Collected letters of Richard Newhall, one of Williams College’s foremost history professors, a dean of the faculty, and wartime stand-in president. Arranged by topic rather than chronology, the assemblage demonstrates the views of a Harvard-trained, (medieval) Europeanist dedicated to teaching rather than research, whose characteristic approach was to expose ignorance so as to promote humility, to encourage self-discovery is the basis of real education. A World War I officer and casualty, he emphasized facts as evidence of decision making and outcomes – how leaders managed important affairs – while disfavoring documentary sources as tending toward abstract ideas which would mislead one from the heart of the matter. Decisions, like journalism and history, were always made with partial evidence. It was appropriate to give actors the benefit of the doubt, and more important for businessmen and lawyers to learn about what we know was done than to prepare for research degrees or to search for the absolute (a ‘mental disease’, according to a favored colleague). The teacher himself must be willing to be forgotten.
His influence on Hyde, Waite, Bahlman, and Bostert are evident. The latter’s narration is useful if sometimes repetitive, notably the summation that history and scholarship had moved over 1920-70 from understanding and explanation to post facto criticism and challenge, from the dispassionate to the ideological.
Well footnoted so as to identify contemporary academics and politicians, the book’s themes include comparison of military training to education (the former suppresses individualism, the latter cultivates it with a view toward citizenship); faculty debate over isolationism, college administration, curricular changes (e.g., instruction in classics, mandatory chapel); and sundry academic and political matters. A review should tell what the author attempted and whether he succeeded by his own standards, since it was unlikely the reviewer could match the scholar in the latter’s specialty. Newhall helped Bailyn transition from English to history by recommending his Harvard application ignore lack of undergraduate studies. Politically a Wilsonian who nonetheless believed political leaders knew more than journalists (and presumably bureaucrats?), he came to be a neoconservative avant la lettre.