Richard and Claudia Bushman, AAS Distinguished Scholars in Residence

Past is Present: I guess we’ll start out with your new projects. Could you both describe the projects you’re working on here?

Claudia Bushman: What I’m doing is an extension of a project I began my scholarly work with, which is a study of Harriet Hanson Robinson, second echelon reformer who spent a lot of time in Boston. And I have her 1870 journal, and when I wrote about her before, because I was writing a full biography of the family for several generations, I felt I had to skip over things very briefly. What I’m doing this year is expatiating, expanding, and explaining this 1870 journal, which I think is just pure gold. We’re really using her words. That’s what I love–her voice, her style, and how she talks about the period. I’m telling many stories.

 

Past is Present: Are you finding that AAS is helpful in terms of the resources that we have?

CB: Oh, yes, because there are so many things I need to know about: maps and all sorts of ephemera and explanations about many topics. The AAS is perfect and when I knew I was going to be here for a year, I knew this was the project I had to do.

Richard Bushman: I’m working on a story of American farming in the eighteenth century. I came to it because 80 percent of the population in British North America lived from the soil. It’s a very large project and I’ve been working on it for a number of years, really bringing it to a culmination now. AAS is terrific because any time I need a book I just whistle and it’s there. It’s a fabulous place and especially because there’s a very stimulating atmosphere to work in, too. You just really get rolling, and I think I’m going to be able to finish it up by the time I leave this summer.

 

Past is Present: What is your start date and end date?

RB: It’s the century. I start roughly around 1700, but I reach back a little bit, and end roughly around 1800, but go forward a little bit. So it’s really trying to characterize American rural society in the eighteenth century.

 

Past is Present: What is the argument that you’re coming to?

RB: I’m actually making a number of arguments since the topic is so large. So I’m addressing questions like: why did small farmers become the characteristic economic organization in North America, while in Central America and South America it’s the huge estancias or haciendas and the small farmers are stuck in the interstices between these big projects? That’s one question. Another question is: why did farming in the South take such a different course from farming in the North? One more: the American population grows 15 times from 1700 to 1790, which puts immense pressure on the society and the economy. So I’m trying to understand how people coped with the huge problem it presented to them.

 

Past is Present: Are you looking at different cultural and immigrant groups, or are you looking at an American population as a whole?

RB: I’m looking sectionally. I have a section on Connecticut, another on Pennsylvania, a third on Virginia, and I deal somewhat with North Carolina. The response is somewhat different, but it’s a large general problem that everyone has to cope with in one way or another.

 

Past is Present: How do you generally become interested in a project? We know that you, Claudia, wrote a biography of Robinson, but how did you first become interested in her life?

CB: I believe that everything I write, which is quite varied, is autobiographical, so I come upon things and then I just know I have to do them. When I began graduate school I was already an older person and I decided that I would do female studies. I never knew anyone who had studied anything like this (that’s how far back I go). I wanted to do women’s work, domestic and paid, and take both seriously. I right away became aware of the mill scene, which I had never known anything about since I’m from California. I read the books, did all kinds of things, learned to spin, and then I found the book Loom and Spindle, which is by Harriet Hanson Robinson, her memoir of her time working in the mills as a young girl. It was certainly the best thing that I’d read. It was just illuminating and wonderful. I was so pleased by those spunky mill girls. When I discovered that all of her papers were in the Schlesinger Library, which was a 15 minute bus ride from my house, without even looking at them, I said, “This is my dissertation.”

 

Past is Present: Have you been back to visit them since? How did you come into possession of the one journal you have?

CB; Many times, but only once on this trip. It’s always such a thrill to me. Here are these little pages, but there are all the things that are encoded on these pages. I became acquainted with Harriet’s grandson-in-law, because I was poking through all the papers. Her papers had been purchased by Goodspeed’s some years before. But Zivan Simonian, which is his name, one day presented me with three volumes from this terrific run of diaries that she kept. I couldn’t even tell you how many years she kept them, fifty years, a great span, but there were some holes, and these filled the holes. I meant to give them all to Schlesinger, but I only gave them two, because I loved this one so much.

 

Past is Present: What’s so special about it?

