Dan Richter reflects on his career as a scholar “and a human being”
This July, the McNeil Center will honor our past director Daniel K. Richter, as he retires from his position at the University of Pennsylvania, with a conference entitled “Facing the Future of Early American Studies.”
In gearing up for the conference, some of Dr. Richter’s graduate students met with him to discuss his reflections on his career as a history professor. In this interview, doctoral candidates Grant Stanton (pictured, top), Francis Russo (pictured, bottom), and Molly Leech (pictured, middle) spoke with Dan about advising graduate students, the evolution of the field, encouraging trends, bad puns, and everything in between.
Grant Stanton
Without further ado, let's begin our hard-hitting interview with Dr. Daniel K. Richter, former director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Dan, I can’t help but note that – at an astounding 5’7” – you've managed to become a giant in the field of early American history. But what was it like to be a young Dan Richter? Did you ever imagine being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize? Or that you’d oversee one of the field’s most influential institutions for over 20 years? Or that you’d have such good looking, charming, intelligent graduate students?
Daniel K. Richter
No, no, and no.
Grant Stanton
And we’re off with the one-word answers!
Daniel K Richter:
I was a terrified young kid from Kentucky in New York City when I went to graduate school and had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I figured if this thing worked out, it would be fine, if not, I'd do something else. I gradually got more and more serious about it, but I never really took it too seriously. The job market was as terrible then as it is now, believe it or not, and I was just going day to day, enjoying myself, doing what I was doing and writing my dissertation and all that kind of stuff. And then I got the Institute of Early American History and Culture (now the Omohundro Institute) postdoc, and that seemed to be validation for something. I probably owe most of my career to the fact that I got that plum postdoc, which was really the only one in those days. I believe there were five job openings the year I came out of the postdoc. I interviewed for all of them and got one job offer, at Dickinson College, which turned out to be just terrific. But at the start I never imagined any of this.
Francis Russo
What made you apply to graduate school?
Daniel K. Richter
My undergraduate mentor Frank Bremer told me I had something and that I should go to graduate school. I had no idea what I was going to do in my life. It was either grad school or the Peace Corps or work at McDonald’s or something, who knows. I applied and I got accepted and I was just following what was opening up before me, without a real strategic game plan. I did go into it thinking I would be a professor if it all worked out. But I never thought about an R1 school like Penn or anything like that. I always thought a small liberal arts college is where I wanted to be. That was my own background and that is where I ended up for the first wonderful 14 years of my career.
Molly Leech
I’m curious if you could reflect on your experiences advising when you were at Dickinson and how did that change when you came to Penn?
Daniel K. Richter
Well it was all undergraduates at Dickinson and it was a small and intense place. You really got to know the undergraduate students and they spent almost too much time in your office. And you had a gaggle of students who majored in you, you know, whoever you were as a professor, they took every class you offered and you really got to see them progress all the way through. I really enjoyed going to commencement at Dickinson because you got to see these students and you could turn to your colleagues and say, “You know, we really did something with that one! I remember when they first started off…” At Penn there was less of that personal aspect with undergraduate students and, in general, I was doing much less undergraduate teaching. The best undergraduate teaching I did at Penn was the year I did the undergraduate honors course, and that was just a terrific group. We really bonded over the years. I’ve kept in close touch with a lot of those students. One of my regrets at Penn was I never got to really invest in the undergraduates, but since I had done so much of that at Dickinson and at Penn I was getting to do so many other amazing things, this was okay I suppose.
Grant Stanton
It’s remarkable to hear that job prospects were as gloomy when you were leaving graduate school as they are now. What kind of advice would you give to those of us today facing the job market?
Daniel K. Richter
It was a different time. The job market was terrible, but it was also the 1970s. Graduate students weren’t as professionalized as they are today. It goes back to your first question: I never had the idea that if that didn’t work out my life was over. In fact, I never really thought that far ahead. I just submitted fellowship application after fellowship application for this or that. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t got an academic job, but I was confident I’d be fine. It was a bit terrifying when I was in the second year of my postdoc at Williamsburg and I had a baby on the way! But on the other hand, people kept telling me there’s always room at the top. And once I thought that that was within reach for me, I kept the faith, I guess. But again, it was a long time ago and graduate school in the 1970s was a very different environment than it is today. People came and went. There were people at Columbia who just seemed to be into spending their entire lives as graduate students. No one kept track of them. There seemed to be less of this kind of “I’m on a professional track to go do something. And if I don’t get that particular kind of career I don’t know what I’m going to do.” I think most of us were open to what life would give us.
Francis Russo
What was your relationship like with your doctoral advisor, Alden Vaughan?
Daniel K. Richter
Alden was a terrific advisor, he really was. Mostly because he gave me enough room to hang myself. I mean, he was very supportive. He was an amazing editor. He would turn stuff back and had just written all over it. He’s also the one who taught me to grade in pencil, because he said if you’re going to convey this kind of news to someone, it should not be in bright red ink. He edited ruthlessly, but he let me do whatever I wanted to do other than that, including famously changing my dissertation midstream. He was just a terrific guy and a terrific mentor, particularly in a university that wasn’t all that user friendly. I have nothing but good things to say about him, except that he asked the hardest questions at my dissertation defense, which I thought was a little bit unfair.
Francis Russo
Could you say more about switching your dissertation midstream?
Daniel K. Richter
Well, it was a characteristic of the Columbia graduate program at the time that you were trained as a generalist Americanist. There was almost no talk of a dissertation until after you passed your exams. Which is why people spent their entire lives there. I’m not advocating that as the best model, but you had four fields you had to study: early America, 19th-century US, 20th-century US, and one outside field. I did a lot of work with Ken Jackson in 20th century urban history, and I could have seen myself going in that direction. This was also the heyday of cliometrics and computerized counting. One of the things I did before my exams was working as a research assistant for Alden. He sent me to go take the tour of what we called “counting captives.” I went through a book by Emma Lewis Coleman, New England Captives Carried to Canada between 1677 and 1760, during the French and Indian Wars, and compiled a database of all these people, tracking whether they came back, how they came back, if they stayed in New France. This was in the early days of something called SPSS. It was basically a spreadsheet, but they didn’t have that word then and they only let the humanists into the computer lab late at night. So I would go there, and I had all these IBM cards punched with my data. If you made one mistake at the beginning of the stack, which was where the program was, you had to wait until it spewed out all the pages of gibberish. And so I’m spending hours and hours, and I finally came up with all these tables. And this is what came out as the article “Crossing the Cultural Divide” (a title I would never use today). I thought I was a quantifier, I knew my way around the computer. I knew my way round an IBM card and . . . do you guys remember what IBM cards were?
[Silence.]
Daniel K. Richter
Well, you had to sit at a special typewriter and you punched the holes in the card by typing. Anyway, one of the things that sent me to graduate school was that I’ve always been deeply interested in race and racism in American history. And I thought I was going to look at the various ethnic groups on the New York frontier during the American Revolution and try to say something about which side they chose. I had this elaborate scheme to do the same thing I did with the New England captives project. I was going to put all these people who lived in the Mohawk Valley into the computer and figure out something about them. People were telling me this is crazy, even in the 1970s, to keep track of that many people and whether you would really be able to get anything out of it or not. But anyhow I went at it and one of the groups I was going to study was going to be the Haudenosaunee. I figured they’d already been studied because Anthony Wallace had written this great book about them. But the more I got into it, the less I was satisfied with what had been done. I realized that the story hadn’t been told. And in the meantime, I’d written up this thing on mourning wars which ultimately became a William and Mary Quarterly article. So, I was sitting at a campfire in Albany on a research trip and I wrote a postcard to Alden and said I want to change my dissertation topic to write about the Haudenosaunee. And he just said, sure, you know, go ahead. Like I did with Francis.
