"... seduced by the power of the obscure footnote."

That phrase "seduced by the power of the obscure footnote" caught my attention — as a historian I appreciate the import of footnotes (and always interested in anything labeled “obscure”) but never understood them to be seductive, so an explanation is wanting.

Author Douglas Brinkley is the writer of the cited phrase. It appears in his book The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1993).

In the Introduction, Brinkley takes the measure of educators — history teachers at university — it’s 1993 and he’s tired of how they teach, or what they don’t:

It has been my observation that as scholars work to obtain their Ph.D.’s in American history, somewhere along the line they lose the spirit of America, either drowning in a sea of newly acquired social science jargon or becoming seduced by the power of the obscure footnote. ‘The average Ph. D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another,’ Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie once noted. But the students deserve the drama, the flesh and blood of the past. A start in the right direction would be an attitudinal sea change: History should be considered not a social science but a jewel in the crown of the humanities.

Brinkley admits that’s a fairly broad statement. How would he teach American history?

I would teach American history and literature on the road. My students would read Mark Twain in Missouri; Carson McCullar in Georgia; William Faulkner in Mississippi; Hunter S. Thompson in Las Vegas; John Steinbeck and Jack London in California; and Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, and Walt Whitman everywhere. Together my students and I would try to discover our American heritage. Instead of sitting in a classroom reading about Abaraham Lincoln’s Illinois, Jimmy Carter’s Georgia, Harry Truman’s Missouri, or Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, we would visit those states ourselves on a historical exploration of America.

Brinkley admits it would be a physically grueling, high-risk venture - but that’s exactly what he undertook with seventeen undergraduates - and it’s all recorded in his book, Majic Bus.

That’s a bus ride I’d take, though in Georgia I’d swap out McCullar for Flannery O’Connor, and Faulkner’s Mississippi for Walker Percy’s Louisiana.

All aboard?

Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash