The Course of Life: Love, Loss, and the Work of History

Sixteen years ago, I was working on a history of flammable fabrics involving children across the United States at mid-century, burned, often fatally, in cowboy playsuits that exploded into flame. In the midst of this research, my teenage daughter had a stroke and died. Her death came a month after my second book was published, a month before my promotion to full professor – major professional milestones that would appear on my CV rendered suddenly meaningless. I had been a parent, a mother, from the time I began this research, but my identity as a mother was not marked on my CV. It was my training as a historian and legal scholar that appeared there and that shaped my questions, research, and understanding. Until this moment. How do we respond as historians, as people, when events in our lives literally stop us short? What role might love, loss and emotion have in the work of history? Returning to my research on the cowboy suit tragedy, I now knew these families’ losses differently. Must I, could I, separate myself as a scholar from that knowing? That question led me also to question the form at the center of academic life. How had this form that took the Latin phrase meaning “course of life” as its title, yet that excluded so much of what gives life meaning, come into being and how does it shape our identities and knowledge itself?