Douglas Harper is a historian, author, journalist and lecturer based in Lancaster, Pa. He is the author of "If Thee Must Fight:" A Civil War History of Chester County, Pa." (Chester County Historical Society, 1990); "An Index of Civil War Soldiers and Sailors from Chester County, Pa." (Chester County Historical Society, 1995); "The Whitman Incident: Revolutionary Revisions to an Ephrata Tale" (Lancaster County Historical Society Journal, 1995); "West Chester to 1865: That Elegant & Notorious Place" (Chester County Historical Society, 1999).
Harper is a graduate of Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa., with a degree in history and English. He has been featured in a BBC production on the Welsh settlements in America, and has been interviewed as a source for historical articles by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post and many magazines. He was arguably the second-most-famous assistant city editor ever to work at the West Chester, Pa., Daily Local News. The other was Dave Barry. The newspaper was affectionately known by its readers as the Daily Lack of News.]
Carl Sandburg writes that Abe Lincoln, in his law office in Springfield, kept an envelope marked, "If you can't find it anywhere else, look here." Everyone should have such an envelope. This is mine.
This began as a site where I could share some books and writers I've loved over the years, especially the more obscure ones that people might not have read in college. But since I put together the etymology dictionary, it's becoming a site for people who are curious about what sort of no-life obsessive-compulsive would do something like that. And I've also opened it up to include my stands in ongoing discussions and brawls about topics such as religion, linguistics, and the American Civil War. That's three topics, by the way; not one.
In 1960, when I was born, my parents lived in a place in Pennsylvania called Exton, a village given that name, for all anyone can remember, because it was just a crossoads "X" on the map. For those of you who know the area, their house sat across the Swedesford Road from what is now the sprawling mothership of Exton Mall, but was, in 1960, a bog.
Later we lived between Exton and West Chester, in a small development in the "suburbs" though that word conjures up a wrong image, one of Levittowns and asphalt avenues of identical families in pre-fab houses cut from one of three cookie-cutter designs. This was the older style of suburbs. They drilled two roads down into the old farm, staked off maybe 20 quarter-acre lots, then the individual builders or families built on them according to their needs and abilities. Simple split-level ranchers, some of them little more than mobile homes, sat alongside upper-middle-class salt boxes. All these homes grew and changed over time, some getting seedier, some more posh. Older couples lived there along with the young families.
Some lots sat undeveloped -- chunks of wooded ridge or field too swampy or steep to build on. We kids roamed the woods and fields, discovering box turtles, gourds, and ruins of old spring houses and root cellars. We spent hours mucking around in old farm ponds for fat frogs and tadpoles.
In the few years we lived there, the balance of development and nature changed. The construction crews came and backfilled the ponds, buried the creek in a culvert, clear-cut the woods, and hacked a highway bypass through the cornfield. They built a road to connect the two streets of our little development, then built another one below that, and lined both with houses. All this seemed like more fun to us kids: a four-year orgy of bulldozers and raw earth, and we couldn't see what we were losing till it was gone. My family moved out of there when I was almost 11. I went back a few times afterwards, and many of my old playmates seemed to have been possessed in the interval by a brutish juvenile delinquency.
Most of the years leading up to puberty I spent out in the woods with the other neighborhood kids, getting stung by hornets, building tree forts, hiding from the local bully (now an evangelist in Virginia, I'm told). I spent summers snorkeling coral reefs in the Atlantic at my grandparents' house in Boca Raton, and winters sledding down the rough ridge back of the old farm.
When we left there, we moved to The Main Line, an old, wealthy and sophisticated Philadelphia suburb. I entered sixth grade woefully behind all my peers in social development. I went from a place where the boys still ran away from the girls on the schoolyard to one where established "couples" had been "dating" for a year or more. One or two of each gender had even experimented with sex. I made no friends, despite the teacher assigning kids to befriend me. I really never tried to. In shyness and anxiety, I retreated into books.
In part, I sought a public identity, in that competitive environment, as a master of arcane knowledge. I memorized all the flags of the world, and was probably the only 6th grader in America to answer an assignment to write a famous person's biography with a paper on Boris III, King of Bulgaria during the Second World War. It made me an object of curiosity to the other kids, but only mildly interesting and occasionally useful. The next year, when my elementary school and four others dumped into a junior high school, and the hormones of puberty began to rage at full flood, I lapsed into a welcomed obscurity. Too shy for sports or girls, I made myself as invisible as a tall guy could be.
I got along reasonably well with most kids, but had no friends after school. I came home and read. Just so you don't get the wrong idea, I eventually did make friends, and good ones. I was a varsity swimming captain and got a lush and lovely half-Armenian girlfriend, played in bands, etc. But it took a couple of years, and even after I started adjusting I never stopped reading for pleasure.
The books I remember from this time were historical adventures like "The Man in the Iron Mask" and "Ivanhoe." And, of course, "The Lord of the Rings." The Main Line was dotted with hospital thrift shops, and in each one was a wall of shelves where you could pick out, for a quarter or 50 cents each, hardcover novels that had been printed in the late 1800s for Victorian families eager to load their homes with the best literature. As the old Main Line estates broke up, these books found their way into the thrift shops, and, from there, into my hands.
I've been reading ever since, and I decided to set up this site to share my passion. These are some of the books I really love, grouped roughly by categories. It's a mish-mash, not a complete reading list, but maybe you'll find some of your obscure favorites on it, too, or maybe it will lead you to pick up something you might not otherwise have tried. My favorites tend to be books that both entertain and inform. I like that combination -- "sentence and solace," in Chaucer's phrase.
I landed in journalism after college (Dickinson, 1983) without having taken a single course in it or worked a day on a student newspaper (except briefly for an underground high school publication). I learned on the job, and my first teachers were editors who tended to have a crusading streak. They taught me, sometimes by negative example, that a newspaper should never think itself bigger than, better than, or somehow aloof from its community. But they also taught me that newspapers should provide a voice for the voiceless in that community, and that they should not hesitate to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Since then, I've been a reporter, copy editor, editorial page editor, and entertainment editor in various papers in southeastern Pennsylvania. Got married 1988 (big mistake), son born 1990 (no mistake there), divorced 1996 (best thing for all concerned, financially ruinous).
Two local history books that I wrote were published by Chester County Historical Society, one a Civil War history of that county, the other a history of West Chester, the county seat, up to 1865. I've also tried my hand at poetry, usually when under the influence of some powerful emotion and some powerful scotch. Some of these, through editorial accident or oversight, have been published in microscopic literary journals over the years.
The picture below was taken circa 1984; or, as we say in the newspaper business, "early photo."
I hope you meet some old friends here and make some new ones. Enjoy.
Moe: "Say, what's a good word for scrutiny?"
Shemp: "uh ... SCRUTINY!"