Lorien Foote can tell you about how the best laid plans go. orien Foote can tell you about how the best laid plans go.
Though the associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas can document that her subject has been her favorite going back all the way to junior high school, she will also acknowledge that she didn’t plan to be a teacher. And even after beginning a career in academics, she’ll note that when she began her second book, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor, and Manhood in the Union Army, she’d actually planned on it being about a different topic.
And yet that book was recently named among the finalists for the Lincoln Prize, the most prestigious prize in her field of history — a field, mind you, she didn’t plan to work in. Funny how things work out sometimes.
“I could have dropped the phone,” said Foote of her reaction to the call that she’d been named a finalist. “I probably wandered around my house for 40 minutes. So many of my favorite books were finalists for the Lincoln Prize ... and the feeling that came to mind was, that’s going to be my book now.”
It was something of a surreal moment for a woman who said her original plans were to work for the CIA. A Norman, Okla, native whose undergraduate degree is in political science, she said she studied Serbo-Croatian language with plans to go to the Balkans and, in her own words, help bring about world peace. But after graduating and already in the interview process, it became apparent that maybe another career might be more appealing. She’d wanted to be an analyst but had been warned she’d probably see field work. And there was the whole secrecy thing.
“At one point in the interview process, we’d gotten to where they said it was important that I not tell people I was interviewing with the CIA,” she recalled. “But I’d already told everyone. So I started to think, is this really compatible with my personality.”
With plans to teach high school, Foote started graduate work and, largely because of her professors, she said, fell in love with American history. She got her doctorate from the University of Oklahoma, and the rest, they say, is... well, you know what they say.
“I guess it’s a story of a sort of zigzagging path,” said Foote.
But it’s one that would come to be repeated when she started research for The Gentlemen and the Roughs. Research on a prior book had led her to accounts of how various Union officers conducted themselves and how they meted out punishment and discipline. Writing an article on leadership styles led Foote to think she was going to write on military justice.
Yet pouring over accounts of courts-martial in the National Archives, she began to see repeated conflicts stemming from differing ideas of manhood and honor. Slowly, her concept of the work began to change.
“The sources really drove the book,” she said. “And it became about what I saw in the sources, this thought of what kind of men do we need to be to win this war.”
Of course, being in the South, she said she’s gotten a little kidding about the topic. It goes something like this: “A book about Yankee honor? Must be the shortest book ever.” But the truth is, her studies were confined to the Union Army because there are complete records available. Confederate records have not survived so well, and there was no way to compare.
And the completeness of those Union records led to some interesting discoveries, Foote noted.
For instance, there’s a general misconception about what honor was and how it was perceived. Movies have given us the idea of honor being defined by moral rightness or exemplary character and only important in the South, but Foote defines the Northern honor culture as one in which reputation entirely informed self worth. In modern terms, she said, think of it as “street cred.” Action has to back up words among a peer group.
So, for that reason, you might see a trial record where a man shot another (unarmed) man for being called a son of a you-know-what. And a large portion of the transcript focuses on whether a man — that is, a man of honor — would ever use that phrase. If not, then maybe shooting him was no big deal.
“But he shot somebody! Why are we even talking about this at all,” Foote said, explaining the question she had to ask of her sources. “Why are we spending 20 pages talking about calling someone an S.O.B. when this guy shot someone?”
The answer, she argues, is that, despite their cultural difference, the North and South both agreed that whoever had the most manly men would win the war. So the concept of being a man was of vital importance, yet often there was “no shared understanding of what it is to be a man,” even within a shared culture.
It was the nature of her sources, Foote said, that earned recognition from the committee that distributed the Lincoln Prize. Her use of military records to explore cultural issues was noted by judges, who awarded her book among six honorable mention prizes — more than most years. And while the top prize was given to another work, so prestigious is the award that even being among the finalists is a pretty big deal, she said. She’ll travel to New York in May to accept the honor.
In the meantime, Foote will be among the author guests at the Arkansas Literary Festival, where she’ll participate in discussion about writing, how to use sources and of course the Civil War. She might even include one of her favorite court martial cases she studied, which stemmed from an incident that took place in Helena.
“I think I’d like to bring out that incident, to talk about here’s what happened in Arkansas with these guys,” she said, though leaving details for the discussion itself.
Mentioning it, she insisted, would commit her to doing it. But then again, plans sometimes change.
