What is your opinion on Carl Sandburg?

[davg2000]

Hi, Rob—

With regard to my “not academic” quote, I struggled to find the right words. I may have chosen the wrong ones. I think as you probably do—there are both fine and poor vocational and avocational historians. But the “average” (popular? ordinary? typical?) reader who is an enthusiast of history should value a well-written presentation of the historical truth as well as an academic reader.

I think one related issue is credibility. When I was teaching the research paper to high school seniors, I always talked about how one is to know that a source is believable. Footnotes and bibliographies, annoying as they might be, do help to establish a source’s credibility, although a well-documented lie or absurd remark is still just that. But a source’s credibility is also based on what else is out there. How is anyone to judge the truth if he can’t compare an idea with other ideas? The notes and bib can point a serious reader in the right direction. But any reader who wishes to know the historical truth needs to read and read and read, and keep an open mind.

As I have been following the “My Journey on Lincoln’s Assassination” thread, I keep hearing the great Eighteenth Century poet Alexander Pope’s words: “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Most have heard this remark. But what else Pope said matters: “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring [font of knowledge]/There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,/And drinking largely sobers us again.” Pope’s point is that half-baked, not credible, ideas don’t look half-baked and not credible at first—one has to read more to find out.

About your gatekeeper metaphor—honestly I think each of us is on his own here. Eventually, a person must decide for himself the worth of any author. I think Sandburg’s “The War Years” is superior to “The Prairie Years” in that one learns more about Lincoln. But I say this at this point in my life, after all of the other reading I’ve done. I don’t know what I’d have said fifty years ago.

I will acknowledge that I may have wandered a bit off the track in this answer.