The Art of Chasing History

What is history? History is the absence of the present. Or perhaps it is the presence of an absence. Either way, the art of chasing history comes down to this: always arriving somewhere a little too late. Always showing up just in time to learn that you missed something significant. History is all about the missing of important things; a historic marker is nothing more than a little sign to let passersby know that something happened, something worth remembering happened on or near the spot on which they now stand, but they missed it. If only they'd been here earlier . . .

Richard Rubin, "The Missing," The Southern Review (July 1996)

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It is the soul of art, alone, which binds periods and places together.

William Gilmore Simms, Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction (Wiley and Putnam, 1846)

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History is always just an approximation of the past.

Mark Bowden, reviewing Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers,

The New York Times Book Review (July 18, 2004)

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History is not like a cluster of grapes from which the rotten ones can be neatly discarded.

Benjamin Schwartz, "What Jefferson Helps To Explain," 

The Atlantic (March 1997) 

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Of our history, though we cannot change it, we must still try for a true accounting.

Wendell Berry, "American Imagination and the Civil War,"

Imagination in Place: Essays (Counterpoint, 2010)

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For a historian, there is no substitute for going to the actual place where occurred the events one writes about to help one describe them in that concrete, vivid manner.

James M. McPherson, "Gettysburg," in William E. Leuchtenberg, editor, American Places: Encounters with History 
(Oxford University Press, 2000)

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I believe that history is made by people. It is not made by cosmic forces. It's not ordained or preordained. I want to tell it in terms of people.

Stanley Karnow, in Brian Lamb, Booknotes: America's Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas (Times Books, 1997)

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Welcome to a new blog, The Art of Chasing History, which gets its title from the Richard Rubin short story quoted at the top of this post.  I am an Assistant Professor of History and Director of the College Archives at Newberry College in Newberry, South Carolina, a small liberal-arts college affiliated with the Lutheran church (the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).

This blog will feature posts on the study and practice of history in all its forms, and will also serve as a public forum in which my students can present some of their explorations into history, public history, historiography, historical biography, and related fields.