As a child, I loved the sound of my Dad's typewriter. It was a big manual machine, and you needed strong fingers just to press the keys down. Every time the typewriter carriage came to the end of line, a little bell went 'ding' and then you had to whap the return lever and make the carriage zing back into starting position. Clackety clack, ding, whap, zing meant that Dad was writing. As I got older he would ask me to read what he was working on, and see if I could find something he should fix or change. If I found something, he was quite pleased. He taught me that writing is not about getting it perfect the first time; it was about getting started and then making improvements. Thank you, Dad. On family vacations we visited historic sites--a frontier fort, a battle field, or a Shaker village. These places sparked curiosity about the past. One day someone brought to our house an old book from somebody's attic. It was a Godey's Ladies Book from the 1850s. It showed women wearing huge hoop skirts and carrying parasols. It had articles about odd things like "How to Cure Frozen Feet." Inside the book, someone had pressed flowers and fern leaves. There was a ribbon and a scrap of lace, a poem and a newspaper clipping about voting for Lincoln. I spent hours poring through that old book, wondering who had saved these treasures and what her life was like. When I went off to college, I majored in history and American Studies. I took my first course in church history (history of Christianity). Then I went to Seminary, back in the 70's (1970's, not 1870s) when it was still a novelty for women to be seminarians or ministers. There I met Craig Koester got married, finished seminary and started a family. We moved to New York City where Craig did his Ph.D. in New Testament, and I worked as a writer and editor for the Lutheran Church in America at their office in Midtown Manhattan. After three years we returned to Minnesota. I started working on a Ph.D. in Church History, and accepted a part time call to a congregation, while also raising children. Do not try this at home. I finished my Ph.D. in Church History, and began teaching on an adjunct basis at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, and later at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. All along the way I had writing projects. Eventually I realized that writing is not just something to do on the side. It is central. Most of all I love writing on historical topics. The fascination for history has never faded. Traveling to archives to do research is a thrill for me. Online research is wonderful, and I do more and more of it as the world goes digital. But there is no substitute for being in the places and touching things that connect you to people from the past. A real handwritten letter beckons in a way that a computer screen cannot. Once you decipher the handwriting, you try to read between the lines with what you know about that person and her times. Sometimes you get stumped by what you don't know or can't decipher. If you persist, the person whose "hand" you are reading becomes real to you, like a friend or a relative. While I was working on the Stowe biography, my husband would come home and ask, "How is Harriet doing?" And I would tell him what she was "doing" that day. I found that some parts of her story were easier to write about than others; welcome to life! Writing history is a discipline. I admit it involves some drudgery. But it also takes imagination and intuition. You can be a detective, tracking down the sources, delving deeper into the story, listening for what is not said as well as what is said. And when you find a gem, it is so rewarding. All the patient (and impatient) toiling becomes worthwhile. Other historians are so helpful. They provide reality checks, tips on where to look, blaze marks on the trail. And librarians are heaven sent. After a while I began to realize that I have some important things in common with Harriet Beecher Stowe. Like Harriet, I was raised in a parsonage with lots of siblings; my Dad was a minister whose personality was larger than most other people I knew. Like Lyman Beecher, he had a big heart and was something of a happy warrior when it came to church controversies. My husband, like Calvin Stowe, is a biblical scholar. Harriet's spiritual struggle to leave Calvinism and still remain a Christian also struck a chord with me, for I too moved my church home to a different address than where I started out. And there the similarities end, for Harriet was brilliant and famous, a nineteenth century woman through and through and I am none of those things. Too much identification is dangerous for an historian, because it can make you see what you want to see instead of what is really there. And yet, if you are going to spend years of your life working on someone, there has to be something that draws you to that person. In the end, you can never completely know another person, especially someone who died before you were born. And yet. Time travelers often find that "objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear."
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