The big question is obviously, 'With all the great genius historians out there winning Pulitzer Prizes, and considering how little time we all have to read these days, why would I want to choose your book to get my history from? You're not a history professor.'
That's a good question. I say this; At last! At long last! Finally! A history book that is not written by the history snobs! Finally! A history book with a light touch and a sense of humor sprinkled in. At last! An historian who is opinionated but doesn't play that academic game of pretending to be innocently telling the story without prejudice.
This book is supposed to be educational and fun at the same time. A spoonful of sugar makes the educational medicine go down. You tell me one history book that has ever tried to do those two things at once. You tell me. I'm all ears. A few childrens' books have tried that approach, but a history book for adults in the same spirit? I'm all ears. You tell me when has that ever been done? I've been buying and reading history books all my 54 years and I am telling you that it has never been done. All history books, and I mean all of them, are dry and un-fun. They are often great, but they are not fun. The very best ones have really boring chapters in between the great ones. Always.
I am your filter between the boring and the good. I will only give you the fun stuff and I will minimize or ignore the boring stuff.
This is a general history that is not exclusively for college or high school students. I am under no obligation to include every boring subject on the grounds that you are all going to be tested later and that this book is trying to prepare you for a career some day. It is not supposed to help make you better prepared to face the world. In fact it is for 60 year old readers, and the 16 year old high-school drop-outs who still want to learn this stuff but doesn't like the way its packaged in schoolbooks. This is no schoolbook. If it ever became successful enough to get into a schoolroom I would be thrilled and honored, but if it never gets into a schoolroom, I wouldn't mind that very much either.
Of course Howard Zinn's unbelievably left-wing biased 'America is all bad' People's History of the United States is in millions of schoolrooms and his is not a legitimate general history at all. Mine is much more informative on general history than his is. Zinn's take on the Civil War is that laborers in America were even more oppressed by the rich bad guys during the war than they were before it, so the war was hardly fought for any noble purposes. That's his take on the Civil War. Me? I try to tell you the story of the war with lots of facts. mixed in with lots of opinions, a few jokes, and a few cheap shots at the guys with Rebel flags on their bumpers. It might be an odd and quirky general history of the USA but it certainly is a general history. Zinn's popular history book is a rambling polemic, with a barely concealed Marxist economics tinge to it all, a book that W.E.B. DuBois would certainly agree with. But it is a false title. It is nothing even resembling what it claims to be, A History of the United States. There are no accounts of famous events and it claims to be a history book! World War II is described in 18 pages as a series of opportunities for the rich and racist powers in America to further oppress the poor people in as many ways as possible. Zinn is a great writer and a great person – but he is no general historian.
Why read me?
I am a full time stand-up comedian. But isn't that one of the most popular and influential sub-cultures in America today? Why not hear about history from that angle for a change? The cynical the sarcastic and the commonspeak. Half the country has either tried stand-up once or thought about it. Most Americans have their favorites and those they can quote. Comedians make up a certain type of person. They come from a wide variety of personalities and backgrounds, but in some ways they seem to consistently represent a certain type of thinking, a certain angle on the world, a certain type of brain-think that is only that profession's own. Headliners, guys who close shows for a living, are almost always of a certain quirky no-nonsense concise mind-set. It was no accident that we full-time stand-ups came to make this our profession. They shook the map and all the actors rolled into the LA corner, and all the comedians rolled into the cities of the Northeast. When I'm at a new club I can always tell who the other comics are the moment they walk into the room. Its not the notebook. Even if I can't see the notebook I know right away, that's the other comic.
Comics either have a certain brain that draws them into stand-up, or they start out cautiously in stand-up and develop that mind-set from decades of the lifestyle.
Historians have their own mind-set also. You watch 800 historians as talking heads on documentaries, and there is a pattern to the personality, a pattern to the mind-set. You meet a few hundred cops and you realize they are of a similar collective mind-set. Well, what about taking someone from one mind-set, and set him to work with the materials normally reserved for another group of mind-set; a history book by someone who has done the homework of the historian, but has the mind-set of the stand-up comedian?
