My last blog post was last June. I guess that some description of what I’ve been doing during the last nine months would be in order. Several observations:
Like many Americans, my life was dramatically changed and my view of the world was unbelievably altered by the events of 2020 and early 2021, including covid-19 lockdowns, ongoing virus restrictions, protests following the death of George Floyd, rioting and violence that followed some of those protests, the United States presidential election, doubts and accusations of election fraud, and the attack on the U. S. Capitol. Also like many Americans, these public events’ influence on me was complicated by personal, family, and work-related developments.
I can’t remember if I mentioned last spring that my mother died on February 3. My father, brother, and I buried her five days later and we planned a memorial service in Western Pennsylvania in the middle of March, which of course was postponed because of covid. It was ultimately held in mid-June. My father moved in with my family in August, then moved to a nearby apartment in early October. Last December, my family did not travel to eastern Pennsylvania to celebrate Christmas with my wife’s extended family. We have lived in Chicagoland eighteen years, and this was just the second time that we had not returned to PA for the holiday.
Last fall, my institution, Trinity Christian College, was completely online. A couple hundred students lived on campus, but all courses were online courses. I taught a new course in our just-approved Foundations curriculum. In October, Trinity also had its ten-year visit by a team representing the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), our regional accreditor. As an Academic Dean, I was lined up for multiple meetings on zoom with different members of the team. The week before the visit was set to begin, I came down with symptoms and tested positive for covid. It was a mild case and I attended all of the meetings from home. This semester, Trinity is holding classes in-person with a remote option. I teach in a classroom and also run a zoom session with students who must quarantine or who have chosen to not come to campus. I am again teaching a completely new course, and it’s a writing course, not solely a history course. My work as an Academic Dean is complicated by the realities that many of my colleagues are not on campus, that spring break was cancelled, and everyone has email fatigue.
In the midst of these developments, my research has taken a back seat. It is my hope to return soon to concentrated work on my book, “On the Pilgrim Way”: The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The manuscript is due to Eerdmans Publishers in August 2022. I have received a summer research grant from Trinity to work on it this summer. The college has also graciously approved a sabbatical for me in the spring of 2022. The time for the final push to complete the work is nearly here.
I do think that the events of the last twelve months—the response to covid-19, protests about racial injustice, the death of my mother—have made me think differently about my writing and my teaching. The cumulative effect of these events has impressed on me the incredible difficulty of understanding another person’s life. The virus affected people’s lives and livelihoods very differently, and therefore different people in my family, church, and workplace developed very different ideas about governmental action. The killing of George Floyd and the protests (and, at times, violence) that followed opened my eyes to new understandings of the experiences of my African American neighbors and colleagues. My ideas about how to understand my mother’s life have changed and shifted.
There are always multiple stories that can be told to make sense of the incomplete and fragmentary information we have about the world. In many ways, we ultimately are guessing from the evidence that we have. This is especially the case when one is trying to tell the story of someone else’s life. I have realized that my view of my mother’s life had been colored by the last few years when she was in very bad physical health. It is only as the months since her death have passed that I have been able to get a longer perspective on who she was and what she was like. The picture at the top of the page is of my mother and me on my wedding day, November 28, 1992. I have inherited more than just her nose and her smile.
This has humbled me as I have thought about the attempt to understand the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Biographers have interpreted her life in strikingly different ways. Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires asserts that Wilder was haunted by the privations and difficulties she experienced as a child and created a myth to deal with them. John Miller and others argue that Laura was shaped by difficulties but persevered due to inner strength, a balanced worldview, and trust in God. What she did not enjoy in life she accepted and made the best of, and she sought to teach others how to love life as a farmer’s wife.
As I think about my biography of Laura, I most would like to avoid taking a side in the cultural and partisan shouting matches of our time. I do not want to make Laura a champion of one side or the other. This is perhaps made easier because it is not always easy to define her by twenty-first century political categories. For instance, her love of nature, animals, and wild landscape is attractive to those on the political left, while her acceptance of traditional family roles and the attractiveness of her vision of the nuclear family is attractive to those on the political right. I hope to be able to describe her as accurately as possible from her point of view, that of a rural woman raised in the upper Midwest during the late nineteenth century who lived most of her adult life in the border south in the early twentieth century.
The last twelve months have also made me think hard about my teaching. I’ve been teaching history full-time for almost twenty years, and I’m much less optimistic about anyone’s ability to tell simple stories about what we can learn from the past. Historians with different backgrounds and worldviews write completely different stories about the past based on the same events and evidence. This includes Ph.D.-educated historians, though we are all historians, using stories to make sense of our own lives, the shape of our communities, and the history of our country. In both public forums and private conversations, we tell selective stories to support our ideas, our political positions, and the way that we live our lives. At one extreme, stories suggest that the way people lived in the past was all wrong, and that our job is to correct those wrongs or to forget about them. At the other extreme, stories are told to call us to ways of life in the past that were superior to today. Neither extreme is completely correct, but both often convey some aspects of the truth.
As a result, I am more and more drawn to ways that history might help people to understand others. I hope that studying history will enable students to understand people in the past who don’t think the way they do, and that therefore they will become better able to understand people in the present who don’t think the way they do. Finally, I hope that students will embrace an understanding of the past that is complicated and not easily fit into the extreme political categories of the early twenty-first century.
I guess I hope that people who read my book (and this blog) will come to better understand these things as well.
I understand that there’s a lot of aspiration (“I hope…”) here. Perhaps I can post some more content soon. Thanks for reading.
Links:
My blog post on Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires
Blog posts on John Miller – Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Midwestern Dreams or Nightmares,” A Personal Appreciation
The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder 