Executive editor, Eric Brandt, on his aims for the Press’s list in American history.
Who wouldn’t want to attend a conference on taboos? Freud said they were forbidden and dangerous. Sade croons that they can be sweet. Henry Miller claimed that, “Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing.” Sign me up! I’ve got my ticket, I’ve booked a hotel room, and I’m packing my bags, bound for the OAH.
“Challenging Taboos” is the theme of this year’s annual conference of the Organization of American Historians in St. Louis. And historians of the U.S. are pretty conversant when it comes to taboos—the spiritual taboos of the Native Americans and the religious taboos of the Puritans who first settled here, the political taboos our founding mothers and fathers fought against, the battle over the taboo of slavery, activists challenging cultural taboos in the sixties, and the social taboos so sharply brought into focus by recent events in the host city’s backyard of Ferguson, Missouri. It promises to be a lively conference and I’m pleased to be attending on behalf of Stanford University Press.
I plan to attend some of the conference highlights. Perusing the conference program, I have a sheepish curiosity about the museum display on the rise of men’s magazines in the forties, fifties, and sixties. There will be sobering panels on the economics of slavery, how Mexicans have been portrayed in American newspapers, and the traditional taboos with which Asian Americans have had to struggle. And one panel will take on the taboo of Queer organizing from the sixties to the nineties, which should be particularly poignant given the recent passing of so-called “religious freedom” laws in Indiana and Arkansas, which many fear are thinly veiled efforts to legalize the oppression of lesbians, gays, and transgendered citizens. Aware that struggling against taboos can be emotionally exhausting, the OAH offers some relief, as well. Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor at the New Yorker has been invited to speak on “The Humor in History and the History of Humor.”
One of my goals for the history list at Stanford is to enrich our offerings in American history, and having a more active presence at the OAH is part of that initiative. While a large number of scholarly presses publish in U.S. history, I remain convinced that there are niches in the field worthy of further exploration: history of the West, history of science and technology, history of the immigrant experience of Asian Americans and Latinos, as well as the history of African Americans—a minority that has played such a significant role in the Bay Area, not to mention the rest of the country.
We’ve already begun actively acquiring in these areas. The first project acquired for our Mellon-funded initiative to publish digitally born scholarship is a dazzling interactive history of the Grand Canyon. We’ve negotiated with the San Diego History Center to publish the annotated diary of Ah Quin, a 19th-century Chinese immigrant laborer, purported to be the first such record written in English. And one of the first books I worked on after arriving at Stanford was the recently published African Americans Against the Bomb, a revealing history endorsed by Tom Hayden of the Peace and Justice Resource Center, as well as by Benjamin Todd Jealous, the former president of the NAACP.
If writing for a broader audience is seen as a taboo by your department, it is a taboo which needs to be broken.
These are the kinds of projects that capture my attention—engaging stories, well told, about people and events that changed the course of history. Stanford certainly publishes a number of monographs written for specialists—and will continue to do so; that is part of our mission. But, I spent half of my career in trade publishing, so I’m always looking for that historian who has done groundbreaking research and has something original to say with a talent for writing for a cross-over audience. If writing for a broader audience is seen as a taboo by your department, it is a taboo which needs to be broken. I feel strongly that the academy needs to take seriously its responsibility to produce public intellectuals, and developing the skill of writing for a broader audience is key. Not every scholar has the talent, but as an editor, I can help an author develop those skills.
If you are a scholar in search of a publisher whose research and writing fits this description, I’d welcome the opportunity to meet you in St. Louis and hear all about it. I invite you to contact me to set up an appointment or stop by and browse through our books which will be on display in the Exhibitor’s Hall at Booth #503. Between appointments, I’ll be hanging out there.
And, if you plan on attending, join me on Friday for an “Evening of St. Louis Jazz,” a formerly taboo form of music embraced wholeheartedly by my father’s generation. I’ll bet that at some point in the evening, the JazzEdge Orchestra will be playing W.C. Handy’s 1914 song, “The Saint Louis Blues”—a fundamental part of any jazz musician’s repertoire. Wynton Marsalis once said that listening to the blues can be an inoculation against getting the blues. Late Friday night, that’s where you’ll find me, listening to some good old St. Louis blues, appreciating some of the vitality that resulted from the breaking of a taboo.
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