CB: It’s her coming-of-age book. It’s when she moves from being a domestic wife entirely to the public sphere. I just love the way she says things. I transcribed it a long time ago, I’ve used it in lots of classes. It’s one of my treasures, so it’s a pleasure to be working on it again. It’s fragile and it’s pale. How I transcribed it I’ll never know, but it’s the real thing.

 

Past is Present: Richard, same question for you. How do you first become interested in a project? You have two strains in your work, one on American life and culture more generally and one on Joseph Smith and Mormonism.

RB: It’s that double life that lies behind this project. I’m basically an early American historian, but from time to time I’ve been asked to do something on Mormonism, so I got involved in writing about Joseph Smith. As I was looking for a new project on the early American history side, I thought I ought to do something that would interact with the work I was doing on Joseph Smith. His family were farmers, so I thought, “Well, I’ll see what I can find out about farmers.” And it worked out well. The two halves fed into each other. I use the Joseph Smith example, his family, in the farm work and the other way around.

 

Past is Present: I know when both of you are working, you must have to answer the final question, the “so what” question. How do you know when your topic or your argument is the one that matters? Or do you ever get to that point when you’re working? Or do you wait for someone else to come along and figure out what it all means?

CB: I think you have to be very humble when you’re a historian, because if I could never do anything unless I was sure it was going to be significant and appreciated, I would just quit absolutely, and I almost quit absolutely almost all the time anyway. I also think that one of the things I have is that I know when to quit. I know when it’s time, when I can’t do anything more to it.  A colleague of mine once told me, “Great works are never completed, they’re only abandoned.” But at least they get done. Lots of people just can’t ever manage to get their work done.

 

Past is Present: Are there any works you’ve had to leave aside in a total state of incompletion?

CB: I have some that have been begun but not finished yet, but I intend to finish them. It’s one of my dreams and hopes, but it will always be foiled, that I would come out even at the end. But who knows? If you knew when the end was, then you could plan better. You do the best you can. But I do like a finished project.

RB: Well I think the answer is as you suggest: you never know if you’ve really finished it. But I think we all have to think of our works as done in private partly, but are also part of a public conversation. The answer to the question “Is this significant?” eventually lies outside ourselves and whether or not people hear it that way. Being in the presence of scholars, giving a paper, as I did yesterday, for instance, at the University of Connecticut, is very useful, because I write these things, they seem interesting to me, but they may not to anyone else. So when you get somebody lit up a little bit by what you’ve said, then it gives you hope. But it is true that every time (public address is really the best for this, not writing) you have an audience, you have to ask yourself why is this going to be interesting to these people, and in the interest of reaching them, your mind goes to one more level of meaning. As you develop those levels of significance, the paper gets richer and richer. That’s why I don’t think it ever ends, you just keep finding more and more things.

 

Past is Present: If you know a particular person is going to be in an audience, do you include certain information or develop your talk in a different way? Or do you just think in terms of giving a talk to a scholarly audience or to the general public?

RB: I think, insofar as you can do that, that’s very healthy. Some people say that you just have to talk your own mind and not worry about who’s listening, but I don’t agree with that because the presence of another person with another mind will light up your mind. For instance, Nina Dayton was there yesterday [at UConn on March 11]. She does a lot of women’s history. I didn’t really think of her as I was getting ready, but after I’d talked to her and realized all the ingenious questions she has about gender relations and women, I came home last night and the ideas began pouring out of my mind–where I can enrich things and add a paragraph here or there. So I think it’s very useful to respond to particular people.

 

Past is Present: Speaking of women’s history, this might be a good time to ask Claudia how you’ve seen women’s history change over the years, either generally or in reaction to various strains of feminism?

CB: One of the interesting things to me was that when people started doing work in women’s history, they concentrated on studying the great women who lived lives closer to those of the great men. They left behind the ordinary women who were doing domestic work, and those were the ones who most interested me. The division has led to a polarization that has continued with women in history and in the world since. I’m always appreciative when I see somebody recognize a standard, traditional strain in women’s history as well as the great doctor and author. That division continues to a considerable extent. I find it interesting to watch.

 

Past is Present: When Nina Dayton asked those questions, did your argument change? Or is it just factual information that you’re planning to incorporate into the work?

