This website is about “doing history,” an expression coined by Jack Hexter (1910-1996) and the title of a book of essays he published the year after I took his graduate historiography course during the spring semester, 1970. I was a compliant student, but hardly a quick study of the Hexter method. It was my first semester at Yale, and unlike the two other chaps in the course (for whom Hexter was their major professor in Early Modern Europe), I had no idea what I had signed up for.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971).
By historiography, Hexter meant the rhetoric of history–the craft of writing about the past while systematically studying it–not the history of history writing, a sub-set of intellectual history (my major field as a graduate student). At the first meeting, he handed each of us a packet of documents pertaining to a dispute that occurred in 1604 during the first Parliamentary session in the reign of James I of England. Hexter had done the research and selected the evidence; our task was to interpret the documents he had provided, to sort out what we thought had happened, and to start writing. The preliminary essay was a solo affair. Thereafter, Hexter encouraged us to work together. We met regularly as a threesome to establish new lines of research, share whatever we found, and peer-review drafts of the historical narrative due at the end of the semester. Throughout, Hexter served as facilitator and guide to various theoretical aspects of writing history. The course ended. I did ok, just ok. Frankly, I was ecstatic at simply having survived a course with Jack Hexter.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).
But as the years passed, my gratitude for his patience with me increased in tandem with my growing understanding of what I never completely grasped during the course itself. In my own experiments with historical narration, I have emulated the exacting attention to writing exhibited by Hexter and Garrett Mattingly, the historian he very much admired. I adapted Hexter’s History Workshop model to undergraduate and graduate historiography courses at Michigan State University. In retirement, I’ve created this website as an homage to Hexter, Mattingly, and the hundreds of students at Michigan State University who survived PVJ’s “my way or the highway” History Workshops on historiography.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
I/me/my in the previous paragraphs = Peter Vinten-Johansen. I spent my entire academic career (after receiving my PhD from Yale University in 1975) at Michigan State University. In the Department of History, I primarily taught Modern European Intellectual History (MSU), Historiography, and the History of Medicine and Health Care. In addition, I held adjunct status in the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences and (for several years) the Department of Teacher Education. I co-founded a summer Overseas Study course, Medical Ethics and History in London, and taught it seven times between 1986 and 2001. From 1997 until 2003, I was the leader of an interdisciplinary team of faculty members at MSU that, with assistance from the medical historian David Zuck in London, wrote Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow.
Photograph taken at Wards Falls, Nova Scotia.
In 2006 I retired from Michigan State University. The following year, Betty, my wife, and I moved to the mountains of north Georgia. I have maintained my connection to MSU by serving as content manager of The John Snow Archive & Research Companion, hosted by MATRIX, the Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences. That site uses KORA, this site is WordPress; so I thank Alicia Sheill and her team of programmers for adding a WordPress directory for me to use on this project, and thanks to Kassie Powell at MATRIX for guiding me through the features of a website program that’s new to me. Thanks, as well, to Betty Vinten-Johansen, David Zuck, and Leo Heska for advice and suggestions throughout the construction process.
The banner is an altered detail from the Frontage Plan that showed deaths from cholera in parts of the parishes of St. James, Westminster and St. Anne, Soho (GBoH, July 1855); I have erased the bars indicating how many people died at each residence number. Please note that such a map showing current house numbers did not exist until the third week of September 1854.