For more than twenty years, "After the Fact" has been a popular and best-selling approach to guiding students through American History and the methods used to generate it. In fifteen dramatic episodes that move chronologically through American history, this book examines such topics as oral evidence, photographs, ecological data, films and television programs, church and town records, census data, and novels.
James West Davidson is a historian, writer, and wilderness paddler. He received his Ph.D. in American history from Yale University and writes full time. He is also co-editor, with Michael Stoff, of New Narratives in American History, a series published by Oxford University Press, as well as the coauthor of textbooks in American history. These include "Experience History," "After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection," and "US: A Narrative History" for the college level and "The American Nation" for the middle grades.
On a river, an eddy line marks the boundary between slack water and swift. Broaching the line, you sometimes find yourself swept quickly downstream and around a bend. As a historian, I've crossed more than one eddy line to ride currents pulling in different directions, from thinking about the end of the world to paddling the barrens of Labrador to viewing the rise of segregation through the eyes of one woman. A through-line that unites these disparate subjects is the attraction to journeys and their obsessional consequences. If you believe that your own life is joined to a biblical history of redemption--in which the world's end will soon draw nigh--how will that conviction affect your everyday behavior? ("The Logic of Millennial Thought") If you are a black woman born into freedom after the Civil War, whose goals at first seem to be teaching school, finding a husband and enjoying a decent middle-class life, how does the particular set of your character propel you to risk life and limb opposing a rising epidemic of lynching? ("They Say: Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race") If you cross Labrador intent on making a name in journalism, how far will you court hardship and starvation in order to succeed? And if you are the widow of the man who pushed one lake too far, where will your own obsessions take you in seeking to complete your husband's work? ("Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure")
We all begin journeys thinking we know where we're going, and we seldom do. Yet the course of every odyssey springs from the way in which an individual's character bends, breaks, or masters the larger movements of the day. Watching such journeys play out provides a singular pleasure, very much akin to riding the currents of a river from its turbulent headwaters to the final outwash in the sea.
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