Interview, Vela Magazine
It’s really stereotypical, but I loved Little House on the Prairie. My grandmother really liked the idea of us reading older kids’ books so we read series like The Bobbsey Twins and The Boxcar Children, the Betsy-Tacy series and The Happy Hollisters. Although I wasn’t processing them as books written about past times, I always recognized that these people lived in a different place and time, and I was curious about what their lives were like. I think it was the mood of them that I was into.
I wrote a piece for Slate where I asked a bunch of historians about the first book they read that made them think they loved history. I opened that piece talking about a series of Time Life books my parents had called This Fabulous Century. It was cultural history, basically: all the fads that people were into, the music people liked, the major scandals, court cases, major news stories, cartoons—all the ephemera of a decade; there was a volume for each one. And I loved them. I thought they were so cool. I was probably 11 or 12.
I was a literature major until my sophomore year, and then I had kind of an existential crisis. I happened to start taking some American Studies classes and I thought, this is more like it: This is like This Fabulous Century, but in a class. I felt more like I was doing something new. It felt more creative to me.
With Eryn Loeb, August 2015.