RB: Well, books have arguments, that is, some thesis you’re propounding. But they also have embellishments, that is the story gets richer because you add more elements into it, and so, for example, when I came home last night what I was thinking about is how gender relationships and parent-child relationships are defined in the farming society by work. In marriages today there are all sorts of complicated things. Then, it was a task. I actually wrote into my chapter today a rather daring thing. I quoted the song from Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye asks Golde, “Do you love me?” and she says, “I’ve cooked your meals, I bore your children, I made your bed. Why do you ask now do I love you?” I think that that speaks for relationships in a farm society where farm and family are totally integrated. Family roles are economic work roles, work roles are family roles.

 

Past is Present: So, larger question, did love exist in the eighteenth century?

RB: I baked your bread, I bore your children…

CB: I did a project on farming some years ago, too, where I really worked on one particular farmer. And he only mentions his wife, well he describes her, talks about her, in terms of what she did. He never mentions her appearance except when she has a toothache or a rash, when she’s sick and can’t do her work. It’s true from the one example I know, but it better not be true in my case.

 

Past is Present: I don’t think so! That leads me to another question. How has your marriage and your partnership been beneficial to you as historians over the years? How do you think you would work differently if you were not married to each other?

CB: Well, I think it actually works the other way. Because we’re married to each other, we work this way. We were married when Richard finished college, and I was still in college. I had another year to go before I finished up, because, of course, I wanted to finish up. But I had no intention to ever do any more. I was sick of school. I’d had enough. But when I did finish college, he was off in a new world. And as I’ve said on other occasions, he was always too busy to take me dancing or to read English novels aloud, which is what I thought you should do when you got married. But he always had plenty of time to discuss paper topics with me or to tell me what I really thought about things, so I was sort of guided into that same pathway. And, actually, he’s been my great mentor all these years, the most influential teacher I’ve ever had. He continues to read all my stuff and say nice things, and it’s worked out very well for us, because we have a life we wouldn’t have otherwise. I certainly do. He’d probably have it. We share a lot of things we wouldn’t otherwise.

 

Past is Present: Do you agree that you’d have the same life without Claudia?

RB: I don’t think so, no. And I would say that she reads all my stuff and doesn’t say nice things about it. She’s a terrific editor. She writes better than I do, has a better ear for language. And I’ve just really learned a lot about writing from the way she criticizes what I say. And, also, she has a good feeling that I’m going off the track, so when I’m reading along, she says “This doesn’t follow, this doesn’t work.” I always take all of her criticisms very seriously, because I think she has a terrific ear and a very clear head. And, also, she stumbles onto topics that are more interesting than my topics. I think this Boston book is a winner. It’s a terrific book. And she got interested in cleanliness when we were associated with Winterthur. I thought that was the best topic in the world, so we finally wrote an article together on cleanliness.

 

Past is Present: Now that we’re on the topic of writing things together, you’ve written about the history of Mormonism. How have your religious beliefs affected your work or peoples’ reactions to you?

CB: I’ve not been aware of the church being a specific influence, but it’s always been very important in the church to do things like genealogy and family history and encouraging writing and things of that sort. Certainly scriptures are likely to be personal narratives, and those are the things that I really do like–personal narratives. I think maybe a greater influence was my mother and grandmother, who were both wild letter writers, and my grandmother wrote her autobiography, which I’ve edited and published. And I transcribed all of my mother’s journals. The entries are not long, but she kept them from the day she was married until her final stroke. She died several days later. We’re really record keepers. The most important influence on finally getting me to start keeping my own records was Mary Chestnut’s Civil War, that wonderful book, and a number of other personal writings of women. I like Esther Edwards Burr’s journal. It really speaks to me. I do tend to like peoples’ stories. I did a big project on oral history when we were teaching at Claremont, and I’ve got these wonderful stories. We started out by doing a bunch of local Mormon women, because I was teaching a Mormon studies class. I sold this idea because I thought this was something we could do to create primary documents, and then we could use them. And so the students have since done a number of presentations at conferences using those, and we did a book, and I’m going to do another one. That’s one of my other unfinished projects. I just love the personal, and it fits with the church. But as to this other part of being Mormon. It always amazes me how it precedes us, how everyone knows. That’s always just interesting.

 

Past is Present: Do you think that people come to you with certain preconceptions?

CB: Well, I think they do, and I think the preconceptions vary quite a bit. I think often that we’re not like what they expect we will be. Then my answer is, “Well, I’m a Mormon. This is how we are.” I think it’s always nice to be something strange and weird and exotic, which we certainly are.

 

Past is Present: Maybe we all need a little of that in our lives. Richard, would you like to say anything?

RB: Well, I’ll just relay one funny experience. I was hired as chair of the history department at the University of Delaware, and shortly after I got there I remember [one of] the hiring committee, who was head of a museum nearby, the Hagley Museum, asked me out for lunch. As we were driving along, in making conversation I mentioned that I was writing a biography of Joseph Smith. He almost stopped the car and looked over and said to me, “Dick, we took all that into account and decided it didn’t matter.” So I do have the feeling that we think we’re just ordinary people doing our work, but we have this strange aura because we’re Mormons. But I’m very religious. Claudia is religious in her own way. And you would think that, therefore, it would all play out into everything I did, and of course when you write a biography of Joseph Smith, that’s going back directly to your Mormon roots. The best I’m able to come up with is that there’s sort of an obligation to show respect for historical figures. The very fact that you believe life goes on after death means, in a way, you might meet these people some time, and so you want to treat them like you would someone across the table from you in a room, someone with whom you have personal relations and show the same kind of regard for them, even if you’re critical or you think they made mistakes, there has to be that basic respect.

 

Past is Present: Which individuals have you found yourself critical of in the past?

RB: Critical doesn’t mean to demean in any way. I wrote a psychological study of Jonathan Edwards, which sort of showed him as a person wrestling with his own demons. And that isn’t a criticism, but instead of making him just this high-bred, theological, transcendent being, made him into a human who was working things out. I didn’t mean to criticize him, but some would say that I turned him into a person with deep psychological problems. That may be trespassing on how he might think about himself.

CB: I can stick in a story here, which is just sort of interesting. Laura Wasowicz, the AAS curator of children’s literature, whom I knew from a long time ago, because I was here as a fellow one time (we were having a conversation about yoga), said, “Do you know anyone named Serge Bushman?” I said, “Yes, that’s my son.” I said, “How do you know him? He lives in Kansas City.” She said, “No, it isn’t me, it’s my husband.” Her husband does taxes, lots of taxes every year. She said that some years ago he was doing taxes for people around here and he just remembered this Serge Bushman because he came from Utah and gave a lot of money to charity and it just stuck in his mind. I guess when Laura mentioned to him that we were coming, he said, “They must be related to Serge Bushman.” It would have to have been when he was in business school, which was twenty years ago. Somehow the Mormon connection is very memorable.

 

Past is Present: We were on the topic of graduate school earlier. Richard, I know you worked with Bernard Bailyn. What kind of influence did he have on you? How has his being a mentor affected your work? I’m sure you still hear things that he said to you as you write.

RB: I really had two major mentors. He directed my dissertation, but the book was published by Oscar Handlin in his series. Oscar was really the one who line-edited it. They were quite different. Bailyn was very critical. He would cut you apart. You’d give him a chapter and it would come back in shreds. Handlin was very permissive. He would say, “OK, that’s interesting. Give me more.” So you sort of were off doing your own thing. And, of course, both of those ways of responding are useful, and so I’d say I learned a lot from both of them. As you go along, of course, there are other people who come to influence you. As I was writing the biography of Joseph Smith, and this is true for all my writing, I like to have close at hand the writing of someone I admire. It may not be on my topic, but I like to hear the rhythms, the structure of their sentences. I like very much the writing of Ron Chernow, who writes biographies. I kept his biography of John D. Rockefeller on my desk while I was doing Joseph Smith. And then Walter Jackson Bate wrote a biography of Samuel Johnson that I admired, because it was so compassionate and so deeply penetrating into the character of this man. But of all the historians practicing today, I think William Cronon is the one I admire because he writes so well and is so lucid in his explanation of how things work. So that’s meant a lot to me. There’s an English historian, I believe now dead, W.G. Hoskins, who wrote a book called The Midland Peasant, which had a kind of gritty texture to it, rooted right in the way people were really living, that I just loved. So that’s been kind of an inspiration for the farming book.

 

Past is Present: As teachers yourselves, what is your strategy? Do you take the Bailyn route, or do you take the Handlin route when you’re critiquing students’ work?

