to ask whether I could go on teaching without further graduate work. He depressed me with his warning that a Ph.D. would be absolutely necessary for continuing at the college level. I could not bear to consider more advanced work like that I had already been through. A colleague at Iowa State told me about a developing new study-American civilization. He thought that I ought to go to Harvard, but that distinguished institution thought otherwise. I have been grateful ever since that Brown was willing to take a chance. In entering its American civilization program I hoped to make the study of literature more palatable, but I ran into Ed Morgan and a term paper he assigned in my very first semester of colonial history. I was soon digesting all the printed documents available relating to Leisler's Rebellion and was amazed to find that there were few certainties. What witnesses could one believe? Did history reduce itself to gossip? Anyway, it was far better than measuring the length of Sterne's dashes. In a history seminar I had an