historiblogography

southern crossings

Ordered to stay within thirty minutes of Fort Benning, I spent Saturday night wandering around downtown Columbus, Georgia. Which is funny, because the interesting part of downtown Columbus, Georgia is precisely one block long. But there are enjoyable things to do here -- drink coffee, drink beer -- and it beats the shit out of being on Fort Benning. (Although it gets a little sad to wander through the place alone, after a while.)

Anyway, this is all meaningless background for a very mildly interesting pay-off: In Judy Bug's Books, which sells the New York Review of Books (!), I looked down at a pile of books on the floor... And suddenly found myself face to face with William Dunning's Reconstruction, Political and Economic. Which started me digging through the pile, finding one long-eclipsed work on Reconstruction after another. It was like slipping through a time portal. (And I should throw in, here, that I had just been wandering the Alabama side of the river, looking at historical markers that commemorate Civil War battles of mid-April, 1865.) The owner of the store said that he had just bought the collection of a retired history professor.

Not much pay-off, but one day a grad student will paw through a pile of books in a used book store, looking through the collection of stuff that I will have spent my entire life gathering together, and he will think: What an amazing pile of old obsolete scholarship.

Or something. Apologies for the least interesting post in the history of this blog, but what the hell. At least you aren't stuck in Columbus, Georgia.

posted by Chris Bray @ 7:03 AM