George Fort Milton and the Art of History.
HISTORIOGRAPHY is an often exciting branch of the discipline of history. The many splendid articles or books that have reviewed either a large body of work on a topic, a period, or say, even the works of one historian are not, at their best, either derivative scholarship or mere laundry lists of titles or ideas. Rather they have brought new understandings and insights as well as suggesting new paths of scholarship that only wide reading and seasoned thought could produce. Nevertheless, though historians discoursed endlessly in writing at the numerous professional meetings on each other's articles and books, only in recent years has there been sustained interest in how historians go about their daily task of teaching, an activity immensely enjoyed by most and one that supports the scholarly life of most historians wherever they work and live. But equally fascinating is how different historians actually practice the art of history and their thoughts about the difficult problems of writing good history. Talk to any colleague who has done so, or read the autobiography or biographies of great historians, and listen to the different techniques, styles, and tricks of the trade that come tumbling out, as well as insight into the interaction of the artist with the art. How George Fort Milton, who earned his keep as a newspaper publisher and editor, did history is especially interesting because his was a career different from that of the usual scholarteacher. Milton neither saw the inside of a graduate seminar room nor did he experience the red slash of a graduate professor's pen. But Milton, in the late 1920s through the mid-1940s, would write five history books, give numerous lectures with historical themes,