RB: I tend to be more Handlin. I think people have to learn it themselves. I think there’s very little gained by being hard on students. I think mainly you have to teach them to think for themselves. Students so often come in with a set of questions they’ve learned in seminars or from theory and they want the material to answer the questions they bring. But you have to realize it’s a dialogue, that you have to say, “Here it is, this is what they left, what does that mean?” The most telling historical question of all time is “What’s going on here?” And then other kinds of ideas fit in. Students have to learn to develop that confidence that, without an interpretive structure already in mind, they can create an idea out of the materials.

 

Past is Present: That takes a long time to come to, and it’s something even I’m guilty of, coming to sources with theoretical structures in mind [etc. …] Claudia, are you critical?

CB: I try not to be hard on my students. You want to put them in a position where they can learn things. What I tell them is, “Yes, you can go search for that idea, but if you’ve got a short period of time and you’re looking for just this, you’re not likely to find it.” What you want is a body of information. If you have any body of information, you have a paper, because there is something there. I worked a lot with continuing students, people who are just really eager to get back to school and are so thrilled to have the chance and so scared that they can’t manage to do it. To see them find something that they really love and continue on with it, that’s really a thrill. I don’t want to hold a whip against those people. It spoils the wonderful experience.

 

Past is Present: Do you ever find yourselves falling back on any kind of theory, and, if so, what kind of theoretical analysis do you have a bias toward?

RB: Well, I love theory, and I absorb it all the time, but I don’t use it as a starting point. I use it as a resource. What I hope is that with this body of theory in my mind, as I read, I will see significance. I did a lot work with psychoanalysis and spent two years studying with Erik Erikson and wrote on both Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin from a psychoanalytic point of view. I’m working on a chapter now, which I call Foucault and the Concord tax list, where I use Foucault’s view of the modern state examining the individual and see the tax list as a way of state control. So I think theory’s very useful and I try to keep up a little bit. But I just think when you come to address the material, you have to go with respect to what it has to say and then just let your mind…

 

Past is Present: Work on it? How do come to the source material with a fresh mind every time?

CB: You haven’t had a fresh mind in years!

RB: I know. There’s a certain amount of self-deception going on here, saying that I don’t have theory, but in my own mind, I just get a tax list and ask, “What does that mean?” “Why are the men’s names on the list?” “Why are they interested in cows and pigs?”

CB: And not chickens.

RB: Yes, that’s very important. Chickens are women’s work. Cows and pigs are men’s work.

CB: So they don’t count chickens.

 

Past is Present: So animals are actually gendered. I didn’t know that. Not every young scholar has the opportunity of having direct communication with you. What advice would you give to someone who’s just embarking on a graduate career or someone who’s trying to get established in the scholarly world? What advice would you have for them? What advice have you given to students? What have you said to the junior scholars here at AAS?

CB: What I would say is that it’s a wonderful voyage. There will be pain. There will be misery. But it will change your life, and it will change it for the good. I’d say, “Why am I doing this? Nobody cares whether I do this or not. It doesn’t matter to anybody. I quit.” I regularly quit, really I do, and then I say, “OK, I don’t have to do this anymore.” And I go to the movies or make some cookies, call someone up or do something like that. But you never tell anyone that you’ve quit. And then the next morning you start again.

 

Past is Present: What gets you back to the work?

CB: Oh, you know, guilt. Richard, when he gets discouraged, he just works harder, but I don’t. I give it up. It’s too painful. But things get done. You just come back to it the next day.

RB: I’d say two things. One, for those who are going to graduate school, I would say you have to ask why you like history. If you just like to read history and love having history books and have always gone to museums, that’s not enough reason to go to graduate school. You have to learn to write history. You must enjoy the process of figuring things out. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, when you apply, the single most important document that you submit is your letter of why you want to attend graduate school. It’s more important than your grades. It’s more important than your recommendations. It’s more important than even your publications because what admissions committees are looking for is someone who thinks about history. You don’t have to have answers. You don’t even have to have chosen your subject, but you have to give some evidence that you’re intrigued by the problems of history, that they engage your mind, and there are things you would like to know. The next day you may want to know something else, but you have to have a mind that’s essentially curious and wants to know. I guess it was Handlin or Fleming who said, “A good sign of a historian is someone who likes gossip. They want to know what’s going on behind the scenes.” Something like that. The third thing I would say is once you get into graduate school, you have to realize that you write your book as you do your research. Some people say, “I’ll do all my research, get my notes, and then I will write.” If you haven’t written it already, you won’t write it then, because it’s too late. You write a book as you’re looking at the materials and are going along and as you see something a little interesting and a little thought comes into your head, you should write that down. That’s the most important thing. It’s not the information, it’s your thought. I often quote Joseph Smith, who said, “If you’re going along and you have a small glimmer of light, write it down, and soon your mind will be filled with light continuously.” And it’s true. If you can just teach your mind to hold onto those little tiny threads and start pulling them, then your mind will do miracles for you. You’ll produce things you never could  dream could come forward, but you have to respond to it as soon as you get that little glimpse.