Francis Russo
Except I dealt you the news by email, not a postcard!
Daniel K. Richter
Back then it was the era of cards. Postcards, IBM cards…
Molly Leech
When were you challenged by a project, perhaps your dissertation or a book in progress, and what did you do to work through it?
Daniel K. Richter
After the Ordeal of the Longhouse, I was casting around for another project. One of the things that is great about the profession nowadays is that SHEAR and other organizations are really focused on helping associate professors figure out how to write a second book. There was no guidance in those days. You wrote one book, you should be able to write another one, right? I was used to being the expert and then there was this yawning void of having to start something else and not be the expert anymore. It was really troubling. I went back and I was going to write this big book on Pennsylvanians and Native Americans after the American Revolution, which I still would like to get back to, maybe if I get reincarnated someday. But my research strategy has always been not very strategic and I just read everything and go all the way through and take enormous amounts of notes.
I got rescued because somebody asked me to write a book about methods in early American studies, so I ended up writing Facing East instead. People kept asking me to do things, which would rescue me. And actually the same thing happened with Before the Revolution. Sean Wilentz had this scheme: he was going to have all these people write short little books, something you’d be able to read in one long airplane ride. That project blew apart because no one could write a short book, but one thing led to another and I ended up going back to Joyce Seltzer at Harvard and saying, “could you publish this?” So that's what finally became Before the Revolution. Now I’m afraid I’m stuck in another loop like that with the Lord Proprietors project. I’ve got all this material written up but I still don’t feel like I have a real handle on that topic yet and I’ve been, as you guys know, at this for way too long now. Do not try this at home, graduate students.
Francis Russo
Is there any plan to do a 25th anniversary edition of Facing East?
Daniel K. Richter
You know, I thought about it, but the book is what it is, and it’s been successful, and there have been so many developments since then. The Native American and Indigenous Studies phenomenon has changed the approach to the field dramatically. And I feel like anything I do would be either having to write a whole new book or dressing up old stuff. I actually had other chapters about Facing East in mind, that I never got around to writing, and at one point thought about that. Particularly, I was going to have a chapter on travel narratives. But that’s not going to happen and I think the book is what it is and people seem to get a lot out of it, so we’ll just leave it at that.
Grant Stanton
The conference in which we’re honoring your career is entitled “Facing the Future of Early American Studies.” I was wondering if you felt there are some insights from the past that we should make sure not to lose sight of? What works from earlier generations of scholarship still hold their own today and might be worth revisiting?
Daniel K. Richter
As much as I encourage, embrace, and value an emphasis on an historian’s positionality and present-day political and moral responsibilities, there is something about those emphases that very much concerns me. An outside perspective – or, as anthropologists and linguists used to say, an “etic” approach – seems to me to be extremely valuable. I used to say: would anybody argue you have to be a member of the United Church of Christ to write about its Puritan antecedents? Particularly when you’re dealing with people who lived 300 or 400 years ago, it really is all a foreign country. It is absolutely true that your own perspectives as a member of a descendant group is crucial – one of the real failings I think of when I was coming up as a scholar was that we didn’t place enough emphasis on that and the power dynamics embedded in it. On the other hand, to suggest that only those perspectives give you a right to write about that history is troubling. I think that writing history is often a story of telling unpleasant truths. I always used to say in my undergraduate colonial history class, paraphrasing Steve Martin, “colonial history isn’t pretty.” But you know, confronting that past is really important. Combined with the general culture today of “don’t make me uncomfortable,” there are some worrisome trends, and not just the threat from right-wing anti-intellectuals.
