Finally! Sent book proposal off to a publisher
After five years with this project, The Mystery of the Iron Box, the story behind the 1934 ransom kidnapping of June Robles of Tucson, the book proposal is off to a university press for consideration. If all goes well, it will probably take about two years for publication, the academic hoops being what they are. Now to turn to the next project, whatever that may be. Each presents hurdles… another 1934 kidnapping that involves copying 15,000 pages of FBI files (Yikes!)…. or a biography of New Mexico rustler king, John Kinney….. never tackled biography before, and have yet to come across much of what went on in Kinney’s mind. Third option, trying to find a fresh take on the nemeses of Wyatt Earp, the Arizona Cow-Boys. I’ve got an idea for that, but will it translate into a book-length...
Read MoreChanneling Elvis: How Television Saved the King of Rock ‘n Roll, by Allen J. Wiener
Earlier this year, author Allen J. Wiener asked me to read his manuscript on Elvis Presley’s television career, and to provide a cover blurb if I liked the book. I am neither an authority on Elvis nor on television history, but I said, “sure.” I was not only a fan of Elvis’s music, but, as a college disc jockey during the 60s and 70s, I played his music, even when his better songs of the period (e.g., the Jerry Reed penned songs U.S. Male and Guitar Man, 1967-68) missed the Top 40 and were considered particularly unfashionable in psychedelic San Francisco. I found Wiener’s book to be a very remarkable study. The blurb I submitted ran 340 words long because I could not stop gushing. Of course only a relatively few words made it to the cover blurb. I let Allen...
Read MoreSee “Publications and Talks” page for new works so far in 2014
The “Publications and Talks” page now includes listings for upcoming article on the Arizona Cow-Boys in the Wild West History Association Journal, and new book reviews of some must-have books: on Lynn Bailey’s “The ‘Unwashed Crowd'” (WWHA Journal), with much new material on the origins of the Arizona Cow-Boys, and “A Lawless Breed,” the new John Wesley Hardin bio by Chuck Parsons and Norman Wayne Brown (Journal of Arizona History). More articles and reviews on the way, plus am readying a proposal for my book manuscript, The Girl in the Iron Box: J. Edgar Hoover’s G-Men and the Myth of the Infallible...
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Gilded Age greed goes Wild West
Been reading up on the Johnson County Invasion of 1892. In “Freedom Around the Corner,” a survey history of America from 1585-1828, historian Walter McDougall addresses the American gift for hustling, a trait shared by those who hustle in the sense of working hard, for themselves, their families, and in shared community endeavors, and those who hustle others, deceitfully, fraudulently, and aggressively for their own gain. The latter, in unsavory, illegal, even unconstitutional form, was practiced by 1880s-1890s Wyoming capitalist ranchers, Social Darwinists who felt they deserved it all, against the smaller settlers in Johnson and nearby counties. The Johnson County War, in light of being an extraordinary story peopled by a wide array of colorful characters, marked by strong 3 (or 4) act story arc punctuated with dramatic scenes, remarkably has been the subject of relatively few books. ...
Read MoreHistory: A science of thought experiments
“How do historians know when they’ve established, once and for all, the causes of any past event? The answer is, of course, that they don’t.” John Lewis Gaddis I regularly read Old West discussion forums. The most active such website may be the “Tombstone History Discussion Forum,” filled with lively arguments over the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the iconic Wyatt Earp, Tombstone (“the town too tough to die”), and all things related. The opinions of forum posters do appear to shift on occasion, but mostly participants seem to talk past one another, their historical and evidentiary arguments on any side of the controversies du jour making little apparent headway in the face of strong, preconceived ideas. I thought a lot about the concrete stances taken on a fluid river of historical knowledge as I recently read an...
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Arizona History Convention, April 10-12, 2014 in Prescott
I’ll be chairing a great panel on Saturday morning, April 12, at this year’s Arizona History Convention, to be held at the Prescott Resort and Conference Center. The panel title is “Turning Lives into Legends: Wyatt Earp, Pearl Hart, and Curly Bill.” Each of our speakers will examine how it is that three memorable Arizona residents–one lawman and two criminals–did or did not pass from their allotted fifteen minutes of fame or notoriety to legendary or even iconic status. Our speakers (and their topics) are: * Anne Collier: “Stuart Lake’s Wyatt Earp” * Jean E. Smith: “Pearl Hart: A Legend in Her Own Time” * Paul Cool: “Curly Bill: Arizona’s All-in-One Robin Hood, Black Knight, and Byronic Hero” Was Curly Bill Brocius an “outlaw hero”? I’ll be looking into how his contemporaries and Old West mythmakers drew upon legendary, mythical, and literary characters and character types to...
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