Private School Macon, GA | Stratford Academy



United States History

2014-2015

Summer Reading Guide

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

Introduction: Three important quotations and commentary. Please read this first.

There was never, for me as teacher and writer, an obsession with

“objectivity,” which I consider neither possible nor desirable. I

understood early that what is presented as “history” or “news” is

inevitably a selection out of an infinite amount of information, and

that what is selected depends on what the selector thinks is important.

Those who talk from high perches about the sanctity of “facts” are

parroting Charles Dickens’ stiff-backed pendant in Hard Times, Mr.

Gradgrind, who insisted his students give him “facts, facts, nothing

but facts.” But behind any presented fact…is a judgment—the

judgment that this fact is important to put forward (and, by implication,

other facts may be ignored). Any such judgment reflects the beliefs,

the values of the historian, however he of she pretends to “objectivity.”

(Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader, 16)

“History,” is changing all the time. When I attended high school in the late 1970s, there was little mention of the South, slavery, sharecropping or racial relations in any of the history books I was assigned to read (and I went to high school in south Georgia!). Of course, slavery was briefly mentioned in the unit leading up to “The War Between the States,” and there was a chapter that mentioned something about the Civil Rights Movement (of course, we never got that far), but the South and these related topics were treated as outside of the theme of all of the history textbooks: the rise to greatness of the American nation. When I got to college in the 1980s, I begin to read a lot of history. I discovered, free of the constraints imposed by the State of Georgia’s required curriculum, that the South wasn’t thought of in a very favorable manner by much of the rest of the country. At best, the South was an embarrassment, a deviation from the supposed progress that characterized the history of the United States. At worst, the South was a place of downright evil, the dark underworld to the North’s goodness and virtue. But, being a Southerner, I didn’t want to be an embarrassment or evil, yet I knew that what I was taught in high school wasn’t the truth either. I decided to take a few history courses and see if I could discover a way out of this dilemma. A class with an excellent history teacher and an encounter with a book called The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Van Woodward provided me with the realization that Dr. Zinn articulates in the quotation above: neither what I was taught in high school nor what I read in college was truth; all were selective recreations of the past. Although all of the histories I had been exposed to were based on facts, the facts were not the most important factor in any of the histories. The selection and interpretation of facts is what history is all about. This selection and interpretation is based on a historian’s judgment as to what is relevant and what is not.

“Tell it like it was,” runs a common American phrase, echoing, no

doubt unconsciously, Leopold von Ranke’s famous injunction to write

history “wie es eigentlich gewesen”—how it really was. But this is

neither as simple nor as easy as it sounds. What happened, what we

recall, what we recover, what we relate, are often sadly different, and

the answers to our questions may be difficult to seek and painful to find.

The temptation is often overwhelmingly strong to tell it, not as it really

was, but as we would wish it to have been.

(Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented, 71)

As the summer reading book makes clear, it is simply impossible to know “how it really was.” The “truth” about the movement of populations across the continent most certainly differed according to who was moving, when they were moving, and where they moved. Additionally, our ability to know this “truth” is limited by the evidence that we have—generally oral legends, written records, and archeological reconstructions. Memories are unreliable, recoverable data is always incomplete, and events that are painful are often repressed. This can also be seen in the tale of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Gilded Age Chicago was a confusing mess of a city. No one was “objectively” observing the city’s development and writing down what was happening. The was no omnipresent force capable of seeing the “big picture” being created out of the interactions between the millions of lives that spent time in that city. For these reasons (and others) a serial killer could operate largely in the open for two years. The book you are to read about this is the recreation of a historian in the 21st century. Where there was no documentation (and serial killers seldom keep accurate records or journals), the historian “imagines” what must have happened or what was going on in the minds of the people involved based upon the best evidence and theories he can access. The histories I read in high school as well as those in college were selected or written too often to tell the past as “we wish it to have been.” In high school, the history curriculum simply decided to not select painful and embarrassing events from the South’s history or the story of a serial killer (or for some reason the 1893 Columbian Exposition). This curriculum imagined a world where all events contribute to the march of positive progress. In college, the books I read had to explain the crimes committed against the Civil Rights Movement and so made the South an aberration, thereby excusing the rest of the United States from complicity. In other words, they imagined a story of good verses evil, and someone had to be evil. But even if this Manichean tale has validity, it is only one of many possible tales that could be told about the same events. Or as Erik Larson says about his book, “I present only one possibility, though I recognize that any number of other motives might well be posited.”

Historians are in the business of reconstruction. …if historians are

builders, they must decide at the outset on the scale of their projects.

How much ground should be covered? A year? Fifty years? Several

centuries? How will the subject manner be defined or limited? (….)

The lure of topics both broad and significant is undeniable…

The great equalizer of such grand plans is the twenty-four hour day.

Historians have only a limited amount of time, and the hours, they

sadly discover, are not expandable. Obviously, the more years that

are covered, the less time there is available to research the events in

each one. Conversely, the narrower the area of research, the more

it is possible to become immersed in the details of a period. Relation-

ships and connections can be explored that would have gone unnoticed

without the benefit of a microscopic focus. Of course, small-scale

history continuously runs the risk of becoming obscure and pedantic.

But a keen mind working on a small area will yield results whose

implications go beyond the subject matter’s original boundaries.

By understanding what has taken place on a small patch of ground, the

historian can begin to see more clearly the structure and dynamics

of the larger world around it.

(James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the

Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, 22)

The summer reading selection deals with a “broad and significant” topic, the shift from a largely rural to a largely urban country in the late 19th century and people’s reactions to this shift. By focusing on these events, we can uncover a great deal of knowledge about the demographic transition, and political, economic and social changes occurring in the United States during the late 19th century. By focusing on “small patch(es) of ground,” I believe that the book reveals “the structure and dynamics of the larger world” in a way that is more immediate and vivid than any general survey of United States history could.

Guides to the Book--Instructions

Each of the following should be answered as a short essay. Each answer should be typed and about one page in length.

1. The large-scale migration of young, single women to urban areas that occurred in the

late 19th and early 20th century is a major theme in The Devil in the White City. What

factors motivated these women to move? What made them so susceptible to the

nefarious intent of someone like Dr. H.H. Holmes?

2. As The Devil in the White City notes, the Columbian Expedition of 1893 was the major

story dominating US headlines for over a year. Francis J. Bellemy wrote “The Pledge

of Allegiance” for students to recite on the dedication of the fair. Why was the

success of this fair deemed so important to the United States and especially the city of

Chicago?

3. What factors enabled Dr. H.H. Holmes to get away with his crimes for as long as he

did?

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