When I was in my early 20's and had the stand-up career going and had all that free time I began my study program. I started with two years of Chinese history. I began to wonder, 'what kind of a history book could a George Carlin or Bill Cosby write if they did the kind of studying I'm doing and did the hard work of writing and rewriting?' What kind of book could come from a good stand-up mind, built for stand-up. But big comedy stars will never get around to doing that because they are too busy being a star, which is a full time job, as demanding on time as the work of a coal miner. They're making movies, doing interviews, going to PR events, and touring. Fame on one end and poverty on the other can make it impossible to find the time to study for the long term. So to be a good stand-up who makes enough money to create ridiculous amounts of free time, but not so much that you become what you do and become time consumed by being a star, might be formula for a really fine history book or two. I hope so. The stand-up glory I have missed by not moving to LA and doing 300 auditions could pay off by keeping me alive as a scholar and me free to enter a different field in my later years. I thought about all this 30 years ago when I started studying every day. I would like to have a stand-up career but not BE what I do. Keep back a little from the TV name-recognition festival, and keep options open to ask the public to accept me en masse for the first time as a witty and interesting self-taught historian who also happened to have a stand-up comedy career. No one knows me as a comedian in Peoria, but maybe someday someone in a Peoria diner will laugh out loud reading my history book. But if they already knew me as the next door neighbor on a bad sit-com, they might not give my book an objective read. If Billy Crystal wrote a history of Russia, everyone would presume that it only got published because it was written by Billy Crystal. His fans would buy it and probably not read it, if it was serious history. The people Billy would want to read it would probably not lower themselves to give it a chance, since they suspect it was just a lark by someone who knew he could do whatever he wanted and that someone would publish it, like a book of poems by Ray Romano. Its a best seller but it isn't good. The way I see it. The public doesn't want to make you famous twice. The second one is a tough sell.
I don't try to to something I'm not, an Ivy League scholar with that mind-set. I just am what I am, a stand-up comic who studied hard and here's what came out. Here are my favorite stories, some basic facts, plenty of opinions, and a few wisecracks. I'm like a guy hanging out on the streetcorner in the city at 18 years old who said, excuse me fellas, I'm gonna go study for 35 years. I'll be back to tell you what I learned. That is my book. I'm a guy from the street who went home to study every Friday night for 35 years while drunks made noise outside his window, now I'm back to report to these very same drunks everything I've learned. This book is for the people, of the people, and by the people. This is the real People's History of the United States.
I reserve the right to go occasionally go several pages at a time without trying to be funny, and occasionally going over the top with a lot of kidding around. But on most pages, I'm just going for a subtle wisecrack here and there. I'm not trying to make every paragraph funny. I've seen a few books like that, where its a funny history book and everything is a sarcastic joke, but I want to use humor as a spice but only rarely a substance.
Compared to most history books, this book has a lot of humor, but compared to a comedy skit, show, or stand up routine, this book is dry information. It's impossible to write a three volume, 2,000 page history book and make it funny wall-to-wall.
Also, there will be times when the joke will fail miserably because you don't agree with the opinion being flaunted. I could listen to a left wing Air America talk show wit and laugh at nothing. Hopefully there will be times when the reader does not agree but can laugh a little anyway.
Being a stand-up comic has given me for more than 30 years an absolutely incredible amount of free time. Ten times more than the average adult. I have not wasted that opportunity. I read a very long time ago that Irish nobles were always instructed from an early age that it was their duty to study because they had the gift of time. The Kings and the peasants were both too busy to study. The poor are too poor to study, the most powerful and rich are often too busy doing their thing to study. But certain rich nobles in castles were blessed with the precious gift of time. It was their duty to study. It was the only honorable choice for spoiled Irish brats.
I was already studying history several hours a day when I read that passage when 24. That inspired me further. I have studied every day for the last 30 years. I might miss two days a year, some years certainly none. Its easy because I start every day with 90 minutes of study and go from there. I consider it my duty as a spoiled show business brat who has more free time on his hands than most people get in six lifetimes.
I TRY NOT TO BE BORING
Who else is going to make you a promise like that? I'm not promising I will never be boring. But I will promise to make a determined attempt to try no to be boring. How many historians give you that? It seems that historians are making a determined attempt to bore you to suicide. 78 page chapters about secondary analytical looks at farm statistics or complex banking issues, or needlessly long biographies of characters who aren't important or interesting to anyone except (apparently) the author.
I SWEAR BY ABSOLUTELY NONE OF MY RESEARCH
Imagine this really moral guy in Kansas who watched an historical Hollywood movie and it was about something he had been researching all his life. He knows everything about the story this movie is based on. A lot of big stars are in it, and now the Kansas guy feels that history has been handed an injustice and he's really mad at the writer and the producer. So he drives to Hollywood, crashes a party and he gets to the writer. He gives the guy an angry lecture about how Hollywood misleads everyone and how wrong he was about his story and where the hell did he get his facts and that this was an atrocity on the historical truth.
The Kansan expects the the writer to either get mad and argue the point, or else concede that the guy was right, and maybe either sort of apologize, or at least acknowledge that what he did might have been a little immoral, but in Hollywood we all have to make a buck.
