Almost 30 years
ago, I bought a three-volume set of The
History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella by William Prescott (1796-1859)
from an antique shop in our local St. Louis suburb. I had been reading in depth
in Spanish and Latin American history and literature, and I came across the set
while browsing through the store’s books.
The volumes were
the eighth edition, published in 1841 and priced at $80. At 175 years old today,
the books are still in fine condition, slightly worn but with marbled pages,
fine leather binding, and acid-free paper. We should all look so good at 175
tears old.
Imagine my
surprise (and delight) to find an entire chapter on this work in The Flowering of New England (1815-1865)
by Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), the writer
and literary critic. Brooks won the 1936 National Book Award for Non-Fiction
and the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for History for this work.
What he says about the Prescott work is illuminating. A number
of writers, authors, and academics in the Boston area had been focused on
writing history for some time, history having replaced religion as a main
literary and cultural interest. But it wasn’t until 1837, with the publication
of this work by Prescott, that Boston took its place on the nation’s world’s cultural
and literary map. Within the next two to three years, the critics in Europe had
weighed in, and declared the work an unmitigated success. The work would
continue to be published throughout the 19th century.
Prescott was nearly blind, Brooks says, and he would often
memorize draft chapters at a time, editing them in his head before having them
written down. And only one or two of his friends knew he was working on his
history. He would go on to write a considerable number of historical works,
including The History of the Conquest
of Peru and The History of the Conquest of
Mexico. Bound sets of his collected works were well sold into the early
20th century.
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| Van Wyck Brooks |
Prescott wrote
the kind of history that is decidedly not popular today among academics – a broad,
sweeping narrative that told a military and political story. But in 1837, it
was an innovation in historical studies. “The freshness and freedom of the
descriptions,” Brooks writes, “the unity and proportion of the structure, the
quiet and modest authority of the apparatus, the lustre of the language were
new notes in American history-writing…”
In other words,
Prescott told a thumping good story.
We do have
writers today that have this kind of historical sweep. Peter Ackroyd in Britain
is one, David
McCullough and the late Stephen Ambrose are
others. When I was at LSU, the History
Department was considered one of the best in country, and it was led by T. Harry Williams,
an expert on the Civil War who also happened to write a
Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Huey Long.
We don’t see as
much of the “big sweep” views of history as we did in earlier years. Our
understanding seems to have become more specialized and atomized – knowing more
and more about less and less. Part of that is a function of the information explosion.
But having more and
more information available doesn’t necessarily seem to make us more
knowledgeable, understanding, or wise.
Top photograph: William Prescott.
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