After the Fact [antikvár]

This book began as an attempt to bring more life to the reading and learning of history. As young historians we have been troubled by a growing disinterest in or even animosity toward the study of the past. How is it that when we and other historians have found so much that excites curiosity, other people find history irrelevant and boring? Perhaps, we thought, if lay readers and students understood better how historians go about their work—how they examine evidence, how they pose questions, and how they reach answers—history would engage them as it does us. As often happens, it took a mundane event to focus and clarify our preoccupations. One day while working on another project, we went outside to watch a neighboring farmer cut down a large old hemlock that had become diseased. As his saw cut deeper into the tree, we joked that it had now bit into history as far back as the Depression. "Depression?" grunted our friend. "I thought you fellas were historians. I'm deep enough now, so's Hoover wasn't even a gleam in his father's eye." With the tree down, the three of us examined the stump. Our woodcutter surprised us with what he saw. "Here's when my folks moved into this place," he said, pointing to a ring. "1922." "How do you know without counting the rings?" we asked. "Oh, well," he said, as if the answer were obvious. "Look at the core, here. The rings are all bunched up tight. I bet there's sixty or seventy —and all within a couple inches. Those came when the place was still forest. Then, you notice, the rings start getting fatter all of a sudden. That's when my dad cleared behind the house—in '22—and the tree started getting a lot more light. And look further out, here—see how the rings set together again for a couple years? That's from loopers." "Loopers?" we asked cautiously. "Sure—loopers. You know. The ones with only front legs and back." His hand imitated a looping, hopping crawl across the log. "Inchworms. They damn near killed the tree. That was sometime after the war—'49 or '50." As his fingers traced back and forth among the concentric v