But in the scene I see the writer throwing the Kansan off with a completely unforeseen angle;
“Of course it wasn't historically accurate. Who ever said I was gong for that?
The writer is bemused that the other guy doesn't get it. The writer says, “I'm not an historian. I write movies. What do I care how exactly accurate it was? I'm not giving these people a quiz on their way out the theatre. This is entertainment. It never even crossed my mind to worry about strict historical accuracy. It's a movie. What don't you get about that? No offense, but at what point was I obliged to care about what history buffs think of my script? I'm just trying to make a living out here.”
That's the ground rules for my book too, pure and simple. Off the record, hey, I study hard and I think my work is pretty good. On the record, I'm just that guy at the party telling you, I don't stand by any of this as a matter of strict history standards. I'm just trying to make a buck, have some fun, and do something creative with a lifetime of study and here it is, hope you enjoy it.
Since I am going be accused of being an amateur anyway, why don't I just declare myself one, declare this to be officially not serious, and thus free me from all the rules of snobby dull source verifications.
So here is an official and important statement on my sources and authenticity of my facts and stories. I stand by nothing. Don't take anything at face value. I reserve the right to be completely wrong, and the right to exaggerate and embellish just like every Hollywood movie does that is “based on a true story.”
This book is officially “based on a true story.” It is not a true story. Its riddled with 3,000 errors and mistakes. Some of them are even deliberate. Hell, I even add a little fake detail now and then for entertainment and fun.
Now I don't invent stories. All my stories have a source, but I'll add an occasional fictional detail to the story.
History books are made unreadable and boring by source obsession. Every other sentence has a tiny number at the end where I am supposed to go to the end of the page, chapter, or book to look up the source in tiny font. I guess I am supposed to doubt the author. I'm supposed to mistrust the author and question the legitimacy of every sentence, every fact, every quotation. The last 110 pages of every history book in the store is boring notes and sources. It really slows up the reading. Why is is so important that we have have to know that you have a source, and what it is?
I say this. What if the source itself is contaminated? Its better to know nothing than to be sure of false information. Almost half of all source citations are from books by other historians, not original sources. So you are sourcing a person who has his own sources and did the work first 50 or 150 years ago. Thus you are two sources removed from the actual source, maybe three. And how many historians are infallible people who never make mistakes. You take any modern history book on any controversial subject, and you can fine 20 historians that will challenge the conclusions in the book and, more importantly for this discussion, will challenge the validity of some of their sources. But if an historian is from a past era, his book becomes gospel and his sources are somehow declared infallible.
I think if you really played a challenge game with all these high and mighty source notes, you'd find that many of them are suspect. So the idea that you put up this pompous number at the end of every other sentence thus proving that what you say is valid, is not only annoying in the sense that it turns fun reading into dry academic reading, it is a false claim. Citing a source doesn't prove you're right, and it doesn't prove the source is above reproach. But that seems to be the idea these days. My work is infallible because I cite my sources.
I say to hell with citing sources in the text. Wrote your own book! Keep the book flowing and in your own style. Paraphrase everyone. Keep the reader happy. When I cite a quotation I can assure you that this is not the exact quotation word for word most of the time. I like to tweak it a little. As for quotations from the 1790's I will modernize the language, period. What slows down history reading like antiquated language style. Rewrite it a little and make no claim to be exact in how you quote and no one can claim that you quoted something incorrectly. Why quote a famous historical quotation for the 89th time. Jazz it up and rewrite it a little. Never enough to change the meaning of course, in fact, just the opposite. Tweak it a little to make the meaning even more clear. Political figures and old historians tend to make their points dryly. So whenever I start to enjoy a fine historian it always comes to a screeching halt when he starts with the quotations. I go from this person's modern flowing style, to the stilted language of a person that has been dead for 150 years or the carefully obtuse language of a diplomat, and all of sudden the air goes out of the balloon. One minute you're having fun reading, the next moment you're not. To hell with all long quotations in general.
And definitely to hell with the paraphrase-quote-paraphrase-quote approach, the Michael Bechloss approach. Either paraphrase or quote. The new history books often do this. Its more work than reading a full quotation, and its more work than a full paraphrase. This is the historian that can't make a call. He doesn't dare paraphrase in full. But he doesn't want to be left out of the writing either. So you get long sentences with two snips of quotes and two snips of paraphrase, all woven into something that is supposed to be smooth but is really tedious and boring. I'll cite a couple of examples.
This is supposed to be an alternative to the standard history textbook with none of the annoying things about textbooks. Who else has ever tried to cover general history for the general reader in this manner? There is not only a need for my book, there is need for more of them trying to do it even better with better research and better writing. But the principle is that the reader should be able to enjoy the book, not just study hard to pass a test.