 

Past is Present: Just practical matters: how do you keep notes? How do you organize everything if you’re writing as you go along?

RB: I keep notes–I think Claudia does the same–by book or by article. I don’t say, “This goes in Category A and this goes in Category B,” because, if you start out with categories, you’re going to end up with the same categories you thought of when you began and you won’t have learned anything. So I read along, write down anything that seems interesting and then always I put in brackets “my own thoughts.” It’s very easy to go through those notes quite quickly. Often at the end I’ll summarize. What are the interesting things I’ve learned here? When you start organizing your actual argument in your book or your chapter, you can go back and pick it all up and put it in.

CB: I think Richard’s real genius is that he gets ideas. He gets original ideas nobody’s ever had just by looking at things and arranging them in different ways.

 

Past is Present: That’s critical. You have to have the ideas first.

CB: I never got ideas until he told me I could get ideas. Now I get them.

 

Past is Present: It’s having the confidence to get them, right?

RB: I don’t believe very much in intelligence. I think every mind has powers that are beyond our own realization. People say, “I’m smart” or “I’m not so smart,” but the not-so-smart people still have a miraculous instrument in their brains if they’ll just let them work. The brain will turn out things for you that you never dreamed.

 

Past is Present: What has been most surprising for you in your own work? An argument or idea that you’ve come up with that shocked you? One that you thought you would never think of? The best moment of inspiration you’ve had.

RB: The first moment I had a sense this could happen was when I was reading through Connecticut laws. I read all the statutes of the colony of Connecticut for sixty years and I kept running into these laws about yoking hogs. Putting a yoke around a hog’s neck. What’s going on here? Then I realized it’s because hogs can root under fences and get under the fence and into the cornfield. That’s a tiny thing, but it was just asking myself, “What’s that for?” and then figuring it out.

 

Past is Present: Would you say that first moment gave you the confidence to proceed?

RB: Yeah. It gave me a confidence and a method.

 

Past is Present: How important is confidence? Can it carry you as far as the idea?

RB: There are so many ways to do history. One of the best things I can do as a teacher is to give people confidence. David Hall would say this. We taught courses together, and we both had the same sense. Since you sit at the head of the table and you have the last word, you have a huge power over your students. When a student says something that’s truly interesting, you have to note that. The table may disregard it. The kids go on, they’re all trying to say their own thing, make their own points, but you need to stop and say, “That was a good idea. And in a paper, the same way, “That was good.” And the student realizes, “I can do something good.”

 

Past is Present: If you don’t have your instructor, the person you respect the most, telling you that you can do it, there’s nothing that will get you through otherwise.

CB: Because it’s painful.

 

Past is Present: You need to hear some good things sometimes.

RB: And despair. “This is all meaningless.” I say that you have to go through the dark night of the soul, or you’re not doing anything original. If it all just flows, you’re just repeating what’s already there. You have to go through moments when it’s darkness and chaos.

CB: And come back. T.S. Eliot said that every time he wrote a poem it was as if he started from scratch, he’d never done it before. And I feel like that with each new book. You have to say, “Look, I did this before. I can do this.” It is always new and always difficult.

 

Past is Present: That will probably give people confidence, just knowing that you go through what you call “the dark night of the soul” in writing books. What eventually gets you through? What helps to get you through that dark night? Is it just wanting to have the finished product, to get your argument into the world? Or is it that this is what you do and you want to continue to do it? Is it that you love the process of historical writing and research so much? Claudia, you’re laughing.