Thirteen notables at the Arkansas Literary Festival
The Arkansas Literary Festival begins Thursday, bringing dozens upon dozens of authors to central Arkansas for seven days of sessions, panels, workshops and book signings. But with more than 80 authors crammed into a week and overlapping schedules, it’s impossible fitting all the events in so here’s a taste of one man’s highlights of the festival:
THURSDAY
Curtis Wilkie
Clinton Presidential Center’s Choctaw Station
6 p.m.
Wilkie is a Mississippi-born journalist and University of Mississippi journalism professor whose most recent book, The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer, is the tale of one Dickie Scruggs, the most famous trail lawyer in the South, if not America, and the brother-in-law of former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Wilkie is also the author of Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South, an excellent memoir of his growing up in the South.
FRIDAY
Kevin Brockmeier at Literature at Lunch
Argenta Community Theater
Noon
Here’s what The New York Times Sunday Book Review called Little Rock-based writer Kevin Brockmeier’s newest novel The Illumination: a “elegantly written new novel.” The 2011 winner of the William F. Laman Public Library’s Arkansas Writers Fellowship will discuss the new novel and his work in progress.
SATURDAY
Portis
Cox Creative Center Third Floor
10 a.m.
This panel — headed by locals Graham Gordy, Jay Jennings and Kane Webb — will discuss the film adaptations of local author Charles Portis. Don’t expect Portis to attend, but it seems as though Portis is the man of the moment in Arkansas.
Michael Takiff
Main Library Darragh Center
11:30 a.m.
Michael Takiff is the author of A Complicated Man, a biography of Bill Clinton, the man that Arkansans can’t get enough of.
Jay Jennings
Mosaic Templars Cultural Center
4 p.m.
Jay Jennings’ Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City was one of those singular works of sports nonfiction, using football at Little Rock’s Central High School as a key for unlocking a greater story about race relations in the city.
Brock Thompson
Cox Creative Center Third Floor
4 p.m.
Brock Thompson’s The Un-Natural State delves into gay and lesbian life in Arkansas during the 20th century.
The Music Session II: Country
Argenta Community Theater
5 p.m.
David Frizzell sang one of the country’s greatest tunes ever, a little ditty about a wife telling her always-drinking man that “I’m Gonna Hire a Wino to Decorate Our Home.” But the El Dorado native and younger brother of Lefty Frizzell (“If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time”) didn’t stop there; he also performed country classics such as “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma” with Shelly West. David Frizzell will perform some of his classic country tunes in an intimate setting.
Isabel Wilkerson
Mosaic Templars Cultural Center
5:30 p.m.
This event will allow the Pulitzer Prize winning Isabel Wilkerson, the writer of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, to go into greater depth about her chronicling of the Great Migration through the trek of three Southern blacks.
SUNDAY
Magamorphosis
Main Library Fifth Floor
1:30 p.m.
Paul Reyes, the former editor at large for The Oxford American, will go into greater detail on how he turned a longform piece of journalism that ran in Harper’s into Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession, a personal odyssey of the collapse of the Southern Florida real-estate market.
David Frizzell
Main Library Darragh Center
1:30 p.m.
A day after performing some of country music’s most iconic tunes, country music singer/songwriter David Frizzell, a native of El Dorado, will talk about his I Love You a Thousand Ways, a memoir detailing his relationship with brother Lefty Frizzell, the late country music singer/songwriter.
Daniel Seddiqui
Main Library Youth Services
1:30 p.m.
Daniel Seddiqui didn’t get a job out of college; he got 50 of them, in 50 states. The result is 50 Jobs in 50 States, a book describing his work as a baseball scout, coal miner and more.
Loyalty, Failure and Honor
Arkansas Studies Institute, Room 124
1:30 p.m. Sunday
Marking the 150th year of the start of the Civil War, this panel brings together three authors to discuss the war in greater depth, including the action in Arkansas. The trio is Carl Moneyhon, Edmund J. Davis of Texas: Civil War General, Republican Leader, Reconstruction Governor; Mark Christ, Civil War Arkansas, 1863; and Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs
WEDNESDAY
An Evening with David Sedaris
Pulaski Academy’s Connor Performing Arts Center
7 p.m.
The Arkansas Literary Festival goes out with a bang: Humorist David Sedaris returns to central Arkansas. Tickets — if available — are $40 and $50.