If there was a reason I followed Frank Bremer's advice and went to graduate school, it’s because he had made me read Perry Miller. I don’t agree with almost anything in that book anymore, but the idea that you could inhabit the mind of a Puritan in a book written by a 20th-century atheist was so compelling to me – that there’s this past world out there that was so different from ours. And yet at least one literary historian could try to figure out the mental world that people lived in. That sense of the distance and yet trying to understand a different culture or different people whose lives are very different from ours, but yet are still facing similar problems to us, that’s always seemed to be really crucial for what historians do. I just hope we don’t lose track of that.
History is an attempt to explain and understand, it’s not a matter of passing out awards for good guys and punishments for bad guys. And there’s nothing clear about that. One of the few pieces of advice I got about teaching early on was from some guy who said, “the whole point of a liberal arts education is to develop a tolerance for ambiguity.” I fear that’s being lost today. The whole point of an undergraduate education is to make you comfortable with ambiguity – which is not to say that “nothing is real,” but rather that easy answers aren’t easily come by. And you also know that I always say, “it’s complicated” isn’t a good enough answer for a historian to give. But you’ve got to start with the complication of it and the ambiguity of it and often the lack of moral clarity that’s involved. But you’re still writing for people today who presumably need to hear something from the past. Yet the past doesn’t speak to us, but from the historian who’s trying to struggle with this stuff.
Francis Russo
At the end of a piece you recently wrote, “The Pig of Knowledge: The Career of a Concept,” you refer to “the true nobility of purpose that comes with refusing to take [yourself] too seriously,” and you’ve often said that you think you’ve always tried to be both a scholar and a “human being” at the same time. I was wondering if you could say more about that or how you’ve become, as Grant was saying, a giant scholar in the field, but can still also crack open a beer.
Daniel K. Richter
Getting back to Grant’s original question, I’m 5’10”, not 5’7.”
[all laughing]
Grant Stanton
Molly and Francis cleared me on that question!
Daniel K. Richter
I think there are two different things there. One is that I think there are too many scholars who take themselves way too seriously. What we do is important, but we don’t convey the importance and especially the moral urgency of an historical question by being too preachy and too absorbed in our own significance. And I’ve always been a big believer in the notion that if you can’t laugh at something, it’s not worth taking seriously. Maybe this is an antiquated notion coming from somebody who came up in the 1970s – the Monty Python approach to life, I guess – but I think that does intersect with just being a regular person. If you can lighten up a bit, not take yourself too seriously, that’s the best way of taking yourself seriously. In fact, I sometimes think that when I hear some very earnest scholar talking about the great significance of the work that they’re doing, I tend to discount their seriousness, by the very emphasis on how serious the work they’re doing is.
Molly Leech
How do you think of yourself as a writer?
Daniel K. Richter
Well, one of the things that Alden Vaughan said about my dissertation was that I had a propensity for Germanic prose. I do. I tend to write long, complicated sentences. And in keeping with our theme of ambiguity, too many of my sentences contain words like “however” or “but.” I’ve run my texts through those programs that tell you the grade level of the prose. And I could never get below grade 16. I don’t really know why that is. But I do take a lot of care with my writing and I’ve always had a lot more fun revising than writing. It’s a lot harder to put the words down on a page to begin with than to revise them. I also like to think that a certain irony and lack of taking myself too seriously does come through.
Francis Russo
Is there a book that you think is a model for this kind of writing? Or one that you read and thought “this is the kind of historian I want to be,” in terms of ambiguity, tone, irony?
Daniel K. Richter
Well, Richard Hofstadter was great at that. And he was one of my early models. Another person who was a real role model for me was Gary Nash. And I think his book, Red, White and Black really opened up a world of seeing early America as this multiethnic place. He was a writer who could really write in engaging ways but also write with a clear moral purpose. Also, my good friend Jim Merrell. I think he has a way of writing in a kind of emotionally effective way that’s really special.
Grant Stanton
It’s encouraging to hear of your struggles. As someone whose writing tends towards the prolix myself, it’s good to know that I too could be a Pulitzer-nominated author one of these days…
Daniel K. Richter
Well, you know, if you think about writing as guitar playing, you should stop thinking about prolix and maybe add some amateur licks once in a while.