CB: In my family we have a completion complex. We have to finish things. Of course we don’t want to quit in the middle. “I will complete this by giving it up.” No, we don’t do that. I don’t have a lot of confidence that any of my ideas will ever get anywhere. I’m always thrilled and surprised whenever anyone says they’ve read any of my books or even know they exist, but sometimes they do, so that’s nice. Every now and then people tell me things I write have been very useful to them, so that’s nice too. I think our own writing, whatever form it takes, is just about the most important thing we can do. That we put down in some kind of format our thoughts, our spirits, our experiences and leave that because we’re all going to go and all these things that are in our minds will just be gone. But what we have put on paper will usually remain in some way. Doing history is one of the ways we do that.

RB: Well, I had a dark year of the soul, really for two years. You know that my first book got an incredible response. I won the Bancroft Prize for it. I thought, “Boy, now I know how to do history.” And I started out on another project, which was quite inspiring to me, about comparing political and religious culture in the eighteenth century. And I worked hard, I read all sorts of stuff, I had a million ideas scribbled down. And the summer would come, time to write, and I would write forty or fifty pages and then it would all just sink into the sand and disappear. Nothing was coming. After this happened two or three years, I began to feel that I didn’t know how to write a book. I thought of changing my profession. I thought of going out and taking another kind of job. But then along came the bicentennial of the Revolution in 1976 and every colonial historian in the world was being asked to give lectures. I had to talk about what I wanted to write. And so I had to ask myself, “What do I really want to say to these people?” And that required me to take this body of material, which was going in one direction, pull it out and rearrange it to make it relevant. And that is what saved me. My feeling is that teaching and writing are related. If you think of your book as teaching people something, then it’s better than if you write. Writing tends to be sophisticated or subtle or intricate or clever. When you teach you have to be direct, just say what you think.

CB: Speak to your audience.

 

Past is Present: So the Bancroft Prize was a hindrance.

RB: It was momentary glory, great confirmation, and then despair.

CB: But you wouldn’t give it up, would you?

RB: No, I wouldn’t give it up.

CB: It’s a great thing. It was a great, great time.

 

Past is Present: I guess one more question. If there’s one book that you could write that you haven’t written yet, what would it be? One topic that you would love to cover.

CB: Well, I have two projects. One is the oral history project that I told you about. The other one is my autobiography. I’m doing this for lots of reasons, but one is that women don’t write their autobiographies and they always apologize for doing it. They say, “I wouldn’t have done this, but my children, my neighbors asked me.” Because that’s the way we feel. Women shouldn’t, we’re just not important enough to write about ourselves. So I decided that that would be one of my final women’s studies projects, that I would tell my own story, and I’m about halfway done with it, I guess. I have plenty more to do. Seeing as I was not apologizing for it, I would give it an in-your-face title. So the title is, I, Claudia. So you take yourself seriously, but not too seriously. Will anybody ever publish it? I don’t know. My family can publish it. See, now I’m already apologizing! That’s bad. We just don’t want to apologize for ourselves, because it’s so important to have women’s autobiographies. Those that we have we value so much.  I don’t dare think of another project until I get those done.

RB: I think I have one more substantial book. I’m going to go back to the other side of the equation and do something that’s Mormon, but it’s really American culture. I am calling it Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates. I’m writing about the plates, which at this point are purely imaginary. No one knows where they are. Even the believing Mormons don’t know. They just have to be imagined, yet people go on imagining them, not just Mormons, but critics of Mormonism are always fascinated with the gold Bible and what it means. It has actually become a cultural resource for American artists. You may have heard of the play Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play. It’s based on the Joseph Smith legend. The hero of the story is visited by an angel, like Joseph Smith was, he’s led to plates that are buried under the tiles in his kitchen, he’s given them by the angel and told that he has a message to take to the world. Of course, in Kushner’s case, Prior, the hero who receives the plates and who is disgusted with the universe, gives the plates back and says, “I don’t want anything to do with them.” The plates turn up all over in novels, not by Mormons but by everyone else under the sun. I’m coming to realize that the gold plates, because they’re so concrete and yet have this divine aura and they come in the hands of an angel, are a way of exploring the boundary between the natural and the supernatural, between ordinary life and the mysterious world beyond. So people use them, and use them for their own purposes, but they become useful as a way of approaching divine questions.

CB: So when we go to the museum, we look for all the gold plates. We’ve learned quite a bit about metallurgy.

RB: I could picture myself coming here for a month or a couple of months just looking for references to gold in Joseph Smith’s time.

 

Past is Present: That would be wonderful, especially with all the digital resources we have.

RB: You could search like mad.