January 2011

Paul Berman’s celebration of the changes in home and family over the past 50 years is the truth, but not the whole truth.

Fifty years ago, in theory, if not always in practice, family members were locked into restricted roles. Men went to work and were largely absent from the home; women stayed home and were largely absent from the community. The end of those restrictive roles has been a benefit to families like mine. Both my wife and I have careers, so our income does not rely on just one of us and is therefore more secure. When our children were young, we worked part-time, so each of us has strong bonds with both of our children. Most of the fathers I know have similarly strong connections with their children, and most of the women I know work. In contrast, when I was a toddler, my father left for work before I woke up in the morning and came home after I was asleep; he often worked Saturdays as well. My mother, a bright woman, didn’t go to college and left work when she married. Once the children grew up, she was bored, but when she tried to go back to work, she found she wasn’t up to it after all those years.

It is trivializing women’s history to suggest that "baby has come a long way" in the last 50 years. Women have always considered their past, often through genealogies, storytelling, oral histories, and even quilts. But, in the last half-century, women’s history in books and articles has come of age.

In his kaleidoscopic novel U.S.A., a trilogy published between 1930 and 1936, John Dos Passos offered a descriptive line that has always stayed with me. America, he wrote, is “a public library full of… dog-eared history books with protests scrawled on the margins.” Historical writing at its best is composed not only of facts, but of thoughts and directions. And, in this fast-paced country, where currents are very much subject to abrupt change, it is often hard for a history book to take root. As every published historian knows, no book is the last word. Some books, however, do stand the test of time to become pillars that can’t be toppled by revisionist trends. That is the case with the texts I’ve chosen to represent the years 1945 to 1974. No amount of fashionable deconstruction can pale their relevance. The excellence of the research and the elegance of the prose in these classics reflect the highest standard of enduring scholarship. The quality of the thinking and the anecdotal brilliance throughout keep them fresh. Protests there may be, but derailments? Not likely.

CHANGES: 1789 AND 1954 CHANGES: 1789 AND 1954

On a high Vermont hill, where Robert Frost liked to absorb the sound of trees, he and I talked through many afternoons, speaking, as Frost put it, “to some purpose.” He held forth on astronomy, mortality, baseball, poetry, and prose, displaying a command of phrase that I have never heard from anyone else. Frost ranged from Ben Jonson to John Lardner, bounded back to Emily Dickinson and stumbled against Ezra Pound, asserting more than once an unshakable ground rule: I was never publicly to quote him on writers or writing. When asked why, he was ready. “Because,” he said, a little triumph in his eyes, “I’m a poet, not a critic.”

Those Yanks of World War II are white-haired now. Great-grandchildren play about their feet. The grand parades and great commemorations are over. Only a few monuments to their achievements are yet to be built. But we can still see them as they were, striking the casual pose, caps and helmets tilted toward the big adventure, cigarettes dangling from a smile. The picture is all innocence. And then, later: the hours and days of fatigue piled one on top of the other, “for the duration,” eyes that have seen too much and will see more, bandages and blankets on the bloody cots, empty helmets, the wreckage of faith. We can see them like this too, and all in between, in the high councils of state and command, on the high seas and miles above, and in holes that turn into graves in an instant. In all the time since the Yanks were young, you see, history has been erecting its own monuments.

The most indispensable photographs show us who we are: the formal portraits of our great-grandparents as newly arrived immigrants and our own parents on their wedding day; the candid snapshots of our youthful selves and of our own children at moments in time gone forever. They mean little to anyone whose life is not tied to the memories.

When American Heritage magazine debuted 50 years ago, its founders explicitly intended it to make history lively and accessible to a larger audience. Hailing from Life magazine and Time, they saw it as little different in approach or style from those publications. That is, American Heritage was going to use all the tools of the best contemporary journalism to make history as fresh and vivid for its readers as the latest news.

They well understood that it matters how history is told, and that, like the news itself, the story is subject to interpretation and revision. The fact is: history is not simply the past conveyed to us in some abstract perfection. It is an ongoing debate about what happened and what it means.

Few periods in the history of this country can match the impact of the years between 1917 and 1941. In less than a generation, America experienced the first large-scale dispatch of U.S. soldiers abroad (some 50,000 would not return), the transition of the United States from country to city, the emergence of Manhattan as the world’s financial center, the flowering of the consumer culture, the flocking of women to the polls, a revolution in morals, the most devastating depression the nation has ever known, the unionization of factory labor, the shift of allegiance of black voters from the Republican to the Democratic party, the birth of the welfare state, and the entry into a global war that would usher in the nuclear age.

The 10 books I recommend are aimed at giving readers a comprehensive view of these years, from the perspective of the historian, but anyone seriously interested in understanding this era should also bear in mind that these are the halcyon days of American literature—of William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, of Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay, of Eugene O’Neill and Clifford Odets.