[laughter]
Francis Russo
What’s the best piece of writing advice that you’ve ever received?
Daniel K. Richter
Don't waste words.
Grant Stanton
I think I’ve heard that once or twice from you.
Daniel K. Richter
Save them like they cost you money.
Grant Stanton
Dan, especially when I first came to Penn, I was surprised that you wanted to work with me, given I wanted to focus on the American Revolution and you literally have a book called Before the Revolution. So I’m wondering about what you have looked for in your students both at Penn and the McNeil Center? Is there a connecting thread over the many students you’ve taught across the years? What have you been on the lookout for when you’ve been thinking “I really want to work with these people?”
Daniel K. Richter
Well, I think I’m fairly open to all kinds of different things and interested in all sorts of different topics, so it doesn’t surprise me that I would encourage a grad student who wants to work on the American Revolution. I’m far more interested in the quality of mind. What I look for are signs of archival and writing skills. The first of these is simply a predilection. You can really pick up on the fact that somebody just loves doing the research. The other is a talent that has to have been cultivated much earlier in a student’s life. There’s always a lot that you can do to try to make a person a better writer but, if they’re a hopeless writer, it’s never going to work. So, do they show the potential to be a really good archivally based historian? And do they have something to work with in terms of their writing? That stands for all of you. Although Molly, the reason I took her on so late in my career was that I was hoping to have somebody who would do New Netherland after all these years.
Molly Leech
I thought there should be more of us studying New Netherland!
Francis Russo
Along these lines, is there a book you’d love to see written still about early American history?
Daniel K. Richter
The Lords Proprietors.
[laughter]
Francis Russo
What’s your elevator pitch for the Lords Proprietors?
Daniel K. Richter
That’s my problem. And here’s what I’ve learned from my graduate students: they’re often no different from me in not being able to give the elevator pitch. There’s something really important about this neo-feudal detour in American history – the effort to turn back the clock to a remembered time when the unpleasantness of the English Revolution hadn’t happened. And when great lordly men were in control of things the way they should be. The monarch was on his throne and we enjoy our own again too, right? Of course, it never worked out in any way that is recognizable. But I continue to be convinced that somehow that sense of the rights and privileges of the propertied male figure gets downsized in American history. In a way, I haven’t entirely figured out yet, I think in this period that ordinary white male men, patriarchal manly men, come to embrace what Stephanie McCurry called in a much later period the “masters of small worlds” ethos. I haven’t figured it out, yet, otherwise I would have written the book a long time ago.
Molly Leech
On the subject of graduate students, and without naming any names, what have you learned from your graduate students over the years?
Daniel K. Richter
I have learned that there are many different ways to be an historian and that there’s no one way to mentor people. There have been a few students over the years that I’ve just never been able to click with, despite the fact that I’ve tried everything. On the other hand, I’ve never been a very interventionist advisor. I let people do what they need to do and try to do what I can to help them. I’ve also learned a lot of little tidbits dropped in during conversations, particularly my infamous weekly sessions leading up to exams. People just come out with great little insights that way. For instance, when I was teaching the Native American history course, I always started at the Bering Straits or when Sky Woman fell from the sky. I have reasons for doing that – and we did cover the first 25,000 years of that history pretty quickly, but one of my students noted that no one starts a European history course with the Neanderthals. That had me thinking ever since: well, you know, what is the purpose of doing this? Or, maybe we should start European history with the Neanderthals, which may be why I decided to go back to the Middle Ages for Before the Revolution.
Grant Stanton
What are some of the more encouraging trends you’re seeing develop within the field of early American studies?
Daniel K. Richter
One thing that I’ve been fascinated with, and Grant you’re part of this I think, is that, having gone all the way around the turn towards “Vast Early America” – which we’ve been doing at the McNeil Center long before that phrase became popular – that people are going back to look at iconic moments like the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the Stamp Act Crisis. Scholars like Serena Zabin and Eric Hinderaker have been reexamining these old chestnuts of American history but through the eyes of 21st century historiography.
Francis Russo
Do you have any hope for what the upcoming 250th commemorations of the American Revolution will look like?
Daniel K. Richter
A lot of planning is going on in Philadelphia, and they’ve got some great ideas. [w2] It should be an opportunity to think back and reflect, maybe to commemorate more than celebrate. But commemorate in a way that’s not going to just turn people off to say, “it’s all shit and lies.” I hope it will be an opportunity for people to think thoughtfully about what the 250th anniversary is. A lot of folks are trying to make that happen. One of the best things that I have seen happen in recent years in terms of public outreach is the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. They do a marvelous job of making things a little more ambiguous and complicated, and getting people to think about things instead of simply uncritically worshiping what came before.
Another trend that I really find encouraging is that we’re really starting to drive home how important Native people and Native land were to the emergence of the United States, in ways that historians had really only been paying lip service to for many years. We’re only now really able to figure this out with work of people like my own student, Greg Ablavsky, and also Michael Blaakman’s work, Emilie Connolly, Woody Holton, for example. These scholars are really beginning to show how it’s not just a matter of expropriating land; it’s a matter of how the entire constitutional, political, and economic order of the United States is built on this dense web of exploitation of Native Americans. This in turn complicates our idea of what a settler republic really is.
Molly Leech
If you weren’t a historian, what career do you think you might have had?
Daniel K. Richter
Well, since I had no idea to begin with, I don’t know what. Telling Dad jokes is not a career, so…[laughs].
Molly Leech
What do you think is the best pun you’ve ever given?
Daniel K. Richter
I was at a McNeil Center seminar at the Library Company. The paper was about salespeople in nineteenth-century department stores. One of the episodes in the paper involved a woman who came in and pretended to have some kind of seizure, falling all over the sales counter. Then somebody came in with the nostrum that was going to cure her, and she suddenly recovered. I declared that to be a “counterfeit counter fit.”
Molly, Francis, and Grant
[Groans]
Grant Stanton
I’m glad to see that there’s not a huge distance between your best pun and your worst.
Daniel K. Richter
No, there’s no difference at all [all laughing]. But seriously, I do love puns and I take a perverse pride in my ability to come up with stuff on short notice, even if it’s terrible. Quite seriously, at the McNeil Center, and I hope with my own graduate students, I’ve tried to stress not taking yourself too seriously, trying to encourage an environment where people are human beings first and scholars second. My stupid puns, I hope, are modeling that kind of behavior. Or maybe not, because I realize how stupid most of them are.
Grant Stanton
Not to be maudlin here, but, finishing off, it’s been a great experience having you as an advisor, Dan. I’ve appreciated all the bad puns, but also the encouragement and the general comfort I have with you as an advisor.
Francis Russo
Yeah, I can only echo that.
Daniel K. Richter
Don’t get too comfortable, Grant.
Grant Stanton
Well, it’s been a nice change of pace to have us asking questions and you answering them.
Molly Leech
Right, especially just coming out of comps! It’s been nice learning about your experiences with your own advisor and what you’ve carried down. I can only hope that we will do the same in the future.
Daniel K. Richter
Yeah, I’m going to miss those comp prep sessions. That was probably my favorite part of working with graduate students, just sitting down every week and talking through stuff.
Grant Stanton
Do you have any final words Dan? Any profound wisdom for the folks reading this at home?
Daniel K. Richter
No.
_________________________________________
Grant E. Stanton is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Penn whose research interests range widely across the landscape of early modern American (pre-1865) and Atlantic history.
Francis Russo is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Penn who studies early and nineteenth-century North America.
Molly Leech is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Penn who studies Native American and early colonial Northeastern American history with a particular interest in the mid-Atlantic region and what the Dutch West India Company called "New Netherland" in the seventeenth century.