Americans usually stop reading textbooks the moment they get out of college. Not because they don't want to learn. We just don't like the way they're written. I don't want to write a book that sets a standard, I want a book to be surpassed, but one that establishes a new concept in history books, make it fun. Make it natural. Don't use big words even if you can. That's not fun. Don't quote foreign phrases. Don't include boring poetry and song lyric quotations just because the author is partial to that poet or that song. Don't have page long paragraphs ever. Only occasionally use long sentences. Keep it clean, so that a religious grandma could read it, keep it clear and keep it clear of passing small time celebrities, so that an immigrant could read it. In fact keep it free of Americanisms so that it could be translated easily. If you use sports analogies, use soccer most of the time, not American football, so that the rest of the world can get the point. Don't include boring chapters about secondary analytical matters. Keep the narrative moving. Don't stop for chapters that bring the story to a halt. Keep writing and studying the good stuff, and let the professional historians study and write about the boring stuff.
We can have fun together because you aren't studying for a test, and I'm not planning on giving you one. Is there anything worse of studying history than the the quiz section at the end of the chapter? Whether it's Middle School, High School or College, the questions at the end of the chapters are the antithesis of fun. Just when you want to continue moving forward with new information, they ask you to go back and go over it at the point of a teacher's whip. Will you look stupid? Will you look smart? Why not let the reader continue to move forward. The pupil can learn just as much with their time by moving forward with new info as it can rehashing the old info to prove he actually did the work of reading and showed some retention.
I buy used textbooks for a dollar at flea markets and yard sales. Textbooks that cost a lot of money in 1955 or 1970 and are in mint condition. I read them. These are the books I read the most. Not the latest NY Times best seller or Vietnam or Lincoln. I read the Story of the United States by 7 scholars from Yale and Harvard and it takes me months to do so. I have a University education from 30 years ago that I paid about 30 bucks for. The knowledge is not only not obsolete, it is twice as powerful as a completely up to date University history. I say this because you are getting two history book in one. You are getting the information, and you are getting the style tone and bias of the era. The story of America changes every ten years, and I don't mean with the addition of the recent history chapter. I mean the story of America's past changes every ten years because of the endless revisionism, which is so flexible that it makes the study of history a two pronged challenge. On one prong you have to spear the information, and you have a second prong trying to spear how all the information has been re-interpreted and redefined. You can't for example, write any history of Reconstruction (1865-1877) without describing how the study of it changed from 1890 to the present time. The history of the study of American history is an important overlapping part of American history.
SOURCE NOTES
At the end of each chapter I will write about the books I've read. These are my sources in general. You can be sure I got almost everything from others above me. I rip everyone off in the text, I rewrite everything by my mentors, telling it in my own way with my own additional input from cross sources, and some wise cracks along the road. Only at the end do we stop to write about these source books. In discussing the sources I strive to make it as entertaining and as readable as the main body of text. I'll rip a few of these writers to shreds and praise others as gods. But I will rarely cite specific sources for specific points in the text. The essay on sources speaks for itself. I don't claim to be anything but a student of other scholars, who mixes it all together and writes a general history for the general reader.
I think that one of the most boring and useless things in history books in the law that says that no one can rip off a great point made by someone else without mentioning the author by name. Every historian feels a moral obligation to double the size of the book by giving long winded credit to other historians every time they borrow a great point made by the other. I say rip off everyone and then give full general credit at the end of the chapter.
Sure, I will make an original point now and then, but 96% of my historical insight is totally stolen. The default point on almost every good point I make is that I ripped it off from one of my sources cited at the end of the chapter. But it doesn't matter from which mentor I got which point. What matters is that my text flows with the same consistency and without slowing down for the credit game as if I can't borrow a great point made by someone else and retell it with my own jazz. Borrow first, give credit later. You can't copyright an idea, and stealing good ones and re-telling them in your own writing style is no vice.
A guy sweeping the floor at a department store once saw me (this really happened) and said, “Hey you're Mike Donovan. I've seen your act 15 times. I use your jokes all the time. I never give you credit for them. I hope you're not offended. But I use your jokes all the time with people I know, I pretend its just something I'm saying spontaneously.”
I wasn't offended. I was honored. My own art regrouping and finding new life in another setting with another player. It would spoil it all if he had to stop and confess that the line was from a stand up comedian right. The humility would spoil the fun. The smiles would drop and the air would go right out of the balloon. It's the same with my book. I'm ripping off other historians right and left and it would spoil my conversational flow to tell you exactly which ones at which times. But always presume I'm ripping them off, trying to make a great book the only way I could possibly pull it off; with the collective greatness of my betters.
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