Archive for October, 2007

Heritage is History?

Written on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 [permanent link]

I spent a week digging through my Dad’s studio/barn with him this August, cleaning out musty old stuff and cataloging his artwork. (it was a great exercise in primary document research: “Hey, there’s my old Santa statue!!”) I found a goldmine of several boxes of American Heritage magazines.

Well, “magazine” isn’t the right word. American Heritage began publishing in 1954 as a hardbound periodical, and each new issue was hardbound until 1980. Then the magazine went to a softbound edition, but inside all these issues is a wealth of visual information for me. The Web is great for speed research, and I do get a lot of images by searching Google, but that resource is like a lot of the Web: a mile wide and an inch deep. (I can get 6 or 9 hits of the same image but little else relevant to my need on Google image search.) There are a lot of historical images that I’ve only seen in American Heritage and other historical magazines. Those images inform all the history comix I draw. I may have a talking crab on Jefferson’s shoulder, but it’s vital for me to get the buildings behind them historically correct.

Like many other print periodicals, American Heritage has had trouble making money lately. There’s simply too many Web sites out there offering things for free. The magazine stopped its print edition in May. The good news is that it continues to add new things to its awesome Web site: www.americanheritage.com

I have mixed feelings about this dramatic change in our human development. Fewer print books and magazines means fewer trees killed. That’s good. We’ll continue to use the skill of reading, but we’ll do it on a screen. That’s fine. But I worry about how permanent our new history is going to be when it’s nothing but zeroes and ones hanging in cyberspace. What happens when the power goes out??

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Beschloss bellylaughs

Written on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 [permanent link]

I love living in the Historic Triangle — where a fun Saturday night is a TV talking head historian busting jokes about Hubert Humphey! And the audience GETS the jokes!

From time to time I still write for the Daily Press (the newspaper that hired me in 1992 and asked me to create Chester the Crab in 1995 and then gave me a great run of creating five years of daily educational comics). Last Saturday I went to Jamestown Settlement to report on a speech by Michael Beschloss, author and frequent contributor to NBC and PBS.

He was just what history needs. He didn’t talk in droning philosophical frameworks. He kept involving the audience, asking for shows of hands about questions he asked. He spoke off-the-cuff, not from a dense speech. He told funny stories about people. Now, some were hard to believe — LBJ really owned a car that could travel in water and would scare visitors to his Texas ranch by driving at high speed towards a lake?!?! But some anecdotes I had heard before, and I trust Beschloss’ truthfulness. And I’m old enough that I remember Minnesota politician HHHumphrey. So me and the . . . ah, MATURE audience had a good time.

In promising to keep his speech short and “not go all Humphrey on you tonight,” Beschloss told this crowd-pleaser: Hubert had droned on awhile to a crowd and then caught himself going long, so he asked the crowd what time it was.

“Does anyone have a watch?” Hubert asked.

A heckler replied, “How about a CALENDAR?!”

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