WSJ history columnist moves to culture beat

Cynthia Crossen, who has written a column on the history of business for The Wall Street Journal for the past six years, is moving to the culture beat. She writes Monday about what it’s been like to cover history.

Crossen writes, “My first column, which was published in September 2002, was about the rebuilding of lower Manhattan in 1835, after a fire had reduced the entire business district to ashes. Over the years, I wrote about everything from what financial compensation the survivors of the Titanic got (none) to how much people really swore in Wild West towns like Deadwood (a lot). I wrote about the coining of the term ‘white-collar criminal’ in 1939 and the rash of football fatalities in the late 19th century that caused one state legislature to declare the game illegal.

“In the first few years of my column, I did most of my research at the New York University Library, where, for a stiff fee, you can buy borrowing privileges. The open stacks were a trove of ideas — looking for something else entirely, I stumbled on a book about the Territorial Enterprise newspaper of Virginia City, Nev., whose 19th-century reporters routinely carried paper, a pencil and a revolver. I later wrote a column about it.

“As more historical material became available on the Internet, I could do much of my research on my computer. But I also made a rule for my digital research that I had to find at least three solid sources that agreed on a fact before I could trust it. In some cases, I couldn’t write a column about what seemed like an interesting topic because there weren’t enough sources or the sources seemed tainted.

“But the most difficult part of the Déjà Vu column was finding the right idea. I usually sifted through a dozen possible topics before identifying one that would work. Ideally, there was some link to a modern event.”

Read more here.