Bill Caraher |

I have an ulterior motive for posting another archival article today and if you’re a committed reader of the NDQ blog you’ll figure it out later this month.

For now, I present to you Orin G. Libby‘s (whom we call O.G. Libby around the NDQ office [which is usually only me]) “The Correlation of Literature and History” from NDQ 1.2 (1911), 99-116. Click here to read it!

The article does what it says in its title. Libby, shows how literature can be an important source for historical understanding. Over a century on, this seems hardly a necessary statement to make, but at the turn of the 20th century, history and literature were only beginning their courtship as cultural history or more broadly as “American Studies” which gains momentum with V. L. Parrington’s monumental Main Currents in American Thought which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1928 (and you can read all 1400+ pages of its old-fashioned glory here). Libby was no Parrington and his efforts to show how literature speaks to history would have horrified even the most casual student of New Criticism. That said, Libby was doing his part to surf the currents of the changing discipline of history and show that the University of North Dakota and NDQ were part of a global conversation.

If this piece interests you, check out the rest of the NDQ archive here and stay tuned for why I’ve posted this piece at all later this month!

~

Bill Caraher is the editor of NDQ and reading lots of back issues while he waits for the 92.